B-Kyu Newsletter - 13 December 2020
Chengdu snacks, food lists, cookbooks, Ainu, Malaysian coffee houses, Indian farmers, fighting biryani shops, Michelin in Thailand, rats in New York, East African chilli sauce
Hi folks
Welcome to the B-Kyuniverse for 13 December 2020. Feel free to share the B-Kyu love by sending this newsletter to all your good eating and reading friends and get them to subscribe for themselves. You can read past copies of the newsletter here and our blog here.
In each newsletter we search out articles for you the curious reader to broaden your eating adventures. We collect a wide menu of stories, blogs (including our own) or other media for you to digest, consume and hopefully, get out and feast on the wonderful world of food in Sydney and beyond. Links in the title, a $ sign after a story means you may have to go through a payment firewall if you’ve used up all your free hits.
Food and food writing
7 December 2020: Full list: 100 Good Things NSW (SMH Good Food) What does it take to get a mention in the 100 Good Things Guide in the Sydney Morning Herald? If you are west of the dotted red line (a very close approximation of the Red Rooster Line), then you were lucky to be included as part of two entries called “Be a tourist in your own city”. If you are south of Marrickville, then excluding Cronulla you are in the food wilderness with no hits at all. Don’t turn right towards Chatswood and beyond or you’ll find nothing either until you hit the Central Coast. There are some exceptions in other entries: Butter and CicciaBella in Parramatta, Olympic Continental Delicatessen in Bankstown, Mama Lor in Rooty Hill and Jasmins in Liverpool. Twenty other places are then lumped together in just a couple of points.
The places highlighted are all excellent: Fairfield - Lao Village, Kebab Abu Ali and La Paula; Auburn - Tarim Uyghur and Darband; Bankstown - An Restaurant, Bay Ngo and Taste of Egypt; Lakemba - Khushboo and Island Dreams Café; Merrylands - Kabul House, Zeenat Afghan and Kebab Al Hojat; Harris Park - Taj Indian Sweets, Chatkazz, Haveli and Hyderabad House; Eastwood - Mira’s Korean Street Food, Pu Ju Mi and the Taiwan Hight Markets.
Great to see some other mentions in the entry on Sam Young, where he lists Pho Quoc in Cabramatta and Traditional Cantonese Taste in Eastwood - but the nod is going to him, not the places he has eaten at. Jasmins get a mere slim mention in the entry on falafel as “an old school favourite, is always buzzing with local families” while the rest of the listing promotes in detail a falafel dish at Ezra and Merivale’s Jimmy’s Falafel. The link at the end goes to Jasmins temporarily closed Liverpool store, currently under investigation for Covid health breaches.
The list aims to show “a collection of people, places, moments and mementos that best represent 2020.” What seems missing to us are entries on Sydney Chinatown, (not just new places in nearby Darling Square) or in fact any Chinese restaurants - there’s only one mentioned by Sam Young. The closure and reopening of Superbowl would have been a great 2020 example of the changes and hope for the future. The only Japanese mentioned is high level omokase, and the Thai is a TV series and a restaurant in Mittagong (about the only regional place mentioned that wasn’t a café or pasta).
If the criteria is new or changing or best representing, what, or who, does this list represent? There’s 2.5 million people in Greater Western Sydney (that’s close to half the total Sydney population), and they aren’t tourists. The suburbs very briefly listed and the other unmentioned areas surely have some new and exciting places to eat at and dishes that deserve a highlight of their own. But unless you are inner east of the line, operating in Newtown, Marrickville, Surry Hills or Darlinghurst, you aren’t going to get a look in alongside the ramen at Quay.
7 December 2020: Iteration 8: Rebecca May Johnson cooks the Internet (Rebecca May Johnson, Vittles) How do recipes originate, change and get recorded? Recipes contain possibility and elements of interpretation that are fueled by our access to the internet and our ability to reach out via social media for requests, questions and understanding.
10 December 2020: Food delivery riders keep dying (First Dog on the Moon, The Guardian) The cartoonist looks at the true cost of a cheap home delivery service.
10 December 2020: Counter Magazine have a new issue out, their second. This issue is themed ‘Renewal’ - a constant in the world of food and what we will continue to see post 2020. We are looking forward to reading Colin Ho and Nick Jordan on 'Restaurant Reviews are Dead’. It’s a pricey mag at $22 but there’s plenty to it.
13 December 2020: We spied an add on the back of a bus featuring chef Anna Polyviou promoting the City of Canterbury-Bankstown and their ‘Eat Global Visit Local’ campaign. Great to see local councils promoting the wide variety of food they have to offer (well who else is doing it? - see above). This one offers the opportunity for local businesses to register on the site so they can be promoted.
Newsletters
3 December 2020: Discover the world's cuisines via your inbox (Lee Tran Lam, SBS Food) Well, how meta - a newsletter article in our newsletter and we get a mention! We feel quite humbled to be included with one of our favourites, Vittles, and there’s more here we have subscribed to. We do love this new way of creating, sharing and writing and there’s an opportunity to support other writers as well.
Cookbooks and food terms
‘Tis the season to make lists and the top cookbooks of 2020 are no exception. Broadsheet have a best Australian cookbook list featuring Adelaide’s Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen by Durkhanai Ayubi and Farida Ayubi and from her tameleria in Dulwich Hill there is Comida Mexicana by Rosa Cienfuegos. Booktopia list their The Best Books of 2020: Cookbooks with In Praise of Veg by Alice Zaslavsky, The Ethical Omnivore from Feather and Bone, To Asia With Love by Hetty Mckinnon and Africola by Duncan Welgemoed. For a different view, Goodreads has their reader voted best cookbook list - very heavy on the big celebrity chef names and includes the David Chang bio. SBS Food also do a wrap up of the most popular food terms in 2020, with number one recipe going to a non food 2020 essential item - hand sanitiser.
Chinese
4 December 2020: Beijing’s silent cafe makes hearing-impaired baristas easy on the ear (Xinhua News Agency, Khaosod English) Starbucks have opened their first signing store in Beijing. Hearing impaired baristas work here, with special timers to assist where a sound would be an alert and other tools to assist. Masks are presenting a problem for lip reading but strategies are in place to support if in need. It’s one of the quietest stores in the chain as well.
11 December 2020: Li's Chengdu Kitchen ~ Chinese, Burwood (B-Kyu) Chengdu noodle soups, rice dishes and a snack menu featuring chilli coated hot chips. We have been really digging on intestines lately, the mix of the 'what's that funky smell' with the OTT chilli sauce works fabulously. The broth also has that oily slick that holds the heat while you eat the red coated noodles and polish off the rest of the soup later, even though you promised yourself you wouldn't eat it all.
Japanese
9 December 2020: The Only Ainu Restaurant in Tokyo (Mara Budgen, Gastro Obscura) An izakaya in Tokyo specialises in Ainu, a minority group from Hokkaido who have faced discrimination since settlement of their northern Japanese island. The menu features pickled wild vegetables, salmon, wild lily and onion. The knowledge and acceptance of Ainu culture has increased in recent years, with a popular anime Golden Kamuy featuring Ainu characters and more ability to claim heritage without discrimination.
Korean
11 December 2020: The Sydney cafe dedicated to Korean rice cakes (Lee Tran Lam, SBS Food) The only bangatgan or rice cake shop in Sydney has loyal followers, travelling for four hours to eat these specialty rice cakes. Siroo makes traditional cakes or tteok, and also does a range of more modern flavours. They reflect the seasons and occasions, offering pumpkin flavours for the harvest and bingsoo in Summer.
Singaporean
2 December 2020: On a Singapore Street, Two Rival Biryani Restaurants Go to War (Heather Chen, Vice) As far as restaurant rivalries go, this one really takes the cake. Two restaurants in Singapore (on North Bridge Rd, right near Arab Street), side by side for decades, have almost exact same menus. Threats, attacks with knives, restraining orders, violence against staff and even suspected supernatural goings on have all taken place. One owner has a restraining order so he can’t go anywhere near the eateries after he slashed the other owner with a knife. The real shame is the attention on the fight is scaring off customers who don’t want to feel they could be hurt while they eat .
Thai
9 December 2020: 106 eateries, street vendors get Michelin’s endorsement this year (The Nation Thailand) The 2021 awards for Thailand are yet to be released, but here is the Bib Gourmand list, like their version of cheap and cheerful. 65 are in Bangkok, 20 in Chiang Mai and 21 in Phuket and Phang-Nga range from fried dough stick specialists, seafood on the beach, som tam and Thai-Isaan dishes.
1 December 2020: Consumers warned not to buy grilled blue-ringed octopus because it is highly toxic (Thai PBS World) Thai health authorities have found food vendors mistakenly selling blue ring octopus on bbq grill skewers. The venom from these squiggly squids does not get neutralized by cooking, resulting in some painful and potentially lethal results.
Vietnamese
5 December 2020: Where you can’t beef about making a meal of offal (Vi Yen, VN Express International) Where to find this dish in Saigon, with three different places offering the dish. Pha lau is a Vietnamese dish of Chinese origin made with pork, beef or duck, with liver, tripe and stomach beef offal and a dense coconut broth. There are multiple varieties discussed here, including a duck one we would love, complete with duck head, wings, neck and legs. The stew is served with crusty bread for mopping up the sauce.
Malaysian
3 April 2020: Take a Bao Podcast - #2: The Disappearing Coffee Houses of Malaysia (Yi Jun Loh, Take a Bao) While we are pointing out this episode in particular, there are so many more in this podcast series to work through - salted egg mania, dalgona coffee and kueh . This episode focuses on the kopitiam, especially those in Kuala Lumpur and explores their slow demise and colonial origins.
9 December 2020: Best Malaysian Restaurants in Sydney (Broadsheet) A very good round up of Malaysian places across Sydney. We would question the inclusion of Temasek (as Singaporean / Malay) and bumping others like Sharon Kwan to notable mentions, otherwise a solid list to munch through.
Indian
8 December 2020: Indian farmers protesting push for deregulation squeeze food supplies, and Narendra Modi's government (Arshad R. Zargar, CBS News) The introduction of three laws to deregulate food markets in India has farmers fearing they will lose out to big business and be exploited, causing them to protest in New Delhi and shutting down major wholesale markets in Delhi and Mumbai. Protesters have been beaten and had tear gas and water cannon used to clear them off, invoking comment from Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau.
Palestinian
8 July 2020: The Evolution of Palestinian Cuisine (Yasmin Zaher, Haaretz, six free articles per month) We picked up this story from a very full edition of the In Digestion newsletter (explore this for even more stories). As plant based becomes more common in western cooking, this story looks to the past of Palestinian cooking where greens and vegetables were mostly eaten. Now chicken, rice and tomatoes have taken over, mostly imported, because of a reduction in arable land available to locals. The localised foods have been subsumed by what is available, and many traditional dishes are in danger of being lost. It became illegal to wild forage for the ingredients for za’atar and many farmers lost access to traditional seeds. The article is long, but the exploration of cultural appropriation, loss of food identity and economic and political forces shaping food and culture is well worth the read.
American
10 December 2020: Rats besiege New York Chipotle, eating avocados and attacking staff (Poppy Noor, The Guardian) This fast food store in Upper Manhattan has been so overcome with non paying rodent customers they had to shut the store. Not at the first rat sighting, or the first time a staff member saw one, but when they chewed through the computer wiring for the ordering system.
East African
8 December 2020: How a business course helped take an East African chilli sauce to market (Cat Woods, SBS Food) If there’s a universal condiment, it has to be chilli sauce. Two East African-Australian women in Melbourne have started a business selling basbaas, a red version (basbaas guduud) and green (basbaas cagaar). Both women took part in a food business course run by Moonee Valley City council.
It’s a B-Kyu world
For your crafty inspiration…
Food trucks have officially jumped the shark.
Beep, beep! Make way for a world of cooking fun with the Barbie Fresh 'N Fun Food Truck! Makes a great gift for kids especially food truck fans and those who want to learn the latest cooking tips and skills!
As always, get out and explore the beautiful world we live in.
Alison and Shawn, B-Kyu
Hey guys. Love the blog and the newsletter. You've referenced and linked some interesting podcasts in the past and recently... wondering if you'd share the interesting ones you follow for all things food?