B-Kyu Newsletter - 8 November 2020
NAIDOC week, Bourdain and travel, dine on an A380 @20. Changi Airport, Penang laksa, Balinese in Bondi Junction, Parmy ice creams.
Hi folks
Welcome to the B-Kyuniverse for 8 November 2020. Feel free to share the B-Kyu love by sending 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 broad 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.
NAIDOC Week
It’s NAIDOC week this week, so get out and celebrate an indigenous food business. There’s some great recommendations here for drinks, kangaroo meat pies, native Australian foods and eating places.
10 November 2020: USU Naidoc Week Food Truck (NAIDOC) Outside the Law Building, head into The University of Sydney on Tuesday from 11.00 for a feast with local Indigenous apprentice chefs from Serendib Social using native ingredients found around campus to serve up a free all Indigenous lunch menu.
8 November 2020: Indigenous grains grown in northern NSW deemed 'commercially viable' (Amelia Bernasconi and David Claughton, ABC Rural) The Indigenous Grasslands for Grains project has researched 15 grains with the potential for commercial viability. Native millet holds the most potential with others like purslane with a potential for an export market.
Food writing
2 November 2020: A new anthology of diverse Australian food writing comes out this month (Emily Lloyd-Tait, Time Out) With the New Voices on Food book coming out soon, this article showcases the publication and it’s editor Lee Tran Lam who wins the award for most linked to writer in our newsletter. It shows just how dedicated she is to writing, speaking and publishing and shames us all with her productivity. There’s still time to order the book here.
Covid-19
3 November 2020: Burger King UK tells fans to order from McDonald's, other chains to support restaurant industry (Janine Puhak, Fox News) The UK chain has crossed the food lines to promote buying from UK food businesses, any business - including it’s competitor, McDonalds.
5 November 2020: Coronavirus: meal-ticket plan to get economy cooking (Yoni Bashan, The Australian, $) Proposal by the NSW government to give each household $100 to spend at a café, restaurant or pub, excluding alcohol sales. $100 bucks to spend at Eating World - yay!
7 November 2020: Travellers may need to prepare for changes to in-flight offerings by airlines, experts say (Rachel Clayton, ABC News) After images of business class passengers being offered two-minute noodles appeared on social media, airlines have revealed the reality and cost of full service flights is under pressure. But do we really need a meal on an under two hour flight?
Food and travel
4 November 2020: The Bourdainification of Food Travel (Joanna Fuertes, Vittles) This article proposes that fandom for the Bourdain style of travel and eating has lead to a type of traveller who drops into a local area and expects to eat like him, exactly where he perched but with safety and comfort and none of the icky bits. We’d argue this type of traveller existed well before Bourdain, it’s just that a cable TV show reached far more people than a book ever did and it’s easy to point to one key influencer. Hey, we stole ‘culinary underbelly’ for our byline, who are we to complain?
What we would like to see is a move away from ‘doing’ a country and a checklist of must eat or must photograph as made famous by someone and a shift towards just getting out and exploring yourself and experiencing a place through it’s food and it’s people. Don’t be obsessed with ‘the real deal’ - it’s all real to someone who actually lives and eats where you happen to be. Travel is a privilege, not a right, you are in someone else’s home.
Put simply, the search for the authentic as a tourist is an oxymoron. You may well be able to get a few atmospheric Instagram shots of dimly-lit diners and plastic cutlery but to find the ‘real deal’ requires an amount of time, care and rejection of your creature comforts that is incongruous to tourism. The desire to literally feed our inner-Bourdain is not malicious but it may be time to come to terms with the fact that we’re not the stars of our own edgy food travel show. We’re the antagonists.
Beer
6 November 2020: Resch's fans launch a pub passport to boost NSW tourism (Callan Boys, SMH Good Food) The Reschs Appreciation Society has released a Beer Passport. 75 venues have combined to offer discounts on dining and a stamp in the passport on purchase of a beer. Hall of Fame honours await those who complete all 75 missions in 2021. We are suckers for a stamp and a challenge (and a Reschs), let the collecting begin.
8 November 2020: 'What’s happened is quite sad': what brewery closures say about Australia's drinking (Royce Kurmelovs, The Guardian) A tale of the impact of small companies being taken over by large global conglomerates, shutting down local brewers and blaming the rise of craft beer for their demise.
A frothy Resch’s at the Golden Barley, Enmore (B-Kyu)
Japanese
2 November 2020: Kaiseki is a Japanese celebration of seasons (Audrey Bourget, SBS Food) Learn more about the art of kaiseki, a reflection of the 72 microseasons of Japan and the skill of the chef. Features Melbourne restaurant Ishizuka and chef Hitoshi Miyazawa. This sure ain’t b-kyu food.
Singaporean
10 September 2020: Our Hit List of the Best Heritage Hokkien Mee in Singapore (Panyapol Phuenpha, Phuket Times) While there is debate as to it’s origin (possibly around Rochor Road and our beloved, now gone 7th Story Hotel) this dish is a favourite. This list is a great noodle food trail, from bedok Corner, Seragoon Rd and out to Old Airport Rd to look for these noodles in their pork and prawn head broth, rounds of squid and sprinkle of egg omlette.
4 November 2020: Restaurant A380: A Unique Dining Experience That Sates Your Wanderlust (Atiqah Rosle, Asian Food Network) A restaurant on board a stationary A380 at Changi airport helps those who miss airlines and airline food, at whatever cabin class or food style including Peranakan and Muslim options.
5 November 2020: In Singapore, ‘revenge dining’ trend sparked by Covid-19 cabin fever props up restaurants – but will it last? (Dewey Sim, South China Morning Post, $) With so much disposable income in Singapore while there are travel bans, money is being fed back to dining. The problem is - everything is booked out, lah! Not sure why it is called ‘revenge dining’ - perhaps revenge against the virus?
Malaysian
27 October 2020: Penang's assam laksa ranks No. 7 on CNN World’s 50 Best Foods list (Malay Mail) There’s two Thai dishes in the top ten with massaman curry at No 1, but assam laksa we can vouch for as worthy for a top ten place.
Indonesian
8 November 2020: Bite Cave ~ Balinese Indonesian - Bondi Junction (B-Kyu) Tucked up a side street in Bondi Junction is a small café serving up nasi campur with lashings of crisp pork, chicken skin, skewers and Balinese salad, lawar. We also dig the nasi jinggo, street food glory, a mix of rice, noodles and bits of tempeh and a blob of chicken curry for sauce.
Nasi jinggo at Bite Cave (B-Kyu)
Filipino
3 November 2020: Watch: The Entree.Pinays make silog (Words by Yvonne C Lam, Video Julia Gronowski (ed) and Ava Arguelles, Laura Arevalo, Patrick Hisshion, Shaun Blows, Rodney Guinto (camera), Gourmet Traveller) This Filipino breakfast and anytime meal, silog gets a collaborative video recipe from Fides Santos-Arguelles, Felis Sarcepuedes, Maisie Lecciones, Sandra Tan, Kristina (Nina) Naray and Grace Guinto from the Entree.Pinays collective.
Bangsilog - marinated milkfish with fried egg and rice from Lazza, Marrickville (B-Kyu)
Sri Lankan
7 November 2020: The Fold brings Sri Lanka to the inner west with love (cake) (Candice Chung, Good Food SMH) More love for the new-ish family run Sri Lankan eatery in Dulwich Hill. Whole love cakes for $15, that’s a whole lotta love.
Afghani
2 November 2020: Recipe: Parwana’s Soft and Creamy Red Lentil Dal (Broadsheet) One of our absolute favourite comfort foods is dal, we cooked it often over winter. This version has a far wider spice base than our usual recipe (good ol’ Charmain Solomon and a handful of fresh curry leaves) but we’ll be trying this out next time dal comes up on rotation.
American
4 November 2020: Americans sought out junk food and booze as election results trickled in (Alexis Benveniste, CNN Business) Shortages of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and an increase in searches for fries, burgers, cookies, Chinese and liquor during the wait for the result show Americans resorted to comfort foods at the highest, junkiest level.
Our election night snacking sure followed the junk food theme (B-Kyu)
French
4 November 2020: Hundreds poisoned in France from wild mushrooms (Joe Whitworth, Food Safety News) It’s the season for foraging mushrooms in France, but there has been an increase in poisonings. One of the culprits is the use of identification apps that are wrongly identifying edible ‘shrooms. Increases have also been noted in Ontario, Italy, Hong Kong and in Victoria and South Australia, mainly caused by an increase of people at home from lockdowns. If the virus doesn’t get you, the fungi will!
Meanwhile in mushroom news, Oregon just voted to legalise magic mushrooms. Portland is about to get a whole lot weirder.
It’s a B-Kyu world
It’s Japanese ice cream weather here in Sydney. The Parmy Matcha Cheesecake is highly recommended.
As always, get out and explore the beautiful world we live in.
Alison and Shawn, B-Kyu