Restaurant Lapérouse – History Four years before Captain James Cook bumped into the eastern coastline of terra australis in 1770, a bloke by the name of Lefévre, purveyor of alcoholic beverages to king Louis XIV of France, purchased a grand Parisian townhouse on the left bank of the river Seine and converted it into a bar, wineshop and eatery. The precise…
Category: Restaurants
Doing the Mâconnais
Four hundred km south of Paris and 75km north of Lyon, the small city of Mâcon on the west bank of the river Saóne is the southernmost outpost of the French region of Bourgogne (Burgundy) and the capital of the department Saóne-et-Loire. A population of 35,000 swelled by two recently when we sat in a cafe on Esplanade Lamartine to…
The Pisco King
Meet Johnny Schuler, Peruvian restaurateur, celebrity chef, tv personality, master distiller and Medal of Honour winner for his work in promoting the uniquely Latin American spirit, Pisco. We bumped into Johnny one freezing Friday over lunch in The Plaza Food Hall by Todd English when we stepped in from the cold to enter the Plaza Hotel in our dining ‘brag book’. We’d…
The Art of Modern Restaurant Dining
Six months ago Michelle and I had dinner at The Modern – the flagship restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It was a day, pretty much like any other, if your typical day includes… A 90 minute haircut resulting in a tonsorial crop shorter than your typical marine grunt. Or … Getting married in…
The Chef’s Table – Radiance of the Seas
We returned from a month in the states for one day of laundry and bill-paying before jetting off to Sydney and a taste of new age cruising on Royal Caribbean’s latest behemoth to base in Sydney for the summer – the newly refurbished Radiance of the Seas. I pity those diners who risk a booking in Peter Gilmore’s outstanding Quay…
Saigon
Sipping a chilled 333 in the window of a buzzy bar on Saigon’s renowned Dong Khoi Street I was taken by the faith and trust complete strangers place in others. The spark of this reverie was the nonchalant way many visitors stepped off the footpath into the path of a tsunami of motorbikes and purposefully strode across the road as…
Storming the Celebrity Solstice
Each June and December I join a circle of friends to celebrate the turning of the seasons for a ritual feasting and overindulgence in wine; I’m referring, of course, to the winter and summer solstice. Summer Solstice this December though, was just a tad different. This year was a get-together with 2850 of our closest chums, including around 1700 travel…
Cuzco Museum of Pre-Columbian Art – Day 9
It’s a Cuzco Saturday morning; crisp, bright and sunny. The hotel breakfast made exceptionally palatable with the online news that Collingwood had given Geelong FC a thorough shellacking at the MCG on Friday night, Melbourne time. We’re an odd couple; I’m a ‘Pie’man and Mitch a ‘Cat’woman, so at least twice a year there’s a minor domestic shitfight at our…
Cuzco
We’re in Cuzco (Cusco) and it’s the eighth day of our ramble along Peru’s famous Gringo Trail. To recap, our journey commenced in Lima before flying, via Cuzco, to Puerto Maldonado and 2 nights in Reserva Amazonica in the headwaters of the Amazon River. We then flew back to Cuzco and, leaving our heavy baggage in storage, were immediately swept…
Beaujolais & penne Alfredo
My experience of Beaujolais wine was, for a long time, restricted to the cheap, fruity low-alcohol plonk in the floral-labelled bottle marketed by Georges Dubœuf. The stuff we naïvely labelled “Beaujo” and would lug to barbies and student pissups as a ‘sophisticated’ alternative to a sixpack of stubbies. Geez, those were the days. Over the years I focused my attention on the…