Friday, June 6th, 2008

Time	Event
6:21p	Restaurant review: 100 Miles Cafe The 100 Miles Cafe is one of the local places on my list of green kitchens. I was intrigued with the idea. It's pretty simple - source everything you can, in their case, 99% of ingredients, from within 100 miles. They're located in Melbourne Central, up on the third floor. James and I ate there tonight before going to see a movie. The menu is pretty straight-forward. It looks much like a normal cafe menu, the prices are about what you'd expect for a nice eaterie in a top location ($15 for a woodfired pizza, $25-30 for their top steak). Lots of interesting ingredients put together in a typically Australian-cafe style. While the wine list states the location that every wine's from, the menu makes no mention of their key point at all. It just leaves you to think about what's going to taste good. The information about the food (and why 100 miles) is actually on a map outside the cafe, showing the region they source from and giving examples of what they get from where. Cheese from Strzlecki. Chocolate from the Yarra Valley. Garlic from Ceres, a town near Geelong. Their exceptions to the hundred-mile rule are only a few, and include coffee (Australian-grown in Byron Bay) and miso (made in NSW by one of very few "official" miso makers outside of Japan). Admittedly, I note that some things are probably made locally from imported ingredients, for instance the chocolate. But they've done the best they can in that regard. The food itself was gorgeous. We ordered scotch fillet ribbons in sesame and miso with a mizuna, walnut and pear salad - actually, we kind of fought over who was going to get to order that. James surrendered and chose the duck, mushroom and pesto pizza instead. They were both pretty good, and definitely worth fighting over. I ordered dessert - a chocolate fondant with accompaniment. I thought fondant was the sticky cake icing, but it turned out to be a small cake shell filled with hot melted chocolate fondue. It was simply amazing. It was accompanied by a small scoop of what I thought was meant to be caramel icecream but tasted a little odd. I'm not sure what it was flavoured with. Came across as a little too strong on the esters, unfortunately, like it had been soaking in melted plastic fumes, but a lot of added flavours taste like that to me. The scattering of crushed pistachio nuts over the lot was nice, even if it had been optimistically labelled a "praline" on the menu, but the waiter warned us about that so it was OK. And the melty chocolate thing was liquid forgiveness for anything. Oh yeah. The layout of the place is curious. It's got a really big wood frontage, and you have to go down a long corridor inside to find the main room. There's a balcony there, the room is spacious and airy, still decked out in lots of wood, with a big bar and counter space dividing the room. But there's not a clear flowthrough or maitre'd point - you just arrive at a big counter wall thing that blocks access to the bar and to the main seating areas. We arrived just at 5, and I think the evening front of house staff hadn't started work yet. So I stood on tiptoe to look over the counter thing and bemusedly asked the bartender if I could get a table for two though I hadn't booked. He got just as bemused at me and said "I'll have to ask the boss if that's OK" and disappeared. I looked around at the large number of empty tables, and the front of house book he'd left open in front of me with only five lines filled in, and figured he must be new to eateries. A waiter appeared from behind a big concrete pillar and asked me if I was OK, I told him the other guy had gone to find out if I could have a table, and he gave a funny look in the direction the bartender had vanished -grin-. There was no problem getting a table :-) I chatted with the waiter a bit - the cafe's quite new, they're still getting word of mouth out, business is starting to pick up now but they're still experimenting a bit and finding what works and what doesn't. So it's interesting times for them. I figure word of mouth will be generally good though - prices are moderate, food is seriously excellent, service is basically good even though staff are still a bit new too. The only other funny thing was finding the toilets. You step off that big long corridor into a tiny space behind a black folding wall. You see three black doors, one to the east, one to the west, and a double door to the north. They are all unmarked with no handles. It's a bit dark, and the corners are filled with shadows. I started looking for the grue. But instead I did manage to find a label on one door that helped me work out by elimination which of the doors was mine. James had a similar problem, and on his first attempt to exit the corridor he missed the small dark room completely and found the fire hose instead. Overall: worth a visit. Decor and design interesting, concept straightforward, cool without getting in the way of the food. In fact, I think it does enhance the food. One of their stated motives is that supporting local farmers means they'll grow varieties that have flavour rather than shelf life. From what we tasted, that works. (6 Comments | Comment on this)
10:26p	I have seen this future on a thousand screens Pink. Green, orange, purple, hard curves and soft shines. Spots of light in darkness. Streams of people moving in and out, pulsing like fluid vortices in an engine boiler, veering in clots and clumps as if pulled by a randomly changing magnetic field. Strange surfaces and angles. Mass transit moving like a steady breath of stops and starts. And all of this within a well that reaches several storeys below ground and several storeys above, to the sound of a hundred different musics, four hundred different voices. I think it's the sound that struck me most. A boppy beat made of ten discordant muzaks and the sounds of chatter, a late night energy yet visually still it's a mechanical plastic dream. I looked at the people around us, the restaurants and shops and entertainment outlets. When you spend a lot of time in suburbia you forget that this is real. As real a place as the wilderness. It's a world of constant stimulus of sound and noise, of movement and lights. The window displays, the advertisements that move and sing and dance on their own, that talk to people's mobile phones as they pass. The streams of connectedness, of attention, that link all the disparate elements of this giant microcosm. Drawings of the future used to look like this. Do you remember seeing visions of this when you were small? Movies, or novels, stories of a strange world? It's all here, all now. I have seen this future on a thousand screens, and it tastes just like they told me I thought it would. When I visited the USA sixteen years ago I was struck by the degree they'd allowed advertising to take over their lives, to permeate their world. It was like a maze for the eye - you couldn't look upon anything simply. It was all full of noise, full of voices of colour demanding your attention now, dammit, now, because you needed to look. When I moved to Melbourne three years ago it struck me much the same. Learning to drive here took effort, because every surface was covered with demands, with adverts, with the things you Needed to See. Some highways even had flatscreens that played advertisements in full motion, five metres high and ten metres wide. The official highway signage was in an arms race for your eyes, bringing its own moving and flashing data at ever increasing brightness, resorting to more and more absorbingly stunning images to draw your attention back from the ads to the roads. Tonight we were on foot, in a place designed only for people. Stimulus from all sides, warring with scent and sound and colour, hard and shiny surfaces to reflect and catch. Physical design to scream for attention, as the self-focused happy-people thronging the walks pretended to ignore it. Instead they pulled out their phones and photographed themselves texting the numbers on the wall, sending messages to unknown robots and in return receiving more free stuff for everyone's favourite consumer number one. In intangible form, a data stream of lights and colours that might as well be money if it isn't dreams. I slipped out of the stream, and into the ladies room. Inside, a beautiful lady with glossy perfect hair and an immaculate uniform handed out boxes of multicoloured plastic utilities to every woman entering, giving each a genuinely stylish smile. Between guests she tidied - smoothing nylon flowers by the mirrors, straightening a knocked photograph beside the fur-covered rest chair on soft purple carpet. Creating the glamour, the beautiful illusion. She adjusted bottles of perfume and body spray on the counters, spraying some into the air to extend the experience to all senses. And it was an experience she was selling, for free, in little boxes of coloured plastic and that bright white smile. It extended right into the cubicles where the advertising of her employers faced you down, forcing into your eyes as you sat unable to look away. Magnetic fairy floss for the missing mind, so you'd know what it was you wanted to taste. I saw this future on a thousand screens, and it tastes just like they told me I thought it would. But I never dreamed it so close. (1 Comment | Comment on this)

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