The Age has reviewed a bar that I like, the Abbotsford Convent’s Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment. I never seem to get there though. This could be the prompter.

I do like the Panama Dining Room on Smith St. Used to be a pool hall, when the floor below was a Latin Band venue — The Stage — which used to go off, and where I had some of my best evenings. Now The Age is onto it, and here’s their review. In fact, they like it so much they reviewed it again. It has that up 2 flights of stairs, you have to know about it excellence, but unlike so many such places, it is an expansive place once you get up there. There is a free pool table, and apparently on Sundays they have table tennis. They only got a sign recently. This one will be with us for a long time, like Spleen, and The Lounge, and 20 Myers Place. The photo of the Room’s bar is by Ben Richards, one of the Crumpler crew whose HQ is not so far away from the Room. Here are some more of his lovely Room photos:

Now this is what I call a great inovation: Bikely.  It plots bike paths, and users’ favourite on-road bike routes, on a street directory, and lets you look at the map in three views: standard street directory, Google world satellite imagery, or the latter with key roads superimposed (‘hybrid view’). Check out the 10 km loop taking in the Yarra Boulevard here, for example, and the instructions here.  All Abbotsford routes here.  The first hyperlink in this post are to all Victorian routes — 1616 of them. It also has running routes, which must also be walking routes.  It will be interesting to see whether it is possible to put links to Flickr images in the instructions. Maybe one day I’ll finish this blog’s first ever post, and plot the King Walk from the Carringbush to Dights Falls on the site as a running route. The beautiful photo is courtesy of A J Shcroetlin of Colorado.  Leave a comment if you think this site is as great as I do.

Today’s Good Weekend has a “2 of Us” profile by Bernadette Clohesy of the pair who own the Terminus Hotel, 39 year old Alison Whyte, and 41 year old Fred Whitlock. It’s certainly changing. Upstairs is the now mandatory fine dining restaurant, but there’s also a big party room giving out onto a large deck. Haven’t tried the restaurant, but the pub grub is superb. In fact, it’s a great pub. The place has a website which I have just discovered. Its history of the pub, which the pair purchased in 1996 — 11 years ago — is entertaining. It reveals that the original third partner is the bloke who bought and presumably did up the Healesville Hotel, another great pub, though mainly for the well heeled, unlike the egalitarian Terminus. I signed up for the mailing list so as not to miss out on events such as the 7 Culinary Disasters from the 70s for $70 dinner just gone.

Since the profile of the Whyte-Whitlock combo doesn’t seem to be available online, here are the bare bones, the bits at least not already covered by this newspaper (here and here). Whyte’s from Tasmania, Whitlock from New Zealand. They met at the Victorian College of the Arts. The class of people who transferred from Duntroon to the VCA might conceivably number one: just Whitlock. They have three children under 6: Rose, Milly and Atticus, and live in the Yarra Valley. That seems to have something to do with Whitlock getting stabbed in the head by a local:

“We’re now living in the Yarra Valley; it’s about an hour’s drive from the pub. We first moved out to the country in 2000 after Fred was assaulted while we were walking our dog in the local park. A fellow with two pit bulls came out of the bushes and one of them attacked our dog. Fred managed to pull the dog away and told the guy off. The guy said ‘I’m going to come back and kill you.’ On our way back, there he was with his two brothers and a very large knife. Fred got stabbed in the head. It was terrifying; he had to have stitches. Fred actually cahsed them back to their house and th epolcie came and the guy was arrested.”

I like this:

“Fred’s great qality is his humanity. He tries to help where he can; it’s a very lovely way to approach the world. And it’s the way I want to raise our children.”

and

“Some of his schemes are annoying — but then that’s also the most fascinating thing about him. We’ve got a shed full of coconut oil. He was going to fry the chips in it and he bought an enormous amount. He was so keen; he said ‘We’ll be helping local farmers in Fiji and Samoa. It’s a good fat too.’ The customers were very helpful in giving feedback — they said it was crap.”

This is no. 84 Park St, Abbotsford. I intended to interview the owners, or maybe the tenants, I’m not sure, and bring you the story, but time has got away with me and now the week before Christmas seems like a nice old time to give greater prominence to these folks’ lovely statement which I wholeheartedly endorse. I will bring you the story though, in time. God knows, s’time I did some journalism for this dang newspaper.

This is Cocoro Japanese Pottery Cafe in Smith St, which has been open for a year. One of our friends married a wonderful Japanese woman. Months ago, we cooked a dried apricot tart for them (with a bit of help in the form of pastry purchased from the Richmond Hill Cafe & Larder) and they brought around all the requisites for green tea. As far as I knew, the watery stuff my sushi bar lunch haunt provides me with was green tea, and the green tea ceremony was something in which everyone moved agonisingly slowly. Only when I saw the splendid paraphenalia — in particular the chasen, the bamboo whisk — and the luminously green frothy tea, did I begin to understand how a ceremony might be crafted around this drink. I had never seen anything like it, and never tasted anything like it. Here is a photo:

(I also learnt that people don’t move agonisingly slowly in the green tea ceremony.)

On Saturday night, we had a meal on Victoria St, but it was too noisy for conversation, so we headed to Cocoro for dessert. It is a very lovely place. We sat in a little lounge area newly installed in the front window where you can also nurse a tea or coffee and read the paper. I had my second black sesame icecream for the weekend there — the first was a gustational revelation at Charmaine’s on Brunswick St which I can’t recommend too highly. This one was formed into two balls — “buns” in the language of the menu writer — stuffed with red bean “jam”. It was good, and most of the desserts, many of which featured green tea (“macha”), were equally good. There are safer options for those less culinary adventurous. It seems to be another Austrapanese couple-run place. It’s a tiny place. There are only a few tables. It is a great place to go for conversation.

Like Wabi Sabi Salon across the road, the traditional Japstralian menu is eschewed in favour of less familiar and frankly more interesting home-style Japanese cooking. But this is a serious place. Their website indicates that they are seeking to set up a farm so as to source their own organic vegetables. And they do real frothy bitter luminously green tea, served with the traditional flourish of ritually turning the cup until its “front” is facing the guest. Though I didn’t verify this fact, our friends suggested that based on their previous experiences of this place, they expected that the tea would have been fresh, as in recently flown in from Japan. It turns out that Cocoro are actually starting up an organic green tea wholesaling business. Our tea was from Kyoto, source of the very best green tea according to Wikipedia.

I can feel myself heading towards grumpy old mandom when I think about the price of coffee in Melbourne. $3 is usually too much for a cup of the stuff, but here, a big dose of good coffee, served in their beautiful pottery handle-less cups, is bearable. The Age’s Epicure’s take on the place is here. Thanks for the first photo go to an Irishman, Jeremy Keith.

Miss K, renascent party girl, took me on a bar crawl of Gertrude St on Friday. We checked out Little Rebel (don’t share my barber man’s enthusiasm), Radio, and Gertrude’s (more anon). It involved dinner at Ume Nomiya (ume: Japanese plum, usually pickled — pictured, thanks to Matt Helminski; nomiya: drinking house) the tiny 37-seat Japanese place next to our regular haunt, Tandoori Times. Indolent Andy said it was his favourite Japanese restaurant, and that was enough to pull me out of some inertia and get in there. Mind you I think lingering first impressions when the place was but a bar and was not all that busy were preying on my inertia. Then, it was a bit too cool for school, weird even, though that was back in 2001. We loved every minute of our relatively quick dinner and warm sake slurp there.

Miss K, who uttered the heresy “I like this more than Wabi Sabi Salon”, had a stir fry on luscious Japanese white rice ($14.50). Apart from the very well executed tempura vegetable parcels, it was just a stir fry, but it was how stir fries — surely the most frequently badly cooked dish — should be. My small meal of kangaroo tataki ($11.50) was a work of art: rare kangaroo medallions with tiny cubes of dark purple jelly (ponzu jelly?) and wasabi mayonnaise. It was one of the best plates I have devoured in a long time.

Like Wabi Sabi Salon, it’s got decidedly un-Japanese front of house staff and a strongly caucasion crowd, with quirky Japanese chefs out the back pushing the boundaries of Melbourne’s understanding of Japanese food. They maintain a bottle keep system a la Japonnaise where you can buy a bottle of whisky or sake and have it kept aside for when you come in.
The proprietress is Fiona Craig, a kiwi with an arts degree majoring in sociology who fell in love with Japan while teaching English there for 3 years or so in the mid-90s.

The details are:

197 Gertrude St, Fitzroy — 9415 6101 — food 6-10 p.m. except Sunday and Monday

Its hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thanks to Carlmonus in London, over at Flickr, for the lovely photo. My photos of the bakery are still trapped in my camera while I find the little cord which allows them to travel towards Flickr.

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