Afghan Master Kebab

You know that song, "All my friends are getting married"?  Well, all my friends are moving to Sunshine.  I thought it was because they were smart cookies, but maybe they had a sixth sense about this awesome new opening - what I think is the western suburb's very first Afghan restaurant.

Feast your eyes on its awesomeness!  My youngest is enamoured - she thinks it's like eating in, I quote, "a princess castle".

Afghan Master Kebab specliase in skewered meats which they cook over a narrow charcoal pit at the back of the restaurant.  As the meat straddles the pit, the chef fans the charcoal, encouraging it to glow redder and emit more of that tantalising smoke.  (Don't worry, the restaurant is not at all smoky.)

Mix kebab, $13.99

This is the "mix kebab" - the two chicken kebabs were out of this world, uncommonly juicy and rubbed with a spicy mix.  We also scored a lamb kebab (smoky, tender, yum) and a mince kebab - the only one the kiddo could handle in terms of spice.  Thin, Afghan-style naan bread, some fine fresh salad, a yoghurty sauce and another minty, chilli one made for a most excellent lunch.

In my experience, Afghan food in Melbourne tends to be on the dear side.  Not here - Afghan Master Kebab has really fair pricing, with everything between $12 and $15 (and the "mix kebab" above was really enough for two).  I'm keen to try their "qorma" curries and rice pilafs, studded with carrot and red barberries.

The westie dining scene just got even more diverse - and even more delicious!

Afghan Master Kebab
3/20 Devonshire Road, Sunshine
Phone:  9311 9277

Talking Big West over lunch at Sapa Hills

When I left school, I loved food as much as I do now, but I hadn't considered trying to get into food writing.  In fact, my first career aspiration was to be an art critic.  I was very into semiotics, postmodernism, and wearing lots of black.  I ended up dropping out after a year (I realised I looked much better in red) but I've still always enjoyed art.  There are lots of different experiences you can have observing it, but my favourite is the comparatively rare moment when, browsing a gallery or watching a performance - BAM!  Something hits you, like a key in a lock, and you can't look away.  It's fantastic.

This is why it is very exciting to tell you that I am the 2013 Big West Festival's official blogger.  The Big West Festival is a biennial arts festival held in the west, showcasing western suburbs artists, and celebrating what makes the west the eclectic, gritty and gutsy place it is.  I'll be blogging over at the site throughout the Festival, but as an intro, come and meet Marcia Ferguson, the Festival's director, over some delicious treats from one of my favourite Footscray restaurants.

Plan A had been some lovely soup at Sen, but with it surprisingly shut that day, we strolled to Sapa Hills.  Quite a few people seem to think its slightly swish decor means that it's some kind of gweilo tourist trap, but its Hanoi-style specialties and confident renditions of Vietnamese staples make it one of my favourite spots in Footscray.

Bun nem ran, $12

For instance, spring rolls at Sapa Hills don't just mean the typical tiny tubes with a hunk of iceberg lettuce you get elsewhere.  These are Hanoi-style spring rolls, wrapped in rice paper (instead of wheat) and fried so that they are delicately crisp and crackly all over.  The filling is a delicious mix of pork, vermicelli noodles and black mushroom.  Make a little salad with spring rolls, rice noodles, greens and refreshing dressing for a big whack of yum.

Just about all the artists in this year's Big West Festival are from the western suburbs.  Marcia and I spoke about what makes this part of Melbourne have such a strong and defined identity.  She said she thinks of the west as a "mini Philadelphia".  "Philadelphia loves Philadelphia, and you can feel it on the street," she says.

To her, Big West is about bringing out and presenting to the public the west that is already here.  It's about celebrating what Marcia describes as our "gorgeous mix of immense cultural tradition".  One really exciting event that does just this is Dance Republic, a kind of cross-cultural dance-off between groups like the South Sudanese Dombai Dancers, dancers from the Chin community and students from local high schools.  It's on Sunday 1 December at Little Saigon Market - read more here.

Wonton soup, $5

Just a little wonton soup to whet your appetite.  This is a bargain at five bucks and boasts lovely restorative soup and fat wontons with whole prawns inside.  (I find these soups are great for kids - just enough and not too many tricky noodles to try to scoop up.)

Big West is about inclusiveness and community engagement, but it also offers opportunities for artists to present their work, even if that work is "high end" or highly conceptual.  "Labour" is a "part video installation, part participatory event" by local artist Hoang Nguyen.  His inspiration is his childhood experience of the Vietnamese show tunes that played while his mother made clothes at home.  Through this work he aims to "[explore] notions of work through open karaoke participation".  If that's not a world first, I don't know what is.

Vietnamese coleslaw with prawns and pork, $18

The coleslaws at Sapa Hills are another must-have.  We loved this prawn and pork number - sometimes the pork in soups and salads can be a bit grey and chewy, but here it was really tasty and tender.  I could live off this stuff - so much crunchy cucumber, fresh herbs and sweet pickled carrots.  Scoop it onto the prawn crackers for a Vietnamese tostada.  Yum!

"Massive" perform at the Big West launch

You can read the whole Big West program here.  As mentioned, the rest of my Big West posts will be on the Big West site itself, so stay tuned there for artist interviews and reflections on works during the Festival itself.

Announcing ... The Westies!

Every so often we get out of town.  Sometimes, among ferns or sand dunes, I start daydreaming about moving somewhere where there are a lot more trees and a lot less trucks.  It all sounds great until it comes to food, and that's when I realise I couldn't be happy in a place without dosas and pho and with only one type of mint.  That whole thing about a way to a man's heart is through his stomach?  I may not be a man, but that is definitely true for me.

I've loved meeting fellow food bloggers along the way, doing crazy things like eating chicken embryos and doing blind banh mi taste testing, but my best blog bud is Kenny of Consider the Sauce.  It's brilliant to have a mate and blogging compadre to trade cheap eats war stories with.  We've both been running our blogs for three plus years, and with almost 1000 posts between us, we think we've really lit a fire under the media to get more attention on the western suburbs horn of plenty  ...  but there's always room for improvement.

To this end, Footscray Food Blog and Consider the Sauce are proud to announce "The Westies:  Dishes of Distinction" - the first food awards dedicated to celebrating the amazing food culture of Melbourne's west.  These annual awards will honour three dishes per year from three different eateries (as opposed to awards to the eateries themselves).  So we're talking maybe an amazing dal makhani, the flakiest cheese burek, and an epic soft shell crab banh mi.  Actually, I don't know who makes that - but can someone please start?!

The selection process will take into account taste, consistency, pricing, and a sense of uniqueness or tradition.  This year's winners will be decided after countless emails, Facebook messages, dining-out sojourns and an epic knock-down bar-room brawl  ...  followed by a steak and a dozen oysters, of course.

Each eatery will be presented with a commemorative award - initial designs included a Olympic donut cast in bronze.  That was scratched, but we promise it will still be awesome.  Eateries responsible for producing the winning dishes will be ineligible for further awards for the next three years.

The winners of the 2013 "Westies - Dishes of Distinction" will be announced and the awards themselves presented at the annual Footscray Food Blog/Consider The Sauce Spring Picnic, to be held at:

Yarraville Gardens, Somerville Road.

Saturday, November 30, from 11 am.

The Westies - Dishes of Distinction winners announced at noon.

Amasya Kebab House

A little word association test for you.  Think bread.  Now think Footscray.  I bet you a bag of Olympic's finest you are either thinking of Nhu Lan's crusty French-style bread, or a supple round of injera.  But the bread that gets most overlooked in the 'scray is Turkish bread.  I'm talking big fluffy rectangles with lovely undulating tops, sprinkled with sesame seeds, just begging to be torn apart and swiped through some lovely tzatziki.  One of the best spots to pick some up is Amasya in Nicholson Street.

Amasya is run by Esen who makes all the dips, salad and bread in house.  You can buy a whole freshly-baked, slab-sized loaf for $3.50.  Don't ever let me catch you buying that horrible packaged Turkish bread from Coles - this is well worth the detour.

The fare is Turkish, from a Turkish bread-wrapped kebab to plates loaded with shish kebabs or felafels, dips and salads.

Meal of the day (small), $13

This is the staggeringly excellent meal of the day.  Two hillocks of shaved chicken and lamb from the spit - the meat is really tasty, not too salty or fatty, with loads of delicious crisp bits.  It comes piled up against your choice of two dips (there's yoghurt-based cacik, spinach, eggplant and more) and some lovely fresh salad, plus a basket of fluffy bread - all for a fabulous 13 bucks.  (PS:  You can take leftovers home, and vegos can get a similar spread but with felafels and stuffed vine leaves for $10.)

The other winning tip here is the pides.  Theses are long submarine-like loaves enclosing a filling - maybe cheese and spinach or lovely creamy egg and sucuk, a salami-style sausage.  They are a bargain for $4 or $5 and you can eat them in, too, making them a great pitstop snack.

Cheese pide, $4

I ordered some of these for a function and when ordering said I was happy to have them cold as I'd heat them up later.  "What time are you coming again?" said the fellow there.  "About 10," I replied.  "Oh, they'll be hot then - they will only just have come out of the oven," he replied.  That's fresh!

Amasya Kebab House

134 Nicholson St, Footscray

Phone:  9687 7032

Footscray Food Blog's first-ever video!

Chef Lagenda

I don't know about you, but often when I enter a Malaysian restaurant, the first thing that comes to mind is bingo.  See, you walk in and everybody is just head down, eyes on the prize (be it that slippery last prawn in the laksa or that elusive "legs eleven").  When you finally surface, it may be with a big contented sigh, not a shout of "bingo!" - but the buzz afterwards is just as good.

At least that's what we were chasing when we popped into Chef Lagenda for a quick and tasty lunch.  This skinny-fronted restaurant is neighbours with Laksa King, probably Melbourne's most famous Malaysian restaurant.  There's a lot of mythology about the relationship between the two, with stories about chefs or staff decamping between the two, but let's just say Flemington is spoilt when it comes to Malaysian options.

It's a funny, slightly poky setup inside - almost like a skinny Victorian has had all its walls pulled out and been converted into a restaurant.  From memory there's a semi-enclosed courtyard upstairs.

Warm, slightly astringent Chinese tea comes standard.  Lagenda's got a mammoth menu, but if you want something really authentic, skip the chicken and cashews and flip to the stir-fried noodle and noodle soup sections for hawker classics.

Fried noodles with egg sauce, $11.20

This is one of my favourite Malaysian dishes.  It's usually called "wat tan hor".  Wide flat rice noodles are tossed with a little soy in a searing wok, given them a special smoky taste.  Next, rather peculiarly, they're completely covered with a very thick, starchy gravy mixed with beaten egg in which hovers prawns, fish cake, a few bits of veg, maybe some chicken and other good things.  I'll be the first to admit it looks like a dog's breakfast, but the taste is hot diggity dog.  The secret is getting the noodles infused with LOTS of smoky "wok hei" (the special hot work taste), otherwise it all just tastes gluggy and awful.  Maybe a touch more wok hei in Lagenda's version wouldn't have gone astray, and some of the egg pieces were a bit chunky, but it was a pretty good rendition nonetheless.

Sambal kangkung, $14.50

This sambal kangkung was disappointing, though.  Maybe it's a seasonal thing but the kangkung (a spinach-like aquatic vegetable) was slightly tough and woody.  The sambal was a bit flat in flavour, rather than being its usual slightly sweet and hot self.  Oh well.

I've had quite a few really good meals at Lagenda.  Their laksa is delicious, as is their salted fish and chicken fried rice, and I've had a good smoky char kway teow there too.  Next time you're lining up to pay your respects to the King, consider giving Lagenda a shot instead.

Chef Lagenda

16 Pin Oak Cr, Flemington (9376 2668)

Second store at Shop 9/10, 835A Ballarat Rd, Deer Park (8358 5389)

Tasty tidbits, from fish and chips to duck parfait at IDES

Time for another blog amnesty post!  I wanted to share with you some westside and city dining highlights from the last couple of months.  First up:  IDES.

IDES is a pop-up dinner put together by mates and passionate chefs Peter Gunn and Lindsay Fush (second and third from the left above respectively), who met while working at the Royal Mail in Dunkeld.  Peter is now junior sous chef at Attica, while Lindsay is working at a local pub in Hamilton.  Late last year they formed their own catering business and then began to explore the idea of using their days off to host a pop-up tasting menu here in Melbourne.  You know how they say if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life?  These guys have obviously nailed it.

The menu is six courses of intricate yet playful food, a steal at $90.  It's at Tonik in Kensington, who provide drinks for purchase.  Sure, the space isn't nearly as classy as the food, but Peter and "Fushie" bring in all their own crockery and cutlery to enhance the experience of what's on the plate.

One thing I love is that with the exception of Raffaele Mastrovincenzo (front of house at Attica and wearing black in the photo above), the chefs do all the service, bringing out plates and chatting with you about their ingredients, technique and so on.

One of my faves was this exquisite duck liver parfait served with smoked salt, toasted black pepper and chervil, gorgeous heaped onto toasted bread.  I also loved a starter of an amazing, rich broth that was apparently only made with turnip, onion and mustard oil.

As of today, there are a mere 10 spots left for the next dinner on Monday, 23 September.  Book via the details above, and you can also check out the IDES Facebook page here.

Well, from the sensational to the...somewhat disappointing.  I was pretty stoked to hear that Dumplings Plus were opening a new branch at Highpoint.  If I'm stuck and starving, I'd prefer to have a choice like this rather than the usual food court suspects.

This wonton soup was spoiled, though, by absolute buckets of MSG.  Interesting exchange I had with a Chinese restaurateur recently, though - I said in my opinion restaurant X used too much MSG and he said, quite surprised, "You can taste MSG?"  I think it's like boar taint.  Some find it overpowering; others can't taste it at all.  Anyway, do try Dumplings Plus yourself - I'd go for the plain panfried dumplings next time.

What DOESN'T have a lot of MSG is this quite delicious beef pho from Green Leaf, Moonee Ponds.  We were so struck by its rich flavour yet lack of that particular "kapow" MSG denotes that we checked with the owner and there is only the tiniest pinch in a 20-litre stockpot.

Trying to convince a Footscray resident to go elsewhere for Vietnamese is like selling coal to Newcastle, but if Moonee Ponds is close to you, give Green Leaf a try.  Their prices are a bit dearer than Footscray or Sunshine but they have a lovely little story behind their business and their food is obviously made with care.  Their Facebook page is here.

Rockfish has changed owners and the word on the street is it's not the Rockfish we knew and loved.  I've been quite liking fish and chips from the very awesomely old-school Charles Street Fish and Chips in Seddon (67 Charles Street).

They have a really big range of fish, with ten choices including flathead, whiting, snapper, flounder and more.  Beer care of Seddon Wine Store.

With summer coming up, you could go and explore Point Cook Homestead.  It's quite odd to drive there, getting to the end of the glossy housing estates in Point Cook and suddenly being surrounded by fields and the odd horse, with the city hovering in the distance like a mirage.  The kids kept asking, "Are we in the country now?"  I didn't really know the answer.

You get the feeling they could do so much more with the space - there's a small but lovely old home that I think is mainly used for wedding photos, some empty stables, a herd of geese behind a gate and old farm machinery for the kids to play on.  The restaurant there is called Scrumpy Brown's and they do food that is not mindblowing but nice all the same.

Viz. this nice Caesar salad.  Lattes were pretty good too.

It's not far to scramble down to this lonely, lovely stretch of beach...

...and do some beachcombing.  (We put these back, of course.)  But do heed the warning signs of snakes - we nearly trod on a baby tiger!