Where To Bring Your London Foodie Friend in Melbourne.
First, determine if your foodie friend is white.
*Looks at Kat*
Yes, she's kinda white.
Tick.
Kat was my Australian designer / finished artist at my final full-time ad agency, and I'm pretty sure it was her idea to get me the Joseph Joseph salad bowl as a farewell present, as no one else in the agency had the taste or the consideration.
Anyway, she's been working in London for the last 10 years, and this trip was her first time home since the worldwide epidemic.
The first time we met up in February, I took her to Lulu’s Char Kuew Teow.
What are the chances of her or her friends frequenting decent Malaysian fried noodles shops in London? The agency type? Come on.
It was almost 2 pm when we got there, so there was no queue. We found a table almost immediately and we got our CKTs without having to look back passive-aggressively towards the kitchen.
After that, we had coffee at Brother Baba Budan.
Here’s a tip about being a good food tour guide. You can’t promise someone a good time, (eg., ‘boy, you’re gonna love this.’) rather, you have to make it sound like you discovered a place together, say something like ‘I’ve always wanted to do this, but because of you, I have the opportunity.’
Because coffee is coffee.
What makes it different is context.
You all know this when brown-nosing your bosses, but for some reason, when it comes to food, it just whooshes through your heads.
How about we sneak up to Din Tai Fung? I’ve always wanted to order nothing but Xiao Long Bao, and GTFO. She loved that suggestion, but alas, the consequences of a late lunch at Lulu’s meant Din Tai Fung was closed for staff break by the time we got there.
We walked past QV, and I was telling Kat how I shot the menu for OMI and it clicked. I guessed she had not tried salted egg fries in her life and I ordered one on the spot. And I was right. She made naughty noises as she (we) ate the fries in the food court.
There was just something so uplifting and wholesome to see this grown woman enjoying fries with salted egg sauce. Like seeing your kid watching the twist on Star Wars for the first time, right?
Ah, to be a salted egg virgin again.
Our second catch-up was last week, I brought her a canele from The Flour as I picked her up from the station.
Amuse-bouche in the car, that’s how I roll.
And then ramen at Gogyo.
Because it was raining.
I know London has ramen, but I was confident that no one's brought her to a burnt miso or soy sauce ramen place. And once again I was right.
She got the black one and I the seasonal white chicken one, in the end, she preferred mine.
She had a list of places to go too.
A long one.
In fact, it was her list that made me decide to take her to Gogyo since it was next to the Pidapippo laboratory.
(Yes, they call a gelato kitchen 'lab' now. Just like how I call my desk an ‘atelier’, my shower room a brain box, my toilet seat a think tank.)
The moment she stepped out of the shop saying the flavours didn't excite her, I fist pumped in the air and declared that I've always hated Pidapippo.
Ok, hate is a strong word.
Let me rephrase.
I’m not the target market.
Because I, one, hate queueing.
Two, the flavours were as vanilla as three coats of Dulux American Antique White paint (you may like that) and as creative as brands trying their darndest to do ‘X but make it Wes Anderson’. (You may like that too.)
Their Nutella swirl was not a swirl, but a dribble. Recommend that flavour to your enemy. I'd rather get a tub of Peter's and a full jar Nutella than - oh look, we arrived at Industry Beans, a small rant away from Gogyo.
I know London has coffee, but Kat said she's not too friendly with lactose so I ordered her a batch brew.
Can you believe it's her first? At this point, I feel like Kat just doesn’t get out much.
We talked about how the place felt a little too 'industry', a little too like London. I took a photo of her in a part of Melbourne that could be London.
And when she said Tokyo Lamington is on her list, my eyeballs did a 180 degrees. She said there are no lamingtons in London to which my contempt turned into pity and alright, we'll drive back to Carlton with our takeaway coffee.
She tried taking photos of the lamington, and I said you gotta turn the phone upside down to correct the perspective. She said the shadow is in the way I said your iPhone has a portrait lens you gotta stand further away and zoom in to eliminate shadow. She's like Harvard you gotta sell some online lessons and I said we gotta sell some AI-generated Etsy t-shirts, after she buys me some copper canele mould from Bordeaux.
We picked up my daughter together from school, made our way to the library, then DOC to buy some salami and pre-made pizza for dinner.
Walking by Brunetti, she mentioned her grandmother used to make crostini and even though she's Slovenian they looked like crostinis from Bologna.
Wait, Kat’s Slovenian??
I roasted chestnuts for her before she left for trivia night at a pub.
Not bad for a second food tour.
Yesterday, our last lunch was at Chin Chin (I know), also on her ‘to dine list’.
Being away for 10 years, Kat apparently missed the boom of Melbourne’s 2010 dining scene and is now trying to relive that hype.
She said we must order the beef pad ee sew, sure, and I ordered the chicken wings and sticky caramelised pork.
I told her that’s enough because after that we’re going to Gimlet for a cocktail.
‘Or,’ she said, ‘we could try Din Tai Fung again.’
Yea that might actually give us more joy than Gimlet since she could probably find overpriced cocktails with beautiful interiors in London. Whereas Xiao Long Bao, she was convinved that Melbourne’s XLB will be better than Londons.
They were not.
The Xiao Long Bao’s were ok, but what made Kat’s day was the robot bringing us food. She shrieked with joy.
And while I ordered the fried calamari rings as a joke (I can cut cucumbers at home, but it’s a pain to deep fry calamari) we both agreed they were the best calamari rings we’ve had for a while.
“This place is overhyped,” Kat said as we sat in the new Black Star Pastry, around the corner from DTF and I was like, hey you wanted hits, here’re some hits.
She thought it was going to be a long queue like LUNE, but no, Sydney brands get the cold shoulder in Melbourne and vice versa. We were the only ones without puffer jackets and a camera.
She liked how the watermelon cake wasn’t too sweet, but she wished it was a cheesecake. Should she order the zen cheesecake? I said if their signature can’t impress you, the chances of the sidekicks being good are slimmer than slim.
Black Star has done a complete rebrand and once I saw the cutesy Noritake Japanese illustration (which was trendy what, five years ago?), I knew the Black Star we once knew was gone. It’s got nothing to do with cakes now, just trying to be an international ‘icon’ to sell t-shirts and plates.
$11 for a slice of cake?
You should feel so lucky.
I took her to the State Library.
She had never been in the dome, the room with the green lanterns. She did not know about the new wing from Russell Street. At this point, it’s really apparent that she just woke up from cryogenic freezing and I could point at a fire hydrant and she’d be impressed.
Fun fact: we walked past Han Guuk Guan and she saw me in distress as I saw the graffitied front door, and went through the back to peek through the window to double-check if they were still in business. (They are, the fridge still had drinks in them, just a day off. Phew.)
Cut to us in our apartment, and she was explaining to Chika how she’s traveled to 41 countries so far, mostly in Europe, pointing to Hana where’s what on the world map, sharing all her travel stories.
Chika asked: “why are you even here talking to us? How could you find us interesting?”
Dolly zoom into my face for the big reveal.
All this while, as she was complaining about her clients and life, I thought I could relate. But in reality, her clients were Tiktok, Google, a Premier League Football team.
She’s not the frog; we are.
I cringe as I thought of all the pseudo-advice I tried giving her. I cringe that she saw me trying to spend $30 to get $10 off in Woolworths.
Her life would’ve been absolutely fine without me, food guide or not.
The final stop of the food tour was my miso soup, pressure-cooked pork shoulder, blowtorched then served with my green sauce, a mini brioche bun containing yesterday’s pan-fried sardine with breadcrumbs.
She said finally she could taste my cooking.
No, finally I could cook something for her.
Thanks for the salad bowl, Kat.