Some things are not supposed to change. Some places, like our childhood homes, are so infused with memories that if we could, we’d slap a preservation order on them, just to ensure that every iota remains exactly the same as the place we knew. And that’s why every so often, I give up on trying to eat at the latest place people are talking about, and eat somewhere that’s deeply familiar and completely unpretentious.
Don’t get me wrong – I love zucchini flowers, 63-degree eggs and deconstructed desserts as much as the next self-perceived foodie, and am happy to bang on about the Noma revolution even though I’ve never been. But there are certain restaurants where I’ve been eating so long that even a slight refresh of the decor gives me heart palpitations.
I reckon for most of us, the place we learned to drink coffee must rank pretty highly on the list. For me, that’s Bill & Toni’s, part of the Sydney restaurant strip that’s been serving up cheap ‘n cheerful Italian since the mid-1960s. That was where I tentatively sipped my first cappuccino, its thick froth groaning with chocolate powder and the strong liquid underneath reassuringly neutered with two sugars, and immediately rewarded myself with some lemon gelato to take away the taste.
A few years later, it’s where I ordered my first short black, and although I couldn’t help wincing at the taste, I was proud, even though I couldn’t fathom why anyone would voluntarily order them at a place that also served coffee with milk.
I’ve been eating focaccia at B&T’s since I was 12, and every time they make even the slightest modification, I panic. Adding soups and salads? Hmm, okay, but don’t expect me to order them. Replacing the ugly cream chairs with equally plasticky red ones? Whoa, slow down, tiger.
Love focaccia? Try out this tomato and rosemary version right .
Tomato and rosemary focaccia with basil oil Source: Petrina Tinslay
These neighbourhood pasta joints, along with No Name’s opposite and the legendary Tropicana (home of Tropfest), are so beautifully immune to fashion that they warm my heart. May they sling napoletana sauce and sprinkle parmesan cheese for many years to come.
The same goes for Pellegrini’s in Melbourne, a national treasure, and the place I’ll always know as the Italian Waiter’s Club, whose resolutely laminated wood veneer walls would probably cost a fortune for some hipster architect to recreate.
Sometimes, studiously avoiding renovations can make a place ridiculously cool. That’s where the Ching Yip Coffee Lounge in Sydney’s Chinatown finds itself, in a space that’s a time warp back to the late 70s. A classic Hong Kong ‘cha chaan teng’ in an ancient food court called Dixon House, it serves noodles that bear an uncanny resemblance to the instant ones you’ll find in any supermarket aisle, and the meat on top may well come from a tin. I ordered fruit salad and ice cream there the other day, and I swear it’s exactly like my grandmother used to make it back in the early 1980s.
Long before groovy Western restaurants were experimenting with Asian flavours, Hong Kong’s coffee lounges were doing their own version of fusion, putting condensed milk and peanut butter on toast, and topping spaghetti with stir-fried chicken. Ching Yip has an extremely diverse menu, ridiculously low prices, and decor that makes you feel like you’ve wandered into an early John Woo film, and Chow Yun-Fat’s about to walk through the door brandishing a pistol.
Source: Dom Knight
If the Coffee Lounge (who even calls a cafe that any more, seriously?) ever changes, not only will we lose a valuable slice of Chinese-Australian culture, but a genre of place that probably barely even exists in Hong Kong nowadays.
There are so many other inexpensive, unpretentious places where I grew to love different national cuisines, all of which would devastate me if they changed. The fabulously kitsch underground Greek grotto where I learned to love moussaka and tolerate retsina.
Source: Dom Knight
The multitude of Turkish pizza joints where I discovered how to tell a sucuklu from a pastirmali, and the Lebanese restaurants in whose cushion rooms I was indoctrinated into the cult of shawarma. The Thai takeaways where I went from masaman to red to green curry, the Indian restaurants where I discovered and the yum cha palaces where I first tried chicken feet and confirmed that I never needed to again.
It's official!
Um, Yum Cha only just officially became a word
They’re all part of my food history, and I hope to take my grandkids to every single one of them someday. Unless they stop serving the schnitty-and-spag bol combo at Bill & Toni’s. In which case, let me assure the proprietors, I’ll never be going back again.
