Australia

Jen and I went to Esquire on Friday night to celebrate the recent engagement of our friends Mitchell and Chrystal.  It’s our fourth time at this restaurant and despite a recent change of head chef (Ryan Squires out, Ben Devlin in) there’s always enough quality and change in the menu to keep us coming back. You’ll have to excuse the ...

Urbane is probably one of the most creative and consistently excellent fine dining restaurants in Brisbane.  Thanks to their reputations, other high profile chefs like Ryan Squires and Matt Moran draw greater attention at Esquire and Aria but Urbane is the place to go for Brisbane’s most delicious and inventive degustation.  It’s got the longevity, the loyal customer base and ...

Jacques Reymond is a French restaurant situated in a stately Victorian mansion in Prahran, Victoria.  The establishment has been a part of Melbourne’s fine dining circuit for twenty years and is much loved and highly decorated, having held the prestigious Three Chef’s Hats rating for a number of years.  Jen and I dined here for the first time this year ...

For Jen’s birthday, I took her to one of Brisbane’s most decorated new restaurants.  Esquire’s head chef is Ryan Squires, formerly of Buffalo Club fame.  It’s been three years since we dined at Buffalo Club but it still rates highly for Jen and I as one of our favourite dining experiences so we eagerly awaited Squires’ new venture.  His food ...

Tank Restaurant is a dining experience after my own heart.  It’s run by a Scottish chef who likes Japanese food and decided to live in Australia to serve it.  You can often see chef/owner Alastair McLeod pottering away in the kitchen thanks to the restaurant’s revealing glass panel walls.  I don’t really watch much free-to-air television in Australia but apparently ...

On Sunday, I attended the inaugural ‘Delectable’ Brisbane Food Bowl, a sort of Big Day Out designed for people like me who dedicate large portions of their weekends to eating.  Hosted at Brisbane’s Botanical Gardens, its an event where a bunch of restaurants set up a kiosk and sell one of their dishes for five to ten bucks.  The event ...

I’ve worked in Toowong for the better part of five years now.  It’s a great area.  It takes me ten minutes to get to and from work, there’s a decent pub right next to the office and there’s a pretty great selection of food in the nearby vicinity. Mario Sarti is a fine Italian restaurant is one such place that ...

Nestled in Palm Cove at the Peppers Resort is Nu Nu, one of Australia’s most decorated regional restaurants.  The eatery has a casual, unassuming decor that fits in right at home with the rest of the Williams Esplanade.  The plastic deck chairs remind me of the Serasa Yacht Club that I went to as a kid.  The menu, put together ...

Pony Lounge & Dining is a tapas eatery that Jen and I stumbled across while wandering around The Rocks in Sydney.  It’s a pretty trendy looking bistro that offers up a modern Australian form of tapas which basically means its a hodge podge of food from just about everywhere.  For our seven courses we had a mixture of meats, seafood ...

Jen and I went away to Sydney as our good friend Zara was getting married to her fiancee Nick.  We made a mini-holiday out of the occasion and got away for four nights.  We managed to cram a fair bit in. On Thursday night while Jen was at Zara’s hens night, I caught up with my friend Nick.  Nick was ...