Food and Drink

Home of the snow egg

Vue De Monde is chef Shannon Bennett’s fine dining restaurant that overlooks all other restaurants in Melbourne.  Quite literally.  The restaurant, situated on the 55th floor of the Rialto Building, is perched at the top of the Melbourne skyline and as you’d expect, the view is absolutely breathtaking and now an integral part of the experience when dining there. Although ...

Like any kid that grew up in Brunei, every now and then we need to have a taste of home.  In Brisbane, you can seek it out in Chinatown or Sunnybank where most of the Asian restaurants are.  You can get a chicken rice or a roti for ten bucks and it’s actually not that bad.  But there’s nothing like ...

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 ...

We visited three 3-star Michelin restaurants in New York.  Le Bernardin was a clinical business-lunch affair where we were surrounded by suits in a no-nonsense atmosphere.  Per Se had wonderful service and offered French-American cuisine prepared with impeccable finesse.  We had plenty of expectations with both restaurants but took a bit of a chance on the third big dining experience ...

For New York’s finest hot dogs, you must go to Crif Dogs in the East Village. We found out about the Crif Dogs when Anthony Bourdain talked them up on his travel show The Layover.  You might well wonder just how good you can get a hot dog to taste?  Well, Crif Dogs pushes that envelope pretty damn far.  These ...

Thomas Keller is most renowned for his world famous Californian restaurant French Laundry.  It remains exceptionally exclusive and difficult to land a reservation.  I tried and I failed.  Per Se, its sister restaurant in New York, was a slightly easier proposition to get a table. You only have to call up at 9am local time, exactly four weeks out from ...

Chef Eric Ripert’s French seafood cuisine at Le Bernardin is some of the most highly decorated in the world.  Most recently, it was recognized as the 19th Best Restaurant In The World, in Restaurant Magazine‘s annual awards.  It has upheld a standard of excellence for an unprecedented thirty six years since it first opened in 1976 and is a permanent ...