Welcome!!one!

Buongiorno, bonjour and “g’day”! (don't you like how they're all the same thing? ~ who knew Australian vernacular was so cosmopolitan???).

Also, "a good day to you, sir/maam" for our American pals, "Ni Hao" to China, and "Здравствуй" to our Russian comrades, "etcetera etcetera and so forth"... (for Yul Brynner).

It’s your old pal Kit (Christof) Fennessy here. I've been writing this blog with your help for ten years, and there's over a hundred and fifty recipes, restaurant reviews of Australia and around the world, and general gourmet articles in these pages for you to fritter away your idle hours on.

Want to know more about me? Friend me on facebook, follow me on twitter, or even look up my New Yorker cartoons on instagram! NB; different platforms not all food related)


A big thank you, as always, to my sponsors at Blue Vapours (use them for all your design and advertising needs - we are waiting for your call!).

Now, what's on the bill of fare today?

Monday, March 27, 2017

A Melbourne Pub Crawl

Philosophy, a Pub Crawl Map, 13 pubs reviewed, with a  further 15 suggestions...

If you are reading this in the US of A (or anywhere else for that matter – especially China where the only equivalent I could think of is a tea house), you might not be overly familiar with “pubs”, which is an abbreviation for “public houses”.  A short treatise.

As opposed to a “bar”, a wine bar, or a club, pubs hail from the English and Irish tradition; the little lounge on the corner, usually an old building with timber or tile lined walls, beer on taps, stained glass windows, and a quiet place to socialise and forget your troubles, a bit like a lounge room for the poor.  It’s a place that might have a dining room for a wedding, a nook for lovers, perhaps a ladies lounge apart from the men’s front bar where the girls weren’t supposed to come in (in the olden days).

In Australia, pubs are a big part of Victorian and South Australian cultures, and tend to be in old (in excess of a hundred years) buildings that have always been pubs.  Places built on the way to the gold fields, dotted in little country towns.  In NSW, it seems they’ve been replaced by Leagues Clubs, huge rambling barns with poker machines and tellys everywhere.  Queensland still has a few, but the old classics in Brisbane with big verandahs  seem to have been broken up into lots of little businesses in the old edifices or turned into monster nightclubs where you can score hard drugs.

Pubs are your “local”, a place to drink beer, and maybe see a band.  And they’re distinctly part of the core of southern Australian drinking culture; in short, if you ever come to Melbourne, get out of the CBD (the Central Business District) and into the inner suburbs like Richmond, Fitzroy, or Collingwood, and go to the fucking pub for fuck’s sake.  Or else you’ll have missed one of the key cultural experiences on offer.

Diatribe over (and sorry for swearing Mum!!).

Now for some background to the planning of this particular pub crawl (see map here); one which you might try yourself some day.



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Tuesday, March 14, 2017

I haven't forgotten you!

Hello Voracious Readers!

Just a quick note to let you know I haven't forgotten you, despite no listings in February.  In fact, I've been flat chat making a new food based comedy television show and pitching it around to stations and distributors – so we're actually taking it to the next level!  We'll make a link available here once we go public with the whole thing, which is terribly hush hush!!

However... watch this space!  Next week I'll be posting a bumper "Northside Melbourne Pubs" spectacular, as I take a host of my friends on a bike based pub crawl from Princes Park (Carlton) to Victoria Park (Abbotsford).  To whet your appetite, here's the map!!

(who knows?  Perhaps I'll make another fillum...)



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