restaurants we like

Ploy Thai

Ploy Thai Petersham – we eat here so often, and usually with so few fellow diners, that we tend to think of it as our personal dining room. A Chara and Tony (or Roy, as we’ve come to know him), the charming owners, serve up incredibly good, fresh, authentic Thai food for a sixpence. They also home deliver, but best to eat in. See eatability reviews & address details here.

Sultan’s Table

The Sultan’s Table, Enmore – fantastic fresh, cheap Turkish food. Great waiters who will advise you on best combinations, sizes and portions.

Song Fang Khong

Song Fang Khong in Fairfield is my new favourite place in the world – only been once, last week, but will return asap. Lao food, so we’re talking divine spicy papaya salad, incredible dried beef, the most amazing pork sausage, other salady goodnesses of many kinds with that delicious sticky rice – best to eat all with your hands. Lord, it’s good. And such friendly staff, and I believe our meal cost a grand sum of eight bucks a person. Unbelievable.

Bistrode

Went to Bistrode in Surry Hills for the first time a week or two ago, midweek, just Senor and me. Just the kind of neighbourhood restaurant I love – small, candle-lit, great food, BYO (early in the week anyway), great service. If I had the dough I’d eat here a lot more.

3 comments

Charlotte I’ve been dreaming about Song Fang Khong ever since trekking there last week [I thought I recognised you at a corner table in a flurry of chopsticks and elbows].

So I was wondering what Song Fang Khong means…and it’s something to do with the Mekong River that seperates Laos and Thailand – the area or the people that live on both sides of it {Thai Issan}.

YouTube has this spectacular clip – with Karaoke lyrics!

But this link had a great little story from February 2007 about a TV soap of the same name being banned from Thai television because of Lao sensitivies – scroll just over half-way down the page to “Laos Consigned to Trash Bin…”

http://www.censorwatch.co.uk/cw0207.htm
by Lunging Latino April 17, 2009 at 11:51 pm

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- Wow Lunger, you certainly like to do your research don’t you. I don’t deny it may have been me you saw, with some close friends … their elbows are active as are their yappers. Took me a while to track down the Trash Bin reference but once I did well … I don’t think I shall ever chuck a suitor’s proffered bloom in the bin so nonchalantly ever again. Specially not in Fairfield.
  by Charlotte April 18, 2009 at 12:23 am
  
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[…] the sheer joy of our Lao trip to the west where we encountered the sticky rice heaven of Song Fang Khong, I look forward to our next suburban adventure with the Empress, which I believe is going to be a […]
by Empress online at last – keep her there! « How to shuck an oyster May 16, 2009 at 9:59 am

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aw, shucks

"Wood writes beautifully about food. Partly it's because she has something to say about life, not just about food ... Wood's nimble food writing shifts seamlessly from the hotly contested topic of table-setting on one page to grappling with hunger on another. No philosophy, snobbery, one-upmanship, no competing with restaurant cooks. Just a lot of honesty and admission of failings, mistakes, triumphs and pleasures.
- Helen Greenwood, Sydney Morning Herald

"In this wonderful cookbook-cum-literary memoir, novelist Charlotte Wood evokes memory and emotion as she explains why she loves to cook and what it means to her. Slotted in among the reveries are recipes as diverse as an Elizabeth David-inspired milk-cooked pork and the hedgehog slice of a childhood in Cooma. It's a book that's satisfying to mind AND stomach."
- SBS FEAST magazine

"Charlotte Wood writes so openly about her cooking habits and history and her thoughts about the ethics of good eating that it’s impossible not to be swept up in her enthusiasm. Novice and experienced cooks alike will find something to inspire them here, as Wood has included a range of wonderful, tempting recipes. Reading Love & Hunger is like being invited into Wood’s home, seated at a table crowded with delectable dishes and encouraged to eat until you burst."
- Kylie Mason, The Newtown Review of Books

"This book has the power to reignite a passion for life, friendship, food and the everyday. Part memoir and part recipe book, Love & Hunger can be read cover to cover, as I did, just like a novel, or can be dipped into when the moment requires. Charlotte's unusual cook book is the wise friend many of us do not have ready at hand 24/7. Love & Hunger is a guide, an encouragement and an inspiration.
- John Purcell, Booktopia

"Love & Hunger manages to be a cookbook for the kitchen, a gentle read for the bedside table and a positive affirmation of the pleasure of cooking for family & friends ... This collection of 27 essays gently and sensitively explores the rich complexity and spiritual sustenance that good food with family & friends imparts to our lives. Each chapter explores, a different aspect of ‘the gift of food’ with a number of recipes ‘attached’; all of them good, none of them complex and many wonderfully comforting. There were many moments when reading, we nodded in heated agreement with the almost commonsense views espoused. As one other reviewer noted, it’s rare for a cookbook to move you to tears; be warned you may succumb. ... If there is a criticism to be made, we would only want more…"
- Tim White, Books for Cooks

"Author Charlotte Wood writes like a dream, wrestling with some of those common cooking conundrums, such as dealing with 'polenta paranoia', getting back your kitchen mojo and pondering just what the difference is between a chutney, a relish and a pickle. Her blog is also packed with scrumptious recipes - beetroot palak paneer, anyone?"
- MasterChef Magazine, June 2011

How to shuck an oyster