Have You Eaten (2025)

17/03/2023

Bloody hell this thali at was good. The blob in the middle is dhindo, a buckwheat porridge shaped to house little pool of spiced butter. To the right there’s a paneer curry and a little soup spiced with gundruk (fermented greens, I’m not sure what kind, any help here?). On the left sweetened yoghurt, mustard leaves and spiced spuds. You can tear a piece of dhindo then dip it, soak it or use it to collect some of the other flavours and you end up with a mouthful of wildly different textures and flavours. Extremely fun. Also love the Nepalese pop and dance music playing here, really good vibe.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking of restaurant cuisines like video game factions fighting for territorial space. In that universe Chinese, Indian and Italian are the world powers, they have influence in almost every region. Competing for space are a bunch of mid size factions who have some regional control (Thai in Thaitown, Viet in Cabra etc) but a smaller influence on the overall universe. Then there are the smaller factions just trying to get a foothold in an ever changing world. Nepalese was one once one of those small factions, barely known outside the south Asian community and barely in the conversation of any regional control. Not any more, now they’re on the cusp of regional control in Sydney’s southwest and they’ve got growing influence in Ashfield and the CBD. But outside those regions it feels like no one has noticed. They will though because the growth ain’t slowing.

10/03/2023

This is a plate of roast duck and a bowl of fish maw soup. They’re both rich, extra savoury like so many great street food recipes, and extremely delicious. They’re classic Chinese Thai dishes you’d find easily in Thailand’s Chinatowns but these were served up at one of the newest restaurants on Thaitown’s satellite region on George Street - the little pocket with Tawadang, Show Neua and the oddly branded shop spruiking tropical fruit deals. The idea for the restaurant is to bring all of the best and most loved dishes from the streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown to Sydney. It’s only been open a few months but I’ve probably been five times. The grilled squid is banging, the noodles are legendary, and it’s just a very fun place to eat. It’s pitched a bit higher in price than the other restaurants in the area and I think it’s less busy because of that but I love it.

Also, thrilled to see Sydney’s Thai repertoire expand - specialised sweet shops, Isaan food, more grocers, modern trends coming in from the capital and now this. All the while, Thaitown has been slowly expanding, so much so I wonder if the Korean zone on Pitt Street might be colonised at some point. Don’t really know what to think about that, but jazzed to think there is so much more to come.

24/02/2023

News!
After what feels like years, and I have an update for y’all - a vegetarian filter. I’ve been frustrated for a long time at the state of food journalism in this city when it comes to vegetarian food (google best vegetarian in Sydney and you’ll get ten lists all with the same places) and it’s always been part of our plans to make HYE more accessible for veg peeps. This is the start.
At the moment, it’s just a sliding tab that makes any particularly meaty places disappear from the map, so all you see are restaurants that are veg-friendly. It’s based on some meagre data so there might be some random fried chicken places still on there, but me and are working on that. Also, one of the reasons I’m telling y’all now is we’d love some feedback on this. If you see anything on there that doesn’t make sense, please tell me. Any other feedback extremely welcome too.
I’ll update progress on this on stories. Pics are of some particularly tasty veg I’ve had recently - jhalmuri at Grameen, ethiopian-style ful at Ibrahim Eatz and a full spread of tasty s**t at El Khayal.

01/10/2022

Quizine #42. Medium difficulty.

The answer to the last what-cuisine-is-this quiz was Balinese, an Indonesian cuisine that until just a few years ago was pretty much non-existent in the sydney restaurant scene. Thrilled to see the cuisine, and Indonesian regional cuisines generally, grow in Sydney. Looking forward to more betutu (spice-stuffed roast duck), babi guling (roast pig served with heaps of sides like a nasi Padang) and lawar (textural salad made of coconut, chilli, shallots and sometimes green beans, sometime meaty/offal/blood bits all chopped very finely).

Congrats to these fine folks and social media entities for knowing their Indo cuisines:

23/09/2022

New Thai restaurant on the streets of Haymarket by the name Pork Fat. Chefs used to be at Long Chim. Food reminds me what you get at Long Chim - a lot of homemade pastes and sauces, quality ingredients, and most common dish names but with a few surprises - but this is way less $ per mouthful than the David Thompson branded sort of fine diner. It is pitched a little more up market than the other Thai restaurants in and around Thaitown, but there’s nothing on the regular menu higher than $26.

Feels like eating at Spice I Am back in the 00s after it opened. Can’t wait for more.

Dishes pictured:
1: Green curry with pork jowl, lychee and apple eggplants.
2: Hella fatty grilled pork neck with a spicy roasted rice dip.

14/08/2022

This colossal plate of rice and meat is a Yemeni dish called mandi. Anyone who knows me (Nick here) or has followed my social media ramblings over the last however many years will know this belongs to a food category close to my heart, the mixed rice dish - essentially rice cooked in and then mixed with other yum stuff.

There are a tonne of mixed rice dishes around in the world, and I plan to be their Ash Ketchum. Thankfully, Sydney is a cornucopia of tasty things and I can fill my mixed-ricédex without having to burn four hundred litres of jet fuel.
Anyway, the latest entry: mandi. The Mandi recipe is to first poach meat with spices. That flavoured water is then mixed with rice and placed at the bottom of a tandoor oven. The meat is suspended above, so it drips onto the rice pot. Once it’s all set up, you close the tandoor and come back hours later to find some ridiculously tasty rice and a hunk of meat that’d fall apart to a Gabba track*.

This particular version comes from , one of two mandi restaurants in Lakemba. Despite the fact the dish is wider than my stomach and contains half a chicken, it was around $20. Absurd.

Recommendations for mixed-ricédex entries can be submitted here.

*not scientifically tested. I any future welcome experiments.

29/07/2022

World’s 50 Best Restaurants List came out the other day. I recommend everyone completely ignore it. Any restaurant rating with zero Malaysian stuff on it is completely uninteresting in my books. I appreciate all those chefs do 120 hour weeks and have egos even bigger than my opinions, but like have the judges eaten any Malaysian food? Have they even been to Campsie? From my experience, as limited as it is, Malaysian food is ridiculously delicious, like in the most primal, accessible way. It’s the Hunt for the Wilderpeople of the food world - designed for maximum enjoyment of all people bar complete psychopaths and annoying contrarians.

Anyway, sorry for irrelevant the spiel. I was struggling for a lead on this caption about how fun Hokkein Kia is when I noticed the awards had come out. Maybe I should start a competitor, 50 Not Expensive Or Annoying Restaurants Ranked In No Order Favoured By Me. Hokkein Kia would definitely be on it.

Pictured:
1: Kam heong pipis. Kam heong is a super savoury sauce made of chilies, curry leaves, dried shrimp, curry powder and soy bean paste. Hella delicious.
2. Salted egg yolk chips. As if this was gonna be bad.
3. A very good char kway teow. Pity about the noodles being all shredded - Aus health and safety rules say restauranteurs gotta keep their rice noodles in the fridge, and any good wok chef will tell you refrigerating rice noodles completely ruins the texture, making them dry out and fall apart in the wok. So no slight in these guys, just an annoying fact of life.

Also shout out to Campsie for becoming the epicentre of Malaysian food in sydney without a single printed media outlet saying Little Malaysia.

17/07/2022

Quizine #41 here. I’m going with medium-hard again for this one but who really knows.

The answer to the last episode was South African. It’s surprising, considering the history of the South African community in Sydney, how little of the cuisine we have - since Durban Dish closed, there’s not a single dedicated restaurant. Almost the entire South African food scene here is made up of butchers, grocers, and home cooks. Thanks to all guessers for their guesses, and props to these fine people for knowing where the biltong, boerewors (South African sausages) and bunny chow (spiced stew served in a hollowed-out loaf of bread) is at.

08/07/2022

I first went to Hungry Paulie’s when it was, confusingly, a breakfast stall at the Eastwood Night Markets. I went because I’d heard it was the only place in sydney to get a good hujiao bing (black pepper pork bun, a popular order from Taiwan’s renowned markets), but every time I went they’d run out and I’d end up eating a my what felt like my weight’s worth of sticky rice, offal and tofu instead. Every morning the Eastwood locals would snaffle them up (and a heap of other things too) before I could make it from the other side of town.

Five years later and that early morning popularity has propelled Hungry Paulie from a tiny market stall into three full restaurants. And I have finally got my hands on a Hungry Paulie hujiao bing. Absolutely delicious. Loved every minute of it.

02/07/2022

Quizine #40 here. I’d call this one medium-hard.
I’ve decided to retire this mini-game after the #50 episode. I did promise a prize to the winner, and that is absolutely still on. I’m thinking a nice dinner somewhere, but open to sending a package of people think eating out with a complete stranger is a bizarro prize.
Last episode’s answer was Colombian. I was pretty interested to see how much the local Colombian scene is dominated by cafes rather than restaurants, hadn’t really put much thought into that before. My guess would be the influence of coffee on Colombian culture, which is huge, and (maybe related to that) the prominence of Colombian coffee beans in speciality coffee cafes in Sydney. The interesting thing, to me anyway, are two major differences:
1. The style of coffee Colombians drink in South America, and the way Colombian coffee beans are processed for modern Australian cafes are vastly different. A common Colombian coffee is tinto, black with sugar, weak on the coffee punch, high in sweetness. Another is cafe, a very milky coffee that’s equally low in punch.
2. In Colombia coffee drinking culture is far less utilitarian, here it’s partially social but, let’s be honest, much more about getting high. In Colombia, it’s the other way around and one of the results of that is people drink coffee way later in the day. I’ve been told the busy times for coffee joints in Colombia are around 3 - 7pm and there’s way less care for caffeine-related sleep deprivation.

I’d love to hear more thoughts on this. If you have insights on this, absolutely welcome.

Congrats to these people for guessing Colombian:
, , ,

23/06/2022

A Pakistani chef* once told me, despite the fact he worked at a competing restaurant, that the best Pakistani food in Sydney was from Mazaidar in North Parramatta. Hilarious but extremely useful knowledge. I have no idea if it’s true, or if it’s even possible* but damn, Mazaidar is a good time.

It’s a family-run Punjabi restaurant. The latter means there’s a lot of cross-over with many North Indian restaurants in Sydney, particularly with dishes like haleem (legumes, grains and meat cooked for so long it’s like a thick porridge), nihari (meat slow-cooked with spice and bone marrow), karahi (fried in a wok-like implement rather than stewed), paya (stewed sheep feet) and gosht (generic term for various, usually meaty, stewed dishes).

One thing that makes Mazaidar a little different, besides from a general sense of extra deliciousness, is their $2 add brain speciale. Want a 24-hr slow-cooked lamb shank nihari with a bit of extra texture, chuck some sheep brain in. Or keen to up the nutritional and flavour rating of your paya, whack some brains in. Great fun.

Pics are:
1. Lamb haleem topped with fresh ginger and chilli, hella thick and filling.
2. Lamb shank nihari + brains, extremely rich and with a good punch of spice. Ask for a straw to suck the marrow out of the bone.
3. Saag, karahi and Multani (stewed chicken with a spice mix that often includes dried fruit powders from the city Multan in Pakistan)
4. Gajar ka halwa, or carrot halwa. Simply carrots cardamon and sugar cooked together in a shizza load of ghee, then combined with nuts.

*This dude is definitely remaining unnamed
*Sydney has a tonne of great Pakistani restaurants, and food is too subjective an experience for definitive best categorisation.

18/04/2022

Crap photo, tasty food episode #476,936,986. This is a bowl of canh bún, a northern Viet noodle soup with a shrimp-pork-crab broth broth, rice noodles, blood jelly, water spinach and a log of crab and blood cake (I think?). Traditionally made by grinding up rice paddy crabs and simmering the paste with pork or chicken bones. These days made more commercially. A lot of blogs relate it to bún riêu but I’d say this is much more savoury and less sour. Obviously the lack of tomatoes and thicker noodles make a big difference too.

Before this weekend, the only menus I’d seen it on were and , two restaurants I love, and great representations of Marrickville’s northern Viet community. But this one was from a restaurant far, far from Marrickville or Sydney’s other big Viet zones. The bowl pictured was served up at Pho Moi], a small but bustling restaurant on the edge of Katoomba’s main drag.

The soup was bloody delicious as was the crispy skin chicken (the skin was snap-ably crisp, and the chicken just as juicy) and my coconut blended ice coffee.

Props to Pho Moi] for bringing some different options to the mountains, an area severally lacking in culinary diversity.

13/04/2022

Hiya all

Quizine #39 here. I’m gonna say medium difficult on this one.
Last weeks’ answer was Turkish. Congrats to the fine individuals for knowing where to eat börek, simit, köfte, and çılbır. Now is a particularly interesting time to be out at Sydney’s many Turkish restaurants, as many are hosting iftar banquets at sundown. Taste of Turkey and Konak in Newtown have daily menus for $35 and $45, and most of Auburn’s Turkish restaurants, like all those in the mosque areas, have great daily iftar specials too. The sad news is that one of Sydney’s best Turkish restaurants , will be closing at the end of this month. If you’re lucky enough to get a booking, congratulations, you’ve earned a lovely feed in a beautiful dining room.

Props to , , and for the correct guess.

02/04/2022

One of my favourite central Thai dishes is hor mok - flakey white fish, red curry paste, chilli and lime leaves steamed until it’s the fish and curry paste melds into a mousse-like texture. For almost a decade my favourite serve of it has been at Spice I Am, a legendary restaurant where I first met the experience of spice-related light headedness. But now that I’ve eaten this marryable wonder from Rice and Curry, a popular newcomer to the Thai restaurant scene, I’m no longer sure where I stand.

Also, while I’m here, Rice and Curry do an exceptional Thai milk tea, something that’s oddly hard to find in Sydney if, like me, you’re not into the Trump coloured, super-heroically sweet ones.

27/03/2022

Hiya all

Quizine #38 here. I’d say this is medium-easy difficulty. I don’t really know but I imagine it’s easier than anything we’ve had in a while.

Last week’s single pin quizine was Mongolian, which, I’ve recently discovered, was actually wrong. For years Sydney housed just the one Mongolian restaurant, Arncliffe’s Mongol Lounge (the single pin), but late last year, it welcomed another, Wolli Creek’s Aku Kitchen. Great news for the Mongolian community and anyone interested in carb and meat heavy cuisines, as well as the Mongolian süütei tsai tradition (rich, salted and fat-bonused Mongolian tea), which is now served to the tables of Aku Kitchen. If you’re thinking of going soon tho, call first, they’ve been doing a reno and I’m not 100% sure if they’re out the other end.

Congrats to these four individuals for knowing the where abouts of Mongolian dinners, or just knowing Arncliffe well:

12/03/2022

Most of Sydney’s good Sri Lankan food is sold from takeaway shops in Homebush or in restaurants around the Toongabbje/Pendle Hill/Seven Hills zone. But in South Sydney’s Mortdale, there’s a lonely Sri Lankan outpost absolutely worthy of being mentioned with the same enthusiasm as X Dreams, Sydney Marina, Ram’s and the other banging Sri Lankan joints of Sydney. That restaurant is Chanaka and Nilu Gunasekara’s .

Chanaka used to chef at more fancier inner city restaurants that serve wine, like Subcontinental and Flying Fish (back in the Kuruvita days), but he’s dropped that style for recipes more familiar to his upbringing.

The menu is split between a bain-marie wonderland of spicy, coconut-heavy and mostly plant-based curries and a written menu of street foods and more elaborate dishes. This is kottu roti, a famous Sri Lankan street food named after the kakkatakata sound of a metal spatula hitting a grill as it chopps up, and stir fires roti. That roti is mixed on the grill with a whole number of things, usually whatever is available and whatever the customer asks for (cheese is a fun addition), then served searing hot with a side of spicy chicken gravy. Just behind it, a Kerala style coconutty and curry leaf powered prawn curry, one of many hella delicious curries consumed that night.

Thanks to , , for being legendary eating companions. Already looking forward to coming back in a weekend for crab curry and hoppers.

Have You Eaten