Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  If Pellegrini’s is Melbourne’s original cafe, Mario’s, located on Fitzroy’s main drag, was the next great leap forward. Opened in 1986, Mario’s was (and is) an Italian cafe with the bearing of a classy restaurant. They had all-day breakfast and really good coffee and carefully made bowls of pasta. Owner Mario Maccarone told Gourmet Traveller earlier this year: “We elevated the idea of what a cafe could be… We looked a bit like a restaurant, but you could still come in and get Vegemite on toast.” Take away the Vegemite and Maccarone sounds like a lot of American restaurateurs circa 2012, but he’s talking about 1986. Mario’s turned Melbourne cafes into places where serious food happened, and where breakfast was as important as dinner.

  It also primed Fitzroy’s Brunswick Street to become the cafe capital of the universe. There are a few neighborhoods in Australia that might try to claim that title, but my money’s on Fitzroy, which also puts Williamsburg and Silver Lake to shame on the hipster scale. You can’t walk two feet in Fitzroy without stumbling over another cafe serving pumpkin, pomegranate, crispy kale, and goat cheese on toast, another craft cocktail bar with a more exclusive cocktail bar upstairs that you have to buzz into, another shop selling gorgeous clothes you can’t afford. My brother lives above a disgustingly trendy barber shop that might as well be called “Bespoke,” and a women’s clothing store called “Who Invited Her,” which simultaneously makes me want to applaud and claw my own eyes out.

  Mario’s and its neon cursive sign are still an iconic part of the neighborhood, 30 years after its opening. And all around it are evolutions, cafe menus that reflect an ever-broader array of cultures. There are more Greeks in Melbourne than any city in the world outside of Greece. Refugees from the Lebanese civil war flowed into the city during the ’70s and ’80s. In the 45 years since the repeal of the “White Australia” policy (yes, it was really called that), the city’s Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indian populations have swelled. Somehow, despite the very real racism faced by each of these groups as they arrived, their food has become integrated into the life of Melbourne in a way I’m only just beginning to see in big American cities.

  Those Greek and Middle Eastern and Asian influences have been folded into Melbourne’s cultural identity, and they reverberate through the kaleidoscopic flavors found on its best cafe and restaurant menus. From Thai-style omelettes and creative congees to chicken and kaffir lime scotch eggs, breakfast alone in this city could kick the asses of America’s best seasonal small plates.

  Nostalgia often dictates that I spend much of my Melbourne time eating in those restaurants that raised me, but this time around I ventured farther, and found whole new reasons for prodigious hometown pride. Down one of those magical back laneways in the city, Tipo 00 embodies the rich inheritance that all those Italian immigrants gave to modern Australian cooking. Its small room was packed with diners at 3 p.m. on a Saturday, drinking wine and eating delicate handmade pappardelle with braised rabbit, hazelnuts, and marjoram; light but foresty, hauntingly delicious.

  At Epocha in Carlton, owner and maitre d’ Angie Giannakodakis greets guests with hugs, her slick black suit and spiky hair as timelessly stylish as the antique fireplace in the dining room. Located in a Victorian terrace house overlooking one of the city’s stately parks, the restaurant’s friendly formality mixes with a purposeful celebration of Melbourne’s immigrant roots: The UK might show up in a black pudding that comes alongside the rabbit loin; a green sauce-bedecked lamb shoulder—basically a heap of fat and juices—channels the love of the thousands of Greek grandmothers who live in the city. I didn’t find newness in Melbourne so much as progression, a careful amplification of what came before, which seemed oddly revolutionary. The American hunger for tossing out the old and worshipping the new is thrilling, but so much is lost in the process.

  While eating and drinking at Gerald’s, a cluttered storefront wine bar in Carlton North, the owner Gerald Diffey plonked down beside me and my brother and shared his fiercely held, basically proletariat beliefs about wine. “I don’t really care how preciously you fondled the grapes, or where it was aged—who gives a fuck?” Diffey said amicably. “People forget that a lot of the pleasure and magic of wine is that it tastes good and gets you pissed.” Sitting with a rowdy, foul-mouthed wine evangelist while drinking a casually poured, mind-bending Riesling, I felt as though I had slipped into the life I might have led, had it not been taken from me (or me from it).

  It would be foolish to suggest that I’ve never had a meal in America that felt spiritually similar to what Melbourne offers so effortlessly. Portland sometimes comes close to finding that groove. Grand Central Market here in L.A. has some commonality with the Vic Markets, though the Vic Markets aren’t burdened with the same strains of gentrification that plague GCM. Bacchanal in New Orleans, the wine shop with a sprawling, cluttered backyard where you can sit for hours drinking wine, eating cheese, and listening to music, feels more like home to me than almost anywhere else in the country, even though I have no personal connection to New Orleans.

  Most of the literal interpretations of Melbourne I’ve come across here—the meat pie shops, the Australian cafes—are a little sad, though one or two in Brooklyn come close to the real thing. Sqirl in Los Angeles, a relaxed cafe celebrated for its creative rice bowls and lovely baked goods, is basically a very good Melbourne cafe on a corner in East Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, chef and owner Jessica Koslow spent time working at a bakery in Melbourne.

  I’m sure that a food-obsessed American reading this might be able to come up with a plethora of other examples, places, and things that sound similar to the things I’m claiming as unique to my hometown. It’s true that the differences are subtle—food as a way of life, a birthright, a source of pleasure, and a shared culture rather than a means of constructing identity or differentiating status. But to me they feel profound.

  Don’t get me wrong: Melbourne has plenty of crap, artifice, and hyped-up places that may or may not deserve the hype. There’s a casino full of restaurants with international superstar chef names above the doors. Ben Shrewy forages his way through every big-name food magazine, and his restaurant, Attica, is currently at number 33 on the World’s 50 Best list, serving dishes made with wallaby blood, as well as a fine-dining take on… avocado toast. I’m sure Attica is great; I’d love to eat there one day. But my hometown’s greatest culinary gift, the thing I miss the most, the thing I’ve been looking for ever since I left, is the city’s underlying attitude: That food is just a part of everyday life and, damn, isn’t everyday life wonderful?

  Am I overthinking this? Maybe I should write an essay instead about how sick I am of tasting menus. About all the things servers do that mildly annoy me. Maybe I should just move back.

  My brother has moved back to Melbourne, as has my sister, and my stepfather. My stepfather tells a story about something someone said to him in the leadup to our move to America. He was 30 at the time, and our move would be his first trip outside of Australia. This friend of his, who had spent some time in the U.S., said: You’ll go there and everything will seem familiar. You’ll understand the language. The food will taste somewhat similar. The way people deliver the news on TV, the way people sing at rock shows, the way people drink at bars: It will all feel comfortably recognizable. And then after you’ve been there for a while, you’ll begin to understand the real difference between America and Australia, and that difference is vastly more profound than anything you might point to on the surface. And then you’ll realize you are as alien to that place as you might be on Mars.

  I’m not sure on which planet I belong. Otherness is such a part of my identity that if I were to return to Australia now, I don’t know who I’d be. The dominant narrative when it comes to immigrant stories is the struggles faced upon arriving in a new land, and the confusion of trying to survive while looking and speaking and thinking differently. In those regards my experience can’t begin to compare to people leaving their homes in China or South America or Africa or even
Europe. I’m white. I speak the language; I look the part. But the thing I share with immigrants and expats of all stripes is the intense feeling of otherness that comes with missing home, the belonging to different earth, different air, a different ocean. Leaving is the key event of your life—you spend all the time after trying to reconcile the person you were when you belonged somewhere with the displaced person you’ve become. It’s this very condition that pushes people to re-create a taste of home in their new lives. It’s the exact dynamic that created so much of the food culture I’ve spent my life longing for.

  I’ve continued to displace myself, over and over again, moving away from cities once they become comfortable and familiar. My last move, from Atlanta to L.A., was the most wrenching since leaving Melbourne. I came to a city I’d never visited, where I knew no one, to take a high-profile job as a complete unknown. “I’m not from here” is at the core of who I am.

  When I got back to L.A. after my summer trip to Melbourne, I had a conversation with my mother, another installment in the long line of conversations we’ve been having for 25 years, the one that goes: Why did we leave? Should we go back? What is it that we’re missing so very much? What is the difference?

  And my mother told me something I’d never heard her say before: “America was settled mainly before the Industrial Revolution, and it was all about pioneering, all about rugged individualism. Australia has this reputation of being settled by convicts, but the truth is that most of the country is built on immigration that came later, after the Industrial Revolution. These were working people, and they were familiar with the mind-set that came along with that. Unions! Solidarity! America was built on going out and conquering the West, all by your fucking self. Australia was built on the idea that you look out for your mates.”

  That’s what I miss. The comfort of living in a place where the underlying principle is that we look out for one another. If that ethos leads to good coffee and grilled lamb chops, all the better.

  In America we read the blogs, we obsess about which chef is leaving what job and what storefront will become the next hot restaurant. We stand in line for rainbow-glazed ramen burger bagels. But in the end, our newfound food obsessions founder on that with which America has always been concerned: commerce and status. I see—especially in the food world—an urge to connect, to put more stock in pleasure, to find some sort of fellowship in our dining rituals. Our seating is increasingly communal. Practically all of our semi-upscale eating is now done off of shared plates, in an attempt to force togetherness. These gestures are genuine, and yet they’re received as fashion.

  Culture is so interconnected. Maybe Australians can have their carefree, joyful attitude around food and life because they get so much paid vacation, because childcare is affordable, because there’s no gun violence, because there’s not so much pressure, because the great Australian dream is to have a house and some kids and a few good friends. Because ambition is undervalued. Because life isn’t as scary.

  In Melbourne, the look-after-your-mates ethos, the pubs, and cafes have created a food culture as charming as Europe’s, as exciting as America’s, as varied as Asia’s. A place where the past and the future are often friends, where community feels tangible, where it’s okay to relax. No wonder it haunts me.

  And yet—I love living in L.A. I love my work, and the people and places I write about. One of my greatest joys and achievements has been conquering the West, all by my fucking self. So maybe I am American after all. And maybe it’s too much to ask America to learn how to blend its rugged individualism with a sense of community. In the wake of the most divisive presidential election in modern history (and its pro-consumerist, anti-multiculturalist results), this seems like a particularly ludicrous thing to hope for. Maybe I’ll just have to make do with avocado toast.

  On this trip, as with every Melbourne trip, I went and stood in the throng at the Vic Markets and bought myself a bratwurst and a flat white. I ate standing at the counter that runs along the inside wall of the grand stone entrance. I felt embraced by those walls, by the spirit of the immigrants who have passed through over the last century, by the otherness and longing for home that has inspired so much good food and good living. I gave thanks for that longing, for the German guy in 1976 whose desire for a taste of home made the bratwurst in my hand possible. I gave thanks to Melbourne and also to America, for making me who I am.

  Eat Your Way Through Melbourne

  Queen Victoria Market: Corner of Elizabeth & Victoria Streets, qvm.com.au

  Pellegrini’s: 66 Bourke Street, +61 3 9662 1885, no website

  The Waiter’s Club: 20 Meyers Place, +61 3 9650 1508, no website

  Jim’s Greek Tavern: 32 Johnston Street, +61 3 9419 3827, no website

  Mario’s Cafe: 303 Brunswick Street, +61 3 9417 3343, marioscafe.com.au

  Tipo 00: 361 Little Bourke Street, +61 3 9942 3946, tipo00.com.au

  Epocha: 49 Rathdowne Street, +61 3 9036 4949, epocha.com.au

  Gerald’s Bar: 386 Rathdowne Street, +61 3 9349 4748, geraldsbar.com.au

  Ballad of a Small-Town Bakery

  BY SCOTT MOWBRAY

  From 5280 Magazine

  Okay, so it’s not a city, it’s the antidote to a city: Louisville, Colorado, close enough to Denver and Boulder to be cosmopolitan, but proudly wearing its small-town mantle. For former Cooking Light editor Scott Mowbray, the story of Moxie Bread Company proves the perfect mix of local vibe and urban hip.

  On the floor in a tiny back room of a converted 1880s Victorian house in Louisville sits a hulking 1940s-era Hobart mixer, its single-phase motor turning a cake-batter paddle in a huge steel bowl while Andy Clark, owner of Moxie Bread Company, “juices” his ciabatta dough by drizzling in water. A dough hook, he explains, couldn’t handle a mix this goopy. The stuff fwap-fwap-fwaps around while a stooping Clark coaxes it toward an even wetter state. It’s tricky work that varies with the heat of the room and the weather outside. For Clark, it’s also a daily obsession, one that takes place long before the sun rises.

  Clark is devoted to producing crust with a fine crackle and crumb with a perfect spring and sheen. “As bakers,” he says, “making the dough really wet and baking it dark are two things we can do to be cool.” Anyone who has the good fortune to eat Clark’s bread will appreciate that his definition of cool stretches to include things like finicky hydration rituals at 4:30 in the morning.

  A few steps away, at a long marble-topped table in Moxie’s other back room, Jeff Leddy, Clark’s chief baker, works dough that will become the bakery’s specialty treat: kouign-amann. Leddy is known for his ability to incorporate staggering amounts of butter into flour, the “bourraging” that renders kouign-amann even richer than croissants. “Jeff’s the pastry whisperer,” says assistant Nikki Albrecht. “He’s the Bob Ross of the pastry world.”

  A couple of hours later, a conveyor apparatus slips hand-formed loaves into the heart of Moxie’s four-deck oven, while just a few feet away, Keely Von Bank arranges pastries on the service counter. To her right, chief barista Sullivan Cohen dials up the espresso machine for the arrival of the first customer, who will poke her head in at 7:01 and expect a happy hello. Some of Clark’s crew will be here until the joint, which makes a midday transition to sandwiches and pizza, closes at four.

  A town wants to rise and feel warmly about itself each day. This is the purpose of the diners and shopworn cafes and bakeries that nurture regulars in small communities from Alabama to Alaska. These patrons expect the staffs to know their names, and they like to see other regulars with whom short chats string together, over months and years, into long necklaces of specific, local conversations about kids and family and town bylaws and the weather. It’s not that such places don’t exist in cities, but in small towns, they have a special savor that usually doesn’t have much to do with food or coffee, often untouched by the trends that obsess urbanites.

  Communities like Louisville, in orbit of Boulder and Denver, exist on fault lines b
etween city and small-town life. Residents treasure the quaint, local vibe, but many have acquired commuter palates. They hanker for a spot that serves the cortados of RiNo or Old South Pearl Street and sandwiches that remind them of that trip to Italy or Provence, France. Yet serious chefs and bakers are often reluctant to open a business that’s even 10 miles from reliable city crowds. Which is what makes Louisville’s 17-month-old Moxie especially notable. It’s a young place with an old soul where the owner has found a way to combine urban culinary exactitude with small-town ease and purpose.

  During his first 22 years in Colorado, Clark, 41, ran big bread operations for Whole Foods and Udi’s. Corporate work had him baking around the country: He knew what it took to keep a baguette from drooping in Houston humidity or turning into a cracker javelin in desert air and exactly how big the problem was if you made a proofing error with 700 pounds of dough.

  But as a member of the Bread Baker’s Guild of America (he eventually served on its board of directors), Clark had tasted what artisans such as Chad Roberston at Tartine and Jim Lahey at Sullivan St. Bakery were up to in San Francisco and New York City, respectively. Clark was a soft-spoken fermentation nerd, a quiet doctor of pH. Wanting to scale down, he hankered for a hometown corner bakery where he’d know the customers and the daily turbulence would be “more like landing a Cessna on a little strip in Baja, California.” Bread, at its best, is small and slow.

  Clark was scouting potential locations when he met Louis Karp, father of the proprietor of Louisville’s Waterloo bar and restaurant. Several years earlier, in 2007, Karp’s son had opened what quickly became the most congenial evening hangout in the historic downtown area, and he told Clark the place had the sort of small-town charm he was looking for. That, and there just happened to be a 19th-century house available on a prominent corner along Main Street.