In the first of a new weekly column, ED CHARLES dishes up the latest on Melbourne’s food and bars HARD ROCK The Hard Rock Cafe (1 Bourke St, city) will close this year to be replaced by shops as part of a refurbishment of the Windsor Hotel. Rubbish bins in the next-door alley, Windsor Place, will be [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK 
 IT’S 11pm at the Portarlington Bakehouse, on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, and the wood-fired oven is still warm from the morning’s baking. I watch as Terry Christofi lights some pieces of newspaper stuffed between the old palings in the oven’s firebox; flames shoot out. Christofi taps on the antique brass temperature gauge, waiting [...]

THE CURIOUS COOK I’M sitting with strangers at the bar of Melbourne sushi restaurant, Jamon, when chef Charles Greenfield begins a reminiscence about Kobe beef. It’s 1968 and Greenfield is supping beer at a sushi bar in Japan when he first tries the delicate, fatty Japanese steak. “That was it,” he says, savouring the memory of [...]

Money might not grow on trees, but it certainly can appear under them, reports Ed Charles October 27, 2006 FIRST we started exporting wine to France. Now Australia could be doing the same with that most exotic of ingredients, the truffle. Prized by top chefs, the truffle is the aromatic fruit of an underground fungus — the most [...]

From IN THE BLACK May 06 Wherever you are in Australia houses are bloody expensive and have been for some time. State and federal governments have debated the issue and there has even been a Productivity Commission report. According to the Demographia International Housing Survey (using September figures) Sydney is the seventh most expensive city in [...]

Click on the pic to read the full story. Story unavailable on the Gourmet Traveller web site. I’m reasonably regularly updating who’s food and drink blogging over at Tomato.

Snobbery goes with territory when it comes to wine price - AGRIBUSINESS - SPECIAL REPORT By Ed Charles

My story about the egos and clashes behind the restaurant awards season appears in The Bulletin (that’s our local version of Newsweek) today. More background to this story over at Tomato. Flaming egos and acerbic critics. Why, it must be the annual restaurant awards. Ed Charles reports. Melbourne chef Shannon Bennett won’t be banning the critics. [...]

There’s more to corporate art collection and art investment than meets the eye. From In The Black.

From Tomato Magazine. Catherine Zeta Jones has one. So does the wife Brit super chef Gordon Ramsay. But until recently few Aussies have discovered the joys of the flat pack kitchen, made famous by Ikea. UK design guru Terence Conran is a fan of Ikea, and who can blame him?