Herald Sun, Citystyle Rising prices is the biggest news in food this year, writes ED CHARLES WHEREVER you eat this year, it will cost more. Stay at home and the basic staples of flour, bread, pasta and dairy will cost more. Eat out and it will cost more – and the standard of service might not be up to scratch because of a huge shortage of waiters, sommeliers and chefs. Even dishwashers (the human variety) are in short supply. “The […]
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Lunch most popular:Movida
Spanish chef Frank Comorra is a laugh. When he sent me a copy of his sell out Movida cookbook he signed it as the CEO of Ikea. He’d read by blogpost where I’d complained Movida didn’t conform to the stereotypical Spanish restaurant and owed more to the Swedish superstore than dark oak, Pablo Picasso or Anton Gaudi.Of course, I’m nothing but inconsistent. Shannon Bennett’s Bistro Vue I complain is a French theme park with its beams, French furniture and a […]
Hot day. Cold soup
What do I miss most about home? It has to be the dear old Currant Bun. Today’s headline: Phew what a scorcher! Although they could be holding the front page to the Aussie cricketers a good firm kick in the bollocks. The last time I was home in England, en route to Spain, it was bloody hot. And when I landed in Seville it was 48C. A few seconds of heat melted my suitcase and my cricket bat wilted. There […]
Cover yourself before you travel
The Australian, Wealth TRAVEL insurance is one of those products that few travellers pay attention to, whether they are begrudgingly buying a policy or relying on cover provided through top-end credit cards. For that reason, travel insurance remains one of the most complained about financial products in Australia. “It’s about 18 per cent of all our work for what would be a small partner in the insurance portfolio,” insurance industry ombudsman Sam Parrino says. “That is a lot of work […]
Aussies pay dearly for overseas currency conversions
The Australian, Wealth IT’S time for Christmas shopping and many people will be visiting Singapore and Hong Kong or the duty-free halls for their seasonal spending sprees. But retailers could be taking-advantage of the festive spirit by offering payment in Australian dollars and adding a surcharge to foreign currency conversion fees. Called dynamic currency conversion, surcharging payments made in Australian dollars is perfectly legitimate. But this is one of the many pitfalls when spending abroad and is a matter of […]
Social media is the new thing, and it’s rapidly being integrated into business.
IN THE BLACK Are you a knowledge worker or a pen pusher? The likelihood is that you are the former, which means you are about ideas and -collaboration. In that case, the expressions ‘social media’, ‘Web 2.0’, or more importantly, ‘Enterprise 2.0’, should be in your vocabulary, even if you don’t have a profile on Facebook. While these ideas may seem a threat to old-school types, the reality is that most social media users are Generation Xers and Yers – […]
Fine food no truffling matter
The Australian, Entrepreneur Importers accept the necessity of strict biosecurity measures but can find that their implementation is hard to swallow, writes Ed Charles | November 30, 2007 LAST month Melbourne-based food importer Friend & Burrell was forced to destroy 80kg of the prized Porcini mushrooms. Another exotic food importer reports that truffles — the underground fungus — were ruined because they heated up and spoiled during fumigation. It’s all part of the bureaucracy and sometimes heavy and slow handling […]
Local secrets
Herald Sun, Citystyle For diners wanting a cheap, authentic Asian or African meal, Melbourne’s suburbs offer a world of flavours. To get some insider knowledge, ED CHARLES talks to five people about the neigbourhoods they visit for a taste of their homeland. The secret to a memorable experience, he discovers, is to know which dish to order from which restaurant Ethiopian IT’S the coffee ceremony and the traditional meals that Elleni Bereded-Samuel misses most from her homeland of Ethiopia. She […]
Flower power – it’s my summer of garden love
Too young to have participated, too old to be conceived then I really feel that I missed out on the summer of love. Now, the 40th anniversary of the summer of 1967, I enter what can only soon become my autumn of Viagra. For now though I’m enjoying flower power. Last southern summer while traveling in Cambodia and Laos my structured front garden of small hedges died. I didn’t like the design too much and replaced it with a 4 […]