And further afield:
- The May Gourmet Traveller is out. Once you've waded through the home-ware ads you'll find a review of Melbourne's Fat Duck and Sydney's Cafe Nice, a nice little recipe feature from Franklin (the flavour of everyone's month) and their annual hot 100 of things to see, eat, do and watch.
- Lethlean's bounty of San Pellegrino/World's 50 Best interviews continues with a chat to Andre Chiang.Restaurant Andre in Singapore was awarded no 5 in San Pell’s Asian top 50 this year. Chiang is obviously a pretty complex creature, pulling the plug on his previous restaurant the day after debuting on the global San Pell list at 39 (incidentally he's now no 37), often referring to himself in the third person and trademarking his own idea of octaphilosophy (you need to read the article for that one). He has some interesting thoughts alongside some incredibly obscure ones. He has also worked with some of the best in France and his take on their cooking was lovely: “When you learned a dish, people tell you about the history, the story, the culture, and we talk about produce and seasons and emotion and farmers and soil … ”
A little sidebar: Loh Lik Peng is one of Chiang's backers, the same Singaporean businessman who has a stake in Dave Pynt's Burnt Ends, Jason Atherton’s Esquina and is behind the The Old Clare trio of restaurants due to open in the Chip. He obviously has a pretty good eye for talent. I'm fascinated by these guys who collect chefs like Callan collects his taxidermy.
- Meat exports vs live exports. I don't know much about this, but I would like to. A friend sent me this info-graphic off the back of an RSPCA media release. The basic premise being we should convert live export (worth $900 mill to us) to frozen/chilled meat export (an industry worth $6.8 bill to us). I haven't had a chance to dig any deeper and am still thinking, but certainly had no idea of the scale of meat vs live. I welcome your thoughts and opinions.
- Google are changing their algorithm. They're calling it mobile-gedden. Basically, if your (restaurant's) website is not optimized for a mobile phone (where 60% of people now do their searching), you'll disappear ...
- San Fran's Tartine are expanding, signing on with Blue Bottle Coffee to make it happen. Chad Robertson notes he chose Blue Bottle as he believes they have tackled their own expansion plans by actually improving each business, which struck him as unusual. They will be taking their bread to NYC, Tokyo and LA.
- Expansion is also on the agenda for Parisian Inaki Aizpitarte (Le Chateaubriand), who is opening a restaurant (called Le Chabanais) in London's Mayfair. A far cry from the gritty 11eme.