In the Kitchen by Mike

You'll be able to find Kitchen by Mike on a quiet (on the weekends anyway) industrial street in Rosebery by keeping an eye out for ironically-vintage-clothed hipsters heading through a large, gated driveway. While the south-east has been slowly stepping up in gourmet terms, Wayfarers are still a little foreign to the area.

The front 'porch' of Kitchen by Mike, Dunning Avenue, Rosebery

Kitchen by Mike is the casual eatery adjoining the new Koskela furniture showroom, which has some stunning Australian-made pieces by Russel Koskela (like the sausage dog inspired sofa) dotted throughout a spacious warehouse.

Prices are at the upper end of my spectrum, so I stuck to the food which happens to be on the pricey side as well.

Kitchen by Mike indoor dining area

Run by an ex Rockpool head chef, Kitchen by Mike doesn't have a menu - rather, the day's breakfast and lunch selections are determined by what the kitchen sources at the markets each morning.

Some of this produce is made available for sale, in addition to meats by Feather and Bone, cultured butter by the one and only Pepe Saya, and house-branded chutneys, jams and sauces.

Freshly squeezed watermelon and ginger juice

A rare sunny day at a brunch hour brought us to the outdoor seats, clutching a number of enamel plates with the help of a staff member as the dishes are all served canteen-style at the counter. Self-serve cutlery is available in the terracotta flower pots on each table, while the inside tables utilise recycled food cans as cutlery holders.

There were no smoothies available when we were there, so I settled for a freshly squeezed, blushing pink watermelon juice with the slightest hint of ginger.

Roast pumpkin, feta cheese, basil, pine nuts tartine

We seemed to have arrived at that awkward time between breakfast and lunch, which meant there was not yet any meat dishes displayed on the colouful counter aside from the bacon butties.

Nonetheless, it was a good chance to give our inner vegetarians what they wanted, including a picturesque tartine featuring some of the crunchiest bread ever (not recommended for false teeth). The pumpkin and salty cheese were perfect toppers, smooshed onto the bread, while the overall combination was very pleasant.

Spinach and cheese quiche

The just-warm quiche was light and airy inside, and not overly cheesy with a tart flavour to the spinach. Most impressive was the golden flaking pastry which left a mess all over the table, and a memorable imprint on my mind.

Onion foccacia with fig and caramelised onion salad

This definitely wasn't your typical Italian style foccacia, but more a cross between flat bread and Turkish bread; meaning it was airy and chewy, rather than soft and fluffy. And some darn good foccacia it was.

With sliced onion baked into the dough and a healthy helping of oil and salt flakes on top, the warmed up bread was sensational in terms of texture and flavour, with just a hint of sweetness from the onion. It completely outshone the small side serve of fig salad, which had well cooked vegetables tossed through.

Peach, celery and radicchio salad

The radicchio salad featured a couple of segments of the best peach I've had this season and relatively unexciting celery and radicchio pieces.

Cabbage, apple, hazelnut slaw

The portion of cabbage salad was noticeably larger than the other scoops of salad, and quite the refreshing dish too. Crunchy slivers of raw cabbage, slices of Granny Smith apple and the impossible to pick up hazelnuts and currant grapes were all lightly dressed, making for a particularly healthy slaw.

The light meal was followed by a stroll through the Koskela showroom - as I think most diners did - where I resisted the urge to buy a giant, smooth, wooden wombat. Both the showroom and Kitchen by Mike will draw in a new crowd to Rosebery, and introduce a new style to the industrial streets of the south-east.

Wholesome and healthy Friday night

I think I may have found a solution for the affliction I call scatterbrain. You know, when you've six million things on your mind and your attention skits from one to the next in milliseconds and you feel more like a whirring machine than human. Scatterbrain. And I'm not professing to know any effective long term fix for it. Hell, it's barely a short term fix.

It's beer. Like some magical potion, the first schooner slows down the scattered mind and also reduces the level of worry concerning said six million items. It's especially effective in th early evening time of Friday nights. And despite ongoing declarations and denials of a recession, the pub seemed to be doing alright considering there wasn't a spot to sit or stand in the two-levelled establishment. When times are bad, beer is good. When times are good, beer is good. One must then wonder why everything can't be recession-proofed simply by a spray of beer.

Curiousity got the better of me this Friday night as we ventured for a light meal in Chinatown at vegetarian institution Mother Chu's Vegetarian Kitchen. Think of it as a counterbalance to the couple of pub beverages with friends, politically known as bingeing.

Mother Chu's is an interesting little place which I often see packed with diners - who would have thought there were that many herbivores or curious carnivores? There's a few tables this night and the flow is quite constant for late dinner time.

It feels like a Chinese home dining room or kitchen; something about the laminate tables, perhaps, or the mismatched room decorations. They have these funky wavy and star-like hanging lights that wouldn't look out of place at an inner city suburb cafe or restaurant. They look a little out of place here.

It's a surprisingly extensive menu for a vegetarian restaurant, ranging from little snacky morsels to soups and hot pots and a venerable range of mains. It's not all that easy to make a choice, tossing up between tempeh and tofu, vegetarian 'meats' or actual vegetables. It helps that I'm eager to eat quickly so I quickly whittle down to a page or two and then an order or two.

Deciding between spring rolls or dim sims, I let my companion decide as you can't really go wrong with these, right? Well, that's debatable.

Steamed dim sims from Mother Chu's Vegetarian Kitchen, Pitt St, Haymarket

The dim sims come in steamed or fried options and my companion has opted for the healthier of the two. Three flattish egg pastry-wrapped dumplings arrive on an oval plastic plate that is endearingly, or not so, faded of most of its prior decorative glories. There's a garnish of sliced lettuce, red cabbage and carrot coils and a plum dipping sauce. There's also fork marks in the dims sims from either removal from steaming vessel or actual dim sim ventilation - I'm not sure and it's kind of dark in there, but I'm excited to try my first vegetarian dim sim.

The steamed pastry holds the filling well, but it's the filling that has me looking quizzical. It's mostly orange with couscous-like white-ish bits. I seem to remember the menu mentioning tofu, or maybe not. The grated orange part isn't sweet enough to be pumpkin or sweet potato so we decide it has to be carrot. The overall texture of the filling is a bit grainy but soft. It's rather devoid of a definitive flavour other than vegetables and would have been nicer with soy sauce that the sticky sweet plum sauce. Unfortunately it joins the hallowed shrine of dubious dumplings.

Fuzzy close up of dim sim filling

A few giggles later and very generous offerings for each to take the third dim sim (we end up sharing it), the main arrives with a serve of rice. This main looks and smells so good that I forget to snap a pic until we've already well and truly dug in.

Taiwanese style eggplant

It's a big dish of stir fried eggplant in a rich brown sauce, scattered with loads of fresh mint. I love eggplant in this sort of style as it takes on the perhaps not so healthy oil flavour in the pan. The mint is a great contrasting fresh flavour in a well rounded, soy based sauce. Vegetarian can certainly taste very good.

Our good deed done for the evening, it's about time to head home or maybe, just maybe, for a few more drinks over conversation at the pub down the road. Well, it is Friday night afterall.

Tasteless food?

"One who really knows how to eat, will eat the tasteless food."

This I saw as part of a Dharma teaching or mantra at a recent visit to the Nan Tian Temple in Wollongong. There were other parts to it referring to all sorts of other aspects, but this one stood out for obvious reasons. I think it's something about transcending beyond what we can sense here in this world - but that's all a little bit too deep for me.

Instead, I'm there for a little bit of clarity and hope. And a vegetarian lunch. And maybe general sightseeing as I feel like I still have the tourist bug in me: happy snapping and looking at everything as if it were unique and utterly intriguing. It's quite an open way to live life actually, and afterall, aren't we all tourists of this world? I have my philosophising moments.

After a round of the gardens and shrines we head to the lunch room, half of which is packed with youngsters on a camp of some sort. We later see them all on a 'meditative walk' after lunch. The room is light and airy and set with square tables and stools in a clever imitation stone. They're plastic - fantastic!

Dining room at Nan Tian Temple, Wollongong

The meal is served, after paying, from an open hot bar. It's a little unusual but you tell servers which choices you'd like and they serve it to you. It's almost as if it was previously an open buffet. Anyway, I get a bit of everything with my plate ending up looking as below:

Vegetarian lunch at Nan Tian Temple, Wollongong

A mixed bag indeed. I receive both steamed rice and Hokkien noodles while a fellow lunch pilgrim had to choose one or the other. Most intriguing was the, what I call, vegetarian sweet and sour pork, which is seen in the fore of the picture. Standard flavour with pineapple and red capsicum, but the 'pork' (which sort of looks like intestines in the picture) was an interesting vegetarian style meat type. It had the texture of really firm bean curd sticks, or tripe almost. I must have had the oddest look on my face as I chewed it because I was trying to determine the taste and texture and origins and many other things from this bit of flour concoction.

There were two other vegetable dishes: one with crisp celery and carrot, the other with overcooked cauliflower and what another diner insisted was duck meat. It would have been amazingly good imitation vegetarian duck meat, we reassure him. And on top a few items of crispy tempura vegetables. Two pieces I received were jap pumpkin and the other two were somewhat indiscernible. They were green leaves. From what plant I'm not sure but I ate them nonetheless. Waste not, want not.