So Noods went to the Hunter Valley for the weekend away with the boys, leaving me unsupervised which meant I may have bought 3 pairs of shoes, 2 books about robots, 6 boxes of Kit Kats, 3 handbags, a 17g Madame Truffles truffle, truffle ice cream and truffle salt. Yeah I dunno how that happened but the highlight of my weekend was having lunch with Viv, Sarah and Eric at Chester White Cured Diner with a sneaky beverage or two.

The place is pretty tiny, the bar runs the length of the room and behind the counter hangs an entire row of cured meats. So first things first, we order the Meat Platter (2 meats with sides $20, added 2 more meats for $6 each). We choose the Culatello ITA (King of cured meats! the menu exclaims), Truffle Salami, Sopressa Salami and Fennel Garlic Salami and the board is crammed with pickled carrots, cauliflower and radishes, bread, slabs of asiago and fontina cheeses and of course some olives.

We love the culatello which is similar to proscuitto but has a much more intense flavour and the heady aroma of the Truffle Salami has me weak at the knees. The fennel and garlic salami would’ve been awesome if it was a bit more garlic-y but it’s still tasty as is the sopressa washed down with a Negroni ($16) that is perfect for this almost spring weather.

We were actually thinking of heading to Buffalo Dining Club, Chester White’s sister restaurant in Darlinghurst- for their Spaghetti in a wheel of cheese, but then we heard about Chester White’s Truffled Spaghetti Cacio E Pepe ($22).

DAT TRUFFLE SCENT! Spaghetti, olive oil and pepper is mixed in the wheel so flakes of deeelicious truffle parmesan is scraped off ermahgerd if you love truffle you will love this! The pasta has a satisfying chew and as we scrape the plate clean I quietly contemplate ordering a second round.

And we couldn’t resist ordering the Not Chester Carbonara ($20) made with casarecce pasta, organic porcini mushrooms and speck.

Oooh yeah, mix it goood

Speck! My god how good is speck?! That fat, that flavour, THOSE GLORIOUSLY CRISPY NUBBINS! Each twisty pasta shell was coated in rich egg yolk so that the earthy mushrooms and bits of speck clung on for dear life before being delivered to my soul.

Oh and there’s the house made chilli sauce if you like a bit of spice.

I heart their plates hahaha

Not wanting to share, we ordered a round of the Cheeky Tiramisu ($5 each) which arrive in the cutest little mugs. It is the perfect ratio of cream and coffee soaked savoiardi biscuits and it turns out to be the perfect size for us after all the pasta.

Jars of house made pickles all lined up.

I love that Chester White has that Potts Point hipster vibe and the brilliant service, incredible pastas and tasty meats has secured a special place in my pasta loving heart.

Chester White Cured Diner
3 Orwell St,
Potts Point
NSW

Trading hours:
Wed & Thurs: 5pm – 11pm
Fri & Sat: 12pm – 11pm

I’m not sure why I haven’t visited Nomad sooner. Sometimes life gets the better of me and I stick to my usual tried and true restaurants because sometimes I like the familiarity of food and/or staff you know? But a special occasion calls for a special dinner and so Raff and I chose Nomad and even though we missed out on a booking we were lucky to grab the last walk in seats at the bar.

We start with the Nomad Charcuterie ($27) because everything is made in house and sliced to order and it’s top notch stuff! I was a tad disappointed that there wasn’t any lardo but the silky mortadella and the spicy chorizo more than made up for the loss, and I just couldn’t stop stealing more than my share of the paper thin slices of pork neck or the crazy addictive pork and fennel sausage. Oh and there’s house made pickled carrots, cauliflower and onions too.

The Goats Cheese Churros ($18) with Truffle Honey just blew my mind. I’m not a super massive fan of churros in general because I always find them too hard and crispy but woah man Nomad had me fangirling so hard at how freaking awesome these churros were! They were just super light and fluffy and the salty goats cheese and sweet truffle honey combo was just perfect!

For mains we ordered the Wood Roasted Suckling Pig with Stuffing, Broccolini, Chilli Burnt Butter ($39). Oh boy that crackle! That glorious music to my ears! I couldn’t really taste the chilli burnt butter but no worries for the pig was juicy enough that it didn’t really need anything else.

The BBQ Wagyu Skirt ($40) was a pretty generous serving and had a perfect medium rare centre. It was melt in your mouth tender and the rich Pedro Ximenez jus had me swiping the plate clean of that precious liquid. There was also a bed of mushrooms underneath but well, MEEEEAT!

We ordered the BBQ Cauliflower with Almond Tarator, Manchego ($16) to satisfy our vegetable intake and it may have been my second favourite dish of the night! Loved the grilled edges of the florets but most of all the cloud of manchego cheese!

And for dessert? No you’re not experiencing deja vu, we just reallllly could not stop talking about the churros and we thought well hey sometimes people have a cheeseboard for dessert right and this is kinda like cheese and crackers and whatevers who gives a toss we can eat whatever we want 😛

Nomad
16 Foster Street,
Surry Hills

Trading Hours:
Wed & Sat: Noon – 2.30pm
Mon & Fri: 6pm till late
Sat: 5.30pm til late
Sunday: Closed

Hold onto your hats folks because BAM! LOOK AT THIS TABLE O’ SEAFOOD BOIL! After dancing and drinking the night away at my cousins wedding (congrats Alex and Nguyet!), I took the rellies to The Boiling Crab in Koreatown for an epic seafood feast. We joined the queue around 11.30am and made it into the promised land after a 45mins wait.

The restaurant is festooned with a giant shark, fish nets and life buoys and all the tables are lined in butchers paper just begging for a bag of seafood boil to be upended. The whiteboard at the front of the room displays what seafood is available and their prices so all you gotta do is figure out how many pounds of what you’d like to eat, your spice level and what flavour sauce to go with it (Rajun Cajun, Lemon Pepper, Garlic or the Whole Sha-bang which is a mix of the 3).

Poor Noods watched in envy as the double order of Shrimp ($10/pound) smothered in garlic sauce was plonked onto our table first. The shrimp were large and juicy and that garlic sauce was ridiculously addictive, we just kept dunking anything and everything into that gloriously fragrant sauce!

The Crawfish ($11/pound) in the Whole Sha-bang sauce were fiddly little suckers but with a little patience they were totally worth the effort! Twist off their heads, suck out the juices if you’re so inclined and carefully separate the thinner membrane from the underbelly before carefully pulling out their sweet, sweet flesh which I reckon kinda tastes like a yabbie. Once I got into the crawfish deshelling groove I steadily grew my pile of crawfish meat before dunking a handful into the sauce and gleefully stuffing my face.

But then it’s crab time and we’ve ordered 2 rounds of the Snow Crab Legs ($16/pound) in garlic sauce because hey we’re on holidays and it’s so freaking cheap even with the crappy Aus dollar! I was extremely grateful that we were all wearing ginormous plastic bibs because as soon as we grabbed the crackers there was shell, crab and juices flying everywhere and we all took great delight in seeing who could extricate the biggest piece of flesh intact.

We decide to skip the Dungeness Crab Legs ($18/pound) in favour of a double serve of Alaskan King Crab Legs ($23/pound) in lemon pepper sauce which are so incredibly meaty that we start to doubt if we’d be able finish all our seafood.

The Lobster ($17/pound) is last to arrive but when it does it is greeted with awed silence at how massive this monster is.

Check out how big that freaking lobster was! Our waitress told us the lobsters weighed about 3-4 pounds (1.3-1.8kg) and it was just oh so satisfying grabbing the lobster and ripping off the tail to get at the meat! I did prefer the crab meat over the lobster meat as it had a bit more of a bite to it but it was still delicious especially dunked in the spicy Cajun sauce.

Oh and then there was Sweet Potato Fries ($4) because, carbs. With crispy edges and fluffy innards, they were the perfect vehicle to mop up sauces.

Aaaand demolished! This was one of our fave meals on our USA trip and is definitely on the Must Eat list for when we return!

The Boiling Crab (Koreatown)
3377 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA

Trading Hours:
Mon – Fri: 3pm – 10pm
Sat – Sun: 12pm – 10pm

So I’ve been stalking Dave Moran on Instagram since his days at The Baron in Castle Hill, my fave Westie cafe and have keenly awaited the opening of The General Eatery & Supplies in Dulwich Hill. With a focus on fresh, seasonal produce and coffee by Single Origin Roasters, it’s no surprise to see all the locals streaming in.

So how’s the menu work? First, decide on which salad and how much of it you’d like, ($10/1 salad, $12/2 salads or $14/3 salads), the salads change depending on the produce sourced from the markets but todays options were Grain (pearl barley, quinoa, kale, tomato and pomegranate vinaigrette), Leaf (cos, avocado, cucumber, dill and pesto) and Veg (chargrilled corn with tomato salsa). Then you can add Today’s Cut ($10) which happened to be brisket smoked low and slow for 14 hours.

That brisket. I mean, just look at it. Laying there all sexy and inviting, displaying juicy meat and glorious pockets of fat with caramelised edges. It barely needed that puddle of barbeque sauce because it was just that tender and juicy it seemed like a crime to eat it with anything else! The salad is worth a mention too- I heart grilled corn where each kernel was bursting with that sunshiney goodness and intense smoky flavour.

And then you can add extras of bread and butter ($3) from the Bread & Butter Project, soup ($7), sandwich ($12) or a Ploughman’s Board ($15) if you were after something lighter. The sandwich of the day was salmon that had been poached in white white and then smoked for an hour with apple wood. There was a generous amount of salmon in the sandwich with a schmear of cream cheese and dill and thin slices of cucumber and watercress. This is my idea of the perfect sandwich for summer (so here’s hoping it gets warmer soon!), it’s nice and light but filling enough that you won’t get hungry 2 hours later and curse your life choices.

Noods has been craving soup all week so we got the Pumpkin soup to share and by share I mean I got maybe 3 spoonfuls before looking up and seeing him guiltily swiping the bowl clean with bread. While I always appreciate the inclusion of butter with my bread, I reckon it didn’t need it because the soup was pretty damn spectacular and I’m usually not the biggest fan of pumpkin soup but this one was awesome, rich and hearty and ridiculously smooth.

If you happen to wake up and roll out of bed and stumble to The General before 11am you can satisfy your breakfast needs with a menu that runs from Granola ($12), Avo on toast ($12) or this beauty of a Bacon and egg roll ($10) with avocado, tomato relish and a smoky bbq sauce.

On another visit we arrived on a Sunday for the Sunday Roast where 20 bux gets you a mega slab of juicy pork with an edge of golden crackle, the neon pink hues of braised apple cabbage, Spanish onion that had been roasted until sweetly tender and soul warming honey roasted carrots and parsnips. We were offered seconds but decided to grab a Woah Nelly donut for the road instead because, donuts 😛

The General Eatery is off to a cracking start and I’m looking forward to when they start doing dinners from the 11th September and word on the street is they’ll be serving some pretty ace whiskeys too!

The General Eatery & Supplies
514 Marrickville Road,
Dulwich Hill

Trading Hours:
Mon: Closed
Tue – Sun: 7am–3pm