The Heart Of Food photography class

I don’t think I need to say this but I’ll say it anyway: I have no clue about photography. My point-and-shoot camera broke in March and my photographer friend Matt offered me his old Nikkon D70 almost for free (a $108 donation to our Buddhist centre in exchange). So I researched a bit about Nikkon lenses and got a brand new Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G. That’s how I made the jump to “serious” food photography, but sadly I have close to zero knowledge of talent in this field.

Lucky me, fellow food blogger Simon from The Heart Of Food organised a food photography class for those who, like me, needed some (or a lot of) guidance.

The class took place in Mumu Grill, a restaurant I’ve been wanting to go to for ages, and included a shared lunch with the double purpose of filling our tummies and putting the class theory into practice.

The food bloggers in the house (Ayana, Chanel, Melanie, Laura, and I) were surprised to see non food bloggers attending the course. They were surprised to see food bloggers, especially because at least one of them didn’t even know what the hell a food blogger was (the answer is: someone with a camera who never eats hot food hot).

Simon did an excellent job in explaining extremely useful aspects of photography with a strong emphasis in food. Unfortunately, the 5+ hours we spent there were not enough to dive into any of the topics but we did get good orientation about lighting, focus, composition, post-production, etc. The class was very well structured and dynamic, with “thinking” exercises as well as plenty of opportunities for sharing experiences and playing with our cameras.

Shooting food

As always, I didn’t use full manual mode, but fixed aperture instead. I did try setting the white balance manually for each shot and avoiding the automatic focus most of the times. That’s why the photos are terribly inconsistent. One of the biggest lessons I learned that day is that a photographer must be self-critical and not publish bad photos. I’ll do it when I start getting good photos, but for now…

Starters included bread and dips, plump Sicilian green olives, paper-thin jamón serrano served with thin toasted bread, Szechuan fried prawns with pickled chilli and soy, and duck and shiitake mushroom empanadas. I didn’t touch the bread but did try the dips which were nicely flavoured but not automatically recognizable. The jamón serrano (Spanish cured ham) was awesome both in flavour and texture. The prawns were good, but as well as the empanadas, would have been a lot nicer if eaten hot.

Bread and dips, olives

Jamón serrano

Szechuan fried prawns with pickled chilli and soy

Duck & shiitake mushroom empanadas

Mains were organic chicken with maple roasted sweet potato and spinach, and sirloin tagliatta with duck fat potatoes and greens. Both were outstanding; the chicken was juicy and tasty, and found a good match in its accompaniments. The beef was awesome, tender and moist. Mumu Grill’s sustainably raised grass-fed beef very well deserves another trip to the Northern suburbs. I skipped the potatoes even when the duck fat was a big temptation, and settled with the less harmful green beans and broccoli.

Chicken with maple roasted sweet potato and spinach

Sirloin tagliatta with duck fat potatoes and greens

Sides included a simple but effective cherry tomato and feta salad, and broccoli with lima beans and pine nuts. Laura got a very tasty-looking vegetarian platter.

Cherry tomato and feta salad

Vegetarian platter

I think everyone was a bit disappointed to see that only 3 dessert platters were meant to be shared between the 11 of us. Especially because one of the platters contained nothing but fruit (an artfully cut orange, watermelon, pineapple, pear and apple). The other had ginger bread and vanilla ricotta sandwich (with poached rhubarb and spiced vanilla syrup), brown sugar pavlova (topped with fresh pineapple & passionfruit sauce) and chocolate mole tart (with hazelnut gelato). Back in my destructive eating days I could have polished one of those platters by myself but I’m more mindful of my health these days and had only fruit.

Dessert platter

Fruit platter

We were all pleased with the class but felt that it was too short to explore the vast world of food photography. I’d like a full weekend workshop or, even better, a bootcamp like the ones food bloggers from the Northern Hemisphere have yearly in Mexico.

Cost-wise I’d say the $90 were very well spent. Apart from the class, which was worth a big chunk of the price IMO, all food and non-alcoholic drinks were included. Simon will be running another class on August 6th, you can check out the details here.

Mumu Grill
70-76 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
(02) 9460 6877
www.mumugrill.com.au

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Review: Montezuma’s Mesa

On the second day of October we had already been to two birthday celebrations. The first one was Sergio’s and the second one Rale’s. This year Rale decided to celebrate once again close to his house, in Crows Nest, this time in Montezuma’s Mesa. It’s not hard to guess it’s a Mexican restaurant, actually a franchise with several locations in QLD, NSW, SA and VIC.

The place is very Mexican: lots of decorations fill the walls and hang from the ceiling. Everything is very colourful and cheerful.

There were even piñatas!

Funny thing, everything was super Mexican except from the staff. The serviettes have the franchise’s logo printed on, and the salt and pepper shakers are Corona bottles with lids.

Even when I checked the menu online I had a hard time choosing what to order. Maybe if they offered only the “simple” dishes (tacos, burritos, tostadas, nachos, chilli con carne, albondigas, mole poblano, etc) it would be a bit easier, but they also offer a huge number of combinations that make you wonder if you’re making the right choice or not.

Ana (Rale’s wife) had told us that the place was BYO, but it was not. Luckily I didn’t bring any wine (I’ve been sick for a week). The restaurant has a bar that offers beers (local and Mexican), cocktails (not only margaritas, but also piña coladas and other non-Mexican ones), mocktails and soft drinks. Alvaro ordered a strawberries and cream mocktail ($6.95) and I a bottle of non-chilled sparkling water ($3.50).

As for the food, we settled with the tamale pie (a tasty mixture of pure ground beef, sultanas, olives, sweet corn, Mexican spices, herbs, topped with cheese, served with Spanish rice and salad, $15.95) and the “Baja” combination (chicken and sour cream enchilada, cheese enchilada, rice and salad, $19.95).

The tamale pie was not what we expected. We thought it would be a mix between a tamal and a corn pie, but it was more on the crumbly side and not as tasty as we imagined it. It was also not very big, but it came with lots of rice and a salad that was what we liked the least. It had chopped veggies (cauliflower, zucchini, carrot) and apples and some crumbled cheese on top. No dressing. I’d prefer a fresh salad with Mexican food.

The “Baja” combination was tastier than the pie. The chicken/sour cream enchilada and the cheese enchilada were side by side, covered with melted cheese, with some rice on one side and the same bland salad on the other side.

Ana had the “Special” combination dinner (chilli con carne, chicken taco, chicken and sour cream enchilada, rice, $17.95) that looked pretty good.

Because her dish was a bit delayed, she received complimentary corn chips with a good tasting dipping sauce.

When we all finished and were ready for the cake, the restaurant’s staff arrived with a sombrero for Rale and joined us to sing happy birthday.

After the cake and a speech given by the birthday boy with a strong Mexican accent, we finished our drinks and left, a few of us home, the rest to a nearby pub.

Montezuma’s Mesa
51 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
(02) 9901 3533
www.montezumas.com.au

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Review: Thai Face

There seems to be a fixation with Thai food in Sydney. I don’t write this just due to the fact that there are at least 5 Thai restaurants for each place featuring any other cuisine, but also because several of my friends (who don’t know each other) usually choose Thai for birthday lunches/dinners or takeaway. For me is overkill (I like variety) but then I think about the eateries back home and the same thing happens, the food scene is dominated by chifas (Cantonese restaurants adapted to the Peruvian taste) and pollerías (charcoal chicken restaurants).

Last year my friend Ana and her husband Rale celebrated their birthdays (in July and October, respectively) in Thai Pothong. Not only the same cuisine, but the same restaurant (it’s not that the place isn’t good, it’s just that I’ve been there a number of times and I prefer going somewhere new each time). When I received Ana’s email for her birthday dinner this year I wasn’t surprised when I read the word “Thai”, but I was happy to see that I didn’t know the restaurant, and in fact it was located in a suburb where I had not dined before: Thai Face in Crows Nest.

A quick check in Google Maps gave me the location and a general feeling of the people towards this place. I used to trust blindly in Eatability until we went to a 8.9-rated Vietnamese restaurant and the five of us agreed that it was worth half of the points at most. So now I just read lightly the latest user reviews and try to avoid expectations. From my brief investigation I learned that the place had been formerly Thai Riffic (they have one restaurant in Newtown, too), that is now under new management and obviously new name, and that service is quite slow.

Alvaro and I got there by train and bus after attending a talk and nibbling on some after-talk snacks. We met there with our friends and met new people (most of them South American). The restaurant is big; its atmosphere is similar to Thai Pothong’s. It has an open kitchen, red chandelier-style lamps hanging from the ceiling and red lanterns by the walls. There are long tables with groups celebrating special occasions.

The menu is not traditionally Thai (you can tell by the phrase in the cover of the menu: “The New Thai Dining Culture”) and it has mix-and-match sections where you can choose a meat (or tofu) with a style of dish. It also has a “chef pride” section with the restaurant specials, significantly more expensive than the rest of the dishes. One thing that got my attention was the inclusion of roti in some of the dishes and as a side, with or without satay sauce. We didn’t check the drinks menu because we had brought a variety of wines, as always. This time I brought a dry rosé because it was cheaper than my usual more appropriate choice of Riesling. It wasn’t bad at all.

Time passed by catching up with our lives, taking photos and perusing the menus, but nobody came to take the order. We even had a waitress take a group picture but she didn’t ask if we were ready for ordering. Finally one of our very hungry friends stood up and called a waitress. She looked confused when taking orders but in the end we all received what we asked for.

One of our friends (the one who called the waitress) ordered the creamy sweet basil curry. It looked amazing, according to our friend it was tasty but some pieces of hot chili didn’t allow him to finish the dish.

Alvaro and I shared a roasted duck salad and the mussamun lamb (from the specials section). The salad was very good, it had mixed leaves, quartered tomatoes, strips of zucchini, raw onion, chilli jam-lime dressing and a splash of coconut milk. The duck was tasty and the amount of meat didn’t leave us feeling ripped off.

Some minutes after we finished the salad the mussamun lamb arrived. The curry sauce was the traditional one, the difference was that instead of slow cooked chunks of meat inside the sauce, there were four smallish lamb chops on top of the sauce. There were also two slices of cooked potato, some whole cashew nuts, cinnamon sticks and four roti wedges. We had ordered steamed rice even when the dish had roti in it, and it turned out to be a good decision because there wasn’t enough bread to dip in the sauce. The sauce itself was ok (not to be arrogant, but I prefer mine), but the lamb was a bit tough, too salty and not enough.

One of our friends had ordered the traditional mussamun beef curry and he couldn’t finish his plate. He told us it had too much meat, which was incredibly tender. Next time I’ll stick to the classics.

After everybody finished and a few more photos were taken, the caramel cake Ana had brought arrived. We sang “happy birthday” in English and Spanish, Ana blew out the candles and we stuffed our faces with cake, which tasted very much like homemade cakes you usually find in Peruvian homes.

We were still chatting when we realised that there were no other customers left. The cooks and waitresses were ready to go and the rubbish bins had been taken out of the kitchen and placed in the dining room (I don’t know about here but that is illegal in my country). Our friend Nestor drove us home, while the rest of the gang headed to the pub across the road to continue drinking.

Thai Face
9-11 Falcon St
Crows Nest NSW 2065
(02) 9906 8716

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