Julian Teoh

I think a critique of cutlery is appropriate in a food review., depending on the context. I'll take the old Balzac at Randwick as an example. The food was superlative and the cutlery was ordinary to the extent of almost being inconvenient eg eating skate with a giant blunt knife. If no comments were made on the cutlery, you might well expect that the attention to detail that was lavished on the food was similarly laid on with the cutlery, tablecloths etc etc ad nauseum and that simply was not the case. Balzac was, to a greater extent then than now in my view, a great value place with great food but less solid on the trimmings. Although if the food is dodgy to begin with, then obviously no cutlery can save the place from sliding into restaurant hell. For the record, I think your reviewers down south beat ours (Sydney's) black and blue since Terry Durack left for England (and Durack was orginally from Melbourne as well if memory serves).

Thanks, Ben and Fengyi. Many people have told me that yee sang is a "Malaysian Chinese" dish, while others have told me it was introduced to Malaysia. Does anyone know how popular it is in other Chinese communities and what different forms it takes? I've had versions in Sydney (run by HK restaurateurs) where I received a small serve of vegetables, a large serve of shredded omelet and an even larger serve of salmon slices. Digressing slightly, I've seen innovation in cuisine for the sake of it, and Singapore appears to be one of the places where this trend is taking root, especially when they are trying to make Chinese food more accessible to the expatriate community. Follow this link below to see a fruit "yee sang" with avruga. It is being served at the Fullerton, a high-end hotel on the Singapore River. http://www.asiacuisine.com.sg/features/feature08_01.htm Having not tried it, I'll refrain from casting aspersions but I'm not sure I really want to celebrate my New Year with that!

What do we think of Simon Thomsen's reviewing style? Personally, I think he should put down the thesaurus. This is Thomsen on affogato: "an expensive exercise in ONANISM that pervades numerous menus." This was probably the first time I had to consult my dictionary after reading a food review, as opposed to Larousse or books of that ilk. I wasn't too taken by Matthew Evans's style either, but at least he had the courage to call a spade a spade, or in this case, a wank. And Thomsen's "joke" yesterday about LSD and Byron Bay just sailed some five feet over my head. Come back Terry, all is forgiven.

I was born in Malaysia, and I always used to look forward to "yee sang" (Cantonese) or "yusheng" (Mandarin). In Cantonese, the name puns on "a life of plenty." The way it's served in Malaysia, yee sang comes as a platter with separate mounds of raw fish slices (salmon is fashionable nowadays), shredded crunchy vegetables such as carrot and radish, fried crackers, crushed roasted peanuts and a sour plum dressing. White pepper and five spice powder were charmingly presented in hongbao (red packets) for the guests to sprinkle on the dish. When all the family was assembled around the table, we would all dip our chopsticks in and toss the food together into a glorious painterly mess. The symbolism, apart from the family being together and performing the act, was in the technique: the grasping of food in the chopstick and raising it during the mixing action represented the "rise" of one's good fortune. And there you have it: a visually stunning, wonderfully messy dish. Vibrant oranges, whites, browns and reds commingling in one gargantuan platter of joy. Eating it was the final, and IMHO the greatest, pleasure of all. You have the contrasting textures and fresh tastes of fish and vegetables, smoky sweetness from the peanuts, the crunch of delightfully crispy crackers. The spices and the sour plum dressing round off one of the most appetising and unique dishes to celebrate the New Year. This dish is pretty much the sine qua non of Malaysian and Singaporean CNY specialities. It has become so popular that restaurants and cafes start offering the dish even before CNY (traditionally, it is eaten on the 7th day), and even professional workplaces, where there would be a good proportion of Malay and Indian employees, have offered yee sang to their employees to herald good fortune for the coming year.

This sounds incredible! Don't you think the abalone would've gone bad in the decades it's been in the freezer? Why was the venison dish so expensive? ← I don't think the abalone would have held up, which was why I didn't try it (that, and the minor matter of not having RM17,000 to spend). There was a pretty big fuss about it at the time in Malaysia and the manager of the restaurant appeared on national radio to spruik it. When the host asked him if the abalone would have gone bad, he simply replied "No, it is as fresh as if it were caught from the ocean waters yesterday." I can't say for sure why the venison cost that much, but the manager claimed it was stewed in an infusion of rare, and one presumes, extremely expensive herbs. You were allowed to pick individual dishes off the banquet menu if you didn't have the heart to go all the way. The banquet was designed to be a contemplative showcase rather than just "a dinner" (insofar as you can describe a $18,000 meal as "just dinner"), and was served as a progression of courses to be shared by the guests. If you took it up, you would start off at around 6 pm and finish up a little before midnight, with a selection of teas matched to the dishes, with intervals in between courses so the guests could do some moon-watching. Interestingly, the teas were only provided if you ordered the entire banquet.

Hi Guys, This is a pretty interesting topic, so I thought I might make my first post here I'm not sure where we've reached in terms of the "most expensive dinner," but I remember a banquet that was promoted in Malaysia in 1994 (before the Asian crisis) which cost some RM38,000 (excluding drinks) for a table of ten (on current exchange rates, it would be around USD10,000, but back then, it would have been worth about USD18,000.00). I'm not sure how valid the pricing system was as some of the ingredients were so rare that the restaurant could set the price and laugh at people for taking it up. Case in point: one dish was an apparently now-extinct Japanese abalone which had been in the freezer since 1976, and of which there were only seven whole ones left (and no, they weren't going to give you an entire one). That dish alone cost RM17,000.00. The next most expensive dish was triple-stewed wild venison sinew in cordyceps, which weighed in at a measly RM11,000.00. It's not everyday that Japanese Kobe beef (as opposed to wagyu beef), at RM700, is the cheapest dish in a banquet!