Hackpacker

One of the best experiences we had was sushi making at Buddha Bellies . Before we left for Japan we visited a local sushi train and tried a place in Tokyo so by the time we got to Buddha Bellies we thought we knew a bit about Japan's original street food. We were wrong. Ayuko prepares to slice and flip the rice. Our host was expert sushi chef and sake sommelier Ayuko Akiyama who starts the class with an overview of sushi's history and the huge variety of sushi. We were familiar with nigiri (rice with topping and a belt of nori) and sliced nori rolls but she also showed us a family style that was wrapped into a cone of seaweed and other kooky types. Our class was a basic one with nigiri and nori rolls that was great for kids though we were tempted to come back and do the mosaic sushi which was presented in a colourful square of deliciousness. My basic nori rolls We make sushi at home so the advanced techniques Ayuko showed us were really helpful. Turns out we've

One of Adelaide's biggest landmarks is the corner of Rundle Mall and King William Street, known as Beehive Corner. If you look up you'll spot the landmark insect buzzing over Haigh's Chocolate . Almost ready for its 100th birthday, the first store appeared here in 1915 and their luxury chocolates have spread to Victoria and New South Wales. But there's something special about getting them here at the source. Their chocolate frogs pre-date Harry Potter's sweet-tooth as they've been selling them for 67 years. Today they offer them in peppermint and dark and reckon they sell more than a million a year. But the frogs are getting pushed aside by Adelaide's Panda-monium and you can now buy large chocolate blocks in the shape of Adelaide Zoo's Wang Wang and Funi . Plus there's truffles, blocks and choc-coated fruit. But the best thing about visiting the Haigh's store is coming out with a free sample - they usually insist on giving you a taster at th

Cellar doors used to have this exclusive feel of a mate letting you in the back door to sneakily try a glass. But now they've become part of the marketing plan. So Rockford Wines try to re-create that lost intimacy with their Stone Wall lunch by creating a secret dining society. I'm let into this elite noshery in the Barossa Valley only because a friend of mine has been a member since he was 16 - even at that age he was tall enough to be mistaken for a tree so he must have eluded any ID checks. He's warned me that this lunch will take half the day but I need to get there early for the first glass. Predictably I'm late, negotiating the Krondorf Road but mostly because for a secret society it seems deceptively easy to find. They pop the first cork in the Stone Wall tasting room, which my friend is right. It's worth arriving early for a gutsy flute of the 1993 Black Shiraz. Sparkling reds get the wrong end of the bottle when it comes to most Northern Hemisphere wi

For the last couple weeks I've been watching - with a mix of amusement, bemusement and some hope - as one of Flemington's best loved joints re-invented itself. The new signage reminiscent of McDonald's brought a smile - is the King thinking of a dynasty of chain stores? The new location on Pin Oak Crescent is confusing because the existing location was always buzzing and bookings were theoretically possible but often bungled. And the hope? Well, I just wanted the food to be as good as when the King slummed it in a grubby arcade and you came away with change from a tenner for that steaming bowl of Malaysian soup. We arrived late for our reservation and there was a huge crowd bubbling over into the street. It was opening week and there were floral tributes piling the windows, so I expected we'd be worshipping at the feet of the King for a while before our audience. But I was wrong. The new venue seats 200, so our reservation was honoured and we're zoomed through to

There was a marketing questionnaire that came from Lonely Planet asking authors how many reviews they reckoned they'd written. I really wouldn't have a clue. As a guesstimate, there's hundreds in any guidebook you write then there's a gagillion food reviews, plus about a billion shadow reviews. These are the reviews you start writing then work out that your subject is never going to make it in, so you keep writing it just for yuks. Some of them are pure fiction while in others only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Here's a couple from the notebooks - including my Scotland blog : Seven-11 The ambience is bright, fluorescently so, with an emphasis on brand names and logos that lends a pop culture chic. Chef “Hi, I’m Dave”, whose career we’ve followed from the Dandenong Rd’s Shell Servo, offers us the five chocolate bars for two dollars, but go for the house special – the caldo cane . Rolling over on a unique warmer/disinfector, the “dogs” (indulgen

In the spruiking of the Big Trip, I've done a couple of fun radio spots. I was interviewed on the Peter Greenberg show , which was a phone hook-up with the host in Barbados. It zipped by in seconds and had me thinking I should only do destinations where I can tan. Another phone hook-up was with Travel in 10 with a great an excellent Canadian host. And I even got a guernsey on Life Matters with the smooth baritone of Richard Aedy. But none of these was as much fun as getting in the studio with RRR Breakfasters for a chat . This month Breakfaster, Sam Pang , is off to Russia to cover Eurovision so the good folks at the Rs asked me back to give him some travel tips on Moscow. After much giggling, vodka tasting and scary mentions of Vladimir Putin's KGB career, there might even have been some advice for Sam (this file is 5meg and advice is in the last ten minutes - you've been warned). Mostly though it was just a yukfest with Sam saying I was just "doing a top five&quo

Here's a few questions people have been asking since I got back about planning their own Trans Mongolian/Siberian trip: Do I need to book a ticket on the Trans Mongolian? If you're going directly with no hopping off, it's possible to book a ticket all the way from Beijing to Moscow, which will be almost a bum-numbing week of sitting on the train. It's better to hop-off and see things for a couple of days. This may mean that you get stuck in a town a day longer (which happened to us in Datong), but once you're on the Trans Siberian mailine (from Irkutsk to Moscow) trains are fairly regular. Is a tour the only way to do it? Booking a tour can be a good way to get it all sorted for you, but it's not necessary. We booked each leg as we went. This meant hopping off the train and buying the next ticket as soon as we got there. Once you're in Russia, the train runs on Moscow time so you'll need to be careful not to muddle Moscow Time and Local Time. There's

From Tomsk it’s an bum-numbing 50 plus hours to Moscow. It’s difficult to work out exactly how long this trip will take us because the train runs on Moscow time and Tomsk is a couple of hours ahead. As we travel along we go through three timezones. We’re prepared though with plenty of supplies for in-carriage picnics. The dining car sounds like a good idea for a change of scenery but on the first night of the trip we get stung for over a thousand roubles including separate extra charges for tomato and cucumber slices. So we opt for self-catering mostly. It’s really easy to hop out at stations and do some hunter-gathering. There are stalls, carts and hawkers selling beer, roast chicken and even pre-cooked meals at a cart optimistically labelling itself pectopah (restaurant). There’s plenty of time as stops last up to 30 minutes – even longer if the provodnitsa (carriage attendant) has to finish their cigarette. The provodnitsa can make or break your trip. Mostly they’re overblown charac

After the long train trip we go for a big meal. In the carnivalesque cuisine of Mongolia , meat is cheaper and hence more plentiful than vegetables. But it’s cooking based in the scarcity of the steppes so all parts of the sheep are eaten including the testicles. The first dish I order is mutton porridge, a glutinously thick stew with suspicious globs of meat in it. It reminds me of a hearty Scotch broth, minus any of those annoying veggies. As the Mongols were nomads they needed meat in any form including their national animal, so the horse is eaten. Which brings me to the main – skip ahead if you’re a Black Beauty fan. The Cowboy dish has three hefty horse ribs with potatoes on the side and a doughy dumpling pancake over the top. Perhaps this pancake is for modesty or to grandly unveil the meat beneath. And what does Mr Ed taste like? A nutty meat that could even be another cut of mutton. It’s definitely no racehorse as there’s fat lining the bone, though another piece is rangy like

Recently I had lunch at the 100 Mile Cafe , which prides itself on sourcing all of its produce from within a 100 mile radius of Melbourne. I smugly enjoyed a Yarra Valley rainbow trout battered in local spelt flour, thinking that my food miles were taken care of for the rest of the week. Then in the bathroom a mural cautioning against over-flushing told me that it takes 500l of water to produce a single orange. Food guilt ensued. But this is nothing in comparision to the angst that several locavores are enduring for an ABC blog . You'd think the Metrolocavores would have it easy getting to choose from grub from anywhere within a 160km radius of Australia's self-declared foodie capital. In fact there's been real trouble especially with coffee (Melbournians would have to be the most caffenated Australians), so they've adopted the 90% rule . This means that there's 10% wriggle room for the odd coffee and office cake or staff BBQ . But even this is proving difficult.

If you choose your wine based on how many medals or awards it has on the label then you don't want to know about Robin Goldstein. As part of a research paper on the wine industry, Goldstein submitted Osteria L'intrepido for a wine award in Wine Spectator at a cost of $250 for an entry fee. And at such a price you'd expect a prize.Trouble was that Goldstein had invented the restaurant and mocked up a nice fake menu into the bill. The 'award' was given based on a few Google searches and a browse of Chowhound , a UGC restaurant site. On one level it's an outting of a lazy revenue raiser for a magazine (the NYT estimates they make over US$600,000 from entry fees ) and an exposition of some shoddy research. It also deals another blow to credibility at a time when reviewers are becoming an endangered species with the rise of UGC. It's earned a place in the Museum of Hoaxes but I'm hoping it creates a greater value for good research.

It's Cheap Eats review time again. I've been reviewing for them for about five years, but this year I'm finding that inflation has pushed a lot of places out of the $30 for 2-courses category. Waiters shrug and mumble about fuel prices and troubles on the land, but there's been a slow creep. It started with the humble sandwich. With the discovery of the focaccia , bread-based meals jumped the $5 mark. Cafe owners warmed to the idea like the slabs of bread pressed under a griller and soon you could get the Italian bread in almost every two-bit place for a price of seven bits. A couple of iterations followed - the baguette , the panini and the wrap - nudging the price up a dollar or so each, but no-one ever thought they'd actually break the ten buck limit. It was the hospitality equivalent of the sound barrier. I thought there would have to be some new innovation to do it: styling sandwiches into a dosa cone or throwing on an unecessary side dish ('Do you want

Getting into Helsinki is a breeze, but phoning my friend is much harder. Ninety-eight per cent of Finns have mobiles and the other two percent are lying, so asking where to find a public phone is like asking where to buy gramophone records or betamax tapes. I finally worked it out by using a Skype booth, which involves several trips to get the right change and asking for some 16 year-old kids for help. I feel 300. The featured pic though is my first Finnish breakfast ( aamiainen ) which includes a rice-filled pastry from Karelia called karjalanpiirakka , and coffee served in a Marimekko mug. This is classic Finnish hospitality.

Yunnan is a big province with a wild mix of minority groups, so when the idea of Yunnanese restaurant came up it sounded worth a try. The Middle 8th wasn't too tricky to find (see map) and inside it was all modish minimalism and slick staff. Not quite as extreme as fiery Sichuan, Yunnan is known for spicey grub zinging with pepper and chilli. We played it cool with ordering and ended up with a whacky assortment: chilli-crusted mushrooms, bamboo worms tossed through pease and deep-fried cactus. The cactus was done tempura style with thick globby batter over tender chunks that tasted rather like broccoli, while the worms were protein bullets that were peppered out of any flavour. Perhaps we should have gone with the bee pupa. tagzaniapaste As any inflight magazine will tell you, there's plenty of good eating in Beijing (yep, I got to the Peking duck eventually - soft and good). We tried a few places mostly on recommendations of friends. We got adventurous at a local bakery using