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http://www.tripadvisor.com.au/Restaurant_Review-g255098-d2282964-Reviews-Sunnybrae_Restaurant-Victoria.html

http://www.gourmet-chick.com/2013/01/sunnybrae-restaurant-birregurra.html

http://somethingtorelish.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/cooking-class-with-george-birron.html

http://www.whatimeisdinner.com/2012/10/the-sex-kitten-room-at-sunnybrae.html

Devoured: gourmet gives way to glutton

PUBLISHED: 02 Feb 2013 00:34:19 | UPDATED: 02 Feb 2013 00:34:19

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Mr Creosote and John Cleese in a famous scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Photo: Universal/Celandine/Monty Python/The Kobal Collection

Andrew Cornell

Whyalla and the rest of us have survived the carbon tax, we can be reassured that the most astute scientific minds of talkback radio have postponed the destruction of global warming until at least the next Mayan calendar becomes available. The election is months away. But catastrophe still looms.
We are doomed by food. It’s killing us. Not just the direct assault of sugar and gluten, but calories in general. Apparently. Although presumably the longevity benefits of calorific restriction diets hit a wall some point before we stop eating altogether.
It is, sadly, pretty obvious that once you pass the age of about six you can’t eat all the KFC you like whenever you like without turning into Mr Creosote.
For those not familiar with this cultural icon or his famous scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, Mr Creosote is a human blimp who explodes from over-eating but, and this is why he is such a modern figure, he’s no junk food junkie.
He’s a foodie. The haute French restaurant in which he is a regular offers a special of jugged hare with truffles; the frogs’ legs amandine are described as “delicate and subtle”. He drinks Chateau Latour ’45. He’s a gourmand who inflates the concept of degustation dining somewhat.
The genius of Monty Python, of course, is that no matter how surreal and anarchic, the humour is deeply rooted in reality. And Mr Creosote is back in town. Take the latest Food Issue of the New Yorker magazine and its super-sized 10,000 odd word story on the rise of the “secret supper club” in the United States.
The people who dine at these temples of cult-figure chefs of course tweet, blog and Facebook incessantly about eating and have “handles” like “The Panda Clan” and “Team Fatass” – which are pretty good clues to their dining habits.
One 40-course meal – yes, 40 – to celebrate a 40th birthday included chicken liver mousse with pickled pear, watermelon radish on brioche and lobster, celery root remoulade, black sesame and cherry-white soy vinaigrette.
A discerning diner’s tweeted response? “Only a la carte marathons at Picca and The Bazaar have produced higher course counts.”
Just another wafer, Mr Creosote?
There seems to be an extraordinary correlation between excess in food and finance. The banquet, of course, was historically a response to a victory or a momentous celebration. The degustation dinner was an invention of the various royal courts, an endless procession of elaborately transformed rarities demonstrating wealth.
In modern times, the ostentation of food has regularly inflated with bubble economies: the bull market of the ’80s fuelled the inverse excess of nouvelle cuisine, the debt binge in the run-up to the global financial crisis served up molecular cuisine and endless degustation courses.
We should be reminded of the warning of the Roman historian Livy. In his book Spice: The History of Temptation, Jack Turner writes “in this sorry tale of decline [of the Roman Empire], the cook naturally deserved a special mention”.
Turner cites Livy as mapping the decline of the empire against the rise in the status of the food preparer: “It was then that the cook, who had formerly the status of the lowest kind of slave, first acquired prestige and what had once been servitude came to be thought of as an art,” Livy wrote.
ulius Caesar was aware of the risk, passing laws to regulate excess, Turner tells us, and once “ordered brigades of food police to the market to look for forbidden delicacies and sent soldiers into private homes to check whether his edicts were being violated”.As we enter the season of television cook-offs, remember that the best of them all, Japan’s Iron Chef, begins with the aphorism of the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: “Show me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“To the Romans such as Cicero, what you ate was an issue of the utmost ethical importance,” Turner writes.
For all its camp and fabulous concoctions, Iron Chef actually subverts culinary pretentiousness. It celebrates the glory of the best produce. The judges determine how well expressed the key ingredient is. It is a cooking show for gourmets, not gourmands. And the two are different. Gourmand means glutton. Mr Creosote is a gourmand.
But just as Iron Chef’s Chairman Kaga begins each show delighting in the crunch of a perfect capsicum, the gourmet is not just about trophy eating. As a restaurant reviewer for more than 20 years and a vegetable gardener for longer, there is far more pleasure in a plate of the best produce, treated with respect by a chef who subordinates his or her ego to the raw material – not frothed, foamed, turned into dirt, smeared, denatured.
A chef such as George Biron from the storied Sunnybrae restaurant in rural Victoria, where produce direct from his own garden and local suppliers is presented simply – the greatest skill of all because there is nowhere to hide.
Far better the languid afternoon at Sunnybrae, with the meal interrupted by a stroll through the garden to look at where what’s on the plate is growing, than 12 courses of a dozen raw materials each, none recognisable any longer from whence they came. Rather like the difference between a prime mortgage and a AAA-rated sub-prime collaterised debt obligation.
Hopefully, as the global economy limps away from the excess of the great liquidity glut, food trends will move away from elaborate gluttony too.

Fare Dinkum

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Devoured: gourmet gives way to glutton

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Devoured: gourmet gives way to glutton

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