#stairchicken

[shurgs]

Eating in Sydney's South-West: Cabra-battered dog

This is the first instalment of 'Eating in Sydney's South-West', in which I outline places to eat that are genuinely good, and aren't just tourist traps - medicore, overrated meals, as reflected in their absurd prices.

In this part, I'm going to go through places to eat in Cabramatta, which you've no doubt heard about as the former heroin capital of Australia, now the food capital of New South Wales. Cabramatta has a huge range of food, and you can pretty much find anything here (as long as it's Asian). I'm going to go through a few things that you should eat if you ever find yourself hungry here.

I grew up in Cabramatta and I remember that -- nope, okay, you don't care, you're just hungry and (relatively) poor, so I'll just shut up and get to the food.

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WHAT: Pad Thai 

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HOW MUCH: $9 for chicken, beef or tofu, $11 for seafood

WHERE: Savann Restaurant, opposite the Post Office on Hugh Street

WORDS: If there were a person whose biological parents were the most beautiful people in the world, and then a wizard appeared and magically transformed that person into sauce, they would turn into Savann's peanut sauce. The sauce is so amazing that you'd think that your tastebuds died and went to heaven - the sauce is just sweet enough, and very rich that you'll inadvertently moan "MMMM!" as you slurp it up. The noodles are consistently perfect, neither so firm that you have to chew and chew and chew and chew and chew, nor so soft and sloppy that you feel like you're eating a ghost. The beef and chicken are always juicy. I have never been let down by how tasty and filling this is, and I'm told that the vegan Pad Thai (without eggs and meat) is very good as well.

DANGER!!! While the Pad Thai from Savann is the best I've had, I would not recommend many of the other dishes as standalone meals. The ox-tongue, for example, can be flavourless and dry, and the fried quail quite ordinary. If you do want to try the other dishes, though, you'd be better off dining with 3-5 friends so that you can order however many dishes and split the cost, paying $10-15 each, which is quite cheap considering how full you will be.

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WHAT: Sweet sweet sandwiches

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HOW MUCH: $5

WHERE: Simply Delicious, opposite the train station

WORDS: I know I said that you can have any food that you'd like in Cabramatta as long as it's Asian, but this is an exception. Simply Delicious is a family-owned deli with an impressive range of cured meats, cheeses, and antipasto available to put into your sandwich. The sandwiches in question are huge and can contain just about whatever you'd like, with an unlimited selection of meats and salads for the flat rate of $5. I'm not sure what the bread is, but it is very good. 

I can't recommend anything because I always ask the lovely Serbian girl behind the counter if she could make me a 'surprise sandwich', a question to which she responds, with a smile, "Sure thing," and stands there for a while, deliberating which combination of meats and cheeses to put together, before making an incredibly tasty and filling sandwich.

DANGER!!! For some reason, the sandwiches tend to get very greasy, which takes away the crunchiness of the bread crust (which I love), and makes your hands feel really, really gross as they clutch at the now-transparent paper bag. The best way to avoid this is to wolf it down as quickly as possible. 

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WHAT: Com Do Ga Chien Gion (Fried chicken with tomato rice) - but also just about any other Vietnamese meal that is not pho

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HOW MUCH: $8

WHERE: Tuong Lai, just off John Street on Belvedere Arcade

WORDS: Tuong Lai means 'future' in Vietnamese, something you would never associate with the elderly Vietnamese owners and unintentional minimalism of the interiors of the restaurant. The walls are bare, save for the large menus in Vietnamese, Chinese, and English (there aren't any printed ones), and the tables just large enough for your meal and a drink.

The message is clear: it's all about the food. You will often find the restaurant packed, because its meals are of similar quality to that of the upscale Thanh Binh, but without the stupid prices that only wasteful people would pay.

The Com Do Ca Chien Gion here is an outstanding dish, not just from the menu, but from all of Cabramatta. Whereas the chicken in all other restaurants is deep-fried, here it is baked or barbequed, resulting in an extraordinary taste that I can't begin to pinpoint. Just trust me when I say that it is great.

DANGER!!! Don't be fooled by the seedy-looking interior. I haven't gotten food poisoning from this place yet, so it should be fine for you. I had a hard time picking between the com tam, banh canh suong, cha gio, and com ga chien gio, so I just chose the most unique dish they had. But if you can, definitely come back and try the others. They are just as good.

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WHAT: Pork rolls (Banh Mi Thit)

HOW MUCH: $3

WHERE: The arcade opposite Belvedere Arcade

WORDS: The fresh bread makes this all worth it. Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and completely delightful throughout. My biggest concern with pork rolls in Cabramatta is the large amount of butter they put on the roll, which can often leave you feeling sick, or guilty, or both. This isn't an issue at...well I don't know the name of this place, but it's the only bakery in an arcade.

There is usually a line, but don't stray to other bakeries. Viet Hoa, a bakery that has been in operation for a long time further down John Street, pre-makes their pork rolls, and sells these stale rolls for $4, even though they are smaller.

DANGER!!! Don't pay too much attention to which hands are used to collect customers' money and which hands are used to prepare your bread roll. As it goes, ignorance is bliss.

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WHAT: Salt and pepper fish

HOW MUCH: Market price + $5 - I got Salt and Pepper Snapper for $20

WHERE: The fish market and food-selling place opposite end of the arcade where Viet Hoa is on John Street

WORDS: Although this is a guide to cheap food, if you ever did want to splurge, this is probably the best place for it. Choose your fish at the market, get it cleaned and gutted, and then take it to the shop opposite to get it fried in salt-and-pepper batter for an extra $5. Fresh fish is delicious!

DANGER!!! To get the most out of your money, choose a fresh fish. You can determine how fresh it is by looking at the fish's cold, literally dead-eyed stare: a greater degree of cloudiness indicates that the fish has been out for longer, so avoid these. The fish, once fried, will be given to you in an aluminium tray covered with cling wrap, and will get soggy if you don't eat it as soon as you can.

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So there it is. A starter's guide to cheap eats in Cabramatta.

[shurgs]

GET CRUNK

Sitting around a sticky wooden table in a bar filled with the warm, orange glow of aging incandescent light bulbs, and knocking back a few schooners with mates is easily one of the best things in life. You’re there with no purpose other than drinking and chatting, and that’s exactly what you do. If you ever doubted what your friends meant to you, why you still bother talking to them, this is the perfect moment to rediscover why. You will be reminded over and over again that these are the funniest, most intelligent people you know. This makes it a little hard to track the increasingly large hit to your bank account, but that’s a problem for tomorrow, because, right now, it’s all about bonding and enjoying each other’s company.

I never saw these “merits” of drinking alcohol when I was in high school, mostly because, at the parties I went to, people acted as if they were racing to see who could feel worse more quickly. And that’s how it would always end up - there would be at least one guy who got overexcited and went, “OMG ALCOHOL AT PARTY LET’S GET MAD BLIND!!!!” An hour later, they would be surrounded by a group of less-than-competent friends armed with water, bad advice, and cameras.

These were parties where people would stand around a table lined up with disgusting liqueurs and spirits, shooting these drinks because they couldn’t stand the taste. This wasn’t necessarily because they were new to drinking - I would say that it was because the drinks themselves were gross. Between the overwhelmingly foul stench of butterscotch and alcohol in Baileys, the blended taste of smegma and Chinese medicinal herbs in Jagermeister, and that distinctive taste of burnt rubber asshole in El Toro tequila, it wasn’t hard to see why forcing down combinations of these horrid concoctions would end up in a bad night.

So, only seeing people drinking gross shit, acting like huge dumbasses, and then throwing up, crying, and passing out made me oppose the entire notion of drinking. It didn’t seem like a good time to me. It was like everyone was drinking to forget. I didn’t feel like there were many moments to enjoy.

Sure, you have a little bonding moment when you yell, “Cheers!”, lick the salt off your hand, gag on that disgusting shot of tequila, and suck on a lemon wedge. And maybe you can laugh about how WAYYYYYYYSSSTTTTTEEED someone got. But when that’s all over, you’re left with huge blanks in your memory, and not because you’d had too much to drink, but because nothing happened. You talk to people about insignificant things, dance, hook up - whatever, it’s all meaningless, and you will forget it all anyway. 

Because you’re drinking to forget.

You do have to wonder how it’s come to this. How people measure the enjoyability of their night by the volume of poison they sipped, shot, and chugged through the night, how there are entire stores dedicated to selling thousands of different drinks that all make you forget.

Take my two trips to Glenfield Cellars as an example. The first time I was there, I was looking for beers, and asked an employee what he recommended. He pointed to a plastic bottle that said ‘Fat Ass Scrumpy’, with a bitter cider that, if I were looking to get knocked out quickly and cheaply, would do the job easily, because of its low price and high alcohol content. When I asked for a beer that actually tasted nice, he pointed to Harrison’s Ngahere Gold, and told me it had high alcohol content, and added that it tasted pretty good. I ended up buying a six-pack of beer and those two bottles of cider, which, true to word, got me a personal best of 8 in Bop It!

The second time, I was with Matt, who was looking to buy a carton of Strongbow, but was advised against it by the cashier, who instead recommended 3 Oaks for its higher alcohol content. Matt ended up getting Strongbow anyway.

You can see what the attitudes to drinking were in Glenfield Cellars: it was an activity best gotten over and done with by drinking things with the highest alcohol content, regardless of taste. It’s the same attitude shown at the parties I’ve gone to, and it’s not one that I myself favour, having had memories of throwing up and intense headaches and not much else.

I think it’s sad that there is this culture of binge drinking which fucks it up for those of us who don’t drink to get mad wasted. Not that it matters for most people who aren’t me, but both my mum and boss think that drinking is something to be frowned upon, something that wastes time and health that only the stupid should engage in. I guess that drinking as an activity itself, drinking for the sake of getting drunk, is pretty dumb. But that isn't the only time when people drink. People drink as a part of socialising, as a way of winding down from a stressful week, as a way of sharing something with another person.

I would prefer for people’s perceptions of drinking to more of the latter, one of moderation, rather than the former, a downwards spiral into alcoholism or whatever, because it is difficult to explain why I smell like beer to my mum, who’s picked up my sister from enough parties with people passed out all over from binge drinking to be convinced that all drinking is binge drinking, which simply is not true.

I’m not urging everyone to go out and have a beer with your mates right now, else you miss out on an integral part of friendship and life, but it is one of my favourite things to do, because sitting down and sharing a drink means that you’re not rushing off somewhere that will close soon, or waiting for someone to finish work, or otherwise too busy to talk to each other properly. Drinking with mates is great, not because you’re drinking with mates, but because you’re with mates, and that’s all there is to it. Each soaks up the other’s company, and you really do get a sense that you are with amazing people.

And that’s why I drink - not to forget all the painful shit in my life, but to remind myself that the people in my life, my friends, are literally the best people I know.

Obligatory:

- Stephen

[shurgs]

The man who sits with the pigeons

There's $6000 for first place in the Judith Wright poetry competition, and the deadline for entries is tomorrow. I've realised that, with my newly-found freedom, I could write something and make $5980 profit. So that's what I've been trying to do since yesterday, except I haven't really tried because poetry isn't really my thing, and it's difficult. I don't really get the need for line breaks in poems.

Anyway!

What I've been trying to write about is something that sticks out in my memory, although I don't know why. It's not really going anywhere in verse, so I'm going to try to stick it out in prose, and see if it's even worth trying to express as a poem.

There's a place called Freedom Plaza in Cabramatta, with a huge sculpture of an Asian gate saying something like FREEDOM, HAPPINESS, FOOD (I don't remember the last word, but it's something ridiculous like 'FOOD'). Pigeons flock there, despite the Asian children who chase them while screaming and giggling in delight, because the elderly like to sit on the benches maroon and toss chips, breadcrumbs, or rice to the pigeons. Subsequently, everything is covered in pigeon shit, and there is a strong, musty smell that permeates the plaza.

Opposite the gate sculpture are bronze statues, a pair of dragons. This is where buskers usually sit. Often, the busker is an old Aboriginal guy who strums tuneless chords on a guitar that he holds upside down, or drums on old biscuit tins, or just listens to AM radio on his battery-powered radio. The silver coins on the folded scarf in front of him don't usually add up to more than three dollars.

Once, when I was eight, there was a busker who I'd never seen. He sat on a blue milk crate, streaked white with bird shit and pressure marks. Most prominently, he wore a parka that was once bright yellow, now darkened with blotches of green and black dirt. He didn't have fingers, just hardened black stumps that looked like ginger. In his palms, he clutched a scratched silver harmonica to his lips, wheezing a melody that was overly joyful. Music too happy for a man who should not know of happiness: a man in a filthy parka; a man without fingers; a man sitting in pigeon shit.

I asked my mum for money to give him, but she said that it wouldn't have made a difference. I thought that, if I didn't help him, he'd die. I cried. 

These days, when I walk by Freedom Plaza, I look out for the man with stumps for fingers, but I haven't seen him since. So maybe he is dead.

I am still plagued with guilt to this day, but I'm not sure why. Logically, the two dollars that I could have given would not have gotten him much. Three banana fritters. Two pork dumplings. Three bread rolls. That's about it. That would have been a one-off thing. One day in a life of suffering. Would it have made his life that much better?

The little sense that I can make of my remorse for this man is based off the fact that he died with neither face nor name, no identity beyond his filthy clothes, those black stumps, that harmonica. After maybe forty, fifty years of his life and identity accumulating, he lost it all. No one knew who he was, no one cared. In fact, his death would have been a good thing. Less guilt for passersby, fewer offending odours to take away the business of street vendors. His existence a burden.

Ah, I don't know. I don't if he's really dead or if he 'deserved' it or why his fingers were cut off. All I know is that I hate the smell of pigeons, and that harmonicas make me sad with their wistful wheezing.

I cannot turn this into a poem.

[shurgs]

Hello.

This is a test, a shot in the dark. Fingers stumble across the keys of my laptop, as if the keys were tiny little sexy boobs with letters instead of areolae, and my fingers were arms with little tiny hands at the end of them. Groping, groping.

This is SHURGZ, a collaboration between Matt, Genvin, Diana, Brendan Byron, Jessica Tran, and me. Maybe we will write some interesting cool crazy stuff. Well, no, we definitely will, because we are probably the best people I know, and you know.

Now that I have deflowered this blog, penetrated its hymen with the unimpressive girth of the cock that is the frequency with which I blog, its virgin HTML bleeding all over Tumblr's mattress, I am trying to think of an excuse to leave because I do not want to help clean up.

So, WATCH THIS SPACE.