HILTON TIGHTWADS EMPTY THEIR GRANGE

THE AUTHOR IN GOOD CULINARY COMPANY, WITH CHEF SO HON HUANG, LEFT, AND CHEONG LIEW, RIGHT, CLEBRATING SO'S RETIREMENT AT T-CHOW LAST YEAR. ALL EYES ARE ON CHEONG NOW: WHAT''LL HE DO NEXT?

MILTON WORDLEY PHOTO

A Triumphant Exit The Great Cheong Moves On Hilton Lets Its Genius Go
by PHILIP WHITE - A version of this story first appeared in The Indepndent Weekly


While you were away, the Hilton military determinedly set about the closure of its restaurant strangely called The Grange. They had a farewell dinner for Cheong Liew, the singularly great chef they singularly failed to appreciate, respect, or support, with, well, funding. They wouldn’t even buy him a wall for his restaurant.

Many of the old hard-core trencherboard faces were at the trough that night, and a few pretenders. People who live off, not on, magazine food: stuff designed to be photographed, celebrated and discussed, but rarely eaten. The chow that feeds our booming gastroporn industry. Some of them even seem to think Cheong’s food fits that same bitter bill. Expecting an embarrassing and emotional night, I went in tidy.

I know I’ve said this before, but it deserves drumming in. Since he arrived here, a reffo, in 1969, Cheong has had a bigger effect on the lives of Australians than any politician. He changed the way we eat, with his invention-cum-liberation of our tucker. East-west fusion they called it, twenty-five years ago. Cheong, the ultimate Australian, now calls it “Australian food”. Perfect. You rarely hear the fusion word uttered now, wherever on Earth this cuisine appears and it appears all over the Earth. Most people simply think it’s food, shovel it in, and wash it down.

THE STUFF WE USED TO EAT



















We’re very lucky the Australian name has not followed the fusion, for while the awkward sprogs of this cuisine are now served all over the world, most of it is half-hearted crap, disrespectfully ignorant of its pedigree of tireless, rigorous ingenuity.

Given the weight of the occasion, and hugely keen to see what they would pour at this feast, I was impressed to see the old faithful, utterly professional floor staff proudly serving Dom. For a naive instant, I thought the budget must surely eventually extend to the even greater Krug, but that was dumb.























We sat, and yes, out came wave after wave of utterly remarkable food. Brilliant, delicious inventions made triumphantly to be adored, savoured, and digested. Healthy food, for Bacchus’ sake! The gastronomic encapsulation of thirty years of relentless invention. But as the evening progressed, the quality of the wine took a determined dive. If they had made a serious attempt to raid what’s left of the cellar, pity help the future Hilton diner. I am not well known for leaving a table littered with half-full glasses, but there they were.

One of the suits made a speech about the complete set of Grange there in the big glass case being the only one on public view: a cool quarter of a million bucks worth, lying on their backs like dead marines. We were supposed to ooh and aahhh. Cheong followed this with a humble, statesmanly delivery in which he revealed a secret otherwise known only to the two of us. He never let on that the Hilton actually leases that set of Grange from Fosters, who dutifully add the new release each year, or that the restaurant pretty well had to close, as the cabinet’s full, and times being as they are, well, the Hilton budget wouldn’t stretch to a new one, and, Jeez, you know, Fosters certainly hasn’t any spare furniture cash lying around. But Cheong didn’t spill them beans.

Instead, he concluded: “Don’t worry about the set of Grange. Philip and I drank that years ago.”

The thing about a complete set of Grange is that nobody ever drinks one. So nobody will ever know whether that set was long ago kidney-filtered by Cheong and Whitey, who simply drank it, refilled it with Jacob’s Creek, recorked it, fudged the capsules from bits and pieces scavenged at Grange recorking clinics over the years, and locked the bottles back in the cabinet. Like gastroporn food, and The Grange, this Caucasian artefact has value only as long as it is never used for its original purpose.

Anyway, we ate our exquisite meal, and suddenly, there we were, the Liews and Whitey, out the front of the Hilton. A calm and dignified exit. Queuing for cabs like everyone else, in a city devoid of a winemaker who can match Cheong’s culinary revolution. A city which now has not one serious cutting edge restaurant. Of course you can go silver service and pay ridiculous amounts for the wine to keep the linen budget covered, but there’s not much food on that top-end napery that will beat the lovely, inexpensive stuff you can find in Wah Hing or Indian Village.

The Grange name can now go back safely to the 1844 farm at MacGill, where Dr. Penfold’s fierce winemaking wife, Mary, picked her first crop of grenache, and set this whole mighty ferment fizzing. And there in Victoria Square young Simon Bryant’s brasserie absorbs that sacred gastronomic battleground while he replaces Maggie Beer with a Quixotic campaign to stop the Chinese eating dogs. Woof woof.



The Grange Restaurant & Cheong Liew’s Last Long Table

Friday 18th December 2009

The Adelaide Hilton International Hotel
Victoria Square
Adelaide
South Australia



MENU


Prawn Plum
2000 Dom Perignon

Jellied Abalone Chicken and the Sea Dances
Drunken prawns, oysters
Olive fried octopus
Calamari turban with squid ink pasta
Tuna with soy-cured egg yolk pasta
Fried soft shell crab with salted duck egg yolk
Turnip in pastries
2008 Mountadam High Eden Riesling
2007 Cape Mentelle Wallcliffe Sauvignon blanc Semillon

Shark fin pouch in game consommé
Salt-baked ocean trout, grilled vegetables with fragrant rice
2005 Chandon Vintage Rosé

Roasted Muscovy duck with sour cherries
Spice-grilled Wagyu beef
2007 Mitolo G.A.M. Shiraz

Russian praline torte
Portuguese custard tart, chocolate sauce, durian cream
Black rice and palm sugar pudding
Flavoured fruit ice, sorbet fruits, agar agar, adzuki beans
Veuve Cliquot Demi Sec NV

Vale


CHEONG JUDGING AT KRIS LLOYD'S CHEESE FEST AT THE PENFOLD'S MAGILL ESTATE RESTAURANT LATE LAST YEAR. WILL THE GRANGE NAME NOW RETURN TO THE PLACE IT BELONGS? BRENT LIEDERITZ PHOTOGRAPH

The wowsers are not ready

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in 2006

Saturday’s reading started with Friday’s Financial Review colour mag. The first reference to the drug, alcohol, came quickly with the head “Drinks missionary bar none”, a piece about London’s new bar czar, Jonathon Downey. He’s coming to Sydney to open more bars. “What the hell are we going to do when we can’t smoke, dance, drink and fight in bars anymore?” he asked.

Then came a woman in suspenders with a bottle of Dom Perignon pink, giving Karl Lagerfeld a plug. The old restaurateur, Beppi Polese, was next: full page, in his cellar, white wine in hand. Over the page he’s sniffing a red. Another full page praised vintage port.

The Life and Leisure section devoted half a page to Seppeltsfield, our most hallowed port house. Then a double page to “the historic riesling region”, Clare.

There were pieces about pubs losing money via the smoke bans, and the MD of Adelaide Bank being awarded an expensive burgundy for achieving a twenty five per cent increase in profit.

Move to the Weekend Oz. “Clare may offend again” turned out to be about a serial pedophile, with no mention of historic riesling. Similarly, the bit about Bob Francis made no mention of alcohol, but Lion Nathan confirmed a $25 million profit in Business. The Tour de France winner made the front page of Sport saying his testosterone was high because he’d had a pint of beer.

Travel included a half page on the Italian winemakers of the King Valley, another praising the Pinots noir of Curly Flat, and an encouraging piece about the glories you can drink with your food at Brasserie Moustache, which everyone should attend. It’s near Henschke’s. Magazine ran another piece about Seppeltsfield.

Then there was yours truly recommending the wines of Tim Smith in The Independent Weekly, and I imagine The Advertiser must have had alcohol in it somewhere.

Considering all this, it’s amusing to find the Fin Review’s Health page listing Australia’s “top six drugs” as being aspirin, insulin, diuretics, antibiotics, Paracetamol, and the opiates.

Who are they kidding? Most of the dudes I know on that stuff take it to alleviate the effects of alcohol.

I dined recently with Dr. David Caldicott, the emergency and trauma research fellow at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and Sandra Kanck, the Democrat. While we drank an exquisite red from Ben Jeanneret – Clare offending again – we talked about the hypocrisy of this society when it comes to drug use and abuse.

Now that the fizz of sanctimonious outrage is settling, it’s worth re-examining the pasting all media gave Kanck for her attempt at injecting some logic into the drug debate. Having read her contentious Legislative Council speech of May 10, complete with the contrary hissings of Anne Bressington – thanks for that, Nick – one can only marvel that none of these detractors can see that there are votes in more sensible, realistic, holistic drug policy. Or maybe they can. Maybe that’s why they’re all so hissy.

Maybe Bressington suspects that the party-drug users who voted for Xenophon may have cast their ballot in another direction if they’d known about her.

The infuriating spaghetti of theories and ideas that rise from any contemplation of drug use share one point of eureka clarity, and this is where they most revealingly intersect: the point where drug policy is actually formed. Who forms it? Drug companies? The liquor barons? The religious right? The Laura Norder brigade? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And the politicians and press who can control the ebb and flow of public fear and derision by ridiculing the likes of the well-intentioned Kanck. They’re scared and angry. They think the debate is evil in itself.

The wowsers certainly aren’t ready for Caldicott. As a scientist and an intellectual, he’s razor sharp and determined. As a hot-blooded Irish catholic who dated Dr Ian Paisley’s daughter, he understands the holy roller, the Bible-poker, the interferist and the self-interested powermonger as well as he knows the reality of life and death at the front line in his wards. Where does his budget go? Repairing the victims of alcohol, of course.

“Until I came to Australia I’d never met a dim Australian”, he said. “You have a genetic ingenuity which you betray by adopting an American drug policy which is used as a political agenda. It’s morally bankrupt. It should be the doctors and scientists making this agenda, not politicians, unelected priests, or press.”

I’ll drink to that.