Fix St James gets its own post! I was originally told about this restaurant years ago, and wanted to go because it had an awesome wine list, but never actually made it there. Over the next few years the restaurant continued to pop up on my radar, mainly on social media and I started thinking that it was a pretty awesome place – especially as it always serves some sort of tartare.
So, finally, I decided to go, and I wasn’t disappointed!
Sepia, the best restaurant in Australia in 2015. And it’s consistently awarded 3 hats. My brother has been before, but I wasn’t there to tag along, so I was trying to find any excuse to visit – and an incredibly convenient and worthy reason presented itself, so along I went with a friend.
I had spotted on their website that they had a bar area for walk ins, and I assumed that this would just be for their bar menu, but once we got there, we were seated facing the bar and had the option of choosing their full menu, so 9 course degustation it was!
But first, my “not anmitsu.” It’s a dessert that I’ve been thinking about making for a while now, but I could never bother obtaining every ingredient for every element. I knew I wanted to make my own interpretation of it, in fact, I wanted to hipsterise it. But keeping the mochi, red bean and green tea elements there was so difficult. Plus I wanted shiso leaves, but I didn’t want them to go to waste if I had no other plans for them.
What ended up happening was this:
Ah, the Burj Khalifa. It stands out so much in Dubai due to its sheer height, especially in contrast with the neighbouring buildings. I admit I underestimated the number of visitors somewhat, as I was surprised when the 7PM tickets were sold out by the time my session had started at 5PM, but I’m very glad that I bought the tickets in the morning to secure a trip to the top.
This will probably turn into a very long post full of very random rambling things. I would put Dubai in its own post, but considering I spent less than 22 hours there, it may as well all be crammed into one!
In the last couple of weeks, I realised that I had visited a great many restaurants and cafes, so I decided to try and remember all of them, which lead to me on a mad last week scramble to match the number of places eaten with the number of days stayed – 84 – and managed to complete this quite easily. What an amazing achievement considering I’ve probably visited a low 3 digit count of places in Sydney, and high two digit in two years in Adelaide!
A last minute cafe that I had to visit was Shift Espresso Bar, who had some cool “specialty” coffees with cool names, such as Rebellion (double espresso with condensed milk and whipped cream), Hashtag (double espresso, vanilla gelato, oreo), etc. I went for the Nicaragua single origin and a Rebellion, and they were both quite nice. I’m not a fan of sweet/novelty coffees anymore, but the rebellion didn’t taste too bad at all; I got it more out of curiosity for their presentation.
It’s almost time to return home, and I feel that I have eaten through Cape Town with a valiant effort. I finally found some mindblowing places – the first being Hemelhuijs. It’s a weird name that I can barely pronounce, but I had noticed a crowd around the place during my explorations, so I decided to pop in for a visit. The decor is visibly posh, and even has a cute little deer head with leaves sprouting from its head as a piece of wall decoration. The other thing I noticed straight away was the black salt in petri dishes at every table.
I don’t feel that I did too much over the last couple of weeks – it was a lot of rewatching Person of Interest and thinking up more characters for my amazing world. I also found out that there’s a thing out there called technological singularity, and it’s scarily close to what I was doing for my cyberpunk story, at which point I discovered that I really should read Neuromancer by William Gibson because it sounds amazing!
In food news, I had my first shakshuka at Origin Artisan Roasters – it wasn’t as salty as I had imagined it, but it had a lot of flavour so I really liked it and felt it was a healthy dish:
So having visited Oranjezicht City Farm Markets, it was time to do other hipster things, like chase food trucks and find new cool places. Managed to visit Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants which is an amazing place as there’s a room full of carcasses. They specialise in meats, however on the day I went, a food truck called El Burro was also going to be there at night – so why not! It was especially enticing because they had ceviche on the menu as well.
My crazy dreams are back for the time being, but not quite the same as they used to be. I love my save the world with superpowers dreams, but haven’t had any in a long time.
At least this time my superpowers were back. Well, it wasn’t actually me. I was more of a spectator that shared the same space and consciousness as the person in my dream. It was a character who wanted to run away from his city, because people were trying to kill him. He had to sneak out of his apartment, avoid a lady who was walking toward the apartment, avoid alerting or running into the police, and avoid a massive bomb to escape.
So he ran. The first time, the lady spotted him and then called the police. He managed to run down one street before pretty much ending up exactly where some policemen were stationed, so that was the end of that. The dream “whited out” and the scenario reset.
Next attempt, he decided he would shapeshift into a cat to be silent and to better evade the lady at the apartment. This worked out much better – though from his perspective there was still what felt like an audible thump as he jumped down a set of stairs and proceeded to dash in the opposite direction from the previous scene, and once he felt relatively safe, he transformed back into a human. He was on the left side of a river that ran through the city, when he passed a pole that lit up with red when he passed it – which happened to be the trigger for a bomb going off in the distance – but close enough that he would be caught in the blast. Once again, the scenario reset.
Third time, he again escaped as a cat and this time ran on the right side of the river, far away enough so that he wouldn’t trigger the sensor. But… a bigger bomb went off. A white wash again, and now I returned to my real self, in front of a witch-like lady, who held a tiny half robotic man in her hand. She explained that he never did make it, and that it was all a dream – at which point I was thinking “wow this is such a bad ending to a story”
And that was pretty much it. How random! For once the super powers in my dream were being used to unsuccessfully escape. I hope I do get another save the world dream in the future!
