Opinion
Where does kingfish carpaccio, hot dogs, caviar, and burgers sit on Adam Liaw’s scale of great to yeah nah mate? Not where you might expect.
They say that there is wisdom in crowds. But when it comes to food, crowds can often be extremely dumb. If you’ve ever lined up for ramen in Japan behind 200 tourists, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Regardless, fashion in food is real, so here are a few dishes that loom large in Australian dining, and a few that deserve a little more recognition.
Kingfish carpaccio
Nobody is getting excited about ordering the kingfish carpaccio, and yet these days, there’s no more ubiquitous dish on Australian menus. In fairness, it’s hard to feel any kind of vibe over spending $28 for five thin slices of raw kingfish
plastered on a plate, slathered in flavoured oils and sharp vinegars, under-seasoned and dotted with a laundry list of unnecessary garnishes. As uninspiring as it is, we still order it.
We’re not ordering it because we want to eat it. Kingfish carpaccio exists solely as an enabler. It’s light enough and seafood enough to order so you still feel comfortable ordering a $148 dry-aged steak to share. It’s an unspoken bargain that allows you to have steak and chips and a big glass of shiraz in the third quarter, while still feeling a bit refined because you ate some raw fish in the first half. The kingfish carpaccio comes, it’s begrudgingly distributed, then eaten, then quickly forgotten. The world moves on.
Literally any other way of eating raw fish
Puglian-style crudo with just salt, olive oil and a wedge of lemon. Japanese sashimi. Peruvian ceviche. All of these are classic raw fish dishes that are celebrated the world over, and which have stood the test of time.
They succeed by understanding that proper seasoning and the delicate taste and texture of raw fish is what makes them great, not being demeaned by microherbs, green oil and crunchy sprinkles in a half-hearted attempt at creativity that will fade from the Australian food landscape in just a few years’ time.
Hamburgers
I feel like we’re nearing the end of a two-decade-long project in collective delusion where burger aficionados first tried to lecture us about how “real” hamburgers had to be cooked medium-rare (a bit gross TBH), only to pivot shortly thereafter to lecturing us that the best burgers were, in fact,
smashburgers, cooked the exact opposite way.
People lined for hours for In & Out pop-ups, and US and local chains alike eyed impressionable Australian consumers hungrily on the assumption that America’s greatest soft power export of deifying truly average foods meant that we would gobble up any mass-produced burger foisted upon us.
Unfortunately, that assumption was correct, and the average price of a hamburger in this country rose faster than that of a three-bedroom house within 10 kilometres of the CBD, despite the fact that you can make a great burger yourself at home from the cheapest possible mince in the supermarket.
The pretence of every fancy burger joint is simply that it will deliver a better-than-McDonald’s burger for just three to five times the price, but the reality is that they’ve really only consistently succeeded in delivering worse-than-McDonald’s fries. I’m just going to say it – hamburgers are all kinda the same and they’re all kinda mid.
Hot dogs
Hot dogs, on the other hand, are always amazing. If they’re $2 from IKEA they’re amazing. And if they’re fancy gourmet ones for $15 they’re even amazing-er, and unlike hamburgers, there’s a noticeable quality difference between those price points.
Sausages, generally, are one of the most underrated foods out there, and what, I ask, is a hot dog if not a sausage in bread? Sausages are popular, cheap and taste delicious, but for various reasons the food intelligentsia tend to turn their snouts up at any sausage that doesn’t have a fancy French name.
But answer me this: have you ever been let down by a hot dog in any form – from the fanciest gourmet variety to a weekend Bunnings snag in a bag? I know I haven’t.
Caviar
Much has been written about $40 caviar bumps in Australian restaurants and their role as a potential sign of the coming apocalypse. I don’t intend to rehash that here, save to say that in some ways, I respect that restaurants have been able to monetise the performative content industry in such a direct way.
Instead, let me tell you a story about caviar generally. The Western fetishisation of caviar came into its own in the 1920s. The wealthy elite of Russia had fled the Bolshevik Revolution and caviar houses sprung up across Europe. Instead of wondering why the Romanov dynasty collapsed and why all these fish eggs had suddenly made their way out of Russia alongside a lot of very wealthy and nervous Russians, everyone completely missed the point and built an image of status and refinement around the very food that had become emblematic of out-of-touch idiocy in its native land.
European and American dilettantes scoffed caviar in front of their friends, and though mobile phones had not yet been invented, one imagines that they took some kind of mental selfie at the time.
Anyhoo (and I am sure quite unrelatedly), shortly thereafter came a global economic and cultural crash we now call The Great Depression. Loath as I am to draw parallels from the past to today, we now live in a period when income
inequality is twice as bad as in the Roaring Twenties: some billionaires are getting their kicks cutting funding for children with AIDS while others are sending their girlfriends into space with Katy Perry, and still nobody under 35 in Australia can afford a house.
If you really love the taste of caviar, then go for your life. But if you’re being truly honest with yourself, do you really?
Bread and butter
There are few pleasures as universally enjoyed as freshly baked bread, torn by hand and slathered with good quality salty butter. It’s something Australian restaurants have done very well since the “olive oil and dukkah” era. The best part? It’s usually only about $7.
If you feel bad about filling up on bread before your meal, I can guarantee you the pleasure that you are getting from a few mouthfuls of great bread and butter is absolutely worth it. Eating bread and butter doesn’t make for the best social content so it’s probably not worth getting your friends to film you doing it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy it. What are you saving that stomach space for anyway? A kingfish carpaccio?
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Adam Liaw is a cookbook author and food writer, co-host of Good Food Kitchen and former MasterChef winner.
