Working by yourself demands serious dedication. When you look around your office and notice everyone else working away, tapping up emails and ticking off boxes, highlighting things done from a list, think of the weary freelancer. I look up from my desk and I see the spot on the wall than needs a bit of Jiff. I look up from my computer and I may as well put on a quick wash, make a coffee, get a snack, flick through that gorgeous new cookbook, do a blog post.

In a bid to be normal, once every now and then I do a work lunch, I pop into the city and I wear shoes (not my usual office attire… flip-flops), I meet a friend or my gentleman, and we eat commuter workish things. We go somewhere different every time and I soak it up like some crazed lonely-girl – happily blissed out by the one-hour limit. I eat out all the time for dinner, there’s barely an evening not spent exploring some new place with some new person or old friend. But lunch, work lunch, is different. It’s snacky and light, and there’s no alcohol slowing us down.

Case in point, Din Tai Fung in Sydney Westfield. I went to the one in Hong Kong this year and was bowled over by those miraculous little xiao long bao. Thin noodle encases a fragrant broth, a firm pillow of pork floating within. The trick is to hold the dumpling in your spoon, pierce it with a chopstick, then drink it up in one mouthful. A mild vinegar soy sauce and some chilli-spiked oil are worthwhile additions. So we had just a steamer each of these, chatting about work stuff and the daily grind, the hours oh the hours… And then we bid our good days and head back to the dreary office at home.

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A chicken sandwich arrives. It’s a velvety creme of chicken mousse, spiked with herbs and the essence of something glorious roasting. It’s sandwiched between wafers of crispy chicken skin and has the punch and swoon of an entire roast chicken straight out of the oven. It’s the beginning of a kitchen menu at Adam Humphrey’s Arras in Sydney. With partner Lovaine Humphrey, Yorkshire-bred Humphrey moved Arras from Walsh Bay to Clarence Street a year ago, and the “white box” is now a fresh space filled with fun food. The chicken sandwich canapé is paired with a round glass of tiny cauliflower florets and cous cous, roasted and crumbly. Arras’ kitchen menu changes every day and is determined by the chef, a “five-course” menu with at least eight courses including the canapes and amuse bouche. One after the other a procession of intricate, delicate dishes arrive, each with their own personality, complexity of flavours and usually sense of humour. A fork on a plate is twisted with a fine tangle of linguini, delicate and thin. The fork spears a bacon jelly in this gorgeous twist on the carbonara. A pillow of parmesan foam sits on top, a massive fried parsley leaf the final flourish.

The kitchen menu continues with a dish of poached grouper, “squid noodle”, crumbed and fried sweetbread and sweet and sour vegetables, then the old-fashioned “beef olives” arrives. {READ MORE}

An overhaul of a large corner space on George Street, The Rocks’ end, has resulted in a New York style bar and brasserie that makes oysters and champagne its business. Chef Sean Connolly, formerly of Sydney’s Astral Restaurant and also of The Grill by Sean Connolly in Auckland, has teamed up with hospitality guru Fraser Short to turn the former Brooklyn Hotel into something fabulous. The Morrison: It’s as though New York has come to Sydney, but with Sydney Rock Oysters trumping anything the Big Apple could offer.

The sprawling The Morrison is a spacious 250-seat restaurant. Exposed brick walls, concrete pillars, wood benchtops and bar, glossy white square tiles, bar-brick walls and vintage light bulbs are meticulous design elements of the space. Multicoloured mosaic tables and indoor plants add to the urban interior. Sidling up to the main bar, the Conservatory is a sculptural room, glass ceilings and walls creating an open-air environment.but the oyster bar is the centre of attention in the main room.

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If vintage is in, and who can deny it is, then vintage cocktails made from vintage-style fortified wine is what all the cool kids are drinking. The gorgeous bar crew at dynamite bar Eau de Vie in Darlinghurst met me and a bevy of drink writers and bar-tending guns at their beautiful long wooden bar yesterday to reveal how “apera” makes a great drink.

An apera, I learned, is Australia’s newly invented, and now official, word for an aperitif-style fortified wine. Sherry may well have been what grandmother used to drink, but apera is our reinvention of it and its stuffy cousins. Apera ranges from a dry to very sweet style, and is usually produced using a “solera” system, which involves drawing and storing proportions of aged, or vintage base wines from a pyramid of barrels. This is then used as a source of flavours and ingredients to create apera. After fermentation, apera is fortified with grape spirit, brandy or both. But, for our purposes, it’s just a really delicious way to make some drinks.

An “apera sour” {pic: top right and bottom left} is a spin on the old-fashioned sour, all bourbon whisky, lemon juice, egg white, sugar syrup, but with a rich sweet apera float to top it. I adored this drink, all sour and sharp and sweet. The neat and simple “crazy love” {pic: bottom right} is an elegant combination of dry apera, orange and vodka. A blow torch over the glass and a squeeze of the orange zest had the orange oils fire up in gorgeous bursts, giving a lovely burnt orange taste to the drink. While this was my favourite, the vote of most-delicious for the experts in the room went to the “apera cobbler”. One wine writer explained the notes of nut and the complexity of flavour made this a winner – we used “919 pale dry apera” for this one, Australia’s answer to Sherry – and here is the RECIPE for you.

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We have an affection for rusty and rickety things, I think, because they conjure up another time, a slower time, when we took time to do things properly and made space for one another in our lives. We keep grandmother’s plates because they were precious to her, we buy keepsakes in old stores because it was somebody’s something special once. In a throw-away world, the rustic and the rickety place us in a slow moving place, where we can sigh and breathe and be together. There’s a new space under the city, in the hidden back street alleys, where tables nestle amongst precious old things, where mellow blues and jazz plays and waiters wear bracers and black vests. It’s a setting that gives us a moment to be together, greet each other at the table, shake hands and offer squeezy hugs, and simultaneously share food. Food nurtures this togetherness. Good food revives our senses and invites us to be present in the moment and to delight in what we have in front of us. At Mr Wong, this new dumpling place lead by chef Dan Hong and the Merivale Group, steaming bamboo baskets of dumplings bring with them a palpable sense of joy in a setting of beautiful, rusty and rickety things.

Sydney’s once proud dim sum culture can be faulted at times; bamboo baskets arriving too hurriedly and too cold, Mr Wong revives us with inventive, fun and pitch-perfect dumplings. Green tea arrives in traditional pot-bellied white ceramic, Chinese mushroom dumplings ($9) arrive in a bamboo steamer, and the lid stays on so they’re hot until they’re gone. Lobster Mei Si rolls ($11) are crispy pillows of spun gold, nutty fried noodles delicately wrapped around the tender meat. Asparagus and scallop dumpling with XO Sauce ($9) are transparent dumplings, soft and freshly turned. Steamed BBQ pork buns ($9.80) are everything we want them to be, not too large and the pillowy white buns opening to a rich purple barbecue centre. The pan-fried pork buns ($9.80) are however the most immaculately produced little things, fresh and soft, filled with a gorgeous broth that bursts into the bowl when pierced with a chopstick. Their pan-fried sticky bottoms are a masterstroke, elevating the humble dumpling to something worthy of a cult following. This is not cheap dining, but maybe dim sum doesn’t always have to involved overeating anyway. A few dishes here go a long way. {READ MORE}

Happy Friday everyone. I hope there will be great adventures and cruising and relaxes with tea and icey bubbly drinks. This weekend I’m off to Kangaroo Valley, where we’ll probably do a bon fire, herd some cows, read books in the sun on the massive lawn. Dare I take my swimmers? I’m taking a pork belly to test a recipe for my Sunday Life column The Perfect…, and will let you know how that goes. I’m thinking crispy, spicy and wholly aromatic. It’s a wintery kind of dish and a brilliant precursor to the supernova of special days on Sunday, mother’s day. But you’ll get the perfected recipe in a few weeks when it’s published. Meanwhile, check out the Mother’s Day page this Sunday. She’ll love it (a surprise), and it’s simple enough to gather the kids and get them to cook it.

This weekend I’ll be taking loads of pictures in the Valley, and will share them all here. I know we’ll be doing a pub lunch tonight, hopefully with roaring fire to beat the Southern chill.

This Sunday as well I’m on 702 ABC Sydney with Simon Marnie. I’ve grabbed not the mother but the grandmother Margaret Fulton, and we’ll be chatting about all things food and good. So flick on your radio at 11ish to hear that, and call up for a chat! Meanwhile, it’s nearly 5 o’clock.

Every now and then, something comes along and just changes everything. It’s a shift so great and so momentous, we just don’t want to go back to how it was. And that’s what’s happened in Sydney, with the opening of The Grounds of Alexandria. This is where I ended up (upon the recommendation of the wonderful Jill Dupleix, and then everyone else) this morning, with the rest of cool hunters and leisurely espresso cravers. I’ll post a proper post this week but I just wanted to do a sneak preview of sorts. The place is darned revolutionary. It’s a warehouse space turned into my future dream home of rustic, polished, spacious, light-drenched, and just awesome.

Drinks in jars may be more overdone than zeit geist, but here it works, and the rippled iced coffees done in a two-hand-to-hold jar is syrupy and not too sweet. There are vanilla and chocolate milkshakes and granola with yoghurt and berries so fragrant you’d think they were fake. And a little carrot cake topped with cream cheese icing had me pause for teariness. It is the best carrot cake I’ve ever had. And I like carrot cake. But actually, speaking of carrots, Peter Rabbit is outside.

There’s a whole garden out there. A whole sprawling brick-paved, pergola-topped garden with raised garden beds and raddichio growing amongst the strawberries (see fragrant strawberries earlier). There are tiny baby eggplant for heaven’s sake. Sitting perched on a rafter-sided garden with my carrot cake in one hand, strong soy flat white in another, and balancing some almond and plum compote-topped porridge there somewhere too, I was as happy as a duck in water. Yes, and there are ducks, and rabbits.

These kids wander around with towel-wrapped ducklings that squeak with concern, but it’s a cute sight. I’d like to see a more watchful eye over the critters, (nobody should be allowed to hang a rabbit in the air for that long), but I have no doubt the uncomfortable animal handling will be ironed out. Or I hope it will. The visiting children are overwrought with excitement, it’s a veritable petting zoo. But with good coffee.

Inside the place is immaculately designed, high ceilings, massive windows, the white railway tiles, copper coffee pots and turquoise cup and saucers just gorgeous. There’s a cafe, coffee roasting and testing facility and bakery, all housed in this massive warehouse. The coffee roasting facilities also incorporate a boutique coffee school, which includes a coffee workshop area to educate caffeine fascinators. But this is a game changer because of the garden, where The Grounds grow their own heirloom vegetables. The vegetable garden patch meets cafe makes us conscious that what grows around comes around. It’s an idea that Sydney will hopefully see a lot more of in the future.

At the helm of The Grounds is creative entrepreneur Ramzey Choker, as well as coffee expert Jack Hanna and interior design and events agency The Artistry.

Photography by Kate Gibbs.

BUILDING 7A, NO.2 HUNTLEY ST ALEXANDRIA NSW 2015.

Blame the salt air. Blame the beachy Scandinavian whites and creams and blonde wood furnishings, and the long window baring all of sun-tanned and swimsuit-wearing Balmoral Beach. In such a setting, you can hardly be blamed for going past the impressive chargrill and meat menu and choosing instead things taken from the sea.

It’s good fortune, then, that chef Richard Falkiner has a light, gentle hand with seafood. Nude, seared scallops sit on large white plate, with a pretty wreath of tiny cauliflower florets, raisins and walnuts ($25).

In what is perhaps becoming Sydney’s signature dish, lead by Tetsuya, a soft pillow of lightly smoked confit of ocean trout takes a turn for the fresh with a cucumber salad, ocean trout roe and baby radish leaves ($24).

The Palmer Island mulloway, pleasingly crispy skinned and soft with butter, comes on a smear of carrot puree and doll-size garden of “sea asparagus” or samphire, salty, crisp and tasting not unlike apple skin, and steamed baby spring vegetables, soft with a central satisfying crunch ($32).

The excellent concept of a “young adults” menu forced a little squeal of delight at our table, even though neither of us met the description, alas. A crumbed John Dory fillet comes with a tumble of crispy fries and a salad ($15), and a glorious sort of 1950s heyday dessert, ice-cream with a selection of ever changing toppings ($10), conjures the beachside vibe. {READ MORE}