El Loco - Surry Hills, New South Wales

El Loco

64 Foveaux Street, Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia (02) 9211 4945
Open Mon & Tue 12pm - late, Wed 12pm - 1am, Thu - Sat 12pm - 3am, Sun 12pm - 10pm

I sometimes daydream about food. A more truthful statement would be that I sometimes daydream about things other than food. A frequent daydream is the one about stopping at a roadside shack in the middle of nowhere. The sun and dry heat of the desert baking my skin, sealing my lips from thirst. I step into the shack and as my eyes adjust to the unlit room beer taps and a simple Mexican menu appear out of the darkness. The beer is cold and the food is fresh and delicious. This, I realise, is true Mexican food. No mince bathed in fluorescent grease. No mound of processed cheese. I have finally found a home. Three hours later I am screaming obscenities as three men hold me down. The police are on their way and the stranger who unknowingly ordered the last dark meat turkey burrito before I could is having splinters of chair leg tweezered from his back.

El Loco in Sydney is a garage that has been re-purposed to hold a casual dining room. The main restaurant feeds through to a larger pub, although we did not find any need to leave the street art covered converted garage due to the pub section of this establishment being completely devoid of amazingly delicious Mexican food.

This phrase – amazingly delicious Mexican food – is how I choose to accurately describe the offerings from El Loco. For me it is what I always imagined Mexican food could be like. It should be fresh, simple, tasty. It should be cheap and plentiful. It should accompany beer and make the sun shine. It should be pretty much nothing like a lake of dark oil with liquid cheese sprayed on top, which is my memory of my prior drunken Mexican food outings.

El Loco has a range of soft shell tacos including beef, chicken, pork, prawn and a secret taco that changes daily (braised lamb shank when we were there). Each taco is combined with a unique array of toppings. The beauty in their tacos is that they seem small but what they actually are is the perfect size. The amount of topping is the perfect amount. When I make tacos or burritos at home I cannot not put too much of everything on. My burrito ends up looking like someone has blocked a tunnel with shredded cheese, meat and lettuce. My tacos bulge like a woman’s magazine stuffed with advertising leaflets. The chefs of El Loco have managed to find restraint in their food and with restraint comes the ability to showcase a range of flavours and textures that I had not previously encountered in Mexican cuisine.

As well as tacos El Loco boasts a few other items – a grilled fish burger, a ‘salad’ of toasted tortilla chips and other items I didn’t get to try. On the drinks side there are beers as well as a range of appropriate cocktails, all of which are satisfactory – they exist as an accompaniment to the food. The food is the key here. It’s not ‘fancy’ or ‘special’ but at the same time it really is. The way getting Som Tam from a Bangkok street food vendor is special. I really enjoyed the food here.

Three hours later and I wait for this version of the daydream to end. It’s slightly different this time. The chair legs are metal for one thing. The food though, was as good as always.

Pink Cuco - El Locos house slushy of El Jimador tequila, pink grapefruit and lime juices, homeade coriander and raw ginger syrup.

(from bottom left, anti-clockwise): Carne Asada Taco (?), the daily Secret Taco, Fish Torta Sandwich, El Loco Salad.

'El Loco Salad' - A healthy salad consisting of chilli spiced tofu, shaved fennel and radish, cabbage, coriander, spring onions, avocado, queso fresca (cheese), tortilla chips and our El Loco dressing.

Fish “Torta” Sandwich - Grilled fish served on a soft bun with cabbage, coriander, spring onion, mayonnaise and pico de gallo salsa

Pollo Taco - chicken, sweet corn salsa.

- words by pisso | images by uberjoi.

Loam - Drysdale, Victoria

Loam Restaurant

650 Andersons Road, Drysdale, Victoria, Australia (03) 5251 1101

Open for lunch Thursday to Sunday, and dinner Friday and Saturday

It was a beautiful day as we set off on the hour and a half drive to Loam, perfect for getting us into the holiday spirit. The drive was easy (though we did miss the entry by a few metres) and we arrived right on time for our lunch booking.


We were greeted warmly as we walked through the doors, which instantly put us at ease, and the understated decor and mesmerising view only made me more excited about our upcoming meal.


Featuring a photograph of some beautiful mushrooms, the non-traditional menu consisted of a list of ingredients that were in season, from which the chefs could create at their discretion. All we had to do was decide which ingredients we wanted to omit (none!) and how many courses we would like - four, seven or nine (with or without matching wines).



It was lunchtime, and we had started the day with some bread and cheese, so we settled on seven courses without wine - five savory, one cheese and one dessert. I pounced at the Choya Plum wine, lemon, ice while Pisso opted for his favorite White Rabbit Dark Ale.

December is: Almond, Anchovy, Apple, Asparagus, Avocado, Banana, Beans (Broad), Beef (Hopkin's River), Blueberries, Blue Mussel (Seabounty), Boysenberry, Borage, Cabbage (Savoy), Carrot, Cavolo Nero, Cantaloupe, Cauliflower, Celeriac, Cherry, Chickweed, Chook (Glenloth), Coconut, Crayfish (Geraldton), Cucumber, Duck (Great Ocean Ducks), Eel (Skipton), Fennel, Grapefruit, Goat's Milk (Drysdale Cheese), Hen Eggs (Kossies), Honey (Wallington), Lamb (Western District), Mandarin, Nasturtum, Oyster (Pipe Clay Lagoon), Parsley, Peas (Garden), Pear (William),  Pig (Western Plains), Pineapple, Plum, Point Henry Saltbrush, Potato (Ron Polley), Pumpkin, Quinoa, Rabbit (Macleay Valley), Radish, Rhubarb, Rock Samphire, Rose, Salmon (Huon), Samphire (Bellarine), Sea lettuce, Sea urchin (Lakes Entrance), Shitake (Otway), Silverbeet, Snapper (Port Philip), Squab (Glenloth), Squid (Port Philip), Sunrose, Tarragon, Tomato (Black Russian, green), Veal (Gippsland), Walnuts (Wellwood), Wagyu Beef (Blackmore), Watercress

Gourmet butter to go with our pick of bread.

A trio of 'snacks' arrived at the table...

Sea Bounty mussels in their own juices.

The mussels were spectacular and has inspired us to try cooking them in the same way at home. Then it was time for our main meal, which I'll present with the motto 'less words, more visuals' in mind. Enjoy the food porn!

Yolk, cauliflower, asparagus, sherry vinegar, oatmeal.

Snapper, black russian tomato, basil seeds, samphire.

One of the prettiest dishes I ever did see - Sea urchin, silverbeet, chicken skin vinegar, flowers.

Our favorite dish of the day - Wagyu rump, oyster, bruny island raw milk c2, parsley.

Pork jowl, watercress, lettuce hearts, sea blite.

The texture of this dish was amazing - Mauri taleggio, fermented cabbage, raw honey, fennel.

Mandarin, almond, coconut, young pine.

Surprise petit fours.

Phew! Overall, a delightful meal which I'd happily recommend. What a way to finish off the year!

Recipe: Sticky Rice Wrapped in Bamboo Leaves

(copied from the old we heart cats and food blog)

Hi... okay this is the explanation of how to make sticky rice parcels (or Joong).

There are many variations on this recipe, many different things you can put inside the parcels. This one is fairly traditional apart from the fact that it doesn't use the preserved egg (because überjoi doesn't like it) and that it's made by a half-turkish anglo bastard.

I made some of these to take to work when we had a sort of 'cook off' (I work in an office and it gets really boring sometimes). It's probably too much effort to make on a week night and I wouldn't do that again unless I had too... but it was fun.

You need to start prepping for this dish a day in advance - soaking all the dried bits overnight (sticky rice, bamboo leaves and mung beans if you're using them) and marinating the meat. Then the next day it's about 1 hour to boil the leaves, another hour to make the parcels and then 2-3 hours to cook them.

Step 1: Get some things together.

The 'things' I got together in the picture are (from back left):
-Sesame oil
-Char Siu sauce
-Chinese sausage
-Dried Prawn
-The meat (in the bowl at the back)
-Bamboo leaves
-Oyster sauce
-Rice wine vinegar
-Soy sauce
-Saki
-Five spice
-Dried/preserved pork
-Glutinous/sticky rice (soaking in the pot)
-Split mung beans (soaking in the plastic container)
-A pot of water (it was in the picture so I thought I would mention it...)
-Fresh Shitake mushrooms

Ingredients not in the photo:
-Vegetable oil
-2 eggs
-Cooking string

Other than the bamboo leaves and the sticky rice, the rest is extranious. Put what you like into them. But this is how I made them and they turned out pretty good. Not as good as a restaurant but pretty good.

Note: if you look closely at the picture you can see the crap that usually fills our table discreetly pushed onto one of the chairs. To the far right on the floor is a cat bowl.

Okay... above is a picture of some leaves in boiling water. I've already mentioned that you will need to soak the sticky rice, the leaves and the mung beans overnight. The next day, before you start wrapping them up, boil some water and throw the bamboo leaves in. Boil them for at least 30 mins. This kills any mold germs that might have been lurking on them. I think bamboo is also dirty because pandas eat it so maybe even boil them for an hour to get rid of any panda germs too.

handy hint: you can put vinegar in the water to make them a bit softer as well. But I find that the leaves are fine after boiling them in just water.

Dried prawn. But I've tried to un-dry them using hot water. It doesn't quite work, but they re-inflate a bit. It takes 15 mins or so to un-dry the prawns. These will go into the parcels.

Now I chop up the other bits that are too large to put in whole. In the picture is the preserved pork, the chinese sausage and the fresh shitake mushroom. You don't have to use fresh shitake. It was available so I used it.

I have noticed that there isn't a picture of the meat (überjoi, you didn't take a picture of the meat...). So I'll just tell you what I marinated it in. The Char Siu sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine vinegar. Using the Char Siu sauce is kind of like cheating. It makes things taste good. It works well in this recipe and I'm anglo so I don't need to respect any tradition. Also - I used pork for the meat (from a Yarraville butcher who cut it up especially for me. He was very nice.) but you could easily use Lamb instead. The meat comes out very tender.

Here are the drained split mung beans. They become a smooth paste in the end product.

This is an addition that überjoi asked for - some omelette. I just whisked up two eggs and lightly fried them, then sliced them on a chopping board. This is to replace the preserved egg.

Drain the rice and it looks like this. To add some colour and flavour to the rice, stir through some soy sauce.  Use your own judgement for the amount - I put in a fair amount and it's never been too salty. Also - you can add some oil to the rice at this point. This will help the rice stop sticking to the bamboo leaves when it's cooked.

This is the most challenging part... getting the hang of puttingthe leaves together. Youtube it and I'm sure you'll find a video... but I'll try to describe the process:

Firstly, cut some lengths of cooking string before you start.

Take one leaf and fold it round to meet itself, like you're trying to make a cup out of the leaf. The bottom part of the leaf should naturally fold up onto itself.

Sit the folded leaf in the palm of your hand. Fold up the bottom part of the leaf so that you have a firm base on which to pile the rice and other ingredients. Now take a second leaf and wrap it around the back of the first leaf (that's the stage I'm at in the picture above...). Make sure that the 2nd leaf 'catches' the folded over bottom part of the first leaf. This will help to hold it in place.

Now you just pile everything into it. Here is the order I followed:

1. Rice (just enough to cover the base of the leaf.)
2. Mung bean (about the same as the rice, if not less)
3. prawn, shitake & sausage
4. Meat (1-2 cubes, depending on size)
5. Egg
6. Dried pork
7. More mung bean
8. More rice

Now, depending on how much of each thing you've put in, you may need to wrap a third leaf around the back of your parcel. Do this if you need to, then fold over the top edges.

Hold the fold down with one hand and take a length of pre-cut cooking string. Place one end under the hand holding down the fold. Then wrap the string tightly around the outside and tie it off.

The natural twine I used to wrap up these ones came with the bamboo leaves and makes them look really authentic.



This is an uncooked parcel on a leaf. überjoi likes taking the pretty photos.

So then you make parcel after parcel until all the ingredients are used up. Then you throw them all in a big pot of boiling water for 2-3 hours. They will be done after two hours. The meat will get more tender if you leave them in there longer.

You will need to add more boiling water after an hour or so. Make sure all the parcels are submerged.

This is what you get at the end... the parcels become firm and all of the flavours have combined through the rice.

You can eat them with some soy dipping sauce, or with sugar or (my preference) just by themselves.

words by pisso | photos by überjoi