Life with Bees

Let's praise friends who get things done. They make the bookings for the hotels, they remind everyone what time we were having drinks and harass everyone to pay their share of the bill. So thanks Al, for rounding us up and booking us in for no less than three Chinese restaurants in a month.

1. Spicy Ginger Cafe, 25 Childers St, Civic
It's Szechuan and it works. Dip into a hotpot of pork filled with chilli flakes (two of us inhaled  the fiery flakes and nearly choked to death).  Try not to squabble over a nest of super-thin french fries seasoned with onion and spices. They're the savoury, deep-fried equivalent of spun sugar.  A huge plate of thousand year eggs encased in aubergine is stodgy and less successful. Forget about desserts, which are mostly Western-influenced or old standards such as fried ice cream. It's student cheap - $99 for four of us.

2. The Scholar, 23 Woolley St, Dickson
There's a slightly more upmarket feel to this restaurant, which sits upstairs from the Dickson strip. A tank of live seafood and abalone at the front of the restaurant looks promising and the menu is diverse. Roast pigeon is a little dry but comes well seasoned and complete with pigeon head. Al, who loves pigeon, eats the (admittedly rather tiny) brain. TK is enamored of a beef brisket hot pot and a plate of tofu layered with seafood is picked off by the boys, despite the meatier dishes on offer. Desserts include a complimentary and lightly flavoured wolfberry jelly but the fried ice creams are redolent with grease and soon regretted. The bill for four of us is $120.

3. Shanghai Dumpling Cafe, 35 Childers St, Civic
This dumpling cafe sits on the same strip as its rival, the Spicy Ginger Cafe. But there isn't much to compare. For us, the food was a little forgettable. "What did we eat?" I asked TK a couple of days afterwards. There was an ominous silence. Eventually he did offer that the main dishes come complete with generous servings of rice, perhaps too much. The dumplings are a little thick but very reasonably priced. Desserts are possibly the best of the lot, with fried red bean cake and rice balls in sweet soup on offer. They're not terrific but it's a change from that damn fried ice cream. Another $99 for four people.

Banging through the door after work one evening, I tossed my keys into their bowl and relinquished my bag onto a dining chair. TK was cooking something, I could smell heat and garlic but he was being unusually quiet. Off with the shoes, padding into the little kitchen – nothing. He wasn't there.

Then I discovered the cookie tray on the dining table, heaped with treasure trove – rough crystals speckled through all bright green and ruby. The pile gave off a brilliant, tasty aroma, like someone cooking a chilli dish softly in the next room. From the bedroom, TK emerged with a particularly delighted look on his face. “What's this?” I asked, sniffing suspiciously.

He rubbed his hands together. “Chilli garlic salt. Isn't it great?”


It turned out to be a pretty simple mix of rock salt, green and red chillies and garlic, all blended together and spread out to dry. But it took a couple of days to dry, that delicious smell of chilli and garlic fooling everyone who walked through the door into thinking there was a meal prepping.

Finally TK scraped the mix into a blender and ground it into a fine – perhaps too fine – salt. It gives flavour with a good kick of warmth, if you use it carefully. Simex got a bit carried away and sprinkled a big spoonful onto fresh potato chips, leaving the boys a little choked up. But it's so tasty I sometimes sneak a (tiny) fingertipful if I see the jar on the counter, relishing the garlicky heat and the memory of ruby and green crystals, like Christmas quartz.