sven verbeek

We were invited for a lovely lunch by friends Marcel and Micheline. Marcel has worked for Sara Lee in the past. They moved from Belgium to Australia already 12 years ago, and live on literally a stone’s throw from our house. Always nice to catch up and have great chats. Micheline is a wonderful cook [...]

Buying food, eating food, cooking food and admiring food. I inhale it. And I shoot it as well. With the iPhone. An impression of the food I came across over the past weeks. Homemade ‘witlof’ with ham and cheese, grilled in the oven. Old fashioned, but oh so yummie ! A homemade salad of grilled [...]

Marit loves Italian food, and she loves to make it herself as well. As we try to ban ‘processed foods’ as much as possible from our household, we always try to make it ourselves from fresh ingredients. Nothing tastes better than self made pasta and a tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes. I recently read an [...]

I bought an iPhone 4S in October, and since this phone is so useful on the way, I keep taking photos in restaurants, shops, in my own kitchen and just outside. Quirky things in the supermarket and on the plate. Of course lots of pictures I take are about food. Sometimes the phone is stocked with [...]

If it comes to good restaurants on Sydney’s Upper North Shore, there isn’t much choice. The heart of activity is in the city, or along the beaches, but not in suburbia. But there are hidden gems around. The best restaurant up north is without doubt the Berowra Waters Inn,  SMH Good Food Guide, score 17/20, and [...]

A nice evening with my Dutch friend Inge at Sake in The Rocks, the best Japanese restaurant in Sydney. Again awarded with ‘one chef’s hat’ in the new 2012 edition of the SMH Good Food Guide. They have an extensive menu with over 40 different types of sake, but this time we ordered a nice [...]

Indonesian food is yummie and has a beautiful palette of colours and tastes. Indonesia is Australia’s closest neighbour (yes, New Zealand is further away !), but the number of Indonesian restaurants in Australia, and Sydney in particular, is marginal. You easily bump into Japanese, Thai, Indian and Chinese restaurants, but there is hardly any attention for the [...]

The majority of oysters you buy at the fishmonger are already shucked. None of the tags mention when they have been shucked. Which is the most important element to whether an oyster is fresh and thus taste how it should taste. The only place where you see them being shucked is the Sydney Fish Market. That’s nowadays [...]

Rustic bread, artisan bread, handcrafted bread. Give it a name ! The Grumpy Baker in Vaucluse has it all, and it tastes divine. Discovered by coincidence, because it isn’t even mentioned in the SMH Good Food Shopping Guide. Michael Cthurmer started a café and bakery in Darlinghurst nine years ago, as he was bored of the bread [...]

Restaurant Marque in Sydney’s suburb of Surry Hills has reached the number 1 spot in the latest edition of Gourmet Traveller’s Restaurant Top 100 of Australia. Cutler & Co in Melbourne dropped to number 3, whilst Quay in Sydney is the new number 2. It also means Sydney has definitely taken over from Melbourne as [...]