Did I spell that wrong?
Oops.
I meant Runway Cafe--simply the snazziest discount-clothing-and-home-furnishings-warehouse-based eatery in all of Canberra. Overlooking the runway at the airport. In Brand Depot of course.
We are not averse to a bit of bargain hunting, and when you have picked up an art deco coffee pot for $8 you feel like rewarding yourself with something sweet. The food court at the Depot is a little bit dismal really, but in the back corner is a well-presented little cafe/lounge with plush sofas, low tables and menus written on mirrors. This is where we gravitated on our last trip.
The service at the Runway is something like the flight attendant interfacing you might experience on a Virgin flight. The waiter we had was polished and dapper and trendy and very friendly--he grabbed our attention straight away and hit us with a barrage of banter. But he was also a bit cheeky and jocular. No serious Qantas-style silken smiles and mild-yet-authoritative manners at this coffee stop. In fine form, when Rachael asked if there was a minimum EFTPOS she was told, yes. There was.
On assurance that all the cakes were guaranteed not to put any weight on, we decided to indulge with a slice each alongside our standard mocha and chai. The cakes were delicious. But, in keeping with the budget theme, presented rather unfortunately alongside a drift of spray-can whipped faux cream dusted with cappucino chocolate powder. The waiter also seemed to have some trouble with his milk frother so ended up just pouring extra milk into our drinks straight from the carton in the fridge--it made for faster service, but kinda lukewarm coffee.
Faux cream and lukewarm coffee aside--Runway is worth it for the very real, very fiery personal service. Overall, we like it. We're going again sometime.
And calling it Runaway is not really fair at all. But it is cheeky and jocular.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Manuka's last champion of cheap
Lee. Ah, Lee. If it weren't for you and your self-titled Inn Manuka would be soulless. Because even the very, very trendiest hippest coolest jivest priciest place only has true cred if there is an underbelly of some description. Some small splash of grunge. A vestigial throwback to when the area was NOT cool. Because places born cool will never have that a la mode vintage feel of places that started life with at least one visible deep fryer.
Manuka has become like the Toorak of Canberra. It has the shopping, and the restaurants, the coffee. It's a sort of village for city folk. Note well, the hamlet atmosphere is just by day--by night Manuka fancies itself a club zone. Manuka, like most places in Canberra, has to be versatile: the same venue is a coffee house in the morning, an executive eatery at lunchtime, a sports bar after work, an a la carte restaurant for dinner and a nightclub by the time the last screening begins at the cinema. There just aren't enough patrons in Canberra to warrant many dedicated Canadian themed make-your-own pancake cafes, for example (although we hear they are very popular elsewhere...)
But one place that has no chameleonic tendencies is Lees Inn. It is a Chinese restaurant and take away. That's all. That's it. It has been there a long long time and will never in my lifetime try to 'diversify' with a Barista and live bands on Fridays (or live anything, for a matter of fact. Fish here probably comes from the freezer). Coffee costs $1.50 at Lees Inn. If you spill it by accident in your haste to get to the food on the Lazy Susan you can mop it off the vinyl jellybean tablecloth with the serviettes provided in a handy Diner dispenser on each table.
When we went in late on a Sunday evening there were two other tables occupied. One was full of bright young things in pre-club mode looking sozzled and sated, ready for a big night of posing in Minque. Lees Inn must work in symbiosis with the more elite establishments in Manuka--everyone can afford to go out to the best places if they already gorged and got drunk at Lees beforehand. The other table was taken up by a lone man who the waitress remembered, according to my eavesdropping from at least 3 years ago when he was last in with his partner. She inquired about the partner, and the lone man, being lone, was able to tell her they had been broken up for over two of those three years. We felt oddly included in this washerwomanesque interaction. This place was homely and gossipy. They weren't play music on the twin-deck radio cassette player above the counter--they were playing the Cricket.
The only problem was before we finished our meal the young male waiter, obviously keen to go and join the posing, abruptly came from out the back, turned off the air conditioner and switched off the radio and left. How do you spell 'uncomfortable' in Cantonese? We bounced back, though, when the friendly waitress broke the ice with some happy persiflage about the kind of food her toddler likes to eat, and she insisted we didn't rush. And it would have been hard to accelerate our eating very much more anyway--the servings at Lees are more than generous and everything tastes good. Possibly too good to be strictly salubrious, but for $30 for soup, entrees, drinks and mains for two people we weren't complaining.
Lee's. Ah. Edible juxtaposition. Homeliness and hostility, lots of food and little prices, trendy block and outdated decor. But not the deliberately outdated kind. It's authentically outmoded. Our kind of grunge.
Manuka has become like the Toorak of Canberra. It has the shopping, and the restaurants, the coffee. It's a sort of village for city folk. Note well, the hamlet atmosphere is just by day--by night Manuka fancies itself a club zone. Manuka, like most places in Canberra, has to be versatile: the same venue is a coffee house in the morning, an executive eatery at lunchtime, a sports bar after work, an a la carte restaurant for dinner and a nightclub by the time the last screening begins at the cinema. There just aren't enough patrons in Canberra to warrant many dedicated Canadian themed make-your-own pancake cafes, for example (although we hear they are very popular elsewhere...)
But one place that has no chameleonic tendencies is Lees Inn. It is a Chinese restaurant and take away. That's all. That's it. It has been there a long long time and will never in my lifetime try to 'diversify' with a Barista and live bands on Fridays (or live anything, for a matter of fact. Fish here probably comes from the freezer). Coffee costs $1.50 at Lees Inn. If you spill it by accident in your haste to get to the food on the Lazy Susan you can mop it off the vinyl jellybean tablecloth with the serviettes provided in a handy Diner dispenser on each table.
When we went in late on a Sunday evening there were two other tables occupied. One was full of bright young things in pre-club mode looking sozzled and sated, ready for a big night of posing in Minque. Lees Inn must work in symbiosis with the more elite establishments in Manuka--everyone can afford to go out to the best places if they already gorged and got drunk at Lees beforehand. The other table was taken up by a lone man who the waitress remembered, according to my eavesdropping from at least 3 years ago when he was last in with his partner. She inquired about the partner, and the lone man, being lone, was able to tell her they had been broken up for over two of those three years. We felt oddly included in this washerwomanesque interaction. This place was homely and gossipy. They weren't play music on the twin-deck radio cassette player above the counter--they were playing the Cricket.
The only problem was before we finished our meal the young male waiter, obviously keen to go and join the posing, abruptly came from out the back, turned off the air conditioner and switched off the radio and left. How do you spell 'uncomfortable' in Cantonese? We bounced back, though, when the friendly waitress broke the ice with some happy persiflage about the kind of food her toddler likes to eat, and she insisted we didn't rush. And it would have been hard to accelerate our eating very much more anyway--the servings at Lees are more than generous and everything tastes good. Possibly too good to be strictly salubrious, but for $30 for soup, entrees, drinks and mains for two people we weren't complaining.
Lee's. Ah. Edible juxtaposition. Homeliness and hostility, lots of food and little prices, trendy block and outdated decor. But not the deliberately outdated kind. It's authentically outmoded. Our kind of grunge.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Folkus
Rachael loves Kristina Olsen. She is an LA blues/folk/jazz musician who writes killer lyrics and has one of those compelling cynosural voices that makes you sit up and listen. So when she found out Kristina would be doing a gig in Canberra this month, Rachael just had to go.
Now, folk music is definitely a Rachael thing. Previously the closest James had been to Folk was overtaking a Combi on the road to Majors Creek. But in the week leading up to the gig Rachael's contagious enthusiasm was hard to ward off and by Tuesday night James was thoroughly infected. He was open to the idea of a new musical experience. What he wasn't so sure about was the environmental experience.
The Folkus Room is an event more than a physical place--its only corporeal trappings are the backboards erected temporarily to cordon off a section of the Serbian Club in Mawson (near Woden, south of the City) a few nights a week when a show is booked. The backboards serve a kind of Looking Glass cum Wardrobe role--on one side is pokies, a pool table, flickering fluoros and beer-sopped bar runners, and on the other is a mellifluous melange of round tables, curtains, sofas and, of course, folkies, all murmuring and clinking glasses to the faint strains of Parisian tango music. The 'doors' open here at 6, and the support acts don't start until 8, so the spirit of the evening is well and truly abroad by the time the lights dim down and the stage is occupied.
Of course, when we attended a week earlier to secure our tickets, there was no Parisian tango music, no clinking glasses, no atmosphere at all. Just 'blipblipblip' and 'dingdingDONG' and other pokie Sirensongs. And Bill.
We can say, having met Bill Arnett, James has now truly known Folk. This guy used to help run the Merry Muse, and is also known as the Big Fat Fairy. This man has enough character to power all the generators in a folk festival beer tent for a long weekend. He is so engaging that after meeting him at the beginning of the night Kristina was calling everyone else on stage 'Bill' for the rest of the show. We didn't just buy tickets when we met Bill--we were educated in the history of the Merry Muse, the predliections of Kristina and the similarities between Danny O'Keefe (also performing with Kristina) and another guy that once played somewhere, sometime, that Bill liked rather a lot.
We left eventually, clutching our tickets (and each other's hands), a little shellshocked. Hence why James was chary of the return visit--how could he possibly cope with 45 of these 'folkies', this new and peculiar and garrulous breed? Combined with the thought of 'Serbian' counter meals as sustenance for this session, he was leaning towards eating elsewhere beforehand and ducking in at the last minute.
As it happened, we did brave the bistro, and the folkies, with no obvious signs of injury. In fact, the food was exceptional. Good ingredients, well prepared and cheap to boot. The only problem was our unfinished plates were very industriously cleared away in the interval while we were off looking at merchandise. They run a tight ship at the Club, and the Folkus folk are shipshape too--the sound and lighting were great, there were no technical glitches, the acoustics were good and Bill as emcee was irreproachable. The whole experience was intimate and comfortable and engrossing. We liked it. James found new musical heroes in Danny O'Keefe and Peter Grayling, and Rachael got a CD signed by KO herself.
The verdict--yes, oh my yes. We loved it. Blues Narnia. Fairy and all.
Now, folk music is definitely a Rachael thing. Previously the closest James had been to Folk was overtaking a Combi on the road to Majors Creek. But in the week leading up to the gig Rachael's contagious enthusiasm was hard to ward off and by Tuesday night James was thoroughly infected. He was open to the idea of a new musical experience. What he wasn't so sure about was the environmental experience.
The Folkus Room is an event more than a physical place--its only corporeal trappings are the backboards erected temporarily to cordon off a section of the Serbian Club in Mawson (near Woden, south of the City) a few nights a week when a show is booked. The backboards serve a kind of Looking Glass cum Wardrobe role--on one side is pokies, a pool table, flickering fluoros and beer-sopped bar runners, and on the other is a mellifluous melange of round tables, curtains, sofas and, of course, folkies, all murmuring and clinking glasses to the faint strains of Parisian tango music. The 'doors' open here at 6, and the support acts don't start until 8, so the spirit of the evening is well and truly abroad by the time the lights dim down and the stage is occupied.
Of course, when we attended a week earlier to secure our tickets, there was no Parisian tango music, no clinking glasses, no atmosphere at all. Just 'blipblipblip' and 'dingdingDONG' and other pokie Sirensongs. And Bill.
We can say, having met Bill Arnett, James has now truly known Folk. This guy used to help run the Merry Muse, and is also known as the Big Fat Fairy. This man has enough character to power all the generators in a folk festival beer tent for a long weekend. He is so engaging that after meeting him at the beginning of the night Kristina was calling everyone else on stage 'Bill' for the rest of the show. We didn't just buy tickets when we met Bill--we were educated in the history of the Merry Muse, the predliections of Kristina and the similarities between Danny O'Keefe (also performing with Kristina) and another guy that once played somewhere, sometime, that Bill liked rather a lot.
We left eventually, clutching our tickets (and each other's hands), a little shellshocked. Hence why James was chary of the return visit--how could he possibly cope with 45 of these 'folkies', this new and peculiar and garrulous breed? Combined with the thought of 'Serbian' counter meals as sustenance for this session, he was leaning towards eating elsewhere beforehand and ducking in at the last minute.
As it happened, we did brave the bistro, and the folkies, with no obvious signs of injury. In fact, the food was exceptional. Good ingredients, well prepared and cheap to boot. The only problem was our unfinished plates were very industriously cleared away in the interval while we were off looking at merchandise. They run a tight ship at the Club, and the Folkus folk are shipshape too--the sound and lighting were great, there were no technical glitches, the acoustics were good and Bill as emcee was irreproachable. The whole experience was intimate and comfortable and engrossing. We liked it. James found new musical heroes in Danny O'Keefe and Peter Grayling, and Rachael got a CD signed by KO herself.
The verdict--yes, oh my yes. We loved it. Blues Narnia. Fairy and all.
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