What's hot, what's cool
People are still asking us, three years into trying to refine a definition for ourselves, "What's hot?"
As in, how do you define "hot", that handy adjective we attach to our annual edition of The Weekend Australian Magazine in which we attempt a spot of culinary cat herding and list the country' s 50 "hottest" restaurants.
It's a little like the old truism associated with pornography: you might not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. And you know a hot restaurant when you see one or, at least, experience it. It's that combination of ideas, passion (shockingly overused word, I know, like "brainchild"), energy and lack of compromise that comes together to make some restaurants so much more special than others. In a complete sense. That's important.
There'll be nothing on our 2013 list, when we stop debating it, that doesn't punch hard in all areas: food, beverage, service and X factor. There's the chat barometer, too: is anybody talking about it? And for the right reasons?
Read last year's Hot 50 Restaurants here
It's clearly not a science. Try to take a quantifiable approach to these things and you end up with award winners that tick boxes but don't pull heart strings, emotional voids. There are Associations (with a capital A) that prove this every year. Possibly they have a point, but our list (and our point) is different.
And there are the guidebooks that committee everything to death. Hundreds of contributors, vague benchmarks, disparate experience levels, everything democratic ...
Ours is an almost selfish approach and whether that works for you or not, it does not sit on fences. A good list has attitude and the scent of potential controversy.
Chef Peter Gilmore at Quay. Does his world-class fine-dining restaurant also qualify as "hot"?
It's certainly not an attempt to round up Australia's best restaurants, whatever "best" may be. "Best for what?" is my usual response, when asked for the "best" restaurant in any particular city (another perennial).
Yet clearly some of Australia's best restaurants are also among our hottest, too.
Conversely, I think you'll find come August 24 a lot of places that are usually considered to be among our "best" - super expensive, super-disciplined places with many of the things the food guides call "hats" - just don't creep over the "hot" radar.
You see, to colleague Necia Wilden and me, and to our very tight band of contributors who number some of the keenest eyes in the dining pundit pool, such as journalists Simon Thomsen and Elizabeth Meryment, a hot restaurant must be fun.
Foie gras this and truffled that is all very well, and often delicious, but if the restaurant experience is maudlin ... er, no thanks. The hottest restaurants convey an ever so subtle message that the chefs and the floor team are having a good time too. There should be joy in food, not process.
And what's hot right now isn't mashed potato (that's another story, for another time.) Mash and its French cousine pomme puree are cold.
What is hot, on the other hand, is likely to involve ash, charring and burning. ("Waiter, my onion is burned." "Yes sir, you're paying handsomely for the chef to burn it just so.")
It may include kimchi. It will almost certainly include yuzu. If you get a plate that includes all three, however, the restaurant itself is automatically not hot, because any such dish will taste rubbish.
Palm hearts are hot. So are eggs. Radishes are still hot. And butter. And anything cooked near or over charcoal, real wood coals and smoke is insanely hot. Both literally and metaphorically.
Clear as mud? (which is not yet hot but probably will be soon, as in the famous Mugaritz potato cooked in clay).
Cool. I mean, hot. And if you think you know what hot is, let us know, pronto: we're offering a dinner somewhere hot with me - to whoever's list of 50 restaurants comes closest to our own.
Source: The Australian, 27 July 2013
