“I twittered that I was having fun writing the chapter in my book about what a restaurant run on Googlethink might look like (besides being decorated in gaudy primary colors)…
…I have lots of ideas about an open and transparent restaurant operation, experience, and community. If you have any ideas you’d like to share, please join in.”

I reckon we’ve had open source and transparent wine lists in Australia for sometime. It’s called BYO. And it is coming back. For example, BYO is available every night at Esposito at Toofey’s and Thursday nights at Libertine for a bargain $10. St Jude’s Cellars is doing something similar with its attached bottle shop where $15 is added to the retail price of the wine drunk at the restaurant.

Wine lists cause a lot of confusion with restaurants charging roughly 2.5 times wholesale price sometimes for the very stuff we drink at home. In Nobu’s case the mark-up is three times.

What about an open source menu? Could that work on a BYO model too? Diners turn up with ingredients, possibly home caught or grown, and leave it to the chef. Diners pool ingredients with other tables.

Perhaps, the restaurant has an iphone app which will identify what all the other diners are bringing to the table at the request of the chef. Each diner simple pays $10 for each course for preparation.

As with the internet the chef has to deal with a lot of crap.

Personally, I’ll turn up with a locally sourced Perigord truffle, some Tuna (but unlike Nobu I can’t source otoro direct from Port Lincoln), eggs from my neighbours hens and beets and salad leaves from my inner city veggie garden.

What will you bring and what do you want your open source restaurant to be like?

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I was saved from seeing Sex in the City and instead spent a few hours in the Melbourne Wine Room. Apparently, the change in clientelle there started the previous Thursday. First one Cosmopolitan, then many many more were ordered.

The crowd was different to usual, well-groomed women mainly toasting each other with sauvignon blanc or Champagne pior to the next sitting of the film. None of the emasculated men had temerity to drink beer although I noticed a couple of blokes managed to slip-in a pinot.

Then it was to Baroq House on Thursday, not to have Jägermeister poured down my throat by a topless dwarf in a top hat, sadly (Yes, he also did gigs at Baroq). But for a much classier cocktail class courtesy of  Belvedere Vodka and mixologist Grant Collins from Bar Solutions.

We learnt, we drank and nibbled. How we laughed. And then my team (not named by me) “Two Blonds and a Bloke” came second in the mixology competition. We also made a decent martini and a Moscow mule so I did escape with my masculinity intact, almost. And I’m still avoiding Sex and the City.

 Luxury Cosmopolitan Escape

450 mls Belvedere Cytrus (or plain vodka)

100 mls Grand Marnier (or Cointreau)

600 ml Cranberry Juice

Dash of lemon juice

1. Chill a giant martini glasswith ice

2. Fill the bucket  with ice. Add the vodka, cointreau (on this occasion) and cranberry juice.

3. Remove ice from cocktail glass. Strain mix into cocktail glass.

4. Top with a dash of lemon. Add a flamed orange zest.

5. There’s enough vodka in this to knock you out. Drink irresponsibly and you will be refused entry to Sex and the City.

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Make that two months. And I haven’t included the screwcaps. Or the beer. Or the spirits. Oh dear.

Anyone game to name them all? Don’t worry too much about the vintages.

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Look closely. That’s 5 litres of chablis for under $10! Chablis. Not.

I’m not quite sure how they get away with this. What gets me is how awful the food looks. Do I really want to buy the wine? No.

Do I want it to taste brilliant? Yes.

But because it looks so awful I can’t bring myself to do it. Call me a snob but it looks like the kind of food that Gordon Ramsay pukes up on his Kitchen Nightmares.

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Similarly if you leave a human being on a espresso machine for long enough and it will eventually produce a decent extraction. The problem is that there is no consistency.

Such is the case at Tre Bicchieri, which came highly recommended from the Rathdowne Cellars (highly recomended for Spanish wine and sherry) newsletter. I suppose they are neighbours on Rathdowne Street - what can you expect?.

The first problem with Tre Bicchieri  is the cafe itself. The haughty staff give no indication that you have to physically get up and order from the counter. They are quite happy to leave you sitting there.

The second problem is the coffee. The full fat milk version arrived about ten minutes before the (no, I don’t approve) low fat.

The third is the over extraction of the coffee. Jak calls this tasting burnt. What it means is that either the group is too hot, filled with too much coffee, left to extract the flavour for too long or a permutation of all three. The aftertaste was really nasty and I have now resolved to return all overextracted coffee as I should have done on this day.

While I’m at this I may as well keep kicking - I don’t reackon Tre Bicchieri’s custard filled pastries. They are far to sickly sweet.

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Bugger! Just as I decide to drink the menu at 1806 in the city I decide to join the Febfast challenge as part of my frugal February.

The idea is that give give up booze for a whole month and people - you perhaps - sponsor me  with the money going to a good cause which will also probably help save somebody else’s liver or sanity*.

“Participants are sponsored by friends and family, with funds distributed to organisations that support young people struggling with substance use.”

I’m not doing this because I’m an alcoholic. But I do drink too much too often and everybody needs a little bit of time off the grog. I will possibly be buying one $15 leave pass for a good friend’s party. But then again I may not (unless she sponsors me).

I’m aiming to raise a modest $200 and can be sponsored here.

*40% of the funds will be distributed to YSAS Pty. Ltd. (the Youth Substance Abuse Service). YSAS is the largest provider of alcohol and other drug services to young people in Victoria.
10% of the funds will be distributed to the Australian Drug Foundation for education purposes.
The remaining funds will be distributed by the FebFast Gift Fund Management Committee to the Australian Alcohol and Other Drugs sector, based on grant applications that are received from individual organisations within the sector.

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The really bad news is that the posse is falling apart. My favourite pole dancer is leaving town. I can only console myself with her leaving celebrations on Sunday, possibly followed by a return to 1806, a classy new arrival on the bar scene despite its Dracula theatre restaurant and backpacker bar roots.
I’ve been challenged to drink the menu at 1806 by the posse.
Draped in red velvet and with what I presume are crystal chandeliers it pays homage to the year the cocktail was defined, 1806 and takes its evolution forward to the present.
The original 1806 cocktail is the Bittered Sling, which comes in a glass which approximates in shape to Marie Antoinettes breast which by today’s standards is quite small but tastes very good. (I didn’t say that very weel - I meant the coktail tastes very good andcanot comment of the breasts or royalty) The posse last week tried a refreshing Raspberry Fizz and creamy Angels Milk.

Anyway, they are egging me on to drink the whole menu from start to finish. All I want to do is slump back into the comfortable sofa and read the bar menu which takes one on an entertaining but boozy journey forward to the present from 1806.
“It’ll make a great series of blog posts they say,” envisioning me being able to conjure the magic that Fraser Lewry provides with his Animal Alphabet.
In reality my liver won’t stand it. I probably can’t afford the dry cleaning. And I certainly can’t afford the bar bill.
But Sunday night I’ll be there attempting the Mint Julep from 1816 and possibly the Rum Shrub from 1826. That will leave 182 years which thankfully is only 33 drinks, 31 if I count what the posse drank the other night.
The brains behind the booze Sebastian Raeburn promises some new molecular mixology, which could set me back a few drinks.
Will anyone out there help me?

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Check out locally made craft brews at Federation Square. This is an opportunity to meet the brewers and discover the secrets of the state’

s great beers. Try not to get bladdered, please.

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