Saturday we had a strict schedule: First Collingwood vs. Hawthorne at the MCG arena. Only my second time to witness true Australian sporting culture. It was an exciting game, but I just couldn't watch as Hawthorne only just beat Collingwood by three points in the last 10 minutes of the game. You can see by Richard's colors below, that we were rooting for the other guys. Boo.
Then we raced to the Exhibition Centre over in Carlton to catch the Taste of Melbourne event featuring Melbourne Restaurants, foodies, wine tasting, food & alcohol sellers. We opted to attend the Beer and Cheese Matching event, which was worth the $12. My favorite was the King Island Dairy Ash Brie and James Squire Porter Beer, though they are not meant to go together. I think we saw everything there was to see at the event and tried our best to sample every taste available. Though I will comment that the tasting plates at the restaurant stalls were way overpriced and not worth the money, the event is meant to promote those restaurants and not provide an opportunity for them to profit after we already pay a hefty entry fee. We stayed til the very end having sampled the following:
Stokehouse Restaurant, Wagyu Cigars with Artichoke tapenade and horseradish, Yum! (Thanks for the free ones at the end of the night)
Esposito, Oyster tempura - a paltry single oyster, pretty boring.
I loved the Vanilla Pannacotta with Blood Orange Jelly from Melbourne Wine Room & Mr. Wolf, just the right balance of creaminess, mixture of textures, and tangy orange jelly and raspberries.
Wallaby tataki from Charcoal Lane was nothing to write home about.
And I don't know why everyone was lining up to try the Palance Wagyu Burger. It was just a $12 mini-burger. Lame.
There was lots more to try, but we moved onto booze. Australian Wine, Australian/Fiji Rum, Absinthe finally caught a taste of the very fancy Patron Tequila (extremely smooth, I want my own bottle - but maybe from the states where it will definitely be much cheaper), Sagatiba's rum in a tasty Caiparinha. Mix all that together and you end up with a hangover like the one I enjoyed the next day.
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