Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to win a voucher to dinner at 400 Gradi from Sweet Cherrie Pie. At the time, 400 Gradi had just been crowned as having the world's best margherita pizza, and as a result bookings were scarce, so it took us this long to use our prize.  Even months down the track, I had to make a reservation 3 weeks in advance for a Tuesday night, and the only slot they could give me was 8:15pm! I decided this was a good sign to indicate that the food should be good (because being deemed as having the world's best margherita is obviously not enough).

We arrived at 8:15pm on the dot, and the restaurant was packed! We hadn't anticipated this at all! We were quickly shown to our table, handed menus, offered drinks and we set out to make decisions on what we should order.

The menu offered all the standard Italian options, starting with antipasti, pizza, pasta, risotto, the more substantial meaty mains, and desserts. We settled on a couple of pizzas to share. The margherita was obviously the first choice, and for the second pizza, we decided on a pumpkin and rocket pizza.

The pizzas arrived in about 20 minutes, piping hot and with oozy cheese. We wasted no time in digging in, starting with the famous margherita.

Now I know I've already mentioned the margherita half a dozen times already, but let me assure you, it is worth every mention. I'm lucky enough to regularly have homemade woodfired pizzas which I thought were the best in the world, but the 400 Gradi pizza was even better than what I'm used to (let's hope there aren't any Russo's reading this!).

Let's start with the dough; it was bready without being too chewy, thin enough without being too crisp and it had the beautiful smokiness that the woodfired cooking process imparts. All a margherita has is sauce, basil and mozarella, so you'd think that there can't be much variation, but 400 Gradi had perfected each of these elements to create the perfect combination. The sauce was full of flavour, the basil was fresh and imparted a beautiful aroma and the fresh mozarella was soft and oozy, just the way I like it. I really can't express how delicious this pizza was, no amount of flowery language will do it justice.

After the margherita I wasn't sure if it was worth trying another pizza, after all, I had already hit the jackpot, but since when have I ever said no to food?!

The second pizza was lined with a white sauce, thinly sliced roast pumpkin, soft goats cheese, pine nuts, and dressed with rocket. I'm a big fan of fresh greens on a pizza post cooking, and the rocket worked beautifully with all the other ingredients. It made for a delicious pizza, but alas, for me, it didn't compare the the margherita.

After the pizzas we decided to indulge in some dessert. The menu was full of scrumptious options, so we did what any indecisive people would do, and ordered a tasting platter. The platter came with three different desserts, a honey pannacotta, a lemon tart and a nutella crepe.

The honey pannacotta was perfect, full of honey flavour and the right amount of wobble. The lemon curd in the lemon tart was also delicious, but the pastry was not the greatest. And the nutella crepe was great, but seemed a little less refined in comparison to the other two desserts.

The meal at 400 Gradi was definitely on the steep side, especially for pizza, but it was delicious. If you could ever imagine a fine dining pizza experience, 400 Gradi is it. And if you can't imagine it, get yourself to 400 Gradi, because it is an experience everyone should undergo.

Ashamed as I am to admit it, I am a relatively new convert to Ottolenghi and his recipes. I've already bought a copy of Plenty More, his second vegetarian cookbook, as an early Christmas present to myself, but I'm still getting through recipes from Plenty, which was my first Ottolenghi purchase. I had come home from from the market with various fruits and vegetables, including eggplants, mangoes, and herbs which needed to be used up, and this soba noodle dish seemed perfect. I have never cooked with soba noodles and too be honest, I think any thin non-egg noodles would work just as well, perhaps even vermicelli.

Ingredients:

Sunflower oil for frying

2 eggplants, diced into 2cm cubes

300g soba noodles

1 large ripe mango, cut into cubes

1 cup basil leaves, chopped (if you can get some use Thai basil, but much less of it)
1 cups cilantro leaves, chopped
1/2 red onion, very thinly sliced

Dressing:
1/2 cup rice vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped
1 tablespoon sesame oil
Grated zest and juice of 1 lime

Method:

1. First make the dressing. In a small pan, heat the rice vinegar, sugar and salt, until the sugar has dissolved completely.

2. Add the garlic, chilli and sesame oil, and remove the pan from the heat.

3. Allow the dressing to cool, and once cooled, add the lime zest and juice.

4. While the dressing is cooling, shallow fry the eggplant in batches and drain on paper towels. As i try to avoid using too much oil, I lightly fried the eggplant, and then covered the pan to allow the eggplants to cook in the steam.

5. Cook the soba noodles according to the instructions. I cooked mine in salted boiling water for about 5 minutes and then drained them and rinsed them well in cold water and allow the water to drain completely.

6. In a large boil, toss the noodles, eggplant, herbs, onion and dressing. Ideally you should let the salad sit for an hour or so, but I was in a rush and served it 10 minutes later. It still tasted great!

This is probably the first of quite a few Ottolenghi recipes I will be blogging, so stay tune!

Now in their second year, the Melbourne Night Noodle Markets have become an important fixture of the Good Food Month calendar in Melbourne. This year the organisers were better equipped to deal with the crowds and moved the markets to Birrarung Marr across three separate areas. It was a beautiful atmosphere, with open grassy spaces, the backdrop of the Melbourne skyline with the MCG, the Arts Centre spire and the Eureka tower in the background, and most importantly some of the best Asian food traders we have, there to showcase their food.

We started our foodie adventures with some dumplings at New Shanghai. This is the new dumpling place that has opened at the Emporium. I got the vegetarian dumplings, of which there were three in a serve. The dumplings were quite flavoursome but rather small, but still a good start to the evening.

Next up was Le Bangkok where we tried the tofu pad thai. Pad thai is one of our favourite noodle dishes, and this was a good one. There was a good amount of tofu which was contrasted by the freshness of the bean shoots and spring onion. I would definitely consider going back to the Le Bangkok restaurant to get some more.

I decided it was important to try a variety of cuisines, so after hitting up the Chinese and Thai stalls, I decided to move on to Sri Lankan. Lankan Tucker was there, and watching them use their skills to make kothu roti was enough to make me salivate. Unfortunately they only had chicken kothu roti, so I had to settle for a pan roll, but this was pretty damn good. Infact it was so good that it went down before I could get a photo.

We then moved on to our second area up on the hill of Birrarung Marr. This was definitely the premium area with both Kong and Chin Chin setting up shop here. Both had long lines, but I was adamant that we had to try at least one. Given that I still haven’t been to Kong, we decided to try their famous buns. Let me tell you, they were definitely worth the wait. I had the peanut butter salt and pepper tofu bun, with pickled mustard crushed peanuts, chilli mayonnaise and some fresh coriander to cut through it all. It was amazing and I could have eaten ten of them, but I forced myself to exercise some self control and stopped at just one.

And needless to say it would have been sacrilegious for me to walk past an Indian stall and not indulge in any Indian street food, so I made a stop at Overdosa. This was an all vego stall so I had a full menu to choose from, and I opted for the Bombay Burger. This was an aloo bonda (or spiced potato patty) in a vada pav roll (sweet milk bun), which was liberally slathered with tomato sauce and garnished with fresh green chilli. Definitely took me back to my Indian street food roots...

 

 

And of course we had to finish with dessert. Whilst the majority of the crowds flocked to the Gelato Messina stall, we opted for crème brulee at the Brulee Cart. We had a Dulce de Loco crème brulee which was a cardamom spiced custard sitting on a bed of poached pears and topped with some salted caramel popcorn. Unfortunately our crème brulee standards are pretty high, and whilst the flavours worked well together, the custard seemed a little runnier than we would have liked it. Still we polished it off quite easily, so I definitely wouldn’t call it all bad.

All in all it was a great evening. Perhaps some tips for people going next year:

Go on a weekday, go early in the season, and get there by 6pm at the latest. The people who went at about 7pm on the last Friday almost gave up waiting in hour long queues.

Take cash. There are only a handful of Citibank ATMs and they have massive queues.

See if you can get yourself into a marquee to secure a seat. This year both the Citibank and The Age marquees were available. The Citibank marquee required you to show your card, and The Age marquee required pre registration for subscribers.

And most importantly, go with an empty stomach. There is so much food, and it would be a sin not to make the most of it!