Van
90 Alicia Street,
Athol Park, South Australia
t +61 8 8347 7036
web & email not available
f not available
open 7 days 9.00 am till 7.00 pm, if you want to eat later please ring the restaurant make sure they are open
food What does the western world know about eating? In the Asian kitchen there is a common saying “In the morning eat like a king, at midday eat like a prince and in the evening eat like a princess!”
Good advice indeed and one that governs why these restaurants close so early. It is simply not worth their staying open any longer because the big meak of the day is in the morning.
Van is a bit of a find and let me advise you you need your gps or a good tracker dog to find it, or perhaps I just have a crap sense of direction, which is more iekly the truth! If you drive down Torrens Road the mosque is the street to turn down and from there it is relatively easy……hmmmmmmm! Van is certainly in deepest darkest Blair Athol.
I often wonder why apprentices waste their money on go fast drugs when a teaspoon of MSG would cost next to nothing and have almost the same affect. The end result of MSG in Asian food is two fold; yes it will keep the colour of the green better, but it may well stop you from sleeping with a bigger impact on your adrenaline than a double espresso drunk at 1.00 am!
It was such a pleasure to be able to negotiate a menu change and add tripe to the beef tendon soup and find it arrived as requested.
Having spent a lot of time i China I have come to understand the value of MSG in a way most Westerners would not but this was a soup of unusual quality and intensity that tasted of bones without booster or MSG. It was clear and clean, skimmed of fat, deep with flavour and full of squishy delicious tendon and tripe.
Who doesn’t feel embarrassed to put just $8 on the table for a wonderful bowl of sustenance?
The humility that comes with this simple cheap food always leaves me thinking that the rest of us with our machines that do things, our vacs and all the rest of the paraphernalia we think we need to cook are really just idiots!
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We’ll be exploring their menu further but our friend Andrew Chatway (Chataway IT) who accidentally fell upon the restaurant, whilst lost in deepest darkest Blair Athol has tried many things and pronounced the excellent and we will be exploring their menu further. Brains in broth are not on the menu but I bet they have them!
kid friendly there are no damned chicken nuggest on their menu and I had a delightful conversation with a six year old sitting at the next table who explained succinctly to the waiter that he didn’t want any raw onon! Yea!
Be warned, whilst we don't exactly enjoy kids late at night in fine dining restaurants (or screaming babies) we are on the war path against those restaurants who invest so little in the dining habits of the next generation they serve them nothing but crap! The children who ate at Mistress were served miniature portions of anything on the menu are now the gourmands of this generation.
A young Mr Heddle on his brief return from the states, where he is now a stockbroker, volunteered that next time I was in New York (don’t I wish) he wanted to take me out for dinner. At eight his Saturdaynight dinner would be a rare kangaroo fillet with a fresh oyster sauce and a Grand marnier Soufflé, so I knew immediately where he would want to take me. “Let me guess the restaurant,” I couldn’t resist teasing him and loving that he was so utterly confident I would have absolutely no idea. “Le Cirque!” to which answered “ You’re a witch! But it’s true because your Grand Marnier Soufflé is better than theirs!” Probably not true because memory and place plays such an important role in how food tastes but it was utterly charming and a huge reward for the time we invested in our youngest patrons!
