A weekend of good finds

I’m fully mobile again. Stitches came out on Friday and the pain is subsiding. Baba and I struck gold with some great local finds.

First was lunch on Saturday when we tried a new pizza joint that’s just opened a couple of minute’s walk away. Pizza Mario has a tacky name and kind of chain pizza joint logo and imaging, but the pizze that came out of their wood oven were magnificent. Yokohama friends no doubt remember il Gabbiano on Isezaki mall. Mario’s pizze are almost exactly the same as those yummy ones that we had for luch almost every weekend. That kind of napolitan pizza with a soft, thin base, chewy crust and very high quality lumps of mozzarella is a real rarity in Australia. I note that pizza mario belongs to some Italian accreditation scheme – the only such establishment in Australia. Japan, on the other hand, had a couple of dozzen such members. Perhaps that says a lot about the Japanese obession with certificates and “licences” as proof of some kind of authenticity – particulary where exotic European food and wine is concerned.

Our second find was a little courtyrad cafe attached to the back of a cute little flower shop in trendy Paddington that we’ve walked past hundreds of times. (For the life of me I can’t remember the name of the place and it’s not coming up on a google search or in the yellow pages….) The flower shop is quaint and quite European with “softer” colours and flower styles than the typical garish Sydney gerberas and birds of paradise. The cafe is good because they do simple lunches cheaply, fairly good coffee AND dogs are welcome so we can take Chai.

The final good find was a fabulous second hand book in Gould’s Books in Newtown. Gould’s is just a big barn with zillions of dusty books stacked floor to ceiling, vaguely sorted according to category but without so much as a nod to trifles such as alphabetical order. When I was writing my honours thesis on China, I went in asking whether they had an English translation of Mao’s Little Red Book. The grumpy, ruffled, bespecticaled, slighlty smelly man with a nicotine-tinged grey beard behind the raised counter (Mr Gould, presumably) nodded and said that there may be a few copies “upstairs, somewhere in the back left-hand corner”. I spent a good two hours looking over shelves that were stacked two-deep and through boxes of books on the floor in the aisles…to no avail. I learned that day that one should never go to Gould’s looking for a particular book, but rather just go in any time when one has a few hours to kill browsing and exploring. Today, Baba found me a great book on flower arranging written by “artist, writer and socialite” Fleur Cowells. It was published in the mid ’80s but Fleur’s arrangements and philosophy are totally contemporary and the book could be reprinted today with little, if any need of updating. It’s brilliantly written with a rather camp, fluffy tone and will hopefully give me lots of inspiration in my efforts to become the best floral designer in the world.