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I thought this place was called Mr. Hyde. Which I considered appropriate because it’s taken over the space formerly occupied by Dr.Jekyll. Mr Hive is where Gordon Ramsay opened his much-vaunted but short-lived restaurant called Maze as part of the Crown complex.

In June 2012, I plan to fly to New York, go straight to the Oyster Bar in the bowels of Grand Central station and slowly pick out a few dozen oysters. Maybe, half a dozen Cape Breton from Nova Scotia, definitely Kumamoto from California, some Shigoku from Washington [state that is] and some Cuttyhunk from Massachusetts.

I guess the word ‘jail’ must have been lurking in the back of my mind when I was deciding where to go for a Friday lunch with my lawyers. Maybe that’s why I chose the Flower Drum, a former favourite eatery where I hadn’t been much in recent years.

It’s a conversation we have almost every week as we head out on our Saturday dinner date.

It was almost enough to drive a man to drink. And to add to the frustration it was all because I wanted to drink some non-alcoholic wine in some unfamiliar American restaurants. On a recent trip to Los Angeles and New York I took along a few bottles of my trusty Edenvale sparkling cuvee and Shiraz.

I know I have bored table guests witless – especially Mrs. Nosebag – whenever the subject of oysters comes up. She is especially tolerant seeing that she doesn’t eat oysters. She has tried. In fact is fascinated by the raptures of the true oyster lover. Just doesn’t like them. I put her in the same category as the ‘professional virgin’. Tried it once and didn’t like it.

Okay, Okay. Don’t remind me. I know I wrote the book The Derryn Hinch Diet. Many people (who hadn’t read it) claimed the only two ingredients were soup and white wine. Having heard of the Fit for Life diet they dubbed mine the ‘pissed for life’ die.

I know it is a religious fable but in this modern, fast-food, preservative-laden world we live in millions of people in the western world have become – or are in dire danger of becoming – pillars of salt.

The Yarra Valley has a reputation for good wines (especially whites and ‘champagne’) and food and has had since Moet & Chandon set up in this upstart vineyard region in the 1980s. See the archived travel feature on how it got started.

In recent months I have not bought a loaf of bread at the supermarket. Used to buy sourdough and store it in the freezer.

This has to be one of the best heat and food cooking inventions ever made. They started in Mexico. There, they were made from clay. They look like a giant clay pumpkin with a wide mouth and a three foot chimney.

When I was a kid we had a “roast dinner" every Sunday. It was lunch-time but it was called a “roast dinner.”

Confession time. And it IS a confession for a food critic and diet book author. I have become a nibbler. I sit in restaurants and order a few entrees. I rarely get to the main course. Not interested in a main course that is the size of a horse.

I rashly (‘scuse the pun) bought a slab of what they called “Virginian Leg Ham” at the supermarket recently. A “ selected portion trimmed of fat and smoked for extra flavour”.

Critic’s Note: It is unusual for a food and drink critic to put a Postscript at the top of a review but since this Bourbon article was first written several things have happened.

To steal from TW3 David Frost’s satirical TV show from the 1960s: That Was The Year That Was. It’s time to make some foodie observations on 2010.

Just realised that it’s been a long time since I posted a Hungry Hinch review. Not that I haven’t been eating a lot in that time. Far from it. And from around the world: from the Rockpool in Melbourne to the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central in New York,

Strange place to find your culinary nirvana: In the bowels of Grand Central Station. To be pedantic, it was actually in a curved ceilinged cavern in Grand Central Terminal. Grand Central Station – despite what they say in the movies -- is actually a post office. But nirvana it certainly was.

She ordered scrambled eggs on toast. We were dining at one of New York’s most famous restaurants –with a menu that featured everything from steak tartar, made at the table, to oysters from Prince Edward Island and a roasted prime rib of beef. And she ordered scrambled eggs on toast. At Sardi’s

Eureka! I have found it. The perfect diet. Would you believe, an idyllic diet? In Hawaii? It’s gonna cost ya (as they say in the USA) but it is worth it. The expense is actually not in the food itself. This is a paradise for fresh, cheap, seafood. It’s just getting here that bruises the bank balance.

Confession time. I am a creature of habit. So is Mrs. Nosebag when it comes to dining out. There’s a standard joke amongst our friends that we apply the ‘One Kilometre Rule’ when deciding where to eat.

Lan Kwai Fong is not a restaurant. It’s a tiny cobblestone hillside lane filled with bars, nightclubs and restaurants that truly is the centre of nightlife in Hong Kong.

I was really impressive with my dinner guest on the way to dinner at “Deux Magot” just off the famous Blvd. Ste Germaine.

The Poms are eternal optimists. They hadn’t won The Ashes in yonks but each campaign the Fleet Street writers talked them up as a real chance. Especially in 2005 when the omnipotent Aussies got done in a one-dayer by the world’s lowest-ranking team, Bangladesh.

I knew it was a good luck sign. An omen. I went to Nammos for lunch at the glorious Psarou Beach in Mykonos and there on the paper table cloth the name of the restaurant was spelled out in Scrabble tiles. N 1 A 1 M 3 M 3 O 1 S 1.

I learned something culinary on my first visit to Athens. I have loved Greek food for years. Taramasalata, saganaki, the way they do lamb cutlets, and Greek salads. (See my Hungry Hinch review of Remvi on Toorak Road in South Yarra which sadly closed mid- 2005. Although their new restaurant in Williamstown is still going gangbusters.)

I ate superb seafood in Greece and thought of that song about Molly Malone.

It was in Acapulco, Mexico. We were sitting on the balcony of the Las Brisas Hotel watching a blood red sunset. I was a callow youth in my twenties and I was there on my honeymoon with my first wife, Lana Wells, on the way from Sydney and Tahiti and, ultimately back to New York where I lived.

I The internecine warfare between New York and Los Angeles makes the jibes and rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne look like a lovefest.

I had a strange, nostalgic, moment when I went back to my old stomping ground of New York recently. Went to the Journos’ pub on West 43rd Street, opposite the famous New York Times building in which I used to work.

A story against myself. Yet another one. About twenty years ago I was offered shares in a new, adventurous Aussie movie called Crocodile Dundee. I scoffed at it and turned it down.

Before the banks shut me down and I owned things like the Macedon Ridge vineyard on Mt. Macedon, Victoria, and several places in Hawaii I used to holiday in Kaua’i for several months every year.

In 1983 John Bertrand and a band of Aussie bandits came from behind, from an impossible position, and won the America’s Cup off Newport, Rhode Island. They won a trophy that had been welded into the trophy room of the New York Yacht Club for more than 130 years.

As I have mentioned in dispatches before, my family did not have a great deal of experience in restaurant dining as I grew up. In fact we had none.

How wrong can you be? Decades ago as a young restaurant reviewer – just back in Sydney from New York – I slagged a place called The Summit.

I am not going to pretend to sound sophisticated even though I have eaten in thousands of restaurants over the years and written a diet and recipe book. I am now going to review a dish that I could not guarantee that I could even spell until a couple of weeks ago.

In recent months, and even through the indulgent Christmas and New Year eatathons Sir Hinchalot has increasingly concentrated on eating seafood.

There are some eating-houses on this planet where you know exactly what you are going to get just by the name of them.

The culinary memory invoked by the dinner menu here had been cobwebbing in the Hinch brain for decades. Close to fifty years.

Have you ever seen those middle-aged men in restaurants, usually dim ones (I mean the restaurants), and they are holding the menu at arm’s length?

Sometimes you like the food but you don’t like the seating arrangements or the waiter. Sometimes you like the décor and other times you feel like shouting ‘Send for the ambience immediately’. And sometimes you are put off a place even before you get there because of somebody else’s rating of it on the Internet.

I love palindromes. I married one. Her name was Eve. The most famous palindrome in Australia – where words spell the same in reverse -- is the South Australian resort called Glenelg

Amidst all the glitz and so-called glamour of the Gold Coast (you could translate that as “tacky”) I found a truly classy place. Who would have thunk it. There, amongst all the face lifts and boob jobs and melanomas and skin cancer clinics, I found a very romantic restaurant.

It was the bloody whitebait debate all over again. I was in Brisbane, alone, and, strolling through the city, I found an exciting looking al fresco restaurant.

It is time to go across the water, across cold and turbulent water, to a place that on the surface seems familiar but is disturbingly different.

I love pub food. That may sound strange from a nosebag aficionado who was recently the guest of a generous host who spent $1500 on a dinner for four at a Melbourne Japanese restaurant. It is true, a few bottles of wine cost $500 but that still left $1000 for food – and I don’t eat much at night.

In June 2012, I plan to fly to New York, go straight to the Oyster Bar in the bowels of Grand Central station and slowly pick out a few dozen oysters. Maybe, half a dozen Cape Breton from Nova Scotia, definitely Kumamoto from California, some Shigoku from Washington [state that is] and some Cuttyhunk from Massachusetts.

It’s a nice touch when a menu says: ‘Boat berth available. Booking essential’. But that’s the sort of place Otto is. Sticking out into the harbour on Cowper Wharf. As one observer noted, Otto is the place to see the 'in' people whether it be media moguls, film stars, politicians or the latest bankrupt.

Sometimes you like the food but you don’t like the seating arrangements or the waiter. Sometimes you like the décor and other times you feel like shouting ‘Send for the ambience immediately’. And sometimes you are put off a place even before you get there because of somebody else’s rating of it on the Internet.

One of Channel Nine’s big hopes for the new 2008 was a new prime time reality cooking show called The Chopping Block. The ratings were so bad for the first airing that it seemed destined for the chopping block itself before the season was much older.

There was a rollicking old party song my parents used to sing when I was a kid and the chorus was ‘Otto drives me crazy, so Otto’s gotto go’ I thought of it when dining at Manta on Finger Wharf at the ‘Loo. Otto’s is next door. Otto’s ( see review) was made famous and (for a while owned by) ‘Golden Tonsils’ himself John Laws.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was commenting on a milestone in Australian restaurant dining: the $50 main dish. Of course it was in Sydney.

There has been a revolution in Australians’ drinking habits in recent times – and I’m not talking about the dramatic decrease in the wine imbibing of the Hungry Hinch.

Years ago, when I was hosting the Midday show on the Nine Network, we did it live every day for 90 minutes from noon until 1.30 p.m. from the Channel Nine Sydney headquarters in Willoughby on Sydney’s North Shore.

I dined at Otto’s on the “Loo’s” famous finger wharf recently. Ordered three oysters for starters. Sure they had some lumpfish roe eggs on them but they cost four dollars each. That makes them 48 dollars a dozen. I thought I was back in London!

The word “Eureka” has been in the news lately for obvious reasons. This year is the 150th anniversary of the rebellion at the Eureka Stockade and there has been a dubious musical called Eureka.

For more years than I probably want to remember I have been signing off my daily radio programme with the expression: “Thank your mother for the rabbits”.

When I was a kid, all those eons ago, we would drive every Sunday in the Morris Minor to my grandparents’ house in Opunake, New Zealand.

My casual weekend lunch with a couple of close friends at Nick’s at Darling Harbour was saved in the nick of time.

When I first arrived in Australia forty years ago the biggest buzz was to go to Bondi Beach. I had never seen such a stretch of sand.

The Sir Hinchalot tastebuds must be doing something right. In recent months I have pulled on the nosebag at several new restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney.

It was really the fault of Marlene Dietrich. The sultry German bi-sexual actress and singer was visiting Sydney in the early 1960s and there wasn’t (legally) much going on in the late-night food and drink department.

There was one defining moment when I realised I was truly back in Sydney for the annual Sir Hinchalot survey. Not so much a case of the Good the Bad and the Ugly but the New, the Old and the Should Be Dead.

There is an area of New York city called Tribeca. T-r-i-b-e-c-a. You’ve probably read it in a Tom Wolfe novel and not understood what it means.

We’ve heard about star treatment for radio and television personalities but even by Sydney’s starstruck standards this seemed slightly excessive.

Many, many moons ago, when Sir Hinchalot was a long way from being knighted and -- as a callow youth with few social graces and an absence of table manners for pubic dining -- he went on his first serious dinner date in Sydney.

I thought this place was called Mr. Hyde. Which I considered appropriate because it’s taken over the space formerly occupied by Dr.Jekyll. Mr Hive is where Gordon Ramsay opened his much-vaunted but short-lived restaurant called Maze as part of the Crown complex.

I guess the word ‘jail’ must have been lurking in the back of my mind when I was deciding where to go for a Friday lunch with my lawyers. Maybe that’s why I chose the Flower Drum, a former favourite eatery where I hadn’t been much in recent years.

It’s a conversation we have almost every week as we head out on our Saturday dinner date.

About 40 years ago a new culinary buzz went around New York – which is pretty big news in a place where it is not easy to impress. A revolutionary new restaurant had opened on 2nd Avenue and it was packing them in.

The 35th floor of the Sofitel Hotel at the ‘Paris end of Collins Street’ has always had a touch of This is Your Life for me.

It started with a gloating trans-Tasman phone call from my sister, Barbara, on her birthday earlier in the same week as mine. ‘Guess what I had for my birthday? Whitebait fritters’.

When I was a young BB&B Police reporter in Sydney, brash (I thought brilliant) boozy and broke I shared a huge old house at Fairlight, near Manly, with other BB & B journos.

Super chef Shannon Bennett is a bit like some of his signature dishes: exciting, visionary, unpredictable and not easy to slot into a category.

Time to come the raw prawn because prawns are in the news right now. Or at least one giant one is. The Big Prawn that looms over the Pacific Highway in Ballina, New South Wales. Apparently The Big Prawn is on the nose. The owner wants to get rid of the prawn that spawned all those other kitsch monsters like the Big Banana, and the Big Pineapple and the Big Russ Hinze ( no, I made that one up).

It must be tough when you’re the owner or chef at a popular restaurant and you are best known for one thing when you know your establishment is much more than that. In the theatre world it’s called type casting.

About 25 years ago, being such an expert at trendspotting and social mores, I decided that Albert Park was going to be the next South Yarra. I bought an Architectural award-winning modern palace in Merton Street – the only three-storeyed building in the area -- and awaited the gentrification.

On the same day I heard the sad culinary news that a fine, new restaurant called Seagrass had closed for Easter, but had failed to emulate a Christ-like resurrection on Easter Monday, I re-discovered a great restaurant still flourishing in the same Melbourne wining and dining complex.

I last mentioned Nobu, the four-letter word synonymous around the world with exquisite Japanese food, after a dinner prepared there last year by Nobuyuki Matsuhisa himself.

The last place on earth I would want to have dinner is at Attica. The last time I was there, there were 43 dead bodies around the place which was a smouldering ruin and the joint was crawling with cops.

It was an innocent question –despite the ever-present but stupid internecine rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. Which city started pub dining?

About 25 years ago I had a Hinch Hunch. Albert Park was about to become the new South Yarra. Real estate prices would zoom, restaurants would blossom and people would flock to the great fruit and vegie shop, the real butcher, and the bread shop.

Every veteran crime reporter in Melbourne knows the location of the Water Rat even if they haven’t kept up with its myriad of name changes.

When a place serves you a simple appetiser – a bowl of olives – and you think ‘these are the best olives that I have ever eaten in my life’ then you know you are in for a helluva Italian meal.

It was yet another of those pointless ‘Desert Island list’ games. Which five albums would you take with you if you were shipwrecked? Which three books? Who would you like to be cast away with?

With Mrs. Nosebag being a vegequarian and the Hungry Hinch edging into his dotage the quest for good seafood restaurants is endless. For me the days are long gone when I’d order a huge steak –and, when asked how I would like it cooked, would say ‘just walk it through the kitchen.’

When it comes to dining out The Fawkner is an open and shut case. Well, actually it’s more of a shut and open case because it has closed it doors and re-opened, and changed menus and management, so many times in recent years you tend to wipe it from your speed dial.

The advance blurb trumpeting the arrival of Guillaume Brahimi’s entry into the Melbourne restaurant scene was over-the-top even by Crown’s standards.

Sometimes you like the food but you don’t like the seating arrangements or the waiter. Sometimes you like the décor and other times you feel like shouting ‘Send for the ambience immediately’. And sometimes you are put off a place even before you get there because of somebody else’s rating of it on the Internet.

At the start of a new year it is worth looking back at three of my favourite eateries of 2007. All had superb food. All should go on the list for special occasions. But I found one thing at each of them that niggled me.

You don’t usually associate food with the word ‘fog’. I mean, there was Phineas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days and Heathcliff staggering through the mist and fog in Wuthering Heights. It even had a Royal connection. Princess Anne’s first husband, Capt. Mark Phillips, was known as Fog because he was so thick.

This is going to sound harsh and uncouth but you never eat in your hotel restaurant unless it is pissing with rain or you can’t be stuffed going anywhere else.

To understand my fascination with different sorts of food you have to go back to my childhood across the ditch in New Zealand. The culinary ignorance of that childhood.

Some years ago on the Hungry Hinch I wrote about a welcome culinary phenomenon: the excellent restaurant burgeoning at the back of a run-down pub. Suddenly, chicken in a basket (with a slice of pineapple), fries, and roast beef sandwich counter lunches were out. The spartan bistros serving overcooked vegetables and chicken parmigiana were also passé.

It is really encouraging when you go back to a restaurant that you haven’t dined at in five years and the food is not only as good as you remembered it. It’s better.

In these days of internecine warfare it was a big risk transporting the idea, the talents, the reputation of one of Australia’s best-known chefs from Sydney to Melbourne.

It was a bit of an exaggeration from Mrs. Nosebag. But I knew what she meant. She was wondering why they weren’t more seafood restaurants in Australia. Especially along the East Coast.

I know this may upset the increasingly gentrified suburb of Richmond, which is becoming as trendy and Yuppie-filled as Albert Park, but memories of darker times die hard.

Back in the days of the eponymous HINCH current affairs programme my producer, Dermot O’Brien, and I would duck out for a Friday lunch with the end-of-week programme almost locked away.

When you’ve been reviewing restaurants for thirty years as The Hungry Hinch and you get invited to yet another restaurant opening with the rent-a-crowd, some canapés, and usually a pink or green or purple drink concoction proffered at the door you are entitled to think: Am I getting jaded?

This place is so good you tend to use it, lazily, as a yardstick. Things are ‘Circa-like’ or ‘reminds me of Circa’. Or ‘tries to be like Circa’. It is an understandable example to hold up. Because it is so good and so consistent.

The gauntlet we had to run to get to the Taxi dining room the first time was pretty off-putting. I almost felt like calling myself a taxi and getting out of there.

It is a combination that can be fraught with disaster when the Hungry Hinch virtually stops drinking – except for a weekly glass of a good red for a weekend lunch or dinner – and therefore can drive anywhere again without risk of being .05.

We used to eat there a lot eons ago when it was the much-vaunted Jean-Jacques by the Sea. It was a sequel to the famous Jean-Jacques and the menu and food impressive, if a trifle expensive for its time.

The Yarra Valley has a reputation for good wines (especially whites and ‘champagne’) and food and has had since Moet & Chandon set up in this upstart vineyard region in the 1980s. See the archived travel feature on how it got started.

There’s one thing wrong with Oyster – a new upmarket eatery in mid-town Melbourne. It’s not the food, not the ambience, not the stylish look of the place, not the service, not the location. It’s the name. When I see a place called Oyster I am expecting a mollusc and seafood bonanza. A culinary trip to Davy Jones’ Locker.

I remember my first visit to the MCG for a Grand Final. It was 1978. I had just arrived in Melbourne to doing the morning shift on “foive ta noine, foine and moild” 3XY. I should remember it. I got thrown out.

They say that the two best days in your life are when you buy a boat – and when you sell it. I think about that a lot when I visit Riva on the Marina and boat storage stack at the top end of St. Kilda.

Recently, I had one of the best meals I have eaten in any restaurant, anywhere, for about five years. And it wasn’t in one of those raved about, swanky places in Sydney or Melbourne.

I guess I shouldn’t be confessing this –seeing that this section of Hinch.net is known as The Hungry Hinch and I regularly review restaurants around Australia and around the world.

Let’s say from the outset I hate tourist attraction restaurants. Especially revolving ones. They are usually there for the view and not the food.

It is always great to find a special restaurant and then go back there again and again for special occasions.

It is always a bit hard writing about the plethora of restaurants in the Crown complex and along the banks of the Yarra. Some are owned by Crown and the space is leased out. Some are not.

I am not always impressed (some would say conned) by opulent restaurants, promising everything, in classy five-star hotels.

One thing that is great about dining in Sydney or Melbourne is the fact that there are some great eateries hidden away in small streets and cobbled laneways.

The number eight is a lucky one for Chinese people. I had a friend who paid a fortune for a number plate with that number in the licence plate she stuck on her Rolls Royce.

I must admit I was a mite tremulous dining at Pure South. Mainly because it was in the middle of a shitfight with the Premier of Tasmania and the Tasmanian media.

There is a breed of people in Melbourne who rarely (never) cross the Yarra River. I’ll confess that I am one of them. MY nosebag goes on in South Yarra and Toorak and Prahran. It works both ways. There are people in Carlton and Fitzroy and Brunswick who would never visit my side of town.

THE DOG’S BAR St. Kilda Melbourne People are creatures of habit. In the Hinch travel section recently I talked about Double Bay in Sydney. But, when it comes to restaurants, in Melbourne, there are people who only dine in Carlton and there are people in Toorak who would not cross the Yarra. There are the South Yarra aficionados and the St Kilda brigade.

My memory must be failing me. Old age. A senior moment. I thought I reviewed the Belgian Beer Cafe several years ago when my father and sister came to Australia from New Zealand for my appearance on This is Your Life.

This is an extraordinary place. And an extraordinary bunch of people. It sits at the best end of Richmond (virtually in Hawthorn) with lots of glass and terraces right on the banks of the Yarra. Not hard to see why it is one of my friend’s favourite nosheries.

Some time ago I amused a few people by describing how I took a saucepan to a local oriental restaurant to pick up some noodle soup for lunch. Shades, as I said, of the days as a kid when Dad would take us to the local “chows” on a Sunday night to fill our saucepans with chop suey, sweet and sour pork and chicken chow mien.

This is a first for the Hungry Hinch column. This is the third time I have reviewed the idiosyncratic Melbourne Japanese restaurant called Jamon. But it has been a peripatetic journey. Jamon One was a shoebox in Prahran. Jamon Two was a cavernous and overly ambitious adventure in Richmond.

It is an enigma. Either a brilliant architectural masterstroke or something put together by a drunken Leggo aficionado or some bloke who was mesmerised by his Meccano set as a kid.

About twenty years ago I was offered a new job. Not a small one. I was offered the job of Premier of Victoria.

It was the bloody whitebait debate all over again. In the charming old town of Beechworth, Victoria, in the middle of Ned Kelly country, I felt I had got involved in a holdup.

This is the Bot revisited. I reviewed the new Botanical for brunch in 2003 – which was great -- but this is, literally, a crackling good story.

In a past life, not far from The Curry Club, I used to do the HINCH programme on Channel Seven. Our studios were also in South Melbourne.

I used to have a corny old foodie joke about that “acquired” taste for a Middle Eastern dish called Falafel.

In the main street of Woodend, in the magestic Mt. Macedon region of country Victoria, they have reconstructed and beautifully restored the famous old Victoria Hotel near the clock tower in that charming town at the base of the ranges.

Nearly thirty years ago a culinary character was born. His name was The Hungry Hinch. He first appeared, reviewing restaurants, for The Sun newspaper in Sydney. His debut was made a bit easier because a bloke named Derryn Hinch was the new Editor of the paper.

Several decades ago, in the midst of some deluded fiscal madness, I opened a New York style restaurant in Melbourne and called it Sardi’s – as a tribute to the great and famous show biz restaurant on Broadway in New York.

A current, almost daily, personal ritual in Queen’s Road, Melbourne, brings back memories of Sunday nights in thousands of Aussie households in cities and towns across the country in the Fifties and Sixties.

The Sir Hinchalot tastebuds must be doing something right. In recent months I have pulled on the nosebag at several new restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney.

Before I talk about Mario’s I have to talk about a cook named Graham Kerr. A circuitous route but it will become apparent.

Recently I went to a cocktail party for the Seven Network which was held at Federation Square in the heart of the Melbourne CBD.

Recently, I was well fed at Fed at the Fed.

A few years ago I was in Kyoto in Japan doing research on a new novel.

A toffy address: “Reserve at the Victorian Wine Precinct”. Enough to make you do a runner.

You know a place has made it when it is talked about with a single word or abbreviation and all the trendies and foodies know exactly what you are talking about.

Haven’t talked about breakfast much lately. Should have. Breakfast, brunch, weekend lunch, is often the only meal that some folk spend out. Especially on Sundays.

I know it looks like a tinfoil tantrum. I know it cost about 250 million dollars more than it should have.

This review will have dollops of Melbourne memories because twenty years ago I lived in Albert Park. Not far from the famous VicAv trendy noshery on Victoria Avenue.

As the song says: I think I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so”.

And for this the last Sir Hinchalot of the year it is only fitting that I found one of the best restaurants in Australia to dine at.

This time of year -- the Spring Racing Carnival – is always a time for good food and good wine and good company and sexy outfits and foxy women and that’s just at the track from Saturday to Saturday.

To be honest I am not sure how this happened. If you remember Sir Hinchalot musings from the past or read the old Hungry Hinch reviews in the distant past you would be pretty aware that I am not a fish person. Not a fishy person. Especially not a diner who enjoys really fishy tasting fish – although I will eat raw salmon or kingfish or tuna at a sushi bar any day.

Anybody who has ever been in the restaurant business knows that these days it is tough. It is hard to make a real quid. Long hours. Demanding chefs. The end of the long business lunches since FBT. A shrinking dollar and how far it can go makes people more prone to fast food outlets and takeaways.

A confession this morning. It is true I lived through the Swinging Sixties in New York. Lived through Timothy Leary days of "tune in, turn on and drop out". And even though a friend was a friend of Judy Collins and we sometimes had together and even though another friend owned the Bitter End in Greenwich Village I did not join the Flower Pot generation. Did not wear flowers in my hair when I went to San Francisco. Did not even smoke Pot.

One of Steven Sondheim's most successful musicals on Broadway was called A Little Night Music. I took one of Australia's best known newspaper baron's to see it and at interval her snarled that "this isn't a musical...it's a bloody operetta" and we left.

I had a friend visiting recently from Adelaide and she was complaining that Melbourne doesn’t have a lot of great bistros. Not like Rundle Street she said. And I almost agreed with her and I was wrong.

This is going to be the strangest Sir Hinchalot restaurant review in years because I am going to rave about a miniscule but brilliant restaurant and I am not going to tell you where it is.

It has long been a Sir Hinchalot theory that show me a tourist restaurant with a view and I’ll show you a place where the food aint that crash hot.

A personal flashback to about thirty years ago. A much younger and much slimmer and more impoverished and even callow version of Sir Hinchalot was working and existing in New York.