good pig

Places that I think offer good pig products

pork belly

Once you go black you never go back, right? Bistro Guillaume, now temporarily closed (they're moving somewhere else in the Crown complex that has outdoor seating facilities), has the loveliest pork belly I've ever tried. The meat is juicy piggy wonderful. The skin is wafer skin and crackly as anything you could ever want. It's served very simply: you get some puy lentils (always a good friend of meat), apple, fennel and pureed potato. This is everything I could ever want in roast pork.

URL: http://www.bistroguillaume.com.au/
Physical: the ether

blood sausage

I'm going to come right out and be a bit of a snob and say that unless you dig the 'extras', you shouldn't claim to be a fan of pork. Pork is about far more than chops and roast leg and bacon. It's about more than good roast belly, even. My favourite kind of blood sausage, that I've had so far anyway, is morcilla. El Gaucho does a very nice version--crispy charred on the outside from the grill, soft and moist like mudcake on the inside--but my favourite has to be, has to be, MoVida's housemade version. When I had it it was in the middle of winter and they served it with assorted white vegetables: potatoes, parsnip, Jereuselem artichokes. A death row meal.

URL: http://elgaucho.com.au/
Physical: 454 Nicholson St, Fitzroy North

URL: http://www.movida.com.au/
Physical (for the mothership, but too, I'd imagine you could get morcilla at Aqui too): 1 Hosier Lane, Melbourne (just off Flinders St, heading up towards Forum)


other offal

You can get pork liver products--slices of terrine, little tubs of pate loaded up with cognac and other good things--in a bunch of places and usually it's pretty good. Bistro Guillaume had, as an entree, a platter of three kinds of rillette (duck, pork and rabbit) and a terrine, as well as some salted and dried meats.

If you're after a more gutsy offal experience, though, look no further than Dainty Sichuan. Dainty, oh sweet Dainty, used to be in a laneway off Lt Bourke in Chinatown--just up near the Supper Club, if I recall correctly. It offered large serves of nice Sichuan food at a reasonable price with shitty service and a small (by comparison) dining room full of Tsing Tao boxes.

Now, with a larger restaurant a couple of minutes walk from South Yarra train station, it offers nice Sichuan food at a reasonable price with shitty service and a large dining room with a few Tsing Tao boxes stacked in the corner for old time's sake.

I say service is shitty, but it's not as bad as the truly awful Shanghai dumpling place on Tattersal's Lane. Here they place the opened bottle of beer in front of you. In the dumpling shit hole, they slam it down on the table, sometimes unopened, and throw a bottle opener in your direction. Class.

Dainty has an extensive menu that covers all kinds of good things. The Gong Bao chicken is classic Sichuan stuff and if you're in a group you must must must order it. But in terms of pork products, Dainty really hits its stride. The crispy pork belly with assorted mushrooms is lovely. And, yes, the offal--what I've had of it--is really good. I like the pig ears. The slippery, salty pig ears, soft and crunchy at the same time, loaded up with lots of chilli and Sichuan pepper, are everything you could want on a cool evening. Best washed down with beer.

Physical: 176 Toorak Rd, South Yarr

salted and dried

Hands down the winner has to be La Luna Bistro with its selection of hand-cured pork products. The cured fat, cheek, belly were all a spiritual experience. Paired with crispy bread and fresh herbs and good olives and pickled chillies and onions, this is what gods would eat.

URL: http://www.lalunabistro.com.au/
Physical: 320 Rathdowne St, Carlton North

to market to market

Not a restaurant, no. Not sure if it has a URL. I'm told their supplier is some outfit in Carlton or wherever and that this place has a shop front, so maybe they have a website. But the French shop in Queen Victoria Market, right near another favourite of mine: the Swords wine, beer and cider shop. The French shop, whatever their actual name is--I'm too caught up in their display window of cheese and cured pig and white anchovies and everything else that's holy to pay attention to things like signs--sell very good terrines.

Just around the corner from there, the Melbourne Bratwurst people sell very good bratwursts. Get the classic: a bratwurst (I like the hot ones) loaded up with pre-grated cheese, mass produced sauerkraut, onions and your favourite kind of mustard. Laugh not. This is good stuff.

Heading further around, you'll find a couple of the poultry shops selling Daylesford bull-boars sometimes. A bull-boar is a classic Italian-Australian invention: a holy mix of spices and pig intestine and pig meat and steer meat.

URL: http://www.qvm.com.au/
Physical: 513 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne VIC

sausages and butchers elsewhere

Two places spring to mind. Firstly, out in my old 'hood, Rob's British Butchery. Fergus Henderson is stuck all the way over in the UK so this place stands alone, so far as I know, in convincing the good masses that the British know a thing or two about cooking. Rob is the sort of fine chap that will only start making stuff if he can get a serious traditional recipe. He sells all kinds of gear: gammon, white pudding, black pudding (sorry, Rob, I prefer the Spanish version) and pork pies (yes).

Sausages are his specialty, tho'. He has many many many kinds of sausages, most of them pork-themed. Everything I've had--and, back when I was in the SAIL Program and took kids down here every few weeks, I had pretty much all of them--there was really good. His boerwors are better than anything you'd buy anywhere else outside of, I'd guess and hope, South Africa itself. Chorizo? Only good chorizo you'll get anywhere outside of a specialist Spanish or South American place.

Peter Bouchier has outlets in a bunch of places--the David Jones Food Halls at Chadstone and in the CBD and the mothership in Toorak (just down the road from well-regarded Bistro Thierry, which is on my list of places to try (the menu covers so many of my favourite things). He's won some award--the cup of whatever, the judges' choice of whatever--for his sausages and whatever that award was, he deserved it. His sausages are very good. He has a mixture of traditionals (say, toulouse and merguez) and stuff I presume he's made up, like a chicken sausage that included asparagus (sadly, when I asked the sales assistant how that worked, ifit was fresh or pickled or something, she got a bit standoffish, maybe thinking I was rubbishing her product [or maybe she just didn't know]). The service, aside from that little incident, which I attribute to a misunderstanding, is really good. Go into the Toorak store and they don't care if they've never seen you before: you ask for what you want and if it's not out the front, they'll produce it from out the back. An unusual cut? Sure. Give me five minutes. Marrow, freshly scooped from the bone? Sure.

Bouchier is more expensive than your regular butcher, yes, but his products are very good.

It's very easy to get rubbish pork. Too easy. Some places have a good range of cuts--Springvale has a few butchers that focus heavily on pork--but the quality isn't particularly high. Too, some of those Springvale places smell bad. Not encouraging.

You can order black pig or whatever you want through most butchers, but if you just want to walk in and get something to cook that day you're limited. I don't mind Howard's Fine Foods, which is up near Glen Iris railway station. Howard, if that is his real name, sells Otway pork. And I like Otway pork. It's very good and, while it's maybe not the best--black pig, hands down, so far--it's accessible and reasonably priced. Howard is a good man. He might not have the biggest range on display, but he'll get stuff in, produce things (like great slabs of pork belly before MasterChef made it cool) from out the back or order things in. He'll cut meat to whatever size you want. His sausages aren't bad, either.

Otway pork, wherever you get it, is good. I like that it's sold in supermarkets. I mean, I do prefer a good butcher, but if it's not practical for me to get to one--it's night, it's a Sunday, I don't have the time before work to tram it up to bloody Glen Iris--I know I can get some nice cutlets or whatever. 

The Wursthutte, just up near the Coles in Malvern, is good. His specialty is sausages, obviously--he has a fair few varieties of bratwurst and they're all good.

I want to find a butcher that sells good quality pork in a variety of cuts. It's easy enough, perhaps, to get good quality chops and maybe leg roasts. A lot of expensive high street butchers will sell you free range or organic whatever. What I want, tho', is a holistic place: I want to be able to buy meat of noble birth in cuts such as neck and cheek and tail and trotter. 


URL: http://www.robsukproduce.com.au/
Physical: 117 Lonsdale St, Dandenong

URL: http://www.petergbouchier.com.au/
Physical: http://www.petergbouchier.com.au/html/s02_article/article_view.asp?keyword=Our-Locations

Physical (Howard's): 1614 High St, Glen Iris VIC 3146


URL: http://www.wursthutte.com.au/
Physical: 187 Glenferrie Rd, Malvern VIC 3144

Otway pork: http://www.otwaypork.com.au/ (despite what the site says about it being lean--I guess it is--it's nowhere near as lean as most stuff you get in supermarkets and butchers. lean, when it comes to pork, is a bad thing).