Philip White’s confused again – this time it’s Jamie Oliver’s Adelaide Italian restaurant and the notion of eating/drinking local.
A blizzard of orange and brown wine ordnance smattered in this general direction the last time one of our blokes stuck his head over the parapet and dared to mention the new fashion for extremely long wine lists. These often include little or no traditional Australian wine but devote many pages to the confusing European preferences of hipster somms out in the Wild East.
This uprising started there and is quickly sweeping west and north. It respects no borders. The mapping room sans frontiers hadn’t even begun to get its head round the rapidity of this spread when next thing we know we’ve got Jamie Oliver opening his Italian joint in Adelaide with an all-Italian list. Adelaide had one of its cute little frissons of aghastness.
I know; I know: it’s just a short-term hiccup in a long spaghetti western. They just hadn’t got the Australian bit working yet. Jamie promised to do something about it the minute Tom Koutsantonis MP, Treasurer, Minister for Finance, Minister for State Development, Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy and Minister for Small Business re-aimed a well-triggered comment Jamie’s way on Twitter the night we were discussing my boss’s article about the new joint on InDaily.
Wouldna been too hard to get a follow-up note from Leon Bignell MP, Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Minister for Forests, Minister for Racing, Minister for Recreation and Sport, and Minister for Tourism, but that can wait.
Jamie would have done it nevertheless. Put up an Italian wine list, I mean. A bit like Clive Palmer, Jamie can do whatever he can afford to do.
He’s squeezed a couple of Langhorne Creek wines on his list since then, and some Victorians.
It’s not as if mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. It’s just that this bloke thinks Italian food’s the best sort he knows so he’s likely, I reckon, to like the wine that evolved with it.
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Since I don’t have television, I missed all the miracles you saw Jamie do there, but I remember him being all over Sainsbury’s UK chain years back, just as he’s everywhere now in Woolworths Australia.
And as Jamie’s Italian opens in Adelaide, he obviously sees some value in his image also being all over Woolies. Like many of our winemakers, Adelaide’s most touted new arrival is happy in both roles.
While I doubt very much that Jamie is your actual Italian, like he says he wishes he was, he really is something of a thing right now. So what’s the big deal about him opening an outpost of his chain of Italian restaurants at 2 King William Street, City?
As I see it, it’s a clever Pommie pub lad comes south. He invades through the television sets and the biggest half of the supermarket duopoly that specialises in the sorts of TV food and drink that I presume Jamie wouldn’t have in his shop. And he opens an Italian joint in the front bar of the old art deco building where David Wynn used to bank his Coonawarra money. David was born in Florentino’s. That’s Italian, isn’t it?
Jamie’s got just as much right to do that as Macca’s or Colonel Sadness, or Maggie or Saskia Beer, for that matter. The English have been taking colonial cash home from North Terrace since they invented this colony. And we should be grateful this one’s chosen Italy to copy, rather than Essex.
Because it looks so much like a leg, Italy’s probably easier to remember than all those Australian bush ambiguities masquerading as overlapping places, regions, provinces, districts and areas – places Prime Minister Howard always referred to as the “regional areas”, the “provincial regions”, or “regional districts”.
Even without a famous Englishman coming to Adelaide to teach us about Italy, Australia’s got some baffling stuff to sort out about regional labelling, and it’s not all wine.
Take the Beers. When you have an operation which starts off as regional with a few pheasants in a shed and you end up with a successful paté made from chook livers and you co-operate with the ever-helpful duopoly, it can seem harder and harder to keep track of just how regional some of these things are actually expected to be.
Tom Koutsantonis isn’t Italian, either, but there he was on Twitter kindly offering Jamie free consulting about the difference between Italy and South Australia. Who knows? To Tom, Jamie might seem Scottish.
Which brings me round to what appears to be called regionality, which is a sort of movement against movement in the sense that one could feel morally superior, even sanctimonious, if one ate only food grown and made within, say, six hours’ walk of one’s home.
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Before this Italian restaurant thing, I seem to recall Jamie occasionally being a bit warm to this local food notion. Obviously the Kangarilla adherent might find herself a bit short on salt and pepper (no local salt mine) just for starters, but strict regionality can get much more austere when you stretch it past beer and wine to include music.
"Maybe it’s Woolies’ determination to get everything tasting all regionally that gets them attracting famous experts like Maggie and Saskia and Jamie."
To stretch my boundaries, in my last trip to Woolies, I deliberately abandoned the regionality pretence and bought Italian: some Always Fresh Italian Rustic Crackers. From the Artisan Collection, these were of the Garlic & Sea Salt variety. They came from a spot where I seem to recall a cut-out idol of Jamie hovering, but in retrospect, I can’t be sure whether or not these are Jamie’s personal selection of Italian Rustic Crackers.
Given his new role as sort of Italian envoy since the retirement of the mighty Amanda Vanstone, and the handsome packaging of these Italian dry biscuits, customers should be forgiven for thinking there was some sort of a Jamie/Woolies/Italy synergy happening. In Woolies, Jamie speaks ex cathedra.
The crackers were packaged, of course, in black, which is the new colour for premium biscuits. Biscuits have waited until every other packaging industry had a decade or two in the black before they patiently took their turn to pass it on.
The fine print says these crackers were “carefully crafted in the Abruzzo region of Italy … using traditional artisan methods” – like cooking, I presume – but it also says “Made in Italy from local and imported ingredients”, which turn out to be “wheat flour, potato, vegetable oil, extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, yeast, garlic, parsley, malt and flavours”.
And what do they taste like? I reckon they taste like some of those brown bits that you hope go a bit hard around the rim of a shepherd’s pie made with instant mashed potato, whatever that is.
Which sorta indicates to me the crackers could have been made without all those other exotic ingredients in one of the Pheasant Farm factories in Australia and still come out just as Italiany as these ones from bloody Abruzzo. Santa friggin Maria!
I reckon that if you give Jamie the sort of regard his presence in Woolworths shares with the Always Fresh Artisan Collection and the Beers, you have no right to complain about him having only Italian wines on his restaurant list. He can even call it an Italian restaurant if he wants. Maybe he’s an expert at making things seem Italian to a certain group of people.
Maybe it’s Woolies’ determination to get everything tasting all regionally that gets them attracting famous experts like Maggie and Saskia and Jamie. Everyone’s in this together.
I’d be very surprised if Woolworths isn’t already making “Italian” wines at its big Dorrien Barossa refinery. Who knows whose nose will get the credit for them? I’ll bet it won’t be Woolworths, which knows how much Jamie’s image in its shop improves the public perception of its droll potato biscuits from Abruzzo. Or somewhere.
It’s name rich, down there in Woolies Gulch. Just a matter of keeping the product up.
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