Aussie food

What is typical genuine australian food? When you ask the Aussies they get a somewhat wandering gaze and you might get the answer:
- Maybe a steak with chips...
- No that's international
- Ok so then meat pies and sausages
Yeah that seems to be the traditional stuff, pies and sausages.

The Aussies love barbecues. They cook and eat outdoors whenever they can. (Just like Swedes you could say but the difference is that it is not limited to ten sunny days in a year...)
A barbecue here is not necessarily same as grilling meat as in Sweden. It could as well be cooking on a gas driven outdoor stove. In the weekends you can see heaps of people using the public barbecues that you find in every park. i think it's considered a human right to have access to those.


What has happened in the last decades is that the food scene has been more and more inspired and overtaken by the asians. A majority of the Brisbane city restaurants and food courts serve asian food and there are all kinds, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and most of all Japanese. And Japanese food is not only Sushi like home. There are lovely hot Japanese curry dishes.

Some general reflections on Aussie food:
- Australia is a third world country when it comes to cheese. In any swedish grocery store you would find 100 sorts of cheese with various tastes. Here, also in the main stores, you are happy if you find 10 and they all taste the same. And from all lovely cheeses in the world they import Jarlsberg!! The tasteless Norwegian crap :)
- Also bread is something you wouldn't write home about. They're still too stuck in the english heritage with boring toast bread.
- When they make hot dogs they first spread butter on the bread, the bread is also much bigger than what a European is used to. So an aussie hot dog is more bread and less sausage than home.
- Hamburgers are almost like home except for that they love to put beetroots on them!
- They have developed an own sushi style. Sushi here is not just raw fish but can also be e g chicken or ham (not raw of course) or lobster salad. and all sushi places have those.
- The national pride candy is TimTam, a chocolate covered biscuit tasting a little bit like Twix. They're lovely. You can't just eat one. I'm addicted.
- And then of course we have the vegemite. All Aussie's have grown up with it and most of them seem tolike it. It's an extremely salty spread that you have on sandwiches. Tastes like spreading a stock cube over your bread. To be honest, uneatable for a foreigner. It's an acquired taste that you need to be grown up with.







There aren't that many lunch restaurants as in Sweden where you actually sit down and eat. Instead there are food courts everywhere.

You find them in the city and also in all shopping centres. A food court is a number of restaurants that serves take away food but also have a common shared area where you can sit down and eat.
This is good because if you are a group with different preferences you could buy food from different vendors but sit together at same table. For lunch however most people just garb some take away and take back to their offices.




And back to the steaks. Yes the Aussies love steaks and there are a lot of good steak restaurants around. Often they are called something with "hotel" Below steak is from The Railway Club Hotel in Melbourne.

But I still haven't visited Norman Hotel with the wonderful slogan below. Their steaks must just be great!

Cheers