The Food and Drink of Sydney by Heather Hunwick

Author:Heather Hunwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-12-23T01:56:47+00:00

Photo 5.1 Image depicts the gentlemanly scene reminiscent of a men’s club, although the figure of a woman in the center seems at odds with the social standard of the time and is more likely the proprietress. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

In both London and Paris, coffeehouses and cafés, respectively, were popular meeting places for business discussions and political discourse, a fashion Sydney also enthusiastically embraced. Sensible to this trend, Messrs. Cheval and Poehlman set up a café next door to their restaurant, which, they were proud to advise, offered café au lait and café noir in the style of fashionable Parisian equivalents. Their Café Restaurant’s eminence was enhanced when a shipment of ice arrived in Sydney from Boston on January 12, 1855. Mr. Poehlman purchased more than a ton, allowing him to sell the cocktail-on-ice then all the rage in the United States, the sherry cobbler, just as ambient temperatures were hitting 112°F (44°C).10

Frank Fowler, English journalist and author, wrote after his 1855–1858 sojourn in Sydney that the restaurant, later to be known simply as the Café Francais, “is much frequented by the young swells and sprigs of the city,” where lunchtime was taken seriously and where “They serve eight hundred dinners a day.”11

Just six weeks after the Café Restaurant opened, from March 25, 1854, and for the next couple of months editions of the Sydney Morning Herald advertised the opening at 491 George Street of the Aux Frères Provençaux—Café Restaurant de Paris. Messrs. Budin and Mellon were confident the public would “be found to be kept quite in the Paris style” and, furthermore, the cooking could not be “surpassed in Sydney.” The series of advertisements described the various menus and their prices: the most elaborate was the 8s dinner, which offered “2 Hors d’Oeuvres; 1 soup, choice; 3 plates, choice; 1 Entremets ditto; 2 desserts; Half bottle of fine wine; Bread at discretion.”12 With these two restaurants Sydney embraced haute cuisine.

Nevertheless, traditional British fare continued to be offered at better hotels such as Pfahlert’s, which opened in 1870 in Wynyard Square: “Pfahlert’s Grill with its be-napkined rounds of stilton; its crystal bowls of clean crisp celery, its porterhouse steaks, its pewters of foaming ale.”13 Richard Twopeny in his book Town Life in Australia, 1883, decried the entrenched tastes of many wealthy businessmen who preferred “a good plain English dinner, none of your unwholesome French kickshaws.”14

Years later, two events typified the continued infatuation of the elite with French culinary style. In 1888 Sydney celebrated its centenary with all the pomp, ceremony, and style it could muster. The highlight of the celebrations was the State Banquet, which the Sydney Morning Herald declared on January 27 to be “probably the most important event of the kind which has ever taken place in this or any other of the Australian colonies.” Around one thousand guests enjoyed a seven-course French dinner, set out on an impressive menu in French alone. A few months later the Australia Club, the archetypical local gentlemen’s club, held its Jubilee Banquet, complete with a French-only menu.

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