Sydney Escorts

SYDNEY TRAVEL

I am sitting beneath the sun-cheating awning of the Australian Hotel, an Edwardian-era, outback­style pub near Sydney's Circular Quay, facing a fierce dilemma. Namely: Can I order the 'roo and continue to live with myself? Let me explain. Growing up in Canada, I spent my most impressionable years watching Skippy the Bush Kangaroo ("Skippy, Skippy/Our friend ever true!"), an Australian television series about a kind of long-legged, antipo­dean Lassie that was always bounc­ing to the rescue of stranded baby wombats or unlucky pilots whose para­chutes had gotten tangled in booyong trees.

I've been in Sydney for just two days when my friend Heather, a food-loving journalist who works for Australia's pub­lic broadcasting network, drops the bomb. Australians, she tells me, actually eat 'roos, They also eat emus, witchetty grubs, and crocodiles. The food of the outback is called "bush tucker;' and kangaroo steaks, especially lean and meaty, are great mari­nated in tamarind and grilled on a bar­becue. I've come to the Australian Hotel because of its extensive menu of bush tucker, but if I eat Skippy for lunch, I may never be able to look at myself in the mirror again. I remind myself that I've crossed the Pacific on a mission: I'm seeking out the defining taste of Sydney, a moment when culture and landscape mesh, and you realize exactly what puts the "there" in the dot on the globe you've come so far to visit. For me, this sort of thing tends to happen over a plate of something unfamil­iar and delicious. I know that when that Sydney taste comes, if it comes, I'll recog­nize it immediately. It just better not be 'roo. Part of the problem is that I've spent the afternoon at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, observing the preternaturally alert din­goes, elusive platypuses, and moonfaced koalas. The visit'S highlight was an idyl­lic half hour among the wallabies, joeys (baby kangaroos), and emus-Taronga allows visitors to wander freely in an en­closure that features the entire nonhuman cast of Skippy. The kangaroos hopped, they nuzzled their pouches, they lolled in the shade. They looked innately maternal, im­possibly benign-and entirely nonedible.

So, as I overhear the family at the next table hesitating between the 'roo and the emu, I decide to compromise. Forget Skippy: I'm going to have the saltwater crocodile. I saw the brutes lurking in ponds at Taronga, nostrils just above the water­line. They can attain lengths of 20 feet, and it's estimated in Australia they've nibbled at least 60 people in the last 35 years. Having croc for dinner is just so much karmic payback. The waiter brings it to me atop a small pizza, whose crust has been rubbed with coconut cream and topped with Thai herbs and a quartered lime. The flesh, cut thin, slightly charred at its curled edges, looks just like a glob of melted mozzarella.

As for the flavor of crocodile-well, I swore my days of seeking out extreme cuisine would come to an end when I was forced, by circumstances and my commit­ment to veracity, to write the following line: It tastes exactly like chicken. "BUSH TUCKER?" says BarryMcDonald, his pale blue eyes widening as he pauses next to a stack of imported San Marino tomatoes in the aisles of Fratelli Fresh. "Naaaah, mate. Real Sydneysiders don't eat that stuff."

Crocodile, McDonald reckons, is for tourists. Instead, Sydneysiders-as the residents of this metropolis of four mil­lion on the southeast coast of Australia are known-eat some of the most appetiz­ingly innovative food in the world. Since the mid-1980s, when the "Mod Oz" move­ment inflected simple, fresh ingredients with Asian spicing and European know­how, Sydneysiders have been spoiled by such cooking stars as Neil Perry, Donna Hay, Tony Bilson, and Kylie Kwong. They discuss the annual Sydney Morning Herald's Good Food Guide's ranking of chefs, from one to three hats, with the pas­sion of Parisians debating the Michelin Red Guide's triage of the latest starred bistros. And they scheme to get into Tetsuya's, a temple of fusion run by a Japanese-born chef that always ends up on lists of the world's top ten restaurants. (Weeks before leaving, I faxed a request for a reservation; they replied that they were booked solid six months in advance, but they'd see what they could do.)

A significant minority of Sydneysiders also shop at places like Fratelli Fresh, the warehouse-like food emporium Barry runs with his brother Jamie. The aisles are filled with things from here and there: chestnut £lour from Tuscany, tiny salted capers from Sicily, pineapples from Queensland, and johnny-Iove-bite tomatoes grown here from seeds imported from Sicily.

As supplier to 149 of the city's restau­rants, Barry seems to know everybody who matters on Sydney's cooking scene. If I'm looking for the city'S real taste, he tells me, I've got to meet chef Neil Perry. A cell phone call and a quick cab ride to Circular Quay later, and I've got a window seat at Rockpool, with one of the city'S best chefs whipping me up a multicourse sea­food lunch.

Perry is keenly aware of overfishing, like many Sydney restaurateurs, he refuses to serve orange roughy, bluefin tuna, and oth­er threatened species, and he is increas­ingly filling his menu with sustainably caught and farmed species. "A lot of fish in Australia are caught by day boats, not big trawlers," says Perry, "which means that species under threat in other countries are in pretty good shape here."

Sydney'S best chefs are pioneers in ethical eating, which may be the most enduring culinary legacy of this decade. The menus at Sydney'S finest seafood restaurants-among them Greg Doyle's excellent Pier, which juts into Rose Bay­include a list of the bays and ports where the catch is landed, helping informed consumers choose their fish wisely. And the charismatic Kylie Kwong may serve the world's only sustainably sourced Chinese comfort food. The menu at her always-packed Surry Hills restaurant Billy Kwong boasts organic Hokkien noodles, an astonishing twice-cooked crispy-skin free-range chicken, and a selection of bio­dynamic wines.

Following your senses, I'm discovering, is a great way to explore Sydney. But it can also get you lost. In bustling Chinatown, sleazy Kings Cross, and funky Newtown, I feast on Nepalese mamas, Indianpako­ras, Vietnamese pho, Malaysian rojak and kopi ais (dumplings, fritters, soup, salad, iced coffee). I spend an espresso-fueled day roaming Surry Hills and Paddington, walkable neighborhoods daubed scar­let and violet by bottlebrushes and jaca­randas, and whose Victorian-era terrace houses festooned with wrought-iron bal­conies call to mind a southern hemisphere French Quarter. It's at the Royal Botanic Gardens in The Domain, a swath of city center green where the signs say "Please Walk on the Grass," that my instincts lead me ash-ay.

This is where Australia's very first veg­etable patch was planted by Governor Arthur Phillip, the man who brought the First Fleet-ll ships, carrying 1,400 souls, most of them convicts from the British Isles-safely into what is now Sydney Harbour in January, 1788. That these men survived their eight-and-a-half­month voyage, in spite of rough storms, fetid conditions, and constant floggings, is astonishing enough. That their descen­dants and the generations of immigrants center green where the signs say "Please Walk on the Grass," that my instincts lead me astray.

This is where Australia's very first veg­etable patch was planted by Governor Arthur Phillip, the man who brought the First Fleet-ll ships, carrying 1,400 souls, most of them convicts from the British Isles-safely into what is now Sydney Harbour in January, 1788. That these men survived their eight-and-a-half­month voyage, in spite of rough storms, fetid conditions, and constant floggings, is astonishing enough. That their descen­dants and the generations of immigrants that followed them could build a city as appealing as Sydney is a miracle.

Soon I've lost sight of the elegant facades of upper Macquarie Street and get thoroughly disoriented following sinuous paths lined by flax-leaved paperbarks and large ferns. The upper branches of the cab­bage tree palm, I'm surprised to note, are hung with what look like scores of giant eggplants wrapped in leathery fronds.

Wait a minute, I say to myself, feeling like an extra in the Temple of Doom: Those eggplants are moving. In fact, they're writhing and chittering, spreading mem­branous wings and flashing hooked claws and pointed teeth. It turns out I'm stand­ing under thousands of gray-headed fly­ing foxes that have elected the Gardens as a permanent camp and are now gnawing their way through some of the rarest fo­liage found in the southern hemisphere. Sydney, I'm beginning to realize, is that kind of city: You can have an Indiana Jones moment within a two-minute walk of a great espresso macchiato.

IT IS ON THE ADVICE of my friend Heather that I find myself on a curving stretch of waterfront pavement, outside an establishment called Harry's Cafe de Wheels, whose neon sign proclaims it has been in business since 1945. Harry'S is a Sydney institution: one of those catering trucks you see on the side of highways the world over, made colorful by hand-paint­ed murals and framed photos of Pamela Anderson, Elton John, Rolf Harris, and other clients of renown.