Australian food splits into three strands that rarely used to meet: ingredients Aboriginal people have used for tens of thousands of years, British colonial staples, and the Mediterranean and Asian cooking brought by post-war and later migration. Roughly 30 percent of the population was born overseas, and the menus show it.
Native ingredients
The term bush tucker covers plants and animals used by Aboriginal Australians long before European arrival, and restaurants have spent the last two decades learning to cook with them properly.
- Kakadu plum — the highest recorded vitamin C concentration of any fruit on earth, up to a hundred times that of an orange.
- Finger lime — a native citrus whose flesh comes as tiny beads that burst like caviar; now on menus in Paris and Tokyo.
- Macadamia — the one Australian plant that became a major global food crop.
- Lemon myrtle, wattleseed, pepperberry, saltbush — aromatics that turn up in everything from ice cream to lamb rubs.
The national dishes
Australians eat around 270 million meat pies a year — with tomato sauce, standing up, ideally at the football. Vegemite, a yeast-extract spread invented by Cyril Callister in 1922 from brewery waste, is eaten scraped thinly on buttered toast; visitors who spread it like jam always regret it.
The lamington — sponge cake dipped in chocolate and rolled in coconut — is named after Lord Lamington, governor of Queensland from 1896 to 1901. The pavlova is claimed by both Australia and New Zealand; it honours the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured both countries in 1926, and the Oxford English Dictionary gives New Zealand the earlier printed recipe.
Seafood
Barramundi takes its name from a Gangulu word meaning "large-scaled river fish" and is the fish to order in the north. Sydney rock oysters are smaller and sweeter than Pacific oysters and are farmed in the estuaries north and south of the city. Look also for Moreton Bay bugs (a flat slipper lobster), mud crab and tiger prawns.
Kangaroo is sold in every supermarket — very lean, best served rare, and a sustainable meat by most measures.
Coffee
Italian and Greek migrants brought espresso in the 1950s and the country never accepted anything weaker. The flat white is the standard order. Australia is one of the few markets where Starbucks failed outright — it closed 61 of its 84 stores in 2008, unable to compete with independent cafés on quality.
Where to eat well
- Melbourne — laneway cafés, Lygon Street for Italian, Victoria Street for Vietnamese.
- Sydney — the fish market at Pyrmont, and Cabramatta for the best Vietnamese food in the country.
- Adelaide — the Central Market, open since 1869.
- A Bunnings sausage sizzle — a sausage in white bread with onions and sauce, sold outside hardware stores to raise money for local clubs. It is a genuine institution and costs almost nothing.