The first impact of this French restaurant was that it was busy - very busy! We had a booking for 4 made days in advance (just to be safe) and I recommend you do the same, don’t just turn up.

The staff immediately attended to you once you stepped in and we were seated pretty much in the middle of the lower level. The upper level has more tables and a bar.

The menu was perfect with not too much variety, but just enough to make your selection easy from 6 options for each course.  In fact, you can view it here - http://www.tabourestaurant.com.au/menu.pdf

We ordered some white wine, and if memory serves me right, I believe we a 2006 Andre Kientzler, Pinot Gris - actually, we had 2 of those!

To start, I had the cheese soufflé - which was perfectly cooked. I was told prior to coming to Tabou, that this could be quite a heavy dish. It wasn’t too heavy, but then again - I had a good appetite built up before leaving home. With each spoonful, the cheese just melted in your mouth and the taste was exceptional, I could do it again for mains.

My mains contained slices of roast lamb loin served with aubergine (eggplant), courgette (zucchini) and anchoiade (?). The lamb was cooked really, medium-rare - just how I like it. The vegetables and sauce however, was quite bland - a bit too simple in my opinion. The vegetables had a nice bit and complimented the lamb well - without them, it would be a plain meat dish with tomato paste. Might try the pork next time.

To top it off, I had another soufflé, but this time it was chocolate and I can’t say that this was my favourite dessert. While the soufflé itself was very nice, the surrounding chocolate sauce was quite bitter - almost tasted of coffee, not what I expected (or maybe I didn’t read the fine lines of the dessert description). But the dates flavoured ice cream served beside it, saved my tongue. We also had a bottle of dessert wine to leave a sweet taste on our palates.

Overall, I enjoyed dining at this restaurant. Yes, it is expensive - especially when 4 of us order 3 bottles of wine at $60 a bottle. If you get a 3 course meal alone, be prepared to fork $70 out. If you have French bottle of wine or two, you’ll soon be looking at 3 digit figures per head. Overall for the quality of food, I may have preferred elsewhere (like Vamps). But the overall experience in itself, was well worth it.

Atmosphere - 8/10
Food - 7/10
Wine/Cocktails - 9/10
Staff - 8.5/10
Value for money - 7/10

Last night I had Sushiv (www.sushivmathur.com) over for dinner and decided to cook a recipe from Gordon Ramsay. It’s Herb Crusted Lamb (but I’ve modified it a bit)

Gordon used a rack of lamb while I used individual lamb cutlets.

So I’ve outlined my version of the recipe below, and you can have a look at Gordon’s video further below.

So here goes:

Ingredients
Lamb cutlets (says 3 - 4 pieces per person)
Continental Parsley
Rosemary
Bread (stale is fine, just something that makes good breadcrumbs), I used a baguette
French Dijon mustard

Method
On a plate, lay out the lamb cutlets and season with salt and pepper. I like Gordon’s style of doing this on the plate, because any of the seasoning that is outside of the lamb bit can be swept up and absorbed as you move the pieces of lamb around - so make sure you use every bit of season on that plate!

Start the oven at 180*C. On a pan, drizzle some olive oil and place the lamb on medium heat just to give it some colour. Once you have colour put the lamb on a wire-rack and place it in the oven for 10 mins.

Meanwhile, in a blender tear bits of your bread (I used half a baguette) with some parsley and rosemary. Drizzle in a bit of olive oil - not too much. Blitz the mixture until you have some a nice texture of herb breadcrumbs.

Take the cutlets out and brush each side with Dijon mustard and coat it all over with the herb breadcrumbs. Do this for each cutlet and place it back on the wire-rack. Put it back in the oven on the top shelf so that the heat crisps the breadcrumbs. Do each side for 5 - 7 mins.

You can serve this up with mash potatoes, green beans (which I love to cook with garlic and Marsala wine) and some wilted spinach.

Enjoy!

Here is Gordon’s video:

Recently, BigPond has made deals with various music industries including Sony BMG, Universal, Warner Music and EMI, as well as with independent labels MGM and Liberation.

This would mean giving Telstra’s BigPond the rights to even more music, raising their inventory from 20,000 to nearly a million.

The advantage they stand with, is the ability to download the music to almost any portable device including media centers or your Xbox.

Each downloaded song will not have any restrictive copy protection limiting it against a single device. This gives the iPod owners an alternative from iTunes and “puts consumers in the driving seat”, says BigPond MD, Justin Milne.

It is estimated that the inventory would grow up to 1 million by Jan 09. However, in the meantime it shouldn’t be too long before BigPond users get access to more than just the current 20,000.

Sheraton New York has been mesmerized by Microsoft and have adopted the Surface application in their lobby.

Take a look at the clip below.

It would seem that News.com.au has certain priorities. They make no attempt to focus on the breaking news section which lists that an “Ausie (sic) tourist was kidnapped and raped”, nor do they believe that they should talk about either the fuel prices, stock market plunge or a powder scare for the NZ Prime Minster.

But that they should let all of us know with a big focus image on the headline news, that some woman, 3 months before her wedding was told by her fiance that he had 4 kids - a secret she was never aware of during their relationship.

Great News!