Gelato Messina - It doesn't get better than this.

Recently, I was one of eight lucky recipients of a golden ticket for the Gelato Messina factory in Rozelle.  I felt like Charlie Bucket standing outside the walls of the Willy Wonka factory. Tucked away behind an unassuming facade, the factory turns out mountains of delicious gelato to feed our insatiable appetite for all things Messina.
Founded in 2000 by Nick Palumbo, Messina is a Darlinghurst institution which has been slowly taking over Sydney with shops at Star Casino, Surry Hills and as of last week Bondi Beach. The queues outside the stores in Darlinghurst and Surry Hills have to be seen to be believed. Look out Melbourne, there is a Gelato Messina scheduled to open very soon in Fitzroy and plans are afoot for stores in China too.
Nick and his fabulous team demonstrated how they make their gelato starting with a lemon sorbet, followed by a traditional vanilla ice cream and finally, the extremely delicious Bombe Alaska.  Whilst they were hard at work talking and demonstrating, we got to eat our way through a special gelato meal.

The first course was a simple lemon sorbet served with sake.  The intense lemony flavour is created by using both the juice and the pulp of the lemon and not just any lemon but Meyer lemons. We discovered that sorbet is a simple combination of water, sugar and fruit - the secret to success lies in the use of the right type of sugars and in the right combinations.
Following this was a bruschetta served with a pretty pale pink tomato sorbet. The flavours were refreshing and surprising.

Our next course was a Foiddle Pop (I am not totally sure of the spelling but it is a Duck Foie Gras Paddle Pop).  The Foiddle Pop is the prettiest shade of pink, with cherry gelato and popping candy on the outside. We were all giggling as the candy popped away in our mouths.  Not too sweet nor too savoury it was absolutely delicious.
Our main course was an 18 hour sous vide pork belly with crackling, apple and pepper gelato and pumpkin puree.  The Gelato Messina boys had taken the traditional apple and pork combination and put a whole new crazy twist on it and it was YUM!!!
For dessert we had mini pavlovas served in little jars with lids on.  The base was a passionfruit jelly with raspberries and mini meringues and a few micro mint leaves.  The texture and flavour was absolutely sublime.
As we worked our way through each course, the boys chatted about their inspiration and their process.  They make everything, with the exception of the savoiardi biscuits for the tiramisu, on the premises. Every paste, jam, brioche or cake is made in house and they spend hours working to create the perfect ingredient for the gelato making process.  The ingredients used in gelato have to not only taste good but also have to work at many different temperatures.  The process is quite complex and it would seem that the secret to success is to make sure that the cooling process happens quite quickly, in under one and a half hours, otherwise you run the risk of bacteria forming in your gelato.

Only the best ingredients are used in the gelati. We tried the Callebaut chocolate and the hazelnuts which are sourced in Piemonte in Italy.  The pistachios come from the town of Bronte, which is in the foothills of Mount Etna in Sicily, where the soil creates the right environment for growing the perfect pistachio.  The pistachios are hand picked and shelled, hence the fantastic green of the pistachio gelato.


Nick and Donato, his business partner have been working together for the past three years.  They have a great sense of humour and look to films and television to provide inspiration for their ever expanding range of flavours.  They are inspired by shows like the Mighty Boosh and Game of Thrones.  Hence the Khaleesi or the fabulous Robert Brownie Jr - milk chocolate gelato, chocolate brownies and chocolate fudge sauce..  And as they describe it "Go on.. relapse today, rehab tomorrow".
Our visit was to give us some insight into the boys and their inspiration before their book is launched later this year.  The Gelato Messina book will include 50 recipes and has been painstakingly written for both the professional and domestic chef. Luckily, for those of us without blast freezers, we will still be able to try making these gelati at home.  The dark arts of which sugars to use and the process of chilling the gelato are all explained.  It strikes me that it is extremely generous, this sharing of years and years of professional knowledge. Nick said that he is happy to do this as he is always seeking to improve and advance the art of gelato making and for this he should be commended.
$39.95 due November
Personally, I plan to use the book as an armchair guide to decide which flavour I will have on my next visit to the Darlinghurst store.  It is a well worn path from my house to Gelato Messina and from our place all roads lead to Gelato Messina and sometimes we visit two or three times a week.  I feel happy and safe in the knowledge that the ingredients they use are so fresh and so much care is taken in the making of the gelati.  

My personal favourite is the Hello Sailor, the prettiest pale pink you could ever imagine, it is a sorbet made of ruby red grapefruit juice and Aperol and the sailor should be pronounced with a sibilant ‘s”. Having said that, I recently made a visit to the Darlinghurst Laboratorio and in the interest of "research" for this blog entry we tried three of the new monoporzione. The Pop Porn, Strawberry Fields and what could possibly be my new favourite, the Golden Bluff.

I am sure Marie Antoinette would have said "Let them eat ice cream and make sure it is Gelato Messina".





Potts Point Pin-Ups

It's a love fest for Sydney from the very cool crowd at Monocle Magazine, who were recently in town to launch their new book The Monocle Guide to Living.

Sydney features very strongly in this gorgeous yellow cloth bound almanac which features design team, Smith and Carmody and the gorgeous Bronte restaurant, Three Blue Ducks.

As we've come to expect from this dynamic publication, destinations from around the world abound in the book - Sydney doesn't claim all the pages.

Here's a sneak peak.







Tao Lin @ Alaska Projects for the National Young Writer's Festival

Tao Lin is not like other touring writers.  He hates reading his own work, doesn't respond well to the question and answer format and seems a little like he'd prefer to be somewhere else at his own event.  Okay, okay, he's probably a lot like other touring authors, but there is something about his obvious apathy that is either utterly affronting or back-thumpingly heroic.   The crowd that attended the NYWF event hosted by Alaska Projects, for the most part, belonged wholeheartedly to the latter school of thought.  They laughed when he awkwardly sidestepped answering questions, empathised about the mainstream critical response to his books, endured with great humour a long slideshow of seemingly random images and commented over and over again about how much his work resonated with their lives.                                                                                                 Tao Lin is the author of three novels, two books of poetry and one short story collection.  He runs his own publishing house called MuuMuu House (which mainly accepts content found on the internet) and according to Bret Easton Ellis "is the most interesting prose stylist of his generation".
According to other critics, Tao Lin is either the end of the modern novel, a "Kmart-realist", or he is the voice of his generation and a playful minimalist.
Taipei is Tao Lin's latest novel.  The book follows the meanderings of Paul, a writer.  We go from Manhattan to Taipei, along the way experiencing love and pain with unexpected consequences; connections are made via technology and many a drug are ingested with careless ease.  
When NYWF author, Wilfred Brandt asked Tao about the autobiographical nature of Taipei, Tao agreed that much of the first draft of the book was drawn from his memory.  When he was further drawn on the topics of sincerity and irony, Tao responded that he believes everybody misunderstands the true nature of the terms.  "You don't know what you are intending when you say something" - sincerity and therefore love and romance don't make sense.  "I'm interested in writing about relationships without such simplistic definitions".
Questions abounded from the enthusiastic audience and whilst Tao didn't answer a lot of those questions directly, the evening threw up some interesting fodder - from what are Tao's influences (he's been reading the same book for 10 years The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, and mostly reads those books he first encountered in college), how does he place himself in the American canon (no response), how does he feel about the critical response to his work ("If I didn't know me, I wouldn't like me either", but doesn't let readers' responses affect how he writes), how does he work (almost stream of consciousness writing, then labours over the editing), to the eggplant motif of Taipei (he didn't know about this, but "I think it has enough").
There were also questions about the author's ability to articulate the altered state of his characters.  Tao brushed these aside mostly, but did allude to a scene in Taipei where Paul does a book event whilst high.  What Tao himself meant by this can only be guessed at, but the twitterverse quickly made the leap - one tweet claiming "the author is superhigh". 
Twitter, blogs, online forums, Tumblr - these are the worlds of Tao Lin and his readers and where Tao Lin shines.  His is an intertextual universe where more than one medium is employed to tell the whole story. Other authors, such as Sheila Heti and Miranda July, similarly incorporate social media into their writing and novels, which sometimes gives them the feel of a collaborative art project.                                                                         Tao Lin's Taipei is strictly a novel and is written with little elaboration.  It may authentically capture the mood of a "connected" generation, but it feels like it is authenticity in a bubble as Taipei is a book about a generation of adults who don't know how to act or talk to each other face to face.  When the real world beckons, just like it was for Tao Lin at Alaska Projects, awkwardness and boredom ensue and mistakes happen.                         No matter how you see the work, there is no denying that Tao Lin is showing us how a new generation lives and engages with the world.  "Reading makes me feel less alone" said Tao Lin that night and it's obvious that many of the large crowd agreed with him.  One only wonders if it would be his own work that Tao himself would reach for when looking for solace.

Granta interview with Yuka Igarishi
Sydney Morning Herald review by Mark Tewfik
National Young Writer's Festival programme (Oct 3-6)

Tampa - love it or hate it, just don't censor it!

There are so many reasons we find ourselves either loving or hating a book, and these are things that are completely idiosyncratic to each of us.  That thing that makes a story or character resonate can be a combination of many things in the writing, but often it can truly seem an alchemy of intangibles that is hard to put your finger on.
Our reasons for reading any book in particular are even harder to pinpoint at times.  Surely, we don't read books to be constantly amused.  We, most of us, I would think, read to be amused, educated and sometimes challenged.
As a bookseller, reading is a necessity as well as a privilege.  But when I read, I always have my customers in mind, which means I have hundreds of people piggybacking my thoughts on every page.
I bring this up because of the book that has become persona non gratis in many Australian bookshops, to the extent that even the US and UK have reported on the controversy it has caused here.
Tampa, written by Alissa Nutting, is a book that quite a few people think you shouldn't read, and a book that select bookshops in Australia have decided to ban from their shelves.

Australian jacket
It is the story of Celeste, a 26 year old school teacher and paedophile.  The story follows her journey towards the successful seduction/abuse of two teenage boys in explicit and uncomfortable detail.
Celeste herself is an unashamed predator, whose predilection for young and inexperienced boys motivates her every action -  her marriage, vocation and appearance are all vehicles to get her closer to her victims.
There are some interesting questions raised not only by the subject matter of this book, but also in the way Alissa Nutting chose to write the book.
There is no comeuppance for Celeste, no boundaries and certainly no context provided for her actions.  The sex is written in titillating fashion, and it is abundant.  And of course, that is where the controversy surrounding this book stems from.
Alissa Nutting, the author, was inspired by a true story.  Her motives were to explore why society in general doesn't take the sexual abuse of boys by adult women as seriously as the opposite and why in so many cases such as that portrayed in Tampa, the adult women are seen as victims of sexual precocity in teenage boys.
The failure to recognise women as authors of their own desire is also common in literature.  The phenomenon of the best-selling 50 Shades of Grey, based on the sexual education/submission of a woman by the older and wiser Mr Grey, is a case in point.
US jacket
So whilst Celeste is disgusting, at least Alissa Nutting doesn't find romantic or convenient excuses to explain her rampant sexual appetite or suggest that she is a victim in any way.  Her deviance lay not in her desire for sex, but in the manner in which she procures and safeguards it.
It is the honesty of this book that makes it so equally compelling and confronting, and in my mind, it is not a book to be avoided, but one to be taken very seriously.

You don't have to read Tampa to know that you don't want to read Tampa.  Books are endeavours we take ourselves on - we inhabit lives for the duration of the story - and one can certainly understand why readers would be reticent to spend time inside Celeste's head.  However, the same can be said of  many other recent best-sellers, including The Slap, The Corrections and Notes on a Scandal.
Bookshops - particularly those that are petite like Potts Point Bookshop -  discriminate whenever choosing books they wish to promote and keep on their shelves.  In this case, booksellers who felt that their customers would not want to inhabit the world of Celeste could simply have chosen not to carry Tampa instead of dramatically "banning" it.
All the author would ask of you is that you don't give in to the idea that this is a sensationalist exercise simply due to it's parts.  All we would ask of you is that you look beyond the cover to find out more about the audacious talent of Alissa Nutting.
In the end, it is up to you.

More articles about Tampa
The Guardian
The Herald
Three Guys One Book

National Bookshop Day

Saturday August 10
Waiting for the excitement of National Bookshop Day!
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.  Inside of a dog it's too dark to read"  
Groucho Marx
Join us for a wonderful line-up of fun for all the family - including your dog!



Tim has worked with animals before.
From 
10am - 12pm, 
as you are browsing, Tim, photographer /bookseller/ all round good bloke, will take a photograph of your dog.
Or if your concerns run to the spiritual, read your dog's past, present, future at the Dog Tarot station.


Dr Mim and Claire
Also from 10am, meet Dr Miriam Meek and Claire Jenkins, who together have over 20 years experience in veterinary science.  These ladies have a stall at Kings Cross market and will be opening premises as The Potts Point Veterinary Hospital in Potts Point very soon!  
Dr Mim and Claire will be here to meet and greet the neighbours and you can look forward to some tasty doggy treats and a competition to win a complimentary consultation. They will be in attendance until 12pm.

At 2pm, Fairy Poppilina, our storytelling fairy, will transform herself into Furry Puppilina............

 Furry Puppilina will transfix you all with the high jinx and hilarious antics of Hairy Maclary and his troublesome crew and other fun-loving dog stories.  Get ready for a unique storytime experience!

When all is said and done, National Bookshop Day is about inviting you into our bookshop - a well lit place outside of a dog - and to say thank you to our wonderful community!
Please join us for what promises to be a wonderful celebration!


Have you chosen your outfit for our (Wo)Man's Best Friend inspired National Bookshop Day?  Here's a few shots to get you thinking from the extraordinary Couture Dogs of New York.





OPENING HOURS:
Monday - Saturday:  9am - 6pm
Sunday: 10am - 5pm
Public Holidays:  10am - 4pm

14 Macleay Street, Potts Point, Sydney.
Phone: +61 2 9331 6642
Fax: +61 2 9331 573
Email: shop@pottspointbookshop.com.au