The story of how Australian cooking and restaurants became the world's best - a story that spans from Melbourne's 1956 Olympics to Sydney 2000.
Two of Australia's best cooks were refugees. Four of our top five chefs are ethnic Asians. Yet Australian cooking and restaurants - the world's best - are an Australian achievement. Migrants did not deliver the world's best restaurants to this deprived and culinarily backward country, as is commonly claimed. Rather it was through being here that our chefs were able to develop a unique and world-renowned cooking style.
Opening with the Melbourne Olympics of 1956, Advanced Australian Fare explores why and how Australian restaurants flourished in the years leading up to that other Olympics, in Sydney 2000. This is the story of how Australia's restaurants have become the world's best, its cooking style a crowning achievement of global popular culture. It's a warm, human story told through the eyes, ears and palates of the cooks who have done it.
You'll have to look hard to find the word cuisine in these pages. This is Downes at his no-nonsense best, when cuisine just means plain old cooking - except that Australia's is neither plain nor old. Just number one.
