ONE of my favourite TV shows at the moment is "On the Road Again", which is basically a food-porn journey through Spain.
For the uninitiated, the premise of the show is that Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Bassols drive around Spain in convertible Mercedes, being fed great Spanish food by a bald food critic you've never heard of and Mario Batali - by far the largest and most orange of the American Iron Chefs.
I'm not sure what it is that the show does for me; perhaps it's watching the impeccable Gwyneth Paltrow wrap her lips around everything on offer, whilst conversing simultaneously in Spanish and English, looking impossibly glamorous.
Perhaps it's the notion that the sensational Claudia Bassols spent her formative years at NIDA and presumably dated a series of very lucky Sydney lads (and/or lasses, NIDA being what it is after all - your stories in Comments please!), while developing her eating skills at the Indo and Greek restaurants along Anzac Pde. Perhaps it's just the magic of Spain - all the Gaudi and Dali and especially the el Bulli masterpieces, shot in high definition and dripping with style.
The Spanish do food like they do football - beautiful, amusing and satisfying all at once. Like Barca at their best, it's perfection worthy of admiration. But not envy, because the food in Sydney is just as exciting and far, far more accessible (The FFA might want to consider that a 3 course lunch at Australia's best restaurant costs 30 bucks less than my Socceroos ticket!)
There was a time when the gap between Australian food and the best of Europe was as vast as the gap between La Liga and the A-League. In 1956, the Melburnians imported European chefs to cater the Olympics. What passed for local cuisine consisted of poorly anglicised French recipes, dogged ignorance of other countries' offerings, and the pretension that the BBQ was Australia's culinary gift to the world (in truth, the South Americans kill us at BBQ's and have always done).
Between the 50s and late 70s, all the "other" food was largely the preserve of migrants and was considered - well, foreign. It took Australia until the 1980s to develop anything like a civilized restaurant scene, and then another 15 years to break the shackles of Anglo-French protocol and claim a food style of our own.
Now Australia - and Sydney in particular - has one of the world's most influential food scenes. Our chefs are feted and referenced equally with the best of France, Spain, Britain, Japan and the USA. A traineeship in a decent Sydney restaurant is both a magnet and a passport to the world.
The brilliance of the Sydney and Australian food scene is not in its uniqueness because in truth, we probably don't have a cuisine of our own and the main influence is still quite French. Australian food is brilliant in its ability to execute and move between cuisines effortlessly and in a style that uniquely suits Australia. By having the confidence to develop food that suits Australia, we developed something that sits comfortably at the top table amongst the world's food elite.
From the moment this transition occurred, the food scene gained enormous cultural influence in Australia.
Twenty years ago, a man who cooked anything more than a well-done chop on the barbie was considered highly suss. Now guys have pub arguments about everything from the best way to make fish tacos (use the BBQ) to the best ragu sauce (not telling). In 20 years, food culture has penetrated every part of our society, to the extent that he most talked about show on telly this year isn't Underbelly - it's Gordon f@#king Ramsay's f$%king cooking f^&king show (tip: Gwenny and Claudia are so much better looking).
If I've done my job in writing this blog, then you've probably already drawn the parallels with the development of Australian football. It would be artificial to pretend that the sport will follow the same parabola as the local food/restaurant/chef industry, but I think a few comparisons can be drawn:
- the way forward is probably not going to be a unique style of football - instead, it will lie in having the technical abilities to switch between styles and produce something coherent.
- at some stage, we will stop looking at the rest of the world for references to define our football, and the result will be something that uniquely suits Australia.
- the mainstreaming of football is well underway, but the capacity of Australian culture to thoroughly embrace our own brand of football, once we find it, is potentially huge.
I'm quietly confident that in the future, I will watch La Liga without any trace of envy - content in the local product and its place in the world game.
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So far as the immediate future is concerned, the Sydney squad looks to be coming along nicely. Every new coach is entitled to a couple of personal signings, but Kisel seems to be well credentialed and capable of solving the three season old problem of width.
He also seems to score at about a goal every five games, which probably would have got him the SFC golden boot last year - so on paper, he's a great signing. Seb Ryall is promising too - he will provide some competition at right back and he might just be the first Sydney player to have come from the Cove (I'm sure Jaza will correct me if I'm wrong here), which more than makes up for playing for the Tards.
If such rumours as exist are to be believed, SFC are chasing an experienced central defender, and we probably need another CAM option in case Corica is too old and Gan too young to provide the creativity needed. These will come from OS it seems.
If there has been any feature of this off-season, it's the complete lack of speculation and rumour mongering. It's odd to watch Sydney FC flying under the radar, particularly given the huge changes that have happened at the club - but after last season, it's more than welcome.
The circus will start in the next couple of weeks once the new coach hits the ground, but the signs so far point to a club going about its business with a clear strategy and minimum of fuss. It's a dangerously good sign.
