breakfast at bills

"Lauren is looking forward to ricotta hotcakes and champagne for breakfast!" read my Facebook status update, the day before my 25th birthday.

To celebrate my quarter-century, Caliban took me to bills for breakfast. One of my favourite places to eat, bills is home to the best breakfast in Sydney. As you already know, I'm a huge fan of the morning meal, and bills is the best place to get it. Everything is sublime, but the ricotta hotcakes with honeycomb butter and fresh banana are like manna from heaven.

Caliban ordered scrambled eggs with sourdough and cured ocean trout, and I stuck with the hotcakes. After refreshing ourselves with a latte (me) and a chai (Caliban), we tucked into the meals. Caliban's heaped serving of soft, pillowy scrambled eggs was amazing - just the right texture, with all the creamy richness you want from a dish like this. The cured ocean trout was, according to Caliban, salty and smoky without being too overpowering or oily. It's a great balance - rich, creamy eggs with fresh, salty trout. Yum.

Three plump, delightfully misshapen hotcakes made a tower on my plate, with two slices of honeycomb butter melting over them, and a tiny jug of maple syrup was served on the side. Long slices of fresh banana lay underneath the hotcakes, warming them and infusing them with the honeycomb butter flavour. As breakfasts go, this is possibly one of the naughtiest and least virtuous (hey, it does have banana) but for breakfast on a special occasion, it's unmissable. Honeycomb butter is a stroke of genius and Bill Granger, the chef behind bills, deserves every accolade heaped upon him just for this little wonder, I reckon. Honeycomb is sweet but not sickly so, and whie butter is butter, you only need two half-centimetre discs of it when the full flavour of honeycomb takes part. The maple syrup is good, even though I don't normally love the stuff. And the hotcakes themselves are exactly what they should be: fluffy, light hillocks of just-cooked batter. Lovely.

We finished off the meal with a glass each of Veuve Cliquot. It was 11am by that stage, so we thought it was acceptable to break out the bubbly. The waiter informed us that while the cafe had run out of the house champagne we ordered, they'd serve us Veuve Cliquot at the same price. What a lovely surprise - one we thoroughly enjoyed, to the last drop.

bills
359 Crown St, Surry Hills
+61 2 9360 4762
www.bills.com.au

david fishman, 13-year-old food critic

David Fishman is in the seventh grade. In the past year, he's been featured in GQ and The New York Times. Why? Because, unlike regular 13-year-olds, who read Sweet Valley High and obsess about having a "perfect size six figure and eyes the colour of the Pacific Ocean"*, David Fishman is a food critic.

I chatted to David last week because I'm writing an article about tweens. He was polite to a fault, interesting, and interested (a key quality in good interviewees, I say). His precocity was pretty amazing...but I'll get back to that.

David's story goes something like this. He walked into a local restaurant alone (he lives in New York with his parents) and made a deal with the waitress to dine there (she wasn't keen on having a kid eat alone...but he promised he'd be out by 8pm). He pulled out a notepad, and proceeded to take notes on the evening's meal, giving decor, service and food a score out of 25 (like the Zagat Guide does). Other customers and even the chef began to take notice. The next day, someone told someone else at The New York Times, and poof! A star was born.

Fishman might be the youngest food critic around, but like other critics, he's both feted and frowned upon. Alan Richman, GQ's food correspondent, profiled David for the magazine, and took a liking to the young foodie. But Eric Ripert, head chef at New York's Le Bernadin, isn't keen on the idea of a kid critiquing his goods. "Let's not glorify kids who are going to break our balls," he told The Telegraph (UK). "This is not fair. Hopefully, when he's 18 and writing officially, I'll be retired."

But when I spoke to David, he was nothing if not humble. He downplayed his food writing experience, saying "I don't pretend I'm a professional. I'm a foodie...I'm just someone who loves food." He says he understands Ripert's frustration, and explains, "I think he disapproved of the publicity [I was getting], which is fair enough." For his part, David overlooks the criticism, and just gets on with the reviews. "I've been reviewing restaurants - just for myself - for a while now. All I want to do is gain knowledge. I did this for me and I'll continue to do it just for me."

If you have some spare time, and room for another bookmark on your blog roll, check out David's blog, FishmanFoodie.com.

* That might have just been me.