A Four Diamond French Quarter property featuring Carousel Bar and Lounge, Criollo Restaurant and Lounge, Spa Aria, rooftop pool and fitness center, valet parking, Wi-Fi throughout. Deluxe guest rooms offer upscale amenities.
LIKE all parents, even head chefs must contend with picky eaters and high-chair antics at home. So how do they deal with the turned-up noses and pushed-away plates?
LIKE all parents, even head chefs must contend with picky eaters and high-chair antics at home. How do they deal with the turned-up noses and pushed-away plates?
Four culinary whizzes reveal what happens at mealtimes… (it seems a few white lies and some bribery is involved).
Colin Fassnidge, the head chef and co-owner of the Four in Hand and 4Fourteen restaurants and My Kitchen Rules judge, recently posted an Instagram of his daughter, Maeve. She’s leaning in, mouth open, to chopsticks laden with black caviar. “Kids do eat fish eggs,” says his caption, “Cos they pop and are salty!”
He laughs when asked how he got Maeve, four, to even try the fish eggs. “I told her they were popping candy.” So, basically, by lying to her? “I have no problem lying to get them to try something… If you let them switch off their palates now, you can’t win them back.”
Fassnidge’s theory is that when Maeve and her five-year-old sister, Lily, grow up, there won’t be a stigma around certain foods. He tells them what the food really is after they’ve tasted it, so they remember that they do like fish eggs, or even beetroot. At home, the Irishman makes popsicles using raw beetroot juice, telling his daughters they are cherry- flavoured. “They don’t even notice. A week into eating it I’ll tell them it’s beetroot and they say, ‘Oh, well, it’s quite good’.”
When they were babies, Fassnidge always made their food at home – preparing vegetable soup and then blending it for the girls, unseasoned. He says he is conscious of not giving them too much salt or sugar at a young age. When Maeve is handed a lolly during our photo shoot, Fassnidge quips: “Drugs for kids.”
Are there tantrums in the Fassnidge household? “Every day there’s a tantrum – they’re girls,” he laughs. But he plays off their competitive natures to get them to eat. “If one of them likes something, then the other one likes it more.” The chef tries to make food fun, relating it to what the girls love: “Last night I told them broccoli makes you a better dancer, so they had broccoli fights, trying to eat more than the other one.”
Maeve and Lily have been to the restaurant many times, even visiting the whole hogs their father has hanging in the storeroom. “I feed them whatever I eat. If I bring a pig home or a pork shoulder, I say, ‘Tonight we’re eating Peppa Pig.’ They say, ‘Oh, no!’, but they love it.”
“I was a runt growing up, because my mother had trouble boiling water,” says James Viles, the head chef and owner of Biota in NSW’s Bowral. “Her cooking was awful and she knew it. Harriet’s upbringing has been like that, except the exact opposite.”
Viles, whose second child is due next month, doesn’t deny that his work at the restaurant influences what Harriet eats and has come to love. The three-year-old’s self-titled “white sauce” – which she wants on everything – is burnt, pasture-fed, cultured butter whipped into sheep’s milk yoghurt, and it’s straight off the Biota menu (albeit with less seasoning). “It’s simple to make, so we just have it in the fridge all the time. She dips her baby cucumbers in there.”
Harriet also snacks on activated almonds with the skin on. “My wife is a nutritionist, so we have lots of that sort of stuff.” The chef also sneaks vegetables into his toddler’s diet throughout the day – including ‘little trees’. “I do little trees – broccoli – in burnt butter, salt and pepper; she devours it. And she loves watermelon, so we juice it with raw spinach.”
Harriet has never had baby food out of a jar, and she never eats lollies: “We just don’t buy them.” Nor does she have white bread, preferring the dark rye Viles serves at Biota. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy; Harriet has just grown out of a stage where “she would pick up her plate and just peg it”.
And she doesn’t like chicken. “I’ve roasted it, poached it… no matter what, she almost gags. It’s worth watching – one eye goes a bit cross-eyed,” he laughs.
“It doesn’t matter who we are – chefs, whoever – kids are hard to please,” says Guillaume Brahimi, chef and owner of newly opened Guillaume. “I have four children and if I listened to them, we’d do four different meals every night. One wants sashimi, one wants pasta… We try to change what they eat every night.”
It even happens to Brahimi, who last year moved his iconic Sydney Opera House restaurant, Guillaume at Bennelong, to eastern-suburbs Paddington. Although he turns out delectable dishes such as butter-poached West Australian marron with braised pork cheek and cauliflower puree at his fine diner, the French-born chef’s children occasionally tell him they don’t like their dinner. “You do a great dish and you’re really excited… but they don’t like what you’ve cooked,” he admits.
Mostly, though, the family of six loves eating. “We love going out. They’ve been eating at good restaurants since they were [very young]. Two years ago, I took them to Paris and we ate at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. The chef asked my 10-year-old daughter whether she wanted a kids’ menu – ‘No!’ She loved the meal.”
Like any parent, Brahimi falls back on the dependable roster of dishes his kids (Constance, 14, Honor, 12, Violet, eight and Loic, three) love; salmon sliced fresh into sashimi, with soy sauce for dipping, and “the kids are happy”.
Violet eats fresh mozzarella on sourdough with avocado every morning, sometimes with a fried egg on top. And all the children love steak tartare, which they’ve always eaten – “before they knew what it was” – with all the accompaniments: capers, onion, cornichons and egg yolk.
Brahimi also makes crispy potatoes, and “when Papa cooks his bolognaise, everybody is happy”. He says the trick is to take time to cook it. “I buy the mince; we prefer veal. I enjoy making it. I add lots of fresh chopped parsley on top of a big platter of bolognaise and the kids help themselves at the table.”
Dessert is always yoghurt with fresh mango – never anything too sweet or artificial, says the chef as he and his three-year-old son, Loic, bite into large slabs of watermelon at Sunday Style’s shoot. He uses the promise of fruit as a sweetener to get them to finish their vegetables. “I’m too soft on them; I just tell them to eat a little bit more, a little more.”
As in any household with young children, there are a lot of screwed-up faces at the home of Hamish Ingham, the chef and owner of Bar H restaurant. But, then, six-year-old Harper and three-year-old Hendrix will eat homemade pâté by the spoonful, so it’s not all bad.
When Harper was born, Ingham took the role of child-feeder seriously and, like many foodie parents, made all his own purees using organic vegetables. Now she eats freshly shucked oysters and is obsessed with sashimi dipped in soy sauce. “They love the salt, I think, and the texture of the raw fish. For them it’s normal to eat it raw,” says Ingham.
Harper doesn’t like sugar – a preference her younger brother has not adopted. “Even on her birthday, she will only have one lolly, but Hendrix would eat chocolate for breakfast every day if we let him.”
The kids never eat at the large fast-food chains. “Harper has tried it, because my mum took her there, but we don’t need to go there. We drive past and they won’t even know what it is. There’s nothing wrong with a good-quality hamburger and good hand-cut chips. If we go out somewhere I know the burger is going to be made with quality meat, that’s fine.”
As the father of two children who have very different tastes, including a son who grazes through the day rather than eating entire meals, Ingham advises parents take each child as they come and to get them to try everything. “Last night we had a duck dish at Bar H and they both said they wouldn’t like it. Now it’s ‘our favourite’.”
Ingham admits to bribing the kids, but never with a sweet reward: “We bribe Hendrix all the time. ‘One more piece of cauliflower so you can watch a movie, or go to the special bike park.’ Something they love doing wins over cauliflower every time.”
Salma al-Sherif, a 31-year-old cashier based near the holy city of Mecca, told local media that her car had been deliberately set alight this week by men 'opposed to women drivers'.
Riyadh: Saudi police are hunting for arsonists who torched a woman’s car, only a week after the kingdom lifted a decades-long ban on female motorists.
“The incident is being investigated by security officials,” Mecca police said in a statement released late Tuesday by local authorities. “We are searching for the culprits.”
On June 24, women celebrated taking to the wheel for the first time in decades as the ultra-conservative kingdom overturned the world’s only ban on female drivers.
For decades, arch-conservatives justified the ban, saying allowing female motorists would promote gender mixing and promiscuity.
“Half of my salary of 4,000 riyals ($1,067) was spent on a driver to take me to my workplace and drive my elderly parents,” Sherif told the pro-government daily Okaz. “But from the first day of driving I was subjected to insults from men.”
The striker limped out of Tuesday's defeat to Birmingham moments after he was involved in the move that led to Lee Gregory's goal.
Send him back! Send him back!! Send him back!!! Free up some spends for an attacking RB or Right-winger. We got Gregory, Fuller and O'Brien. Pack Easter off to MK Dons and replace with somebody with pace. Act now Olly
Just gets better! We are going to end up with the biggest squad in the league and 75% can't play or unfit! You couldn't have written this one! Priceless. On a good note, history shows that when we field a make s*** team that should get spanked, we do really well! Fingers crossed. COYL
@harryfabian: Time to pack his bags and send him back. That's what other teams do. I can't see the point in paying a loan player who wasn't fit, isn't fit and in all likelihood won't be fit for months after coming back in 4 weeks time to get another injury.
This is laughable, it's actually a joke, HERE IS OUR STRIKER! Towards transfer deadline day, this is what we managed to sign!!! Brilliant
@conor: As somebody above has said we seem to have a 'DADs ARMY' ......Powder - Puff players always getting injured at the sight of a 'Tackle' ! ( NOLU, WDC ).
Meanwhile Becchio and Glenn Murray each have 2 goals. 10 games in and our top scorer has 2 and get this, he's a center back. Only f****** Millwall.
@block 28: emille heskey don't make my lol who next George best lol I hope this is not right plz plz plz
You could not make this up because no one would believe it, there must be a few out there having a laugh at our expense, soet it out before its too late we need points not excuses.