6 best travel deals of the week: save 40 per cent on an epic Japan holiday
COMING SOON
A groundbreaking exhibition, Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor, is coming to Perth's WA Museum Boola Bardip. More than 225 Chinese artefacts will be on display - about half of them have never been shown outside of China.
WHEN: June 28 to February 22, 2026; visit.museum.wa.gov.au/boolabardip
LATER
The Bundaberg region of Queensland is often referred to as the food bowl of Australia and one of the best times to savour it is during the 10-day Taste Bundaberg Festival, when an exhaustive program of banquets, barbecues and brunches unfolds.
WHEN: September 5-14; bundabergnow.com
NEXT YEAR
The 2026 Winter Olympics, taking place in February next year in northern Italy (including Milan), will see the introduction of new sports such as ski mountaineering.
WHEN: February 6-22, 2026; milanocortina2026.olympics.com
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The Age
21 hours ago
- The Age
Please slurp your noodles: Dos and don'ts of eating out in Asia
If you ever dine with locals in China, Japan or South Korea for business or pleasure, you'll have the chance to connect in a relaxed setting. A few rules of etiquette, however, will make for a better experience and impress your hosts. You wouldn't want to appear greedy or hungry, would you? Both may be taken as a sign of poverty or lack of refinement. If invited to someone's house, politely decline food the first time it's offered. Not to worry, you'll be given a second (and third) chance to eat. In restaurants, especially in China, consideration and respect is shown by plucking fine morsels from communal dishes and placing them in your companions' bowls. Again, you might make a polite protest. So will your fellow diners, but don't take them at their word. Try again. It's also polite to refill other diners' teacups, glasses and soy-sauce dishes before your own. This is especially true in Japan, where nobody ever pours their own drink. When someone offers to pour your drink, lift your glass up with one hand supporting it from below, then take a small sip before setting it down. In Japan toasts are proposed at the start of meals; in China they'll be ongoing. Whoever hosts should be first to offer a toast, and will probably order the food without consultation. Meals can be convivial except in South Korea, where too much chatter shows lack of respect for the food and occasion. Anywhere, polite Australian conversational fillers about the weather or traffic will cause bemusement. Talk about the food, however, will be welcomed. Brace yourself: few topics are off limits. The Chinese might quiz you about your age, religion, marital status, salary, rent or the cost of the clothes on your back. Awkward, but take it as a great opportunity to turn the tables and find out more about your hosts. And so to the food. While chomping is universally considered uncouth, slurping soup or noodles can be a sign of appreciation in Asia. Such dishes are also 'inhaled' to cool them as you eat. Only hungry peasants fill up on rice, so don't ask for it if hosted. You'll get a small bowl of rice towards the end of the meal in China. In Japan, rice is eaten between courses and never mixed with food.
Sydney Morning Herald
21 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Please slurp your noodles: Dos and don'ts of eating out in Asia
If you ever dine with locals in China, Japan or South Korea for business or pleasure, you'll have the chance to connect in a relaxed setting. A few rules of etiquette, however, will make for a better experience and impress your hosts. You wouldn't want to appear greedy or hungry, would you? Both may be taken as a sign of poverty or lack of refinement. If invited to someone's house, politely decline food the first time it's offered. Not to worry, you'll be given a second (and third) chance to eat. In restaurants, especially in China, consideration and respect is shown by plucking fine morsels from communal dishes and placing them in your companions' bowls. Again, you might make a polite protest. So will your fellow diners, but don't take them at their word. Try again. It's also polite to refill other diners' teacups, glasses and soy-sauce dishes before your own. This is especially true in Japan, where nobody ever pours their own drink. When someone offers to pour your drink, lift your glass up with one hand supporting it from below, then take a small sip before setting it down. In Japan toasts are proposed at the start of meals; in China they'll be ongoing. Whoever hosts should be first to offer a toast, and will probably order the food without consultation. Meals can be convivial except in South Korea, where too much chatter shows lack of respect for the food and occasion. Anywhere, polite Australian conversational fillers about the weather or traffic will cause bemusement. Talk about the food, however, will be welcomed. Brace yourself: few topics are off limits. The Chinese might quiz you about your age, religion, marital status, salary, rent or the cost of the clothes on your back. Awkward, but take it as a great opportunity to turn the tables and find out more about your hosts. And so to the food. While chomping is universally considered uncouth, slurping soup or noodles can be a sign of appreciation in Asia. Such dishes are also 'inhaled' to cool them as you eat. Only hungry peasants fill up on rice, so don't ask for it if hosted. You'll get a small bowl of rice towards the end of the meal in China. In Japan, rice is eaten between courses and never mixed with food.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
This city restaurant's signature dish has been served 100,000 times
Previous SlideNext Slide There's a famous Chinese tongue twister that cab drivers in China love to repeat. It's about chilli, a point of pride and fierce regional conjecture in China's central provinces. People from Sichuan, it goes, do not fear chilli. People from Hunan province? They're not afraid of the stuff either. People from Guizhou province, however, they just fear the meal won't be hot enough. Queen Street in the CBD might not spring to mind when you think of regional Chinese food, but it's home to a restaurant that cooks the food of those first two provinces – plus a little from neighbouring Hubei – to a rare standard. Red Cliff is named for a military battle that took place on the Yangtze, the river that connects the kitchen's three schools of cooking, in 208AD. Given the restaurant's fondness for both the lip-frazzling bedlam of the Sichuan peppercorn and the thrilling hostility of Hunan's army of chillies, those Guizhou folks have nothing to fear here. Some, myself included, do like it hot. But if chilli isn't your jam, you're still in safe hands. It's the dazzling clarity and sheer vitality in the cooking that distinguishes Red Cliff from its contemporaries, and both turn up in the food irrespective of the heat. Canary-yellow fish soups that run wild with pickled cabbage and chicken broth. Twice-cooked pork belly enriched with fermented bean paste and tossed with spring onion. Dry-fried swimmer crabs piled high and spiced with abandon. Red Cliff is packed every night. Chancing a walk-in, we take a number and are off the street and into a crisp Tsingtao lager in 10 minutes. Cue the sensory assault: ruby red walls covered with cartoon princesses from bygone dynasties. Hanging yellow and red lanterns; tubular glazed roof tiles – the ones you might associate with ancient temples – tracing the ceiling. The thrum of a full room rising and falling with every bubbling delivery from the kitchen, and, crucially, the aching refrains of 'pao mo', an evergreen Chinese torch song. The Chinese term 'renao', a sort of lively rambunctiousness, springs to mind – an ingredient as critical to central Chinese hospitality as the Sichuan peppercorn itself. It's also commonly found at the bottom of a bottle of baijiu, China's notorious, sorghum-based spirit. There's plenty of it here, just ask the gentlemen in the private dining room. 'This is food that widens eyes and incites hubbub. Food that makes you want to slap backs and spill beer in the private dining room.' Ordering happens either by QR code or by the enormous physical menu; a laminated broadsheet filled, for the largest part, with food from Sichuan, followed by Hunan, followed by Hubei, plus a Peking duck that might've lost its way while making south for the winter. If you happen to read hanzi, a closer inspection of those hanging lanterns reveals the names of some of the restaurant's most popular dishes: wok-tossed bullfrog; sauteed chicken with hot chilli and peppercorn; chou 'stinky' tofu; yabby noodles. You'll spot those dishes on most tables (the tofu will announce itself on the breeze), but those yabbies are the stuff of legend and have reportedly been served over 100,000 times. Order them mala-style (heavy on the Sichuan peppercorn), order them Hunan-spicy (a straighter, hotter heat), or have them rolled about in a blend of 13 spices. Either way, they'll be ladled generously over wheat noodles; a saucy signature. The Zigong-style chilli beef, billed as a two-chilli dish in a four-chilli rubric, is hot. But it's also heaven: a fortissimo of Christmas-coloured chillies, coins of pickled ginger, garlic spanked to shards, coriander, celery and tender marinated beef. It's a maximalist's dream, and there's a hell of a lot of it. Hotter still, Hunanese mainstay lei lajiao pidan, or smashed peppers with century eggs salad, arrives in a mortar, unsmashed. We're instructed to pound the blistered green chillies – sweet, ruinously hot – with the eggs by way of pestle. Their whites now a translucent green, the eggs temper the vicious heat with a cooling funk that also gives the dish its dimension. Still burning? Temper it further with a bing fen, a Sichuanese street dessert that presents like Chinese scroggin served over jelly and red-sugar syrup; a gentle way to finish after a full-throttle session. Red Cliff is a lot. This is food that widens eyes and incites hubbub. Food that makes you want to slap backs and spill beer in the private dining room. Food that makes you want to 'gan bei!' your baijiu and prosecute flimsy arguments until your lips stop fizzing. Sure, the service is curt and the toilets aren't flash. Sure, there is that trolley of splattered dishes next to the counter for all to see. But it's all part of the renao – the beating heart of a central Chinese meal that makes Red Cliff appointment dining, whether you like it hot or not.
