This cosy inner-north ramen joint serves less than 100 bowls a day
Japanese$$$$
Ako's in Fitzroy is a heartfelt story, born from owner Sho Iijima's nostalgia for his mother's home-style chicken soup from Kanagawa, Japan. This translates to a concise menu where chicken shio ramen – clear chicken broth with a salt-based tare – is the hero.
Sho only serves 80 to 100 bowls daily, each with meticulously prepared house-made noodles, tender torched pork chashu, marinated egg and bamboo shoots with a perfect bite. A vegan mushroom broth, also inspired by Ako's recipes, offers an equally nourishing alternative.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
9 News
an hour ago
- 9 News
Expert says Australia's 'chronically over-budget' warship project should be scrapped
Your web browser is no longer supported. To improve your experience update it here Chronically over-budget, significantly delayed and lacking firepower - that's the expert assessment of a major warship project they say should be scrapped. The Hunter Class frigate project is already seven years behind schedule and many billions of dollars more expensive than initially anticipated. In 2018, British company BAE Systems won a $35 billion tender to build nine frigates, or $3.8 billion each, with the first scheduled to be in service by 2027. Australia's next Hunter-class frigates will be based on this British design. (Nine) By 2020 the price tag had blown out to $45 billion or $5 billion a piece, and Defence is now estimating it will cost $27 billion to build just frigates, or $9 billion each, with the first to be in service by 2034 - seven years late. BAE Systems is the company that will build Australia's AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines. Strategic Analysis Australia director Michael Shoebridge said the Hunter Class project was the "high point of decadence" in Defence decision-making. He said Defence adjusted the original BAE British design with a series of add-ons, including different combat and radar systems - which made it massively more expensive. "That frigate program is beyond scandalous - It's entered ludicrous mode for a wasteful use of taxpayer money and a very slow, small contribution to Australian military power," Shoebridge said. Australia's next Hunter-class frigates will be based on this British design. (Nine) He said the Hunter had just 32 missiles, which was a third of the weaponry of the Chinese cruiser that circumnavigated Australia in March. "We're in a very dangerous world and a very dangerous period in the world, and waiting to the mid-2030s and into the 2040s for three frigates for this amount of money, makes no sense. "We could go to the Japanese or the South Koreans and get a properly armed cruiser much faster than BAE is delivering this program." Defence analyst Dr Marcus Hellyer was equally scathing of the Hunter frigate, saying Navy's adjustments to the design had not only significantly increased its cost, but the frigate's weight, taking it from 8000 tonnes to more than 10,000 tonnes, making it slower. "It is monstrously expensive," Hellyer said. "And I would say, if you're in a hole, stop digging. "The government itself has decided it can't wait for the Hunter Class frigate, so it has kicked off a new frigate program and it is considering a competition between a German design and a Japanese design. "So the government itself has pretty much said we need to do something different - in a sense, they're halfway there already." Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said the Hunter frigate project would not be cut despite its problems. "I wish I had a time machine to go back to 2016 and avoid the mistakes that the Coalition government made, but we've moved on," Conroy said. "We've got the project on track. Steel is being cut right now, we've signed the contract, there are about 2500 people working on this project right now. "The fastest way of delivering new capability for the Royal Australian Navy, is following through on this, building this project, now that we've fixed up many of the mistakes the Coalition government made." navy Australia defence national CONTACT US Auto news:Is this the next Subaru WRX? Mysterious performance car teased.
West Australian
2 hours ago
- West Australian
BEN HARVEY: Many questions still unanswered on the North West Shelf project
Woodside Energy boss Meg O'Neill has a gas problem. The whole of Australia is about find out how offensive it is. It's not that O'Neill has too much gas. And this isn't an embarrassing 'I hope nobody gets in this lift' kind of dilemma. It's far more serious. The six-year process of extending the life of the sprawling North West Shelf gas project almost broke everyone involved: Woodside, the environmentalists who fretted the carbon footprint, the Aboriginal activists who saw ancient rock art imperilled and the government bureaucrats who did the policy due diligence. It ended with State and Federal politicians having to make a Sophie's Choice between climate action and protecting Indigenous culture on the one hand and economic reality on the other. Everyone involved will need a cup of tea and a lie down when Woodside finally responds to the Federal Government's demands and a deal is inked to keep the facility going until 2070. Don't break out the Twinings just yet, for this is not the end. It's not, to parrot Winston Churchill, even the beginning of the end. At best, it's the end of the beginning. The big question now is, where will the gas come from? How does Woodside feed a beast which, at one point, was the biggest engineering project in the world? The fields that currently sustain the NWS will keep the place humming until the late 2030s, albeit at ever-declining rates. Woodside might be able to squeeze a few more years by tapping some neighbouring reservoirs over which it has rights but 2040 is going to be pretty close to a hard stop. What then? Browse, right? Most analysts agree that Australia's biggest undeveloped resource will eventually be developed (it will be a long time coming when it is; it was discovered in 1967) but there is no guarantee it will feed the NWS. Respected energy analyst Saul Kavonic has for years argued that it is far more logical for Browse gas to be incorporated into the neighbouring Ichthys project run by Japanese energy giant INPEX. That would see the gas processed at INPEX's still-newish and very efficient LNG plant in Darwin. Kavonic says this would be an 'elegant solution' to the Browse conundrum. On paper it makes sense. The Ichthys field is 150 km from Browse — a long straw to blow through but a fraction of the 900km needed to connect Browse to the NWS. To put 900km in perspective, it's 10km longer than the underwater tube that connects INPEX's assets off the Kimberley coast to Darwin — and that pipe set a world record when it was completed. The competing costs of different pipeline routes isn't the only thing that Woodside must consider. Browse has a sasquatch-sized 's carbon footprint. Woodside would need to plant another Amazon rain forest to offset the emissions so the carbon will need to be sequestered. That technology is still hit and miss so you can bet London-to-a-brick that the company will put its handout for a taxpayer subsidy. We could see a bidding war between the Northern Territory and WA governments. Come to us and we will financially de-risk the sequestration process, the NT will say. We'll JV it with you and tell the punters we're pioneering new climate-saving technology. Have we got a deal for you, the politicians in Perth will plead. Come to WA and we'll fast track everything. We'll give it major project status and bypass every inch of red tape. We'll set fire to the Department of the Environment if we have to! If the economics are overwhelmingly in favour of Darwin Woodside needs a plan B for the NWS. Plan B could be acreage over which Chevron has options and which Woodside has been eyeing off for some time. That's interesting because right now the Federal Government is toughening up its use-it-or-lose provisions. Kavonic thinks at the very least this will give O'Neill the opportunity to pressure Chevron into supplying the NWS. The nuclear option would see the Feds strip Chevron of the fields it's been banking. Either eventuality would be bad news for Chevron, which needs those fields to backfill its Gorgon and Wheatstone processing facilities in the 2040s and 2050s. The supermajor needs to rinse every last dollar from its $100 billion investment in those plants, so the bosses in California won't go down without a fight. And, as anyone who has watched Landman knows, the only creature more ferocious than an American oil executive is an American oil executive's lawyer. If poaching Chevron's assets isn't possible then Woodside has only two cards to play, one offshore and one on. The Equus gas field, in waters 200km north of the Wheatstone project, seems a perfect solution. In 2022, Woodside struck a non-binding deal with owner Western Gas to produce and export three million tonnes of Equus gas as LNG through the NWS. The non-binding part is the most important take-out from that deal because the economics of Equus make no sense to even the most bullish gas price forecaster. The contract may as well have had the working title 'In case of emergency break glass'. The last option is the Perth Basin, where all roads lead to billionaires. The Ryan Stokes-controlled Waitsia project is already exporting gas through a swap deal with Woodside. It is about to directly feed the NWS but under policy settings designed to shore up domestic supply is only allowed to tap international markets until 2030. The Cook Government may need to extend that deadline when it comes to realise that domestic gas is a side hustle to the lucrative LNG trade but so far 2030 is set in stone. The rest of the Perth basin is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gina Inc. Rinehart has sprawling assets in the region but, so far, has shown little appetite to develop them. Even if she did drill a few wells, it's unlikely she could build a processing plant before 2030 and pipe the gas to the NWS for export. Rinehart could avoid the deadline crunch by striking a tolling deal with Waitsia but there's every chance she would turn her nose up at that option when she compares margins with the dizzyingly profitable Roy Hill iron ore mine. Put all that in a blender and you have an economic, political, environmental and social smoothie that will play havoc with Meg O'Neill's guts. And given gas is critical to this country's prosperity, we could all get indigestion.
The Age
14 hours ago
- The Age
The government can print money. So, why can't it keep borrowing?
So, why do governments borrow money in the first place? Why are countries such as Japan (with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 240 per cent) aren't freaking out? And what's stopping governments – including the Australian government – from just continuing to borrow? Well, borrowing a bit of money is generally a good thing. As independent economist Saul Eslake puts it, most households want to pay off their debt at some point in their life so as not to leave debts behind for their children. But it's a different matter for governments and well-run companies because they don't (usually) die. Australia, right now, is better positioned than most countries when it comes to the money our government owes. In fact, he says funding some infrastructure spending – such as on a new railway, hospital or renewable energy technology – is a reasonable way of making sure future generations contribute something to the cost of creating something they will benefit from, rather than the entire burden falling on the current generation. Of course, it also depends on what that borrowed money is spent on. Relying on it to pay for day-to-day expenses such as salaries and wages is probably less fruitful than investing it in big projects like a new train line that people can use for years to come. It also depends on the state of the economy. When growth is weak or receding, there's a stronger case for the government to borrow money to pump into the economy. But when things are going well and business is booming, borrowing can drive up demand and push up prices. It's also less worrying for the government to be borrowing when interest rates are low. When the cost of borrowing starts to creep up, that's when a big pile of debt can be problematic. Then, there's also the question of whether the government is borrowing from within the country, or outside it. The Japanese government, for example, borrows mostly from its own Bank of Japan, Japanese financial institutions and Japanese citizens. That means, despite its huge debt, it tends to pay lower interest rates because there's a huge supply of savings within the country and lower transaction costs than if they were to borrow more from overseas. It also takes out loans in its own currency: the Japanese yen. By comparison, only about one third of Australian government debt is held domestically. Most debt crises, including the infamous Greek debt crisis in 2009, came to a head partly because those countries were borrowing from outside their borders or in currencies that weren't their own. That left them vulnerable to sudden global movements and also meant they couldn't just print off money to pay down their debt. Of course, it's not really a strategy at all for governments to just print money. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, a larger supply of money floating around the economy pushed down its price, or value. In other words, printing too much money leads to inflation because everyone's money becomes less valuable and, therefore, they are less able to buy things. But back to the Australian government's debt, which Treasurer Jim Chalmers managed to trim back to 38 per cent of GDP, then 34 per cent, before this year letting it creep back up to 36 per cent. This year, the federal government has set aside $28 billion towards interest payments. That works out to about $1400 per Australian taxpayer. But it's also only $3 billion shy of one of our most expensive government programs: Medicare. There's no hard and fast rule for how much debt is optimal. And for now, with an AAA credit rating – the best possible mark for a country's ability to repay its debts – the Australian government can borrow at lower interest rates than many other countries. If anything, it's our state governments that have received a warning from one of the world's biggest ratings agencies that their rating could be dropped to AA if they don't rein in their spending. And while Australia's government debt is far from being at crisis level, it is important to keep in mind that it comes at a cost. We know that printing money comes with its own problems. But higher debt also means the government will have to hike taxes, reduce spending, or a combination of the two, to pay it off. Loading Losing that AAA rating is not the end of the world for the states or for the federal government. But it does mean our borrowing options will shrink a bit, and the interest costs will pick up. Our government does most of its borrowing through the Australian Office of Financial Management (AOFM), which sells loans (also known as bonds or bills) on behalf of the government. These loans are then bought mostly by huge asset managers, including pension funds and insurers, hedge funds and central banks, including the Reserve Bank – with some of it bought by non-professional individual investors. As Eslake points out, some of the big borrowers will be barred (by their own rules) from taking on more Australian government debt if our rating is knocked down a notch. However, pressures on government spending will probably only rise in years to come as the population ages, the energy transition becomes more urgent and housing demands intensify. Loading While a debt ceiling such as the one in the US is an arguably silly concept, it's not a bad idea to have a debt-to-GDP target to measure up against.
