Latest news with #BeshaRodell
ABC News
01-08-2025
- General
- ABC News
Australia's 'tough conversations' about diversity are yet to happen
When the nomadic, quasi-Australian, quasi-American restaurant critic, Besha Rodell, finally returned to Melbourne in 2017, she sent her American-born teen to a local school, only for him to come home regularly shocked by the talk he discovered in the schoolyard. In her thoughtful and beautifully written memoir, Hunger Like a Thirst, Rodell writes of her 14-year-old son's first days of school " … baffled by the teenage customs and prejudices of his Australian classmates. 'They tease people here for being poor' … racism and homophobia were thrown around casually, as banter, in a way that would never have flown in the Los Angeles public schools he'd attended." In her book about food, journalism and a life trying to find home, this wasn't the sentence I expected would stop me dead. With a son in middle school myself, in a socio-demographic setting in Melbourne almost identical to Besha's, we had also been grappling with reports of the "roasting", trash-talking and general jeers and banter that came home from our son's school. Some of the stuff — racist, homophobic and sexist — was just appalling. It seemed almost impossible for any of the kids to avoid being swept up in it, especially the younger ones. I couldn't figure out if it was commonplace, a generational thing, or specific to certain demographics — "class" is something you just can't talk about in Australia. But then of course I remembered the disgusting public chants of various private school kids that I'd covered over the years, and I remembered all the way back to my childhood, when the preferred insults of "dyke", "lezzo" and "poofter" were common at my state school. Whereas a certain aspect of the commentariat would have you believe that fears of "cancellation'" have not only eradicated any non-inclusive language, but made us painfully too cautious, the reality seems far more troubling: how common is this kind of talk among our young students? And why is the contrast with America so significant? I asked Besha. She said she could not suggest that her son's experience was universal, but Felix, now in his early 20s, went to a huge school in the middle of Los Angeles, "about the most liberal place you could be". And the socially similar school her son went to in Melbourne — an inner north high school — was not somewhere she expected to encounter bigoted viewpoints as part of the accepted culture. "We live(d) at the top end of Carlton and kids would tease him that he probably lived in the commission flats — in LA there was absolutely no shame in being poor, and in fact his wealthy friends were the ones who felt the need to defend themselves," she said. Besha said that half the kids he knew in the US were black, Asian, Latino, had gay parents. "One of his best primary school friends was trans and everyone just accepted it like it was no big thing. The schools he went to here were much, much whiter, and where there were Asian or black kids, they were socially fairly segregated." Besha's writing life has bounced her back and forth between Australia and the US for decades: her comparative analytical skills are well-honed when it comes to considering the two cultures. She is under no illusions about the horrors of the US school system — like thousands of other American parents on that day in 2012, she rushed to her son's school just to be near him and to take him home when she heard about Sandy Hook. But she can, perhaps more clearly than many of us, see the cracks in the stories we tell ourselves. "I do think Australia suffers from this idea that we're basically an equitable society, and to talk about our deficiencies is to stir trouble, miss the point or be ungrateful. That has definitely changed over the last 10 to 15 years, or is beginning to, but we still haven't had a lot of the tough conversations, publicly, that America has had to have." This week I heard the journalist Jan Fran — who with Antoinette Lattouf has an excellent news podcast called Ette — reflect on something similar: she wondered if we really were as successful a multicultural country as we like to think. The faces, the food, the surnames that dominate modern Australian culture comfortably lead us to believe that we've "done" multiculturalism better than anyone else: when "every Australian town has banh mi" how could you think otherwise? But Fran isn't buying it anymore. Talking about diversity in newsrooms, including at the ABC, she said that Australia's multiculturalism is "peripheral: 'dots' of cultures and ethnicities that orbit the monoculture like satellites, hoping to get close, but never quite at the centre". It's an analysis that stings, particularly when the slang comes home from the schoolyard and all the epithets are — still — about the assumed outsiders. When our parliaments, newsrooms, judicial benches and many other institutions all look a certain way, the satellite theory lands. In this weekend's reads we have scams, frauds and the secret life of chauffeuring pets — which actually sounds like the dream. Sailors to bikies — How tattooing became mainstream INXS's Hottest 100 win: How worlds collided for Never Tear Us Apart I quit my 30-year career as a flight attendant and became a chauffeur for petsResentment doesn't have to mean the end of a relationship One week in the NT's Youth Justice Court shows effects of tough bail laws The ATO learned it was being scammed, then paid out millions more to fraudsters Have a safe and happy weekend: I'll be at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's live performance of one of my favourite films of all time — yes, it's even in my Letterboxd — How to Train Your Dragon. I'm taking all the tissues with me to get through this scene, and its immortal music by the composer John Powell, in one piece. If you're in Melbs, I hope to see you there. Go well. Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.
The Age
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A powerful, razor-sharp culinary and coming-of-age memoir
MEMOIR Hunger Like a Thirst Besha Rodell Hardie Grant, $35 There is a lot to learn from this book. Besha Rodell has led a pretty fractured life. As a child in the 1980s, she lived in a tumbledown house in Melbourne's Brunswick with her father, a historian and former minister, and her American mother, the daughter of a Hollywood scriptwriter. Her mother started having affairs and her father moved into another house, sharing with the man who was to become Besha's stepfather. Before long, Besha's life was divided between the USA and Australia. Within the states, she was a nomad, circulating around North Carolina, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, Colorado and other places. She found jobs in restaurant kitchens and began working obscene hours with curious colleagues. The restaurant industry hardly leaves time for its practitioners to eat. Part of this razor-sharp memoir campaigns for change in the destructive habits of a trade whose virtues Rodell fully appreciates. Yet, many cafes eat their staff. Rodell shares her story with brio, and it is a dizzying sequence of events. She has so many unforgettable experiences that she can hardly remember them all. She and her partner, Ryan, and before long their child, Felix, sail close to the wind financially. Eventually, Rodell found her way into reviewing restaurants and, for many years, this has been her stock-in-trade; at present, she's the chief restaurant critic for The Age. As she starts to unpack the intricacies and demands of writing about food with integrity, Hunger Like a Thirst becomes a sorbet in a culture that is so spiced with hype that it has no flavour of its own. Rodell has worked against the tide in a world where influencers and other minor celebrities are cajoled into providing all the flattery any business could want. If you have posted even lukewarm reviews of restaurants, you may know what it is like to be contacted by the establishment and offered inducements to change your tune. Whom can you trust? She has her roots in an earlier time, when reviewing was a form of genuine engagement, not mindless barracking. She inherited excellent rules from a gentleman called Craig Claiborne who became the food critic of The New York Times in 1957. Claiborne was a pioneer in several ways, not least in establishing a food section of the paper that dealt with more than domestic housekeeping. His rules could well be adapted to reviewing anything, from books to cruises. They advocate a standard of consistency and objectivity. Weekly reviews should be done by the same person. The reviewer will dine anonymously. The reviewer will visit the restaurant at least three times, eat widely from the menu and order some dishes more than once. Absolutely no freebies of any kind.
Sydney Morning Herald
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A powerful, razor-sharp culinary and coming-of-age memoir
MEMOIR Hunger Like a Thirst Besha Rodell Hardie Grant, $35 There is a lot to learn from this book. Besha Rodell has led a pretty fractured life. As a child in the 1980s, she lived in a tumbledown house in Melbourne's Brunswick with her father, a historian and former minister, and her American mother, the daughter of a Hollywood scriptwriter. Her mother started having affairs and her father moved into another house, sharing with the man who was to become Besha's stepfather. Before long, Besha's life was divided between the USA and Australia. Within the states, she was a nomad, circulating around North Carolina, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, Colorado and other places. She found jobs in restaurant kitchens and began working obscene hours with curious colleagues. The restaurant industry hardly leaves time for its practitioners to eat. Part of this razor-sharp memoir campaigns for change in the destructive habits of a trade whose virtues Rodell fully appreciates. Yet, many cafes eat their staff. Rodell shares her story with brio, and it is a dizzying sequence of events. She has so many unforgettable experiences that she can hardly remember them all. She and her partner, Ryan, and before long their child, Felix, sail close to the wind financially. Eventually, Rodell found her way into reviewing restaurants and, for many years, this has been her stock-in-trade; at present, she's the chief restaurant critic for The Age. As she starts to unpack the intricacies and demands of writing about food with integrity, Hunger Like a Thirst becomes a sorbet in a culture that is so spiced with hype that it has no flavour of its own. Rodell has worked against the tide in a world where influencers and other minor celebrities are cajoled into providing all the flattery any business could want. If you have posted even lukewarm reviews of restaurants, you may know what it is like to be contacted by the establishment and offered inducements to change your tune. Whom can you trust? She has her roots in an earlier time, when reviewing was a form of genuine engagement, not mindless barracking. She inherited excellent rules from a gentleman called Craig Claiborne who became the food critic of The New York Times in 1957. Claiborne was a pioneer in several ways, not least in establishing a food section of the paper that dealt with more than domestic housekeeping. His rules could well be adapted to reviewing anything, from books to cruises. They advocate a standard of consistency and objectivity. Weekly reviews should be done by the same person. The reviewer will dine anonymously. The reviewer will visit the restaurant at least three times, eat widely from the menu and order some dishes more than once. Absolutely no freebies of any kind.
RNZ News
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Dishing the dirt on restaurant life
food author interview 42 minutes ago One birthday dinner at Melbourne's fanciest restaurant at age nine was all it took for Besha Rodell to get hooked on fine dining. She turned that obsession into a career, becoming a James Beard Award winning food critic for LA Weekly, The Age, and The New York Times. Besha Rodell's new memoir goes beyond restaurant reviews. It's an unflinching account of navigating a high-pressure, male-dominated world where every meal feeds deeper questions of self-worth, longing, and the drive to belong. It's called "Hunger Like a Thirst: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, A Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table".
The Age
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Your guide to ordering at this of-the-moment wine bar (once you manage to snag a table)
Dining at Suze feels like watching the zeitgeist evolve in real time, says Besha Rodell, a fan of its bold cooking. But you'll need to follow her game plan to avoid an all-out acid trip. Previous SlideNext Slide 14/20How we score Contemporary$$$$ Here's an equation: Take a small Melbourne restaurant, and multiply it by the power of wine bar. Add the coolness of Fitzroy North and two longstanding hospo professionals. What does it add up to? Suze. Located in the two-storey corner building on Newry Street that most recently housed One Trick Pony, Suze is all angles and old windows and slate grey walls punctuated by bright angular modern art. Downstairs, a central slab of a bar is surrounded by tables tucked into the wall, while a staircase leads to a first floor open kitchen facing the intimate dining room. Anchoring the kitchen pass, which has more cooks in it than seems physically advisable, is Steve Harry, a chef who has worked at Napier Quarter, Auterra and a host of other notable Melbourne venues. His partner, Giulia Giorgetti, oversees the front of house, which operates with the kind of friendly, informed cool that the inner north does best. Is Suze an amalgamation of all the experience these two bring from all the other Melbourne wine bar-type restaurants they've had a hand in? Or is it a progression, a leap forward? I can't quite tell – there's a certain Parisian cool to the place, a move away from Italy as inspiration. It wouldn't be the first time (or even the fifth) that Melbourne made this sidestep, but it feels very of-the-now at Suze, as if you're watching the zeitgeist evolve in real time. Harry's menu is both familiar and wild, with dishes that might appear on other menus but wouldn't taste nearly this bold or flavour-packed. There's a house-made ricotta covered with a layer of lush sliced persimmon and doused in pepperberries that are downright prickly on the tongue, a punch of spice that's as unexpected as it is beguiling. Raw fish – silky slabs of meaty tuna the day I ate it – swims in Tasmanian wasabi with puckery desert lime. A spanner crab linguine is a high-acid, high-intensity flavour bomb. If you look at the descriptions above, there are a lot of adjectives somewhat synonymous with the word 'acidic', and that's the biggest issue with the cooking at Suze. Individually, these dishes sing, but one after another? The acid trip can go off the rails. If there's one piece of advice I'd give to every chef it is: Sit in your own restaurant and eat a full meal, all the way through. Because so many dishes are amazing as one-offs when you're in creation mode, but when strung together with every other dish, the experience can be wildly different to what you encounter while standing in the kitchen with a tasting spoon. If I were to try one bite of any dish at Suze, then I'd be swooning. As a single bar of music, this food is glorious; when you play the whole album, there is too much treble and not enough bass. It would be unfair for me to say that every single dish on this menu is wildly acidic, it's too easy to wind up going in that direction. But there are ways for diners to mitigate this potential. Have the Bay of Fire cheddar gougeres. Pick either the raw fish or the ricotta, but not both. If you're going for the whole fish, a glorious flounder in a very perky caper sauce fattened up with bone marrow, pair it with the agnolotti, delicate and heavy on the comte, with an overload of nutmeg that's bold and brilliant. Maybe save the vinegar-forward braised rainbow chard for another day (say, when you're in the mood for the lamb rump). Whether you're on acid overload or not, I'm going to say you should still order the grapefruit sorbetto because it's maybe the best grapefruit dessert I've had in Australia, embracing the bitterness of the citrus while tamping it down with the sweetness of Suze, the restaurant's namesake French aperitif, and giving it spiky energy with a smattering of pink peppercorn. There's also a tulumba, a dense Turkish doughnut, coated in a syrup made from black garlic that's so umami-rich and dense that it almost reminds me of Vegemite. It works! I swear! 'As a single bar of music this food is glorious; when you play the whole album, there is too much treble and not enough bass.' It's not easy to get a table at Suze these days, and I can see why. The vibe is perfect for this moment in time. The cooking is bold and creative. The wine list is varied and approachable and full of bargains. It's an immensely fun place to spend an evening or a leisurely Sunday afternoon. And Harry and Giorgetti are a formidable team, so much so that I expect to see their influence in Melbourne restaurants for years to come, acid and all.
