Paradiso Cinema (Perth WA)

164 James St
Northbridge Western Australia 6003
(08) 9227 1771
http://www.luna.com.au 

Paradiso is one of the few cinemas left open in the CDB, and the one that shows the most interesting films, mostly European films and awarded ones.


I have a mix of feelings about the Paradiso. I like the location and place, and I go there often, but the atmosphere is decadent and boring, and the selection of movies mainstream. No spark anywhere or from anybody.

Despite its great location, and the mix of cosy and fully-sized cinema theatres, the place looks desert most of the times, no matter the time of the day you go, the day of the week you go. I have often felt like a loner, despite me going there to share the movie with other humans. You know, if I wanted to watch a movie on my own I would do so comfortably at home.  I have rarely found the cinema theatres full, and it is usually Oscar-related movies or popular foreign comedies. The last two A separation, and A Chinese Tale.  

The Paradiso hosts the French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and Israeli Film Festivals every year. That is great. What is not great is the selection of movies shown, which is usually made of bland comedies, feel-good movies and an isolated drama... mainstream. They are great if you want to practice any of those languages or see anything foreign in general, especially if you attend the special events they host. Honestly, I would rather have a World Movies film festival showing terrific films from different countries of a given year, than well-marketed mediocre national ones. Wouldn't you? If you really love Indie, independent and good-quality world movies go elsewhere.

The Paradiso is full of loners who do not want to be so. There is a reason why the cinema does not attract the bunch of people that Luna does, despite its location, and it is the selection of movies they have, the atmosphere of the place, and the time screenings they have. That explains the abundance of retirees and mature people in general.

Another thing that bugs me is that the people selling the tickets never seem to be happy or smiley. That is so, because there is usually one person attending to the sale of tickets, and another to the bar, and one, if we are lucky, helping the other two in special events. This is so even if the cue reaches the street. They are overworked many times, and cannot show any spark, because they do not have any left.

The Paradiso is not like one of those old European cinemas, the ones that pretends to be, because those cinemas are full any time of the day with people of all ages and lots of young people, they are much cheaper in general, and have better prices for students.  

The good thing about the Paradiso is that, most times, you can seat wherever you want, and cry freely at a movie without having to fake that a tiny particle of dust is the cause.

I like the Paradiso, but they need to revamp the place, still keeping its essence, and to have a better selection of movies. On the other hand, many of the movie festivals show the films at awkward times, which are impossible for any working person to attend. 

They used to have a better selection of movies in the past, so I do not know what is happening.

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The Tuck Shop Café (Perth WA)

1/178 Newcastle St
Perth Western Australia 6000
(08) 9227 1659
Facebook
Hours:
    Tue-Sun 7:00 - 16:00


THE PLACE - Located in in a clean spot, The Tuck Shop is tucked away from the hustle of the nearby William Street, in a new area of Newcastle Street that is slightly becoming a preferred location for new eateries. Tuck Shop is a name that perfectly describes what this little café is, a place where people go to eat heartily - passionately I would say. The place is very functional and clean, with every millimetre occupied and mindfully used. The Tuck Shop attracts an heterogeneous group of people, from trade workers to business lads, to glamazones, grannies and yummy mammies, loners and groups of friends.

The ambience is casual but friendly. I love the natural light the place has, which creates a relaxed cosy atmosphere, especially after 1.30 pm, when most people are back to work and the place is what should be - a nice café where to seat and enjoy a nice traditional meal without having the bottoms or elbows of other customers bordering your table, or the conversation of the people next table being part of your day. Although, to be completely honest, I find the later quite entertaining. Some of the one-person tables are actually used for two people, so you will have your companion at 5 mm from your face, which is great if you want to kiss, not much if you want to eat.

THE FOOD -  This is a nice café with fresh produce, hot food prepared and cooked in the premises. They have a small but well balanced menu with very healthy and very earthy options, Mediterranean and British dishes and Australian sizing. Classic dishes that will make everybody happy because they are well cooked, nicely sized, and beautifully plated. Traditional old-school cooking in its full splendour. You go there, you eat well, and you leave full and satisfied. The best thing is that they do not to pretend to be anything fancy and do not overcharge you for what you eat despite the hype.

The pies are huge, full of chunky pieces of meat, which are tender, juicy and full of flavour, and with the right amount of gravy. The Pork Belly should be called Wholly Molly Belly because it is huge, and very tasty;  it is a great winter dish that will feed two women or a traddie :O. The mash potato was my mother's like - divine!

Most ladies seem to prefer the light options, while men (and women with a stomach) prefer the traditional dishes.

THE SERVICE - The service is very good, and I am surprised at finding people complaining about it. What I have found is extremely friendly ladies, running non stop, cleaning my table, taking my order, and putting water and cutlery on my table very fast. All of that with a smile and willingness to serve. Depending on what you order, and how many people are before you, you will get your meal very fast or  you will have to wait a bit, about ten minutes, which is not that bad. Still, nothing to worry about during my lunch break. 

THE COFFEE - I am not a fan of the bland Toby Estate's beans, but Tuck Shop prepares a decent coffee, which is consistently good in the premises and for takeaway.  Still, a bit weak and lacking in flavour for coffee addicts and aficionados 

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
 1/  The place needs a barista that is just in charge of the café and another person attending to the cash machine, instead of the girls doing three jobs. They also need another waiter for rush hours, so the service is more relaxed.
2/ Another table on the footpath would be great, and would give some relieve to the indoors area.
3/ Golden Rule: You do not add salt or pepper to your food until you have tried it. Therefore, instead of asking if you want pepper before testing, they should have a salt & pepper set on each table, so customers can use them (or not) at ease.
4/ Correct the fattiness of the pork belly with some zest, refreshing herb or condiment, so the palate can enjoy the fat without being overwhelmed by it.
5/ The peas mash are OK, not specially tasty and ugly looking. Why not mashing then properly and adding some spices? I know this is the traditional way, but they are boring.

***

I would go to Tuck Shop to eat those dishes that require of culinary skills - traditional food like pork belly, pies, soups and cooked dishes. You can easily prepare the bruschette at home. Still, some of the ones served here are great a perfect for breakfast.

I find completely ridiculous finding people cueing and waiting outside for a considerable amount of time, both on weekends and weekdays, which contributes to the crowding of the place. If they line for a nice café, what would do they do when they find a one-star Michelin, take their tents and camp overnight? Chaps, if the place is full, go elsewhere, and come back another day when the place is not full; this favours a better service and will improve the atmosphere of the place, which is overcrowded, noisy and hectic at the moment.

Location 6.5/10
Layout 6/10
Ambience 6/10
Food 8/10
Coffee 6.5/10
Service 9/10
Pricing 8/10

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"The Imposter" by Bart Layton (2012)

This is the documentary, of the many I saw during the Perth Revelation Film Festival 2012, that has stuck to my memory, and the one that fascinated me the most.

The documentary revolves about the vanishing of a 13y.o boy, Nicholas Barclay, for his home in Texas in 1993, to be found in Spain with an apparent amnesia six years later. What happens after the young man call the Spanish Police is the core of the film.

The movie mixes interviews with the protagonist Frédéric Bourdin, Nicholas' family, American FBI and Consular officials, and has very atmospheric re-enactments done with Spanish actors and settings narrating the events occurred in Spain. The story is build up like in a thriller, and it will keep you glued to the screen, wanting to know what is going to happen next. 

Layton has given the documentary the tone of a mystery movie in the re-enactments, but also in the interviews through the use of the chiaroscuro, camera positioning, hues of the film, and the tempo and way the events are presented - everything serves to build up suspense and mystery, and make you doubt and question yourself. Is this a real documentary or a mockumentary? Are we being fooled? The story is fascinating and amazing per se, but the way it is presented, is marvellous from a cinematic point of view as lets the viewer munch on a few philosophical themes: self-identity, reality and perception of reality, the connection between emotion and perception, and the use of cinematic narratives in documentaries based on real events, among other things.   


One of the main downs of the movie is that Nicholas' family is somewhat ridiculed and vilified for the sake of the storyline. After all, we need of good, bad, stupid and clever characters in a story to create an interesting film. In the first place they are portrayed as ignoramuses; however, they are a suburban family living in a poor area of the USA, with little or none education; you cannot expect much of any person grown in this social environment anywhere in the world. In the second place, they are ridiculed for failing to detach themselves from their emotions and see something really obvious for the spectator; however its a characteristic of human nature and behaviour to attach emotion to our thoughts and to interpret what we see according to our own personal individual viewfinder. We do so, all of us, every single day, in our daily lives, so you cannot expect traumatised and emotional people to see things as clearly as we see them from our seat in the cinema. In the third place, the movie implicitly blames the family, by letting some of the characters doing so, for the vanishing of Nicholas, without providing any evidence for it.

Still, this is a terrific documentary. The less you know about the whole story at the beginning, the more you will enjoy it. This is a documentary that attracts people to the genre because reinvents it. A proof that a documentary can be amazing, intriguing, entertaining, and thought provoking.

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El Público (Mt Lawley, Perth WA)

511 Beaufort St
Highgate Western Australia 6003
0418 187 708
Website
Facebook
Hours   
  Wed - Fri: 17:00 - 00:00
  Sat:12:00 - 00:00
  Sun: 12:00 - 22:00
 
I had passed many times by El Público without realising that this was a restaurant, as the store-front is very sleek and the signs are flat banners on the wall and windows. The place is quite small, but very comfortable and luminous during the day, and has a nice background music. The cocktail bar is right at the entrance, but nicely separated from the eating area and very trendy.

El Público offers simple tasty street-food and home-style Mexican cooking, a small selection of traditional sweets, a great selection of soft drinks, Mexican alcoholic drinks (beer, mezcal and tequila) and cocktails. I love their rustic tin crockery and serving pots. Very cute - they convey well the sort of food they prepare.

THE FOOD - I have tried some of their antojitos (snacks) primeros (entrees), and postres (desserts) and most of them were good. The Esquites are yummy and the serving size was great. The Beef Mogo Mogo fried balls were crunchy outside and very tender and soft inside, and a very nice dipped in the sauce. My fav thing so far have been the lamb watercress mini-tacos, which were great - I felt like shouting Cloudy with a Chance of Lamb Taquitos! On the contrary, the frijoles and onion tacos were terrible, tasteless, with chewy fibrous spring onion difficult to masticate. 

Most sweets are home-made style. The almond cake with chipotle sauce is ugly looking, but very nice - more a sort of almond panna cotta than a proper cake. The chocolate pan dulce was also very nice - a bare tiny strip of sweet bread and a tiny bowl of hot chocolate. 

The home-made sodas are really tasty, refreshing and thirst quenching, and the perfect companion if you do not like very sugary drinks with your food.  I have not tried any of their alcoholic beverages. 

They change their menu often, so any of the dishes mentioned here might not be there when you visit, but they have a great variety of foods, which is always great. 


THE SERVICE - The staff are terrific and extremely nice. The Mexican waitress is delightful and helpful, and one of the other girls, Aussie I think, even let me browse her own magazine when I asked if the restaurant had one. That is what I call customer service! The other guys were also wonderful. All of them work hard to make your stay enjoyable and their enthusiasm is contagious.

THE PRICING AND THE SIZING - The servings sizes for primeros, antojitos and postres are Lilliputian, especially the sweets, which seem to be designed for toddlers. Street food is by definition delicious, unsophisticated and very cheap. I understand that having street food in a Perth restaurant is not only a culinary oxymoron, but also impossible to have at the prices you find them in the country of origin. However,  If you want to tame your hunger, be prepared to pay a little fortune: paying +40$ for two snacks, a minuscule sweet and a soda is unaffordable, especially if I leave the place hungry and with the feeling that this is average Mexican food not the real thing.

 
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT 
1- I find the bilingual menu really cute and funny. However, I have heard too many complaints about it to ignore them. Most people are not bilingual, so an English one would make things easier for everybody. Besides, explaining customers what is exactly what you are ordering is time-consuming.
2- Most of Mexican food is very spicy and hot. The food in El Público is obviously adjusted to Australian tastes. I am OK with that. Still it tastes a bit bland. A bit of more spice and hotness would be just being faithful to the original and would make the dishes yummier.
3 - El Público does not serve Haute Cuisine but simple Mexican Food, so it would be better having the description of what it is on the plate written down instead of mentioned when the plate is put on your table.  
4 - Get a coffee machine and serve coffee, pleazzz!
5 - Have more Coriander at hand, so when a customer requests an extra pinch of it, you can say no problem, instead of "we are running short of it in the kitchen". Little details make a great difference.

***

There is a lot of hype about El Público. There is no doubt that is a nice place, has nice food and terrific service. It offers much better Mexican food than other Mexican restaurants in Perth, that is for sure. Still, as the Spanish proverb says, "En el Reino de los ciegos el tuerto es el rey" (in the kingdom of the blind, a one-eyed is the King) Honestly, how many Mexicans have you seen eating there?

Location: 7.5/10
Layout: 6.5
Ambience (day): 7.5/10
Service: 9/10
Food: 7/10
Pricing: 6/10
Drinks (non alcoholic): 8/10

TIP
Ask for the bandejas (mains) for lunch as they are more expensive, but also considerably bigger, better value for money, and better filling for your stomach if you are hungry. 

TIP 2
The primeros and antojitos are perfect for night slight snacking with your drinks!

UPDATE 21/10/13/
There was half a page in the Sunday newspaper a few weeks ago, after this review was written, with an interview with the cook. What he says helps once more to confirm that we do not have real Mexican food in Perth, as many of the ingredients basic for cooking are not available here and their food is Mexican inspired. But it is not only the ingredients. It is the flavours and spiciness of what we get in Perth, which is in the best case Tex-Mex. There you have it.

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"Mongolian Bling" by Benj Binks (2012)

Website of the Movie
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Mongolian Bling is an Australian documentary on the Hip-Hop scene in Mongolia directed by newcomer Benj Binks. I was lucky enough to be at the World Premiere in Perth during the Revelation Film Festival 2012.

Mongolia has always been on my list of must-visit countries, still waiting for the right time for me to go there. I like Hip-Hop rhythms and, well, to me, Hip-Hop is to Music what graffiti is to painting. When I heard about the documentary, I thought,  Are you kidding? It did not cross my mind that Mongolia -the land of Genghis Khan, the infinite horizons, cold winters, archery, horse racing, gers and fur hats- had a love affair with something as Western as Hip-Hop. 
 
Mongolian Bling is one of those documentaries that succeeds because it goes where nobody has gone before, has lots of passion and hard work behind it, and talks about its subject with rigour, humour, vigour and grace, still being entertaining and unpretentious.  Most importantly, Mongolian Blink let Mongolians tell their story with their own voice.

Mongolian Bling does not do what you expect from a documentary of this sort to do - a straight forward narration from an outsider point of view of a given subject. Like serious boring history of Mongolia, Mongolian ways of life, or the Mongolian Hip-Hop. 

Still, Benj Binks and his international crew provide us with a colourful tapestry of modern Mongolia images and we learn about the challenges of daily life in Ulaanbaatar, the aspirations and frustrations of the youth, the religious differences that the country has, generation gaps, gender attitudes, marginality, and musical creativity. Binks is able to explain in a simple way why Hip-Hop is so ingrained in modern Mongolia, and how ancestral musical traditions and attitudes served to anchor the genre in the country. We also see the multicolour facets of the Hip-Hop scene, which is far from being monochrome. All of this is told though the voice of three main hip-hop singers: Guiza, Gee and Gennie (who could not be more different among them at all levels), although hip-hop aficionados and wannabes, and even children are featured in the doco. 

The editing by Davide Michielin and Bieks is great, as creates a tempo and mood that keeps you engaged and entertained. The cinematography by Nacho Pende is great, because goes beyond the obvious and is able to capture the beauty of the ugly districts, the lyricism of chaos, and the shining lights of the darkest places. The live sound by Steven Bond is also great, and the viewer feels is right there listening to these people rap just for you.

The film has been bought by ABC Australia to be shown on TV, but in a 56-minute format not in its original 86 minutes, which, however, will be complete in the DVD. I you have the opportunity, go and see it on the big screen. It is completely worth it.

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David Jones Foodhall Cafe (Perth WA)

Level 1, David Jones
622 Hay St
Perth Western Australia 6000
(08) 9210 4000
 Hours
    Mon-Wed 9.30 - 7.00
    Thu 9.30 - 9.00
    Fri 9.30 - 9.00
    Sat 9.00 - 5.00
    Sun 11.00 - 5.00

There are two coffee stands within the David Jones Food Court, one very trendy and nice, which I have visited often to be always disappointed, and this one, at the bottom end of the Food Court, that offers better coffee and better service.

I go there mostly to grab a coffee when I am in the malls or browsing around David Jones and I crave a really good coffee that is creamy, consistently well prepared, and strong without being bitter.

The girls attending to the place are always delightful, and very fast and smiley no matter the many customers they have to attend to.

 

The place only has five stools to seat around, which are usually taken, so ordering is always a matter of you being in point, around the display cabinets or over somebody's shoulder, trying to catch the waitresses' attention.

The salads are interesting a priory, but they have always looked dry and unappealing to me, so I have never feel tempted to order any. They have a small selection of cakes, which are average.

This café has the advantage of being subject to David Jones' opening hours, which are extended with regards to most cafés in the city. So the place is perfect to grab a coffee at awkward-late times in the city centre.

To me, this is mostly a take-away café - a very good one.

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Zambrero (Mt Lawley, Perth WA)

625 Beaufort St
Mt Lawley Western Australia 6050
(08) 6161 9436
Website
Facebook
Hours:
    Mon-Sun 11:00 - 21:00

Not every place selling burritos should be called Mexican, especially Zambrero. This could be called SubwayMex, as both Subway and Zambrero are similar in concept, preparation methods and service.

THE GOOD
- Zambrero has a spot on location on Beaufort Street, and has a semi-open seating area that allows you to focus on the street or just on your food at the central canteen table or the long one facing the wall.
- The food looks and tastes fresh, which is specially important if most of what you put in your meal is salad and veggies.
- Big is big here! So your burrito will appease the monster in your stomach.
- The prices are cheap.
- Service is terrific: the girls are delightful and will attend to you fast and with genuine friendliness.
- Their black board on the footpath always has funny sayings an jokes.

THE BAD
- My chicken burrito was indeed a chicken and rice sort of Indian burrito, which ruined the whole experience, as it was overcooked and did not taste good, and tasted Indian-ish not Mexican-ish.
- So many things put in a burrito and the taste is just OK.
- The tortillas are a bit not tortillas, but wraps...
- The burritos are not burritos but Mexican inspired wraps. They are ugly looking and I did not feel like taking my mobile out for a picture.  
- Go to Zambrero  knowing that this is not a Mexican place and you won't be eating Mexican food.

RECOMMENDATIONS
- Ask for a burrito whose meat is just grilled or roasted.
- Avoid the cheese, because is the usual cheap cheese that you find in any fast food chain, which can ruin any dish.
- Avoid the sauces, and ask for an extra dollop of sour cream instead.
- This is a perfect place for food emergencies: you are super-hungry, you want to eat right now, and don't want to spend much money, and want to leave full.

I might come back :O 

UPDATE
Free guacamole this week with any dish to celebrate the change in their menu.

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