CHATTER 31 Gastronomes Denied!

Ten distinguished food bloggers and partners, under the name The Gastronomes, teamed up to compete against half a dozen other teams of dubious reputation at a food trivia night at Collins Quarter last night.
The night began with a shared platter meal in the semi open courtyard of this quite large bistro restaurant. No doubt, if it's looked after, the skinny tree in the centre of this space will be a great feature, but that's a few decades away. Meantime it's just a scrawny tree!
First course was charcuterie served with plenty of Dench's undeniably excellent sour dough bread.
There was plenty to eat of the finely sliced Jamon, Wagyu Bresaola, Capcola and very bland rabbit rillettes. The best of all was a chicken liver parfait. It was delicate, there's that word again, super smooth and had very fine flavour. The Cake Mistress, http//:thecakemistress/blog on my left, was not very keen about meat but ironchefshellie.com across the table and I made up for her.
A Kingfish ceviche was overpowered by scaifes of ruby grapefruit. It looked very pretty with baby capers and coriander which were not there for their looks alone, unlike some of the waitresses, but added to the dish.
This goes to support that old saying, which will soon become meaningless in the world of i'this and i'that, when books will disappear, that 'You can't judge a book by it's cover'.
The ceviche came with a dish of grilled local squid, tender as, crispy tentacles, which were beaut, and cucumber, well little cubes of it anyway.
The last course was crispy confit duck leg, done to death, a lovely cherry compot, a tough piadina flat bread burnt, unintentionally I suppose,
and a very nice torn purple fig, smoked macadamia and fennel salad that set us up for the quiz.
Others at our table included mmmmsugar.com, offthespork.com and our captain, www.ieatthereforeiam.blogspot.com and yours truly of course.
We would certainly have won if only we'd known more of the answers but we were handicapped not only by ignorance but also because cheating was not allowed. Also, to be kind to Team Phat, the name has something to do with the absent, slightly overweight food writer and TV personality, Matt Preston, which won for the second year in a row we didn't want to spoil their fun 'cause they really really wanted to win and they did, by a handsome margin. In truth, because we all contributed our share of wrong answers we can say that it was a remarkable effort to end up in the middle of the field. A few more errors and we might have ended up in the middle of the road, never mind the field. If readers want an inkling of how difficult this was try identifying these foodies, we got 5 out of 10.
or 11 ingredients in this cake,
which included things like Persian fairy floss!!! So congratulations to the winners. Gastronomes we'll live to fight another day!