Takeaway takeover – steering a course through an unfolding pandemic

Local fine dining restaurant, Pilot, is tucked away in the back corner of the Ainslie shops in a quiet suburb of North Canberra. Over the last five months, Pilot has steered a course through the unfolding pandemic, as the changing relationship between diners and the restaurant has mapped the meandering trail of the COVID-19 pandemic through lockdown and easing. We’d been to Pilot to sample their long Sunday lunch in late February before the world fell apart. Then the pandemic struck and the lockdown began. Stuck at home our minds turned to the fine dining of the new era – takeaway. Then in July, as the lockdown finally eased – at least for a while – we found our way back to Pilot.

Looking back after many months our earlier long Sunday lunch at Pilot restaurant in late February now seems to be part of another world. I suppose it’s much like many other local places across Australia – once regular haunts of diners seeking a good night, or day, out, suddenly stranded by circumstance. It was a time when a relatively obscure regional city in China – Wuhan – was bettter known as a UNESCO Creative City of Design, than the source of a global pandemic.

‘Looking back after many months our earlier long Sunday lunch at Pilot restaurant in late February now seems to be part of another world. I suppose it’s much like many other local places across Australia – once regular haunts of diners seeking a good night, or day, out, suddenly stranded by circumstance.’

Fish curry in aromatic broth.

How quickly this all happened was brought home when I realised that I had two unfinished articles for this blog – one about the long Sunday lunch just before we went away on a two and a half week regional road tour to Adelaide and Kangaroo Island in March and one about the takeover of the dining world by takeaways, as restaurants scrambled to convert their operations in order to survive.

Big city myopia, regional cities and cool capitals – is Canberra cool and who really cares?

I’ve been entertained by the heated discussion over an article in the Canberra Times recently about whether Canberra is cool or not, written by one of it’s previous inhabitants who now lives in Melbourne. The question of regional cities and cool capitals is one that won’t go away, not helped by some of the superficial journalism that passes for content in the online world.

Instead of endlessly comparing cities – Melbourne versus Sydney, Melbourne versus Canberra, Canberra versus Queanbeyan, Devonport versus East Devonport (as we did in my youth) – to gauge their degree of cool or of dismal, perhaps we’d be better seeking out the interesting places and features that lurk in every city, town and locality – including Canberra.

The eye-challenging foyer of Hotel Hotel in NewActon.

Fleeing the tizz of the big city
When I first moved to Canberra in 2000, as part of my own personal Olympic project, representing Australia in the well-established and popular sport of moving house, I wasn’t sure what I had come to. I was sick of the tizz of the big city—the late night parties and the unbanned substances, that probably should have been, the nicotine and plonk and shimmering vodka, clear as the conscience of a new-born child. In the end I galloped out of Sydney, like one of those wild grey horses that roam the Snowy Mountains—the ones that have now become far too prolific and need to be culled by gunshot from helicopters.