An evening with AA Gill at Sean's Panaroma

Gourmet Traveller - 2 June 2011

 Where do you take the world's most fearsome restaurant critic for dinner when he comes to town? To his favourite Bondi restaurant, naturally, and the choice of Sean's Panaroma, the venue for our reception for our columnist Adrian Gill, was a smashing success by any measure.

In a room packed with fans and friends (including surprise guest Anthony Bourdain), merriment was made over the likes of comfrey leaves fried with aged sheep's cheese, worm-shaped chestnut gnocchi with wild-picked mushrooms and striped Tasmanian trumpeter with artichokes and crab sauce, not to mention the pink lady custards and persimmon, ginger and cassia trifle.

Maybe it was the company, maybe it was the great food, or maybe we were just lucky, but it was Gill's charm that dazzled the assembled guests on the evening, not venom. In Australia  for the Sydney Writers' Festival, touring Hardie-Grant's brand-new collection of his favourite GT columns from the last seven years, the London-based writer had nothing but good things to say about Australia and his Australian readership. "There's something about this collection that is unlike all the other things I write," he said. "There's something quite jazzy and relaxed and sort of finger-clicky about the way that the writing comes out. It's something I haven't quite managed to replicate anywhere else.

"Looking through these things again, I also think they're some of the best things I've ever written. I think they're some of the nicest things I've ever written, too, because they've been given such a nice home."

This Gourmet Traveller web exclusive was published in May 2011.

To see VIDEO by  DANIEL KIRKWOOD link here.

Here & There: Collected Travel Writing by AA Gill is published by Hardie Grant Books