Famine

Last night I discovered that the Last Drop Brewery Restaurant is not the only bastion of high-quality trough-snuffling on Canning Vale's Nicholson Road.


There is also Nicholson's, an eatery famous among locals who rely on it to pick up dinner on their way home from the office. "I couldn't be bothered cooking last night, so I just made a Nicholson's run" is a common phrase among the busy and the harried and the nutritionally oblivious.


We were celebrating the birthday of a friend at her house, and her parents brought Nicholson's takeaway so that no one would have to cook. Others got lasagna, or chicken parmigiana, or chicken marsala. I got the ribs... and how. My meal came in a tray the size of my briefcase and contained three racks of ribs, plus chips. Many chips. There were so many chips that, had I the technology, I could have gone back in time to 1847 and offset the Irish Potato Famine for six months.


Not that it wasn't tasty. Despite having enough meat for three separate people I ate the lot, because it was porkilicious. And the chips were absolutely incredible, largely because they'd been dipped in beer batter before being deep fried. As for vegetables... well, there were a few shreds of red and green cabbage strewn over the meat, but I think they were intended merely as ornamentation. I ate them anyway, partly because I needed the nutrients, but mostly because even raw cabbage tastes good when it's been floating in hot barbecue sauce for half an hour.


I suppose in a way it's good to know that in modern health conscious cholesterolophobic society, there are still restaurants making their way by serving up real, honest, robust, filling foods at reasonable prices, without resorting to McDonaldsesque plastic chicanery.


On the hand, it's also good to know that I have plenty of salad vegetables in my refrigerator for tonight.