Stuck in Sydney this long weekend? Spend the days eating your way through our popular culinary history, from meat pies to vanilla slices.
If there’s one thing that can take you back to the wonderland that was Australia in the 1990s, a Mambo shirt would have to be it. And this week, the surfwear label is returning to the beach, setting up a temporary tuckshop at Bondi Beach, where nostalgia will be served with a contemporary twist. Think the meat pies and bakery treats of your schoolyard days, but with a welcome lift in quality thanks to the involvement of local food favourites Pinbone, Paper Bird and LP’s Quality Meats.
Clockwise from left: beef and Mambomite pie, warrigal greens and ricotta roll, finger lime bun, macadamia and wattleseed vanilla slice.
An iced finger bun loses the pale-pink icing and gains the citrus pop of finger lime while the sausage roll embraces 2018 with a filling of ricotta and warrigal greens. Meat masters LP’s have tried their hand at devon, the processed pork sausage that’s filled many a white-bread sandwich, while the meat pie will benefit from Pinbone’s gluten-free riff on Vegemite, dubbed Marmomite. Wholegreen Bakery worked with Pinbone chefs Mike Eggert and Jemma Whiteman to develop the gluten-free pastry used in the pie and sausage roll, while pastry chef Yu-ching Lee (currently baking at Paper Bird) created the finger bun and a macadamia and wattleseed vanilla slice.
Days by the beach call for icy treats, which calls in turn for Pure Pops, makers of popsicles that skip the artificial stuff for 100 per cent fruit-based flavours. In this case it’s a strawberry spider and a lemon sour.
Meat pie and finger lime bun sculptures by Anna Vu.
And it wouldn’t be a true time-warp without Mambo’s mix of colour and Australian iconography, so they’ve decked out the takeaway shopfront with murals and seagull mobiles by local artists such as Ben Brown and Lauren Webster. Oh, and there are larger-than-life sculptures of meat pies and iced buns by Good Food Crap Drawing’s Anna Vu. School’s out for summer.
Mambo Tuckshop, 10am-4pm, 25-28 January, 266 Campbell Pde, North Bondi, NSW.
