Upfront
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Snakes and ladders Amelia Lester
A
D R E A M D E S T I N AT I O N
Kahanda Kanda GALLE, SRI LANKA
Ten luxury suites, with two more opening this month, make up this boutique resort located on a hillside in a working tea estate 15 kilometres from the UNESCO World Heritage site of Galle Fort. Guests can splash around in the pool, practise yoga and unwind with a relaxing massage in the spa. It’s worth allotting time for a leisurely cycling tour through rice paddies, stopping off to admire ancient temple ruins and take in ocean views, and for trekking in the nearby rainforest. Tatyana Leonov
E AT / D R I N K
THERE IS something very enticing about a big, loud Italian bar and pizzeria that’s open all day Monday to Friday for breakfast, lunch, aperitivo, dinner and drinks. But come Saturday, Orazio D’Elia’s Matteo Downtown opens at 5pm and slides into elegant Negroni-fuelled dinners of creamy burrata with silky green nettle puree, sea vegetables and salty baubles of trout roe ($21, right); and naturally leavened pizza topped with zucchini and prawns ($26). Sunday is a day of rest, before we do it all again on Monday. Jill Dupleix
8 GoodWeekend
MAT TEO DOWNTOWN 20 BOND STREET, SYDNEY MATTEOSYDNEY.COM
MID PYRAMIDS of passionfruit and perfectly spherical mangoes, the bounteous farmers’ markets of Okinawa also sell the stuff of nightmares: jar upon giant jar of a glowing amber liquid in which a coiled snake lies with its jaw permanently agape. Habushu, or snake sake, has been consumed in the islands of the Ryukyu Kingdom long before the archipelago was annexed by Japan in 1879. It’s believed to possess powerful medicinal qualities – specifically, it’s thought to boost the male libido – which depend on making the Okinawan habu snake so angry as to trigger its venom reflex. Mixed with honey and herbs and left to ferment in a type of sake made with long-grain rice, the snake’s venom is prized by drinkers, but no longer fatal. Although habushu, and its base liquor, awamori, have been consumed in Okinawa for more than 600 years, the trade has lately fallen on rough times. Faced with more choice than their predecessors ever had in the drinking department, young people are turning away from a tradition they see as oldfashioned, even cruel. Rather than take a shot of awamori, they’d rather linger over an Old Fashioned made with artisanal whisky. Those Okinawans who continue to imbibe the snake liquor are dismissed as unsophisticated bumpkins. “Footage showing people gulping down awamori has created an image” that it was simply a drink that would get you drunk quickly, said the head of the Okinawa Awamori Distillers Association during a recent round-table talk on how to drum up business. Why do people choose to consume what they do? Trends in food and drink are surely among the most changeable and mysterious – even more so, perhaps, than what style of jeans are in vogue. For clothes, we have runway shows, and designers
who dictate what we will all be wearing. There’s no such prognostication when it comes to what we put in our mouths. I was reminded of this while reading about another foodstuff which has, seemingly overnight, become desperately unfashionable. “AMERICA IS DROWNING IN MILK NOBODY WANTS” read the headline a few weeks back on a Chicago Tribune article which tracked Greek yoghurt’s abrupt fall from grace. It used to be, a decade or so ago, that Greek yoghurt was a health-food staple for a country which had always struggled to produce delicious dairy. American yoghurt was traditionally runny, and very sugary; to come across a yoghurt so thick you could stand a spoon in it felt like a genuine revelation. At one stage Greek yoghurt was so trendy that Chobani, the biggest of the Greek-yoghurt
Trends in food and drink are surely among the most mysterious. producers in the US, opened a yoghurt-themed cafe in New York City. The governor of New York state, where most of the milk for Greek yoghurt was made, even convened the first-ever yoghurt summit in 2012! (Which would you rather attend, the Greekyoghurt summit, or the awamori round table?) But the Spandex-clad mob who initially embraced Greek yoghurt moved on, and did so quickly. Sales of “fluid milk”, as they call it in the biz, had already been in decline as almond, coconut, hemp and soy were offered up as more virtuous alternatives. Now there’s a glut of it. Let’s hope the cows left behind from all this Greekyoghurt madness enjoy long happy lives out to pasture. And those snakes still hidden in dark crevices all over Okinawa? I wish them the very same thing. n
WOLTER PEETERS; ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LETCH
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