Is the American Dream Alive in Australia? Part III
Welcome back to the third part of my ongoing series comparing life in the US and Australia. Today we are diving into the juicy parts of Southern Hemisphere living: food, nightlife, and art. Make sure you’re not reading this on an empty stomach.
Aussie Eats: From Kangaroo Steaks to Vegemite Gelato (Yes, Really!)
Let’s dig into food culture. American cities are known for their incredible food diversity and availability. Americans played a large part in developing and popularizing foodie culture around the world — so how does Australia compare?
I had a few doubts about this before I spent my year Down Under, as Australia doesn’t really have a strongly defined cuisine. Walking into a “New American” restaurant, you can more-or-less picture what the menu looks like: minimalist, protein focused dishes with sides of local vegetables and grains, with perhaps an added emphasis on sauce and subtle fusion influences. In contrast, you might be surprised to learn that even Aussies have trouble picturing what a “Modern Australian” restaurant menu would look like, short of a couple signature desserts, but don’t you worry we’ll discuss the decadent Lamington in a bit.
Like America, Australia has experienced immigration from all over the world and is home to a variety of agricultural regions that produce just about any type of whole food you can imagine.
Neither Sydney, and certainly not Melbourne, left me feeling like I was lacking in food variety at all.
In some ways the variety was even greater than back in The States. Cuisines like Malaysian, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, and provincial Chinese (such as Hunan and Uyghur) are exceedingly rare niches in the US, but were found nearly everywhere in Australia. This was in addition to the more widespread European and Asian cuisines — and even included Australian outposts of extremely popular high-end Asian restaurants that we don’t have in the States (LeTao Hokkaido Cheesecakes come to mind). I was even able to find some passable American Southern food and some surprisingly good Mexican (only in Melbourne) when I got the hankering for it. Though, not without parting with a pretty penny for it; $1 Taco Tuesday has not made it across The Pacific, unfortunately. Perhaps not surprising, considering geographical proximity to Asia vs Latin America, and ensuing emigration patterns. 19% of America’s population is hispanic, compared to only 1.2% of Australian population, where Asian-Australians are 12%. Let’s not forget the delicious takeaway foods either, such as the HSP (Australia’s answer to poutine) and Sushi Hub, without a doubt a step above American fast food.
Living in Australia is nothing short of a culinary adventure — and that absolutely includes the truly local Aussie fare as well. Let’s start with what you’re probably thinking: exotic meats such as kangaroo and emu. Yes, these animals are actually eaten, though it’s not a daily fare. Much like elk or bison may be local to North America, but you might only eat a burger from these animals once or twice a year. Kangaroo is especially lovely and I got the chance to try it in just about every style, from prosciutto to rump roast. It’s occasionally found on a standard restaurant menu, but typically you will need to go to a specialty market or an native ingredient restaurant. While sadly these are not typically owned by Aboriginal descendants, these restaurants do focus on incorporating local ingredients eaten by Aboriginal societies for over 60,000 years and keep some of those ancient traditions alive.
The other commonly-known Aussie food is Vegemite; for the uninitiated, these are fortified yeast spreads that are typically served as a topping to breads, alongside butter. I’m personally partial to the Kiwi variety Marmite, but both are… an acquired taste, shall we say. As is the case with much of the traditional Aussie fare (including fairy bread and sausage sizzles), many restaurants have found a way to elevate and integrate these dishes into higher end menus, with the accompanying presentation flare. A Vegemite gelato may not sound immediately appetizing, but I assure you, they’re quite addicting. Speaking of addicting, desserts are some of the most underrated Australian foods. I still miss the decadence of the crunchy coconut coat of the Lamington, to the satisfyingly crisp in the center of a fruit studded Pavlova. Don’t even get me started on what quite possibly is the best iteration of a chocolate wafer known to humanity, the TimTam.
Australian grocery stores are worth mentioning as well. They are decently well stocked and (for the most part) reasonably priced; I didn’t feel compelled to adjust my diet in any significant way coming from the US. While there are certain foods that are largely unavailable (turkey — Australians much prefer lamb) and others that are more limited (Impossible/Beyond Meats), I felt the local equivalents equally tasty. Boar-free Bacon for instance, has no right to be that good! While both the US and Australia consume more than the WHO recommended limit of sugar, Australians consume about half the sugar Amercians do per capita; I got the sense that your typical Aussie supermarket stocking less sugar laden foods could be one key driver. My anecdotal evidence:
Without any significant changes to my diet or exercise routines, I went through a reverse “freshman 15” during my first 5 months in Sydney.
Unfortunately, seasonality and supply issues seem to strike Australian grocers more keenly than American ones due to a focus on local growing rather than imports. Living in California, I’m more or less used to being able to get any kind of fruit and veg I could want at just about any time of the year. While I would say this is true for locally-grown Australian produce (which there is a plethora of), occasionally you will find some seasonal gaps in the food chain. This leads to unusual situations like figs being completely unavailable for half the year, or $17AUD-per-kilo nectarines — the “grown in California’’ stickers on the back revealing themselves to be the culprits. The closer attunement to the natural growing cycle is at once awesome (transparency; direct line to farming culture) and dystopian (seeing climate change wreaking havoc in real time).
Is Australia’s Coffee Scene Stuck in the Past?
This section is going to trigger some Aussies reading this, rest assured my inbox is ready to receive your hate mail.
Aside from Italy, no other country takes their coffee culture more seriously and is more protective of it than Australia. While the flat white craze only broke in the USA during 2015, Aussies had already been sipping on this drink for nearly a generation. While on a great American road trip, “truck stop coffee” conjures images of ultra-processed, ultra-sweetened black sludge in ungodly sizes, you can rest assured that every Australian truck stop contains a professional barista, armed with an Italian espresso machine. In this way, Australian coffee is nearly unrivaled in its consistent quality across the majority of the continent. I would be remiss to mention the exceedingly high quality of Australian leaf-in chai as well (known as “sticky chai”). Only India has delivered a higher quality chai and nowhere else I have visited (not even neighboring New Zealand) had such a zeal for brewing it in the natural way, by largely avoiding syrups and powders. However, this is where my compliments end. In its pursuit of ubiquitous quality, Aussie coffee takes a serious toll in the form of monotony and stagnation. Yeah, I said it!
This dark side of Australian coffee manifests itself in a few different ways. The first is in the nearly identical nature of most coffee menus. This is so prevalent that it almost occurred to me as comedically dystopian.
Did I somehow step back into the Soviet Russia equivalent of coffee culture?
These menus are so identical that, in most coffee shops, my butt barely has a chance to graze the seat and my eyes have yet to witness a menu before the server asks for my coffee order. In no other part of the world have I experienced this and it even started to genuinely annoy me, taking me several months to adjust my expectations. I’ve talked to a few Aussies about this phenomenon and it’s driven by locals having a “default coffee order” that they hardly deviate from; as such, most don’t even consider looking at the menu before blurting it out. It’s giving NPC energy and is honestly a little troubling, as it ultimately reveals closed mindedness and stifles innovation in the coffee space. I mean if you’re not even going to be adventurous with something as your morning coffee, where will you be adventurous?
This is particularly shocking to me given Australia’s proximity to countries with some of the most innovative coffee cultures in the world, such as Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand. They are no strangers to cocktail-inspired coffee creations. Whereas in Aus, the inspiration seems to only trickle one way in form of the all too ubiquitous espresso martini. Experimental coffee isn’t an alien concept in Australia either, occasionally you’ll even find a competing foreign shop occupying the next street corner that features a staple Vietnamese Cà phê trứng, a trendy Korean Dalgona Coffee, or at minimum a latte with an interesting flavor infusion. In an entire year I’ve only found two Australian coffee shops that attempt in any way to break this mold (that would be Sydney-based Black Star Pastry and Melbourne-based St. Ali Coffee. Both had a couple experimental drinks that were intriguing, delicious, and equally high quality; but alas, these were but a few refreshing coffee oases in an otherwise generic drink menu. There also seems to be a weird cultural divide here (along racial lines I might add) of the patrons who visit the Australian-style coffee shops and the Asian/American-style ones — but that’s a deeper conversation for the upcoming Social section.
One last thing to mention on the cafe front, which I alluded to in my discussion around libraries in the Quality of Life section: Australian coffee shops are aggressively wifi unfriendly. That’s not to say that these cafes are laptop unfriendly or do anything to discourage or turn over tables from under them. Quite the contrary — despite the lack of wifi, nearly every coffee shop that I visited had consistent groups of laptop-toting remote workers spending hours in them, just hot-spotting away. Back in The States, wifi is so ubiquitous (even outside of coffee shops) that hotspots are usually an additional paid add-on for cell phone plans and I would be willing to bet half the population doesn’t even know how to enable the feature. Clearly Australia, like most of the world, has the demand for cafe work.
These cafes seem largely happy to have the business and serve [remote] folks well, but are absolutely unapologetic about not offering wifi.
Some even seemed irritated by the fact that I even broached the subject. There were a few times I probed some more, situations where there was clearly a separate POS network from the general cafe network; I still was met with a brisk refusal. Occasionally, the employees themselves would even lament about how they don’t even get access to the network either. This makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, as it’s typically an international expectation that cafes are the place to go if you need internet access. It’s unclear to me why this is the one sphere where Australia chooses to be hyper-individualistic, it’s not like Aussie phone carriers are any more secure. Even Reddit can’t seem to agree on the cause. In either case, it’s a practice that seems to clash with the generally more communal leanings prevalent in Australian culture.
It became particularly stressful for me when I had work that needed to get done that day. It was difficult to find out if a cafe offered wifi prior to sitting down in it and asking; especially if I couldn’t afford a 2nd or 3rd detour to find one. Of course, I did eventually find cafes that offered wifi; they got a disproportionate part of my business as a result, even if they were only open ’til 3pm. Yet another example of how Australian cafes seem to be rigidly stuck in the past; your only option for later afternoon/evening coffee is literally just Starbucks. Those are even hard to find as Aussies have generally resisted their propagation; for context, the Philadelphia metro area (similarly sized in population and density) has 42 Starbucks, Sydney has 5… for 5 million people.
It’s a real shame, because Australian cafes are absolutely stellar in terms of food and ambiance, and are generally great places to work from. These could make ideal “Third Places” just by extending their hours a bit, capitalizing on this concept is what propelled Starbucks from a local Seattle coffee chain to global juggernaut. So then what does count as a Third Place in Australia after 3pm? Restaurants typically aren’t open yet, even if they were, most don’t have large communal tables that foster the type of community Third Places are known for. Bars may be open, but are notoriously laptop unfriendly and certainly not work conducive. Again, it seems the demand is there, but the local establishments don’t deliver. I honestly don’t understand why every other developed country has this figured out, yet Australia largely doesn’t.
Pre-Pandemic Paradise Lost or Aussie Nightlife on the Rebound?
I am a cocktail guy and would consider myself a beer connoisseur as well. Mixology has been a hobby of mine, likely before it should’ve been allowed. Having come of age during the American cocktail renaissance and traveled extensively to some of the best breweries, distilleries, and cocktail bars the world has to offer, you could say I have…high expectations. Is my perspective a bit skewed? Absolutely. But perhaps also uniquely qualified to comment on the Australian drinking scene.
Australia has a world renowned drinking culture; however, they are also equally renowned for the high cost to do so. I can confirm both are absolutely true, though it’s not immediately obvious. Taking the cost of a cocktail at face value, it ranges between $20 — $25 AUD (no tip necessary, as staff are all paid a living wage). During my time in Australia this translated to roughly $17 USD, about comparable to American prices at the time. Though it only takes a few drinks before you begin to suspect something is amiss, as inebriation has not yet set in. This is because Australian cocktails are notably less alcoholic than their American siblings. I’m not clear on if this is due to regulation or culture, but I noticed Australian bartenders are extremely precise with their pours and often don’t give you more than exactly an ounce unless ordering (and paying for) a double.
In the high-end cocktail world this requires keeping the same ratios and therefore smaller drinking glasses (think partially filled Nick and Nora glasses vs overflowing martini glasses). All in all, this leads to a higher cost per volume of alcohol, which ultimately is driven by intentionally high taxation on alcohol. The only exception here being wine, as it’s seen as a key agricultural export, but even so the price of wine pales in comparison to other wine producing countries like Spain and Italy. At my age, I honestly don’t mind; in fact, I rather like being able to taste and sample a wider variety of the menu without completely ruining my health. However, being the eligible bachelor that I am, these costs noticeably add up when you’re paying for two — especially if multiple venues are involved. (What can I say? I’m a generous date!)
So how does the cocktail scene in Australia measure up? It passes muster. Both Sydney and Melbourne have inviting speakeasies, charming pubs, glistening rooftop bars, and generally pleasant watering holes, both from an aesthetic and quality of drinks standpoint. While on the overall not quite as innovative as the American cocktail scene, there are plenty of standouts, the greatest concentration of which are in what I have dubbed “The Cocktail Alleys of Sydney” off Clarence Street. Australian cocktail bars, especially the basement variety, have a particular charm to them that really won me over. It’s a dimly lit, romantic aesthetic with dripping candle wax, large mounds of which are left to adhere to the walls and form their own ever-changing abstract art pieces, complete with the occasional soulful live music act.
These laneway bars proliferated in the 90’s following a loosening of zoning laws allowing for smaller, more intimate, venues. There’s something especially satisfying about wandering a historic laneway at night and being rewarded by stumbling onto a hidden speakeasy. A truly Australian experience as most large cities in the world aren’t safe or clean enough to consider such an adventure. A few cocktail bars even expanded my horizons around what’s possible drink and ingredient-wise (most notably PAR in Melbourne). I would even consider a few to be world-class institutions from this perspective. However, with a couple notable exceptions (Viking bar Mjølner being a standout out here), none really blew my mind from an experiential or immersive point of view. Certainly many bars offered unique atmospheres, but many seemed to stop at just “good” maybe even “great” but failed to push the envelope. They left me longing for a place where the atmosphere itself morphed into a living, breathing story, demanding to be part of the night.
And what about the beer? Unfortunately, beer seems to be the forgotten step-child of the Australian liquor industry. Wine is subsidized and drunk worldwide, craft spirits are experiencing a meteoric rise, but craft beer… still highly taxed (especially due to higher ABV of craft) and leaves a lot to be desired, at least in most of the country. In general, I found Australian craft beer to be a bit watered down, and missing that “je ne sais quoi” emblematic of the American craft beer revolution. Good but not great, and I find this especially true of New South Wales.
Before I moved to Melbourne, I was under the distinct impression that Australia simply didn’t have a well-developed craft beer movement.
I visited over a dozen different breweries in the region and only two left a strong impression: BrewDog (with a British founder) and Mountain Culture (an American founder). I found myself gravitating toward New Zealand when it came to beer, with their exquisite variation of the NEPA and mouth-watering sours. In general, I felt craft beer was 5–10 years behind in New Zealand and perhaps 15–20 years behind in most of Australia. Perhaps rooted in a similar lack of liquid experimentation as we discussed with coffee? Fortunately, relief and rapture met on my tongue after hitting gold with Collingwood’s craft beer, a welcome escape from Sydney’s mediocre five-month drought. Perhaps it’s in the water, but for whatever reason, Australia hides away nearly all of its best beer in the relatively small state of Victoria. My suspicions were further confirmed after a night at GABS (The Great Australian Beer SpecTAPular), set in the jaw-dropping Royal Exhibition Building (a UNESCO World Heritage Site). GABS truly lives up to its lofty namesake and rivals international events such as Mikkeler’s Copenhagen Beer and Music Festival experience.
In general, I’m satisfied with the Australian nightlife experience. The thing that fascinates me is that Aussies tell me the current iteration is but a shadow of its former self. Even two years after the most severe of Australian COVID lockdowns (think not being able to leave your postal code), apparently the nightlife scene has yet to fully recover. I can see a bit of what they mean; for instance, many bars are egregiously strict on closing times. Perhaps a holdover from the lockout laws of the last decade. For the first time ever, I witnessed a bartender quite literally snatch a drink from my friend’s hand, mid sip, as he was waiting by the bar for the ladies to finish using the bathroom. Many states in the US have absurd and draconian liquor laws (looking at you Connecticut, who in their right mind makes beer flights/tasting paddles effectively illegal!?), but this would be considered egregious in any of them. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons, along with extremely strict speed limits, behind the stereotype of Aussies being law abiding to a fault. I look at it optimistically: with satisfying nightlife today, it’s tempting to close my eyes and picture the pre-pandemic buzz. It only makes the potential for future revelry shimmer more brightly.
Exploring Australia’s Creative Spirit: Galleries, Festivals, and Hidden Murals
So besides drinking, what is there to do in Australia? Plenty, it turns out! I ask that in jest, but it’s surprising how often I get this question in earnest, even from decently well-traveled Americans. It’s a symptom of what I dub “The Australian PR problem”, which I discuss at length as a guest on the Brewed Abroad podcast. This section leans heavily towards my… idiosyncratic interests, but rest assured Australia has plenty of events on offer, regardless of your interests.
Let’s start with art. Art galleries in Australia are nothing short of splendid. From niche art exhibits such as the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney, to natural treasures like the NGV in Melbourne, all left me with a proper sense of awe. Many of these galleries even host special late-night events, which I absolutely adore both from the perspective of date nights, and sheer accessibility as a working professional. While I’m not a big traditional theater guy, I was able to appreciate the gilded heritage buildings these performances take place in. There is a ticket lottery system in place which allows affordable access to these shows, through which I was lucky enough to see a performance of & Juliet at The Regent in Melbourne. Phenomenal show btw; can’t recommend enough, even if you’re not a theater person. In general, art events were refreshingly easy to find in Australia. The cities themselves not only sponsor high quality pop-up exhibitions, but provide convenient portals to discover these and other equally exciting events. I find Australia did a much better job in this regard compared to America.
Back home, I felt like I had to be “in the know” to attend cool events. In both Sydney and especially Melbourne, it felt almost “plug-and-play”.
I typically don’t splurge on live events, but the exception is seeing speakers in person whom I greatly admire and take inspiration from. I was initially concerned that Australia’s distance meant that many thought leaders wouldn’t take the time to come here. Fortunately, I was proved entirely wrong. In my year abroad, I was able to see international intellectual giants such as Esther Perel, Jay Shetty, and Neil de Grasse Tyson in person (and interact with all three!). Advertisements abound at ICC Sydney about a variety of other other speakers, including Wim Hoff, Jordan Peterson, and David Goggins. Worth noting that Sydney is hosting SxSW (an immediately recognizable brand for my American readers) for the next few years, the first of which took place while I was still in the country. I get the sense it will take some time to begin rivaling the experience in Austin, partly just due to the communication barrier of expressing what SxSW even is to the locals, most of whom seemed largely unfamiliar. Regardless, it’s certainly a positive sign of thriving tech and artistic communities of all kinds. With this caliber of headliners:
I can only conclude that Australia’s “backwater” reputation is mostly a 20th-century holdover. The Australia of today is vibrant and is capable of attracting global talent.
Maybe the only sphere where this is still partially true is in musical acts. While both Taylor Swift and Lizzo toured the country while I lived there, it seemed tickets were hard to come by. Rising stars like Masego and Thundercat seemed to sell out almost immediately due to venue capacity and limited tour schedules. The rave scene was certainly no Coachella either, with few American artists headlining. However, the local electronic music scene competes with the best of them, producing artists like Flume and Rufus Du Sol, and attracting musical talent from Asia who don’t frequently tour the US.
Street art was another unexpected highlight. When thinking of great street art perhaps places like Berlin, São Paulo, or even California come to mind.
Australia certainly deserves a seat at the street art hall of fame.
Both Sydney and Melbourne had multiple equivalents of San Francisco’s famous Clarion Alley, with visual treasures scattered around the city. Typically I feel the need to search for good street art, scouring forums and tour sites for the locations. No need in Australia — even outside of the many neighborhoods known for this kind of thing, alleyway murals are plentiful and a feast for the eyes. And if graffiti is a little low tech for you, Sydney even puts on a special annual event (Vivid) where alleyways are brought to life in neon and old subway tunnels become psychedelic journeys through light and music.
While I had to rely on my typical sleuthing strategies for my more niche interests of immersive theater, fantasy balls, the alternative scene, and cosplay, I found multiple events for each in Australia. Without a doubt, the US is the best place to be for most of these kinds of events, so I intentionally set my expectations low. This was the right approach, as I was able to appreciate the alternative events that did exist and enjoy their best qualities. The Love Lust Lost immersive theater show was a particular highlight, with the stellar cast and all the unexpected hidden nooks to explore. It would be unfair walking in and expecting it to rival NYC’s Sleep No More, as it’s simply a different league — but a satisfying one. I had a similar mindset attending Australia’s many cosplay conventions and comic cons; yet I discovered that the smaller size meant quicker entry (for the most part), an easier time actually seeing everything, and more run-ins with recognizable faces from the community. The quality of costume crafting and the artist alleys matched anything I had seen in the States. Certainly fewer famous guests and a lack of truly compelling panels, but it’s a tradeoff that I would take any day.
I would be remiss not to mention one particular activity that Australia knocks out of the park entirely: consider this my brief love letter to Aussie escape rooms. My previous experiences with escape rooms have been fun, but not particularly memorable. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed them enough to attempt to corral a group outing where an escape room would be the centerpiece. That completely changed when I visited The Cipher Room in Sydney’s hip Newtown neighborhood. I won’t spoil the experience for you, but the level of immersion and attention to detail here was like nothing I had ever seen before. I wasn’t the only one to have this reaction, as several members of our team wanted to come back to attempt the other rooms. I ended up completing four different rooms within three months, verifiably hooked. It turns out that one of the friends I met in Sydney was somewhat of an escape room aficionado, having been to over 60 different rooms worldwide — and the ones visited in Aus all ranked among his top 10. Not to be outdone, when moving to Melbourne my friend tipped me off to what he believed was the best escape room in all of Australia, and I simply could not resist. Deep Space Divinity gripped me like few experiences have. In an attempt not to give too much away, I’ll simply say that at the end of this experience, my group all developed feelings for an AI and couldn’t stop discussing the moral implications of our actions for the rest of the day.
If three Michelin stars means a restaurant visit is worth an international flight, then certainly this escape room meets that bar.
The TL;DR
- Australia has a great variety of cuisines, including traditional Aussie fare and foods from all over Asia. Good Mexican food; howver, is hard to find and expensive.
- Grocery store stock is generally great and sugar is less prevalant, but do be prepared for more seasonal variation and lack of a few North American staples, such as turkey.
- Don’t expect coffee shops to offer free public wifi, a hotspot is worth investing in
- Pro: Coffee will be super high quality just about anywhere in the country
- Con: Little variation in coffee, menus will be nearly identical in most Aussie-run coffee shops
- Drinking is more expensive in Australia, expect cocktails and beer to be watered down
- Sydney has a slight edge in cocktails, Melbourne has the best beer in the country by a mile
- Bars are coffee shops are aesthetic and interesting, but both close earlier than you think
- Art, festivals, and events are plentiful and easy to find
- Musical acts from North America tour Australia in-frequently and tickets usually sell out quickly
- Don’t sleep on the Australian escape rooms
