Momofuku Seiobo (Bar Menu), Pyrmont, New South Wales (Alissa and Don eat Australia)

When creating the shortlist of places to check out during our trip to Sydney, Momofuku Seiobo was one of the places that I knew was non-negotiable. As long time fan of David Chang (I even cooked a dinner of Momofuku Ko dishes late last year), a visit to a Momofuku restaurant has been on my restaurant bucket list for many years, and I was not going to let the opportunity to cross one off the list pass me by. The only problem? We had already reserved degustation dinners at LuMi, Cafe Paci and Sepia months in advance, and with other banquet/chef's choice menus at Ms. G's and Nomad also planned, Seiobo's reservation window of 20 days before the requested date came a bit too late to an already crowded and expensive party, and I didn't want to cut any of those other meals out of our plans either. Thankfully, Seiobo had a perfect compromise; their small 5 seat bar offers a limited bar menu for walk-ins, and features that most famous of Momofuku dishes - the Pork Bun. With the promise of Pork Buns and other dishes in the more casual Momofuku style of Noodle Bar and Ssam, Alissa and I set off early for dinner in Pyrmont to avoid any potential queues for the bar.

MoG @ Home #1 - Momofuku Ko (Ministry of Gluttony at Home)

Something I haven't really talked about on the blog is home cooking. When I started the Ministry of Gluttony, I obliquely referenced cooking when I subtitled the blog 'gastronomic adventures at home and abroad'. Up until now 'at home' has meant dining out in Perth (or more generally Australia), but as a passionate and adventurous home cook I had always meant to include the meals that we make at home. I've been cooking since I was 5 or 6, and if I hadn't stumbled into Art School, I may very well have gone down the path of being a chef. As a student much enamoured with the avant-garde, new media and conceptualism while being decidedly unpainterly, I used to half-jokingly refer to myself as a failed painter, but when you consider I was for many years a member of an art collective named Spatula which interrogated and challenged contemporary food production, perhaps its more accurate to say I've always been more of a unrealised chef.

While I'm not really interested in a career change, in the last few years I've been really wanting to put more effort into upping my skills in the kitchen and challenging myself with recipes outside my comfort zone. I'm a confident home cook who is just as comfortable cooking from Heston Blumenthal at Home as I am freestyling a pasta of whatever is in the fridge, but as someone who is very much a product of my Art School education, the challenging modernism of contemporary fine dining restaurants is the kind of cooking I find most appealing. It is to this end that I've started Ministry of Gluttony at Home - a series of multi-course dinners for 8 (including Alissa and myself) focusing on recipes from challenging chef's books; the kind of cookbooks filled with multi-component recipes and esoteric ingredients that combined with time consuming methods and restrictive equipment requirements means most copies sold end up on coffee tables rather than kitchens.