Piranhas are some of the most vicious little creatures in the animal kingdom. They may be small, but we shiver at the idea of swimming in the Amazon River and feeling one nibble on our toes. The killer fish can strip something as big as a cow to its bones in a matter of minutes. But now it’s time to fight back! A restaurant in Japan has turned the tables and now serves a lightly fried, delicately seasoned gourmet Piranha dish. No telling how it tastes though.

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Rothko is a São Paulo restaurant inspired by the paintings of Mark Rothko and the passion for gastronomy of Diego Belda. From the rock clubs he owned, Casa Belfiore and CBBAR, to a unique restaurant in the heart of São Paulo’s nightlife, Belda is also a painter but in parallel discovered the world of gastronomy during a short season he spent in Holland.

After that he moved to France where he developed his skills in French cuisine. Rothko was founded in 2011 combining traditional burgers with an authorial gastronomy project, special Brazilian ingredients, and nostalgic recipes.

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Thanks to the always excellent Brain Pickings by Maria Popova, we’ve just discovered the edible modern art-inspired desserts of Caitlin Freeman. The Mondrian cake is incredibly fetching.

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Check out this neat edible spoon by green developmental partner Triangle Tree. It’s 100% natural made entirely of corn and organic products, replacing the need to use non-biodegradable plastic spoons. Not only can you eat a variety of meals with the spoon, but can eat it once you’re done. It’s also available in plain, spicy and sweet flavours to complement your meal choice. For example, eat the spicy spoon to add zest to bland and boring food or the sweet spoon with cereal or desserts.

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What a pairing. The ChocolatRouge range of wines, which mixes up chocolate and red wine in varying levels of sweetness (Dark Red, Sweet Red and Milk Chocolate), infiltrated our consciousness recently and we haven’t stopped fantasizing about it since. Baileys addicts now have an alternative.

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Until recently I didn’t realize you could become a loyalist to your barista. If you’ve discovered one good coffee roaster, where’s the need to discover another, right? Wrong. I now know what it feels like to “cheat” on your barista. Corduroy is much more than your typical hole-in-the-wall espresso joint. Nestled on Foster street in Surry Hills (between Tios of late night Tequila fame and the old Hotel Hollywood) a Little Marionette family gem has been quietly going about their business for the last year or so.

Opened by Marionette roaster, Ben Stronach, and managed by Nigel Park, the espressos pack a punch as do the avocado and smashed eggs on sourdough and the scrumptious little chocolate tarts. Everything at Corduroy is effortless and chilled, right down to their slow cooked sandwich of the day. It looks like there may be no going back.

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Tate & Lyle Sugars has opened the world’s first hotel using entirely cake as its building material. Fittingly called Tasting House and curated by Miss Cakehead, 14 cake artists took over 2,000 hours to bake and 900 hours to decorate the three-storey edible hotel. In the eight tasting rooms you’ll find “vanilla sponge cushions, windows and walls clad with 2,000 macaroons, a rug made from 1,081 meringues, marshmallow garlands, windowsills built entirely from cake and a bath filled with caramel-coated popcorn”.

Of course, it’s a pop-up hotel — somehow we didn’t think cake hotels were going to fit right into the whole sustainable architecture movement.

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Smitten. That’s what we are for Cape Town’s Truth Coffee. Blame the stripped away industrial interior, the long hanging lights, the beautiful vintage detailing on the coffee bar, and the heavy wooden communal tables, anchored with piping. The ruby red stools, the pops of color, and the grand silver roasting machine help too. Through and through, Truth Coffee reeks of personality.

It is the kind of coffee space that calls on you to linger for hours. Of course, then there’s the coffee. Founded by local barista extraordinaire, David Donde, Truth Coffee’s specialty is in “producing artisanal style coffees for the coffee geeks out there in sunny South Africa.” Using a vintage probat roaster fitted with a cast iron drum, they roast a line of blends from a kick-in-your-teeth kind of espresso to a “forgiving” French blend that you won’t soon forget. And each of these blends is continuously tested, iteration after iteration, until the pinnacle of flavor is reached. Quality and taste drive every decision here. Put away the sugar and don’t even think of adding whipped cream. At Truth Coffee, you’re promised an addictive cup of “flavour not bitterness,” as they say. We’re sold – and smitten.

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The city of London is a pretty exciting place visually, so it seems almost counterproductive to dine in the dark. But that’s exactly what you’ll do at Dans le Noir? London, where you can experience the world in pitch black while blind waiters serve you your organic meal. It’s supposed to help sharpen your other senses in the meantime, so we can’t think of a better place to start training for super-sensory powers than dining in the dark. Unfortunately, the restrooms are fully lit for safety reasons, so you can’t practise there.

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Finally, a menu that helps us make up our minds about what to eat. Before you even make an order at pan-Asian fusion restaurant inamo St James in London, you can poke around at its interactive menu to beam prospective eats onto your plate.

The system even allows you to check on the chef, choose your tablecloth, get a waiter’s attention (goodbye, frantic hand-waving) or book show tickets. You know what they say: see it to believe it.

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Wow, imagine flying off for a short decadent getaway away without actually leaving the country. That’s the premise of Dine Mile High, which — lucky for all Londoners — touches down in mid-March to take away all the logistical pains of making it to the airport on time with your passport and boarding pass.


Instead, you’ll get checked in to a glamourous weekend ‘away’ (choose from Göteborg, Beirut, Sicily and Mozambique) at a pop-up London venue with entertainment from cabin crew and DJs on board — plus, of course, cocktails, wine, four-course meals prepared by ex-Moro chef Ollie Templeton and other delightful nibbles. That’s style.

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Sick of working in a bank, Henrique Fogaça quit his job and got a burger trailer. After that, he opened a cafe within the courtyard of an art gallery near Paulista Avenue, which is one of the most important thoroughfares of the city of São Paulo. It quickly became a charming and exclusive restaurant called Sal Gastronomia, with haute cuisine from appetizers like the octopus bruschetta to the seared tuna teriyaki with black rice and pupunha palmetto and the skull cake with sauce of berries. In 2012, he created the Mercado, a gastronomic event which happens once a month, bringing together chefs to cook food at affordable prices.

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Reason number 88790 why being in Melbourne right now would be dreamy: The Urban Coffee Farm & Brew Bar, a lush, jungle-esque plantation popping-up in the city’s center. On March 1, Melbourne launched its annual food-frenzy, the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. This year boasts everything from the infamous world’s longest lunch to master classes from iconic chefs to enough barbeque to leave even the most hardcore tailgater satisfied.

Adding to the festivities is a reinterpreted terraced coffee farm smack in the city’s center, built by design practice HASSELL.

A small jungle of 120 coffee plants sit besides shipping containers from Melbourne’s own port and timber packing crates. The pop-up hopes to give visitors a glimpse of coffee’s story from seed to cup. As its tagline reads: “Take a journey through the farm to understand the coffee story.” Daytime finds Australia’s best baristas and Melbourne’s café heavy weights taking turns at the brew bar. Take-away coffees are on offer but why not go for a tasting flight? Or a master class even, where lucky barista-wannabes can learn about everything from roasting to cupping.

The Urban Coffee Farm & Brew Bar is on from now until March 17. And if you find yourself able to stop on by in the warm summer afternoon to sip a cup of some of the country’s best brew surrounded by coffee trees – well, frankly, I am utterly jealous.

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It wasn’t that long ago that we were marveling at the prospect of sucking all the planets out of our solar system. Now an Etsy seller from Salt Lake City Utah is offering the Death Star as handcrafted sugar-free 5”-long marchmallow-flavored lollipops. Sweet! If you prefer not to incur the wrath of Mr Vader, try devouring these realistic creature eyes instead.

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Air travel and sushi are two things we love, but don’t necessarily picture together. So it’s pretty neat that SushiAirways boldly mashes up both. Its interiors are playfully modeled after the Douglas DC-3, an American fixed-wing aircraft that was big in the 1930s, while Jap cuisine is served by staff dressed in matching uniforms reminiscent of cabin crew gear. To board the bar-restaurant in Singapore, customers have to climb a flight of metallic steps like one of these ubiquitous air-stairs. OO STUDIO helmed both design and concept It could have gone so wrong, but thankfully it never descends into bad taste territory.

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This is the home of the world’s strongest coffee. Death Wish Coffee has been gaining popularity in the coffee community over the last six months. nNothing artificial goes into this brew. It’s just strong, all natural, fair trade, organic coffee beans. This may be the most evil coffee on the market right now.

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There was the gummy bear chandelier and the gummy bear dress, which wowed us with their off-the-wall foodie WTF. Nothing, however, could prepare us for this latest gummy creation: a jelly replica of you. Now on offer in Japan, men can create spitting images of themselves in gummy form thanks to Tokyo’s FabCafe – the same café-cum-design-studio that recently gave Japanese women the opportunity to chisel their likeness into chocolate truffles on Valentine’s Day. This is, apparently, the men’s response.

To make the gummy mannequins, men will pose for 3D body scans that will then be used to create the jelly molds. A few sugary mixes later and out comes a human gummy clone in jiggly, bright yellows, blues and reds. The resulting candy brings a whole new meaning to the idea of Sour Patch Kids.

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‘Got style, will bake’ is the slogan of Kiss And Bake Up, a bakery based in Devon, UK. Kiss And Bake Up specialise in jaw-droppingly intricate cake sculptures, often with a quirky, geeky edge (think Doctor Who and Harry Potter). The bakery is run by Sarah, a gorgeous blue-haired baker who has as much attitude as her food. In a good way, of course.

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At French restaurant Ne Quittez Pas in Tokyo, which serves up southern French cuisine with fresh seafood from Misaki, Kanagawa as well as green produce, you can also find soil in your food. It’s not of the accidental variety either. Owner-chef Toshio Tanabe, who has previously worked at Michelin-starred restaurants, recently started offering customers a six-course soiled meal for 10,000 yen or nearly US$110.

Tanabe sources his chemical-free soil from a supplier in Tokyo, preparing the ingredient with some light cooking to release the flavour before running it through a sieve to remove sand grains. Dinner starts with an amuse bouche of soil soup and ends with a soil sorbet and sweet dirt gratin. The highlight is dubbed the ‘soil surprise’ or a soil-dusted potato ball with a truffle center. As one guy comments: ‘Apparently there’s about $11,000 worth of fine cuisine behind my refrigrator (sic) right now.’ He’s right. Yum.

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Cookie is one of those places. You know the type: tucked away, easy to pass by without batting an eyelash and frighteningly good. Hidden above Melbourne’s bustling Swanston street in Curtin House, Cookie takes everything you know about Thai cuisine and flips it on its head, adding a signature modern spin. If you’re looking for menu recommendations, you could talk to the staff or listen to me…

Whatever you do, order the god damn roasted duck salad and don’t leave until you’ve eaten the whole thing! If you aren’t up for food (not everyone is always hungry like myself), perhaps you could head into Cookie’s bar to check out their extensive list of beverages or keep heading upstairs. Curtin House is also home to two other great bars: The Toff and Rooftop, as well as a cinema, bookstore and some clothing stores. Enjoy! And don’t say we didn’t tell you so.

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