Meat Review – The Bootlegger Bar

As I mentioned when reviewing the E-I-E-I-O burger, I love a meal where there is more than one meat contained within the dish. And on a recent visit to Katoomba NSW I discovered a restaurant-slash-bar that had on its menu a dish that contained not two meats or three but indeed four!

So lets have a gander at the Bootleggers Meat Share Plate.

A meal made in Trev-heaven!

So the description of the meal is a Share Plate and it is indeed intended for two people. Given it was our anniversary I relented and shared this plate with my wife, but being the kind woman she is she let me devour the lions portion of it.

The meal comes with four meats from two different animals. Beef brisket and links (sausages) and chicken wings as well as fried chicken. Personally I would have preferred the links be made out of pork but you can’t have everything.

Along with the above came enough non-meat foods to ensure that you would have some chance of being able to pass your next bowel movement. Slaw, Corn, Pickles, Potato Salad and Chips. Good to see that at least 40% of the sides were spud based – potatoes being that good that they should almost be considered an honorary meat!

Unto the breach!

The meats were all very tender. The fried chicken was done very well, not remotely oily or greasy like that one would get from a fast food restaurant. The chicken wings were lightly spiced so not as hot as buffalo wings but at least had a bit of bite to them. The brisket was very tender as brisket should be. The only meat that didn’t impress me was the links. They weren’t bad in any way, but just your average beef sausages so were somewhat overshadowed by the rest.

The non-meat stuff was good too. I think. I dunno, I wasn’t really paying attention.

 

Exploding Hot Sauce!

Sauce made by chef Wile. E. Coyote

The waitress brought out two types of hot sauce, espousing their virtues about how they were made on site, not simply store bought. As readers of my blog would know I love hot sauces so was eager to try them out. The red hot sauce was indeed very hot, not as hot as the likes of Mad Dog 357, but still had a helluva kick. The green sauce? Well I went to open it…

…and it exploded!

Perhaps exploded is not the right term. The heat had built up in the bottle so as soon as the top was twisted it made a sound like shook up cola can and the sauce blew forth! It covered my shirt, splattered my face and even left a sorta Trev-shaped splatter pattern on the window behind me.

The poor young waitress was very apologetic. After ascertaining that it had not gone in my eyes she brought multiple wet paper towels for me to clean myself, then later appeared with a shirt from the restaurants merchandise stash for me to wear home. So sadly, unless I had chosen to lick my clothing I never got to sample what the green hot sauce tasted like.

The shirt I wear when doing my radio show, though my music isn’t bootlegged – the CD’s are just really worn

 

Overall

This meal is nearly $80 but its certainly enough for two people (as long as one isn’t me) and its very good tasting. Besides the volatile hot sauces the only other accompaniment was a small bowl of BBQ sauce – personally I would have preferred to get a hearty gravy but perhaps that would push the meal into the realms of making a coronary a certainty. The bar had a different selection of wheat beers on tap which were quite nice, but if you’d take my recommendation skip the ginger based beer, it was pretty average.   So yeah, do yourself a favour and if in Katoomba drop past Bootleggers – you will get a decent feed and maybe a free shirt!

 

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How 20 Years of being an Adult Collector began

This month – January 2021 – marks 20 years of me being an adult collector of Transformers.

It also marks the 20 year anniversary of my first (very short lived) marriage.  And the two are not unconnected.

 

As a kid we didn’t have a great deal of money, though I never went without a roof over my head or food in my belly so we did OK.  I’d get a few transformers each year with my bit of pocket money I earned mowing the lawns at home or turning in rabbit skins when visiting my dad.  And I sometimes got a Transformer for a birthday or Christmas as well.

My collection circa 1987

In my teens G1 was coming to an end.  However this was also the time that my mother began running a small Toys & Gifts shop.  This meant that I could get my Transformers wholesale!  It was also the time of reissues so as well as being able to purchase Micromasters and Action Masters at cost, I was also able to grab the Combaticons, Arielbots, Protectobots and even a few bigger figures like some Dinobots & Autobot Cars.  Yes sir, it was a golden time.

Primus bless reissues!

Sadly I strayed in my late teens as so many young men do.  G2 didn’t hold much appeal for me and suddenly beer and girls were very interesting.  So my collection, which at the time equalled 1 gross – 144 figures (if you counted individual bots such as Micromasters and Target Masters) – was put away in a box and did not see the light of day for many years.

I never stopped loving Transformers, even when I moved to Melbourne to go to Uni.  But once again partying, friends and girls seemed somehow more important.  I hated Beast Wars (I appreciate it now but back then thought it was an abomination) and sometimes my mates used to get me liquored up and goad me into a ‘trukk not munkey’ rant.  To be honest to this day organic alt-modes still do little for me.  So Transformers stayed waaaaay in the background of my existence.

 

Now comes January 2001

 

I got married.  Stupidly.  It was partly as I’d always been too lazy and cowardly to break up with the girl and partly because she had a balcony you could do Shakespeare from (I was young, shallow and dumb OK – a large chest seemed more important than a pleasant personality!).  A couple of dear friends of mine were filming the wedding for us and asked what present we would like.  I replied filming was more than gift enough.  When they persisted I said jokingly ‘Get me a G1 Optimus Prime’.

Well the night of the wedding we are unwrapping gifts.  I’m trying to stifle my boredom as they are mainly ‘grown-ups’ gifts like linen and breakfast trays (once again – I was 23 and immature).  Then I unwrapped the gifts from Tammy & Michael.

And there… lo…. was a loose GENERATION ONE OPTIMUS PRIME!!!

Me on honeymoon with Optimus Prime. I swear he got more action than I did

There was also a Wreck-Gar (whom I already had but now they could ride each other!) and a Chop Shop.  I squealed like an excited schoolgirl! For me it was the highlight of the night!

 

And thus after nearly a decade away, I came back to Transformer collecting.  I discovered eBay and found so many G1 toys that my ranks quickly swelled.  With a new career I had more money, and from big toys like Omega Supreme, Metroplex, Sky Lynx & Trypticon, to smaller figures like the Throttlebots, those G1 gaps were filling fast!

7 months into the marriage it ended.  Shan’t go into details but let’s just say my ex worked in education and I discovered she was doing some very ‘private tuition’ with one of her teen students and leave it at that.  So the marriage died which in the long run was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me; I ended up moving in coincidentally with the friends who had given me Optimus.  But though my marriage was dead, my love for Transformers was thriving!  I continued to buy G1 stuff online, and the new Robots in Disguise toys hit the shelves in Australia, bringing back all the concepts I loved like vehicular transformers and combiners.

My G1-cartoon cast in the early 2000’s

My collecting has continued ever since. By the end of 2001 my collection, which had stagnated at a count of 144, was over two hundred and I had no inclination to just how far it would end up going!  I’ve continued amassing Transformers right through all the cartoons from Armada to Cyberverse, throughout all the live-action movies and especially the G1-inspired toylines such as Generations, right up to the latest Earthrise figures.  I’ve travelled many parts of the globe and brought back figures you couldn’t find in Australia.   I got married again 12 years ago but this time it was for all the right reasons and I couldn’t imagine loving my wife more. If I’m 100% honest the fact that she is so tolerant of my hobby makes up a small part of that (only a small part, there are a plethora of wonderful things about her to love!).  And my kids love to play Transformers with their Dad!

They even have their own playtables set up – bless their hearts

Now 20 years on I’m sitting at around the 3500 figures mark along with about another thousand pieces of TF merchandise, have my own Transformatorium shed and indeed this blog where I often share my love of the hobby.  So I’m a pretty damn lucky guy!

“Who says I have an obsession?!”

 

I can’t even remember the exact day in January 2001 I got married on, but I damn sure remember getting that G1 Optimus Prime.

 

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