Day 5&6: Let's Talk About Food

The weekend arrived without much fanfare - one thing about being being locked in a hotel room is that I'm finding the days tend to blend together quite a lot. If I could tolerate watching free to air TV, I'd maybe notice a difference in programming, but the only other clue to it being Saturday morning was the lack of activity in the office block outside my window.

Another care package, this time from my brother, means that I now have a Super Nintendo and a keyboard and mouse for my laptop, which meant that I whiled away most of the weekend playing videogames. (A couple of frustrating attempts at Super Mario, before getting lost and quickly giving up in Super Metroid, I then switched over to Hotline Miami from my Steam library, for anyone playing at home).

Apart from a couple of movies - 21 Bridges (RIP Chadwick Boseman) and Sonic the Hedgehog (I liked this way more than I expected to), and staying up to watch the Moto GP on Sunday night, the weekend passed like any other - generally unproductive, and with a couple too many beers.

So, with the absence of much else to say, I'm going to editorialise a little bit here on the state of quarantine food. 

Let's back up a little bit to Saturday. Breakfast was fine - more scrambled eggs and bacon (I still cannot overstate how happy I am to see Aussie bacon again). 

I am starting to miss toast though...

Lunch was a nice surprise, instead of the ole double carb combo from the past few days, we got a sausage roll to accompany our sandwich

Add Balfour's sausage rolls to the things I really missed while I was away

And, to top off the day, dinner was a rack of pork ribs. I honestly did a double take when I read that that was being sent up. Another suprisingly interesting and good meal - not spectacular -  the sauce could have been a bit richer, and could have done with more of it, but they were well cooked and fell off the bone.

And a decent little pannacotta for dessert as well.

By this point, I was genuinely starting to get excited by what each dinner announcement would hold. As I've said a few times in the past couple of days, I am constantly surprised by the kitchen's willingness to swing for the fences on some of the dinner choices, and so far, they'd been racking up a few good runs into home base (I'd like to clarify that I don't think they were hitting homers over the fences - just playing well enough to get everyone around the bases - I'm not good at sports analogies).

And then everything went a bit weird on Sunday. I was only aware of the arrival of breakfast because I was lurking at the door of my room (don't judge me, I was hungry!) and heard the faint rustling of paper bags outside - if there was a knock on my door, the person doing the drop off must have been an owl (they're famously very quiet when flying - maybe I should just stop with the analogies). Not a gamebreaker, but I felt a disturbance in the force - perhaps a changing of the guard if you will.

STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!
(this did at least taste better than it looks)

 Lunch was also a bit odd - maybe this is my own personal bias, but I don't count antipasto as food. Yes, it is made up of all the same stuff as food, but an antipasto plate has a magical power to never make you feel full, or to ever be entirely finished no matter how long you pick at it.(think back to any barbeque or dinner party you've ever had to clean up after - you will always be scraping some brie off of a wooden board)

The ever-present sandwich made up the difference at least.

At this point, those of you who have read this far are probably wondering why I'm waxing lyrical about antipasto; well, because here at Sunday night's dinner the wheels really came off the train.

"Fried Rice" in inverted commas - at least the cake was nice

There's alot I want to say here, but it's all mean and I don't want to put it in a public forum. The kindest assessment I can must of this dish is 'awful', and I might leave it at that. And while I sit locked in my room, the best I can do is speculate how something so truly atrocious was allowed to leave a professional kitchen, I think airing any of that without giving the kitchen any benefit of a doubt or fair chance to explain isn't fair. 

And I don't want to trash the hotel for one bad meal, the point of lauding the pork ribs is to show that they have on the whole been doing a good job, but my problem with this one bad meal is much larger. The issue with this meal is not that I had to order Uber Eats in order to have a decent dinner on Sunday night, it's that we're stuck in a system in which, by my estimation, around 300 people were all provided the same barely edible dish, with no possible recourse (beyond shelling out for Uber Eats), and that this is happening across the country.

Kitchens have bad nights, nobody knows that better than me, but in the real world, this usually means one table getting a refund, maybe a free dessert and a floor manager spends the next couple of days hoping that nobody takes to TripAdvisor. In quarantine world, it means hundreds of people go a night without eating. Again, I don't blame anybody in this instance (there is probably someone to blame, but that's not my finger to point), but like any good restaurant that has a bad night, it is up to management to take a look at what went wrong and fix it. And to the hotel's credit, that has happened. Tony (hi, Tony!) stepped up and took responsibility, has apologised for the balls-up, and promised to fix it. And so far (I am writing this a couple of days later, for a peak behind the curtain), the food quality has ticked back up to its usual standard. But this is only the pointy end of the iceberg (that's not an analogy, it's a mixed metaphor).

If we zoom out however, that last important step doesn't seem to be happening. I've spent the last couple of months before arriving dreading the food I was going to be served because quarantine support groups on Facebook are flooded with people posting frankly disgusting food that they have been served in quarantine. Everything from still-half-frozen microwave meals, to lunches consisting almost entirely of Caramello Koalas, the food standards across the country are not up to snuff, and the restaurant manager is off spinning around in his wheelie chair in the office instead of helping out with service (The government is the restaurant manager in this analogy - last one I swear).

I'm at least lucky enough to be housed in a hotel that clearly takes pride in its service and reputation, but that doesn't allow me the luxury of turning a blind eye to the problems that others undertaking this process are encountering. From where I sit, a lot of it is fairly easily fixed (relatively - I am aware that writing and enacting unprecedented national policy isn't necessarily 'easy'), and the government has had almost 6 months to fix it, and so far, the issues that people face travelling now are the same as they were months ago. And I think the big first step is to stop vilifying those returning home. It's hard to have a conversation about living conditions in quarantine facilities when the current conversation still revolves around the repeated refrain of "you should have come home when we told you to" (I have seen people receive signed letters from Scotty from Marketing to that effect) and whether we should be being shipped off to Nauru to isolate instead. 

So what I'm trying to say about Sunday's fried rice is this - people in hotel quarantine are not prisoners. They are Australian Citizens trying to exercise their constitutional right to return home, and making a big sacrifice to do it. And they're not doing for free anymore - remember, we* are paying for the privilege of having zero choice in what we eat. This government has enacted a policy which has essentially interned 1000's of Australian Citizens, and then washed their hands of any responsibility. 

In closing, because I am so far away from where I started on this one - I would like to say thank you to the team at the HGC for the job you are doing. And to the government - do better. It is frankly insulting to be told in the same breath that anyone outside of Australia should have pulled out their magic crystal ball 6 months ago and predicted that Australia was going to shut its borders until, at last count, mid 2021, and that the policy that you enacted is too expensive and the cost would be passed on to those travelling, without any discussion of choice (unless you're Dannii Minogue), or transparency as to how that money is being spent.

And because I don't really know how to finish this - I ordered dumpling Laksa and steam buns from Dumplings R Us on Rundle St for dinner on Sunday night, so here's a picture of that.

Dumplings R Us are a goddamn institution!

PS - There is an important distinction between policy and my personal experience that I should have made a few 100 words ago but got caught up in my rant. Just to restate for those in the cheap seats - this was never meant as a dig at the HGC, it is meant to hopefully bring to light some of the conditions others have been facing in hotels across the country, and not as a 1000 word dissertation on bad fried rice. 

*Personally my quarantine fees will be waived because I booked before June 13, but the vast majority of people now in quarantine are being charged $3000 to do so.