Food heroes on Koh Samui

My first-ever blog post was about eating Rick Stein's beef-dripping fish and chips by the harbour at Falmouth in Cornwall.

I enjoyed Rick's TV series on 'local food heroes' a few years ago. He visited food producers and restaurateurs all around the UK who were doing great things with local produce and bringing great food into the lives of local people.

In Koh Samui, Thailand, on a week's holiday for a friend's wedding, we found our own local food heroes. Three ladies cooking simple and delicious food in a roadside shack opposite the resorts lining Lipa Noi beach.

They just served the basics: red curry, green curry, papaya salad, pad thai, crispy pork, tom yum goong, tom kha gai, stir-fried meat and vegetables. But it was authentic and cheap and delicious.

Papaya salad

Prawn green curry

Several of the wedding guests could be found there every lunch and dinnertime for the whole week, sitting on plastic stools around the plastic tables and washing down plates of delicious food with ice-cold Singha or Beer Chang.

Our food heroes' cooking was full of fresh local ingredients: shallots, chilli, spring onion, fish sauce, coconut milk, Thai basil, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, coriander, bamboo shoots, prawns, fish and meat. Every dish had zing, fire and the perfect balance between sweet, salty, sour and hot flavours.

It wasn't just the food that made them heroes. They offered an authentic, real eating experience on an island that is dominated by large resorts and tacky neon-sign bucket-drink nightclubs. The resorts opposite their roadside shack all had restaurants, but the food was invariably mediocre and incredibly overpriced by comparison.

Our food heroes' basic eatery was a place to escape to, where we got a friendly welcome and a taste of the real Thailand every day.

Our local food heroes on Koh Samui

A foody, winey weekend in Melbourne

There they were, in all their crispy-crumbed deliciousness. On trips to Spain I would prowl the side streets in search of the best, the freshest. Sidle up to a crowded bar at the sight of laden trays coming out of the kitchen. Here in Melbourne was perfection - salt cod croqueta perfection, as good as the ones in Madrid, and found only three and a half hours from Auckland.

It was at MoVida for Friday lunch with sister Libby and those salt cod croquetas and a glass of Verdejo that I realised I was in for a proper foody, winey weekend. MoVida is very good at food and wine. Spanner crab salad with piquillo peppers. Rabbit loin wrapped in pancetta with lardons, peas and black sea salt flakes. Pressed quail and morcilla with apple and pickled garlic. Rioja and ribera del duero. What's not to love? And you can almost imagine you're in Barcelona's barri gotic as you step outside into Hosier Lane, with its walls covered in graffiti murals. We loved it so much we went back again for Sunday lunch.

However tempting it was to sit in MoVida all afternoon working our way through the wine list, it was time to shop up an appetite for dinner. Mission accomplished thanks to Zara and Myer. A tiny bar called Von Haus down a little side street off Bourke Street was the perfect place to take a load off. You feel like you are walking into a Victorian terraced house in London 100 years ago as you enter the wood-panelled, dining room-like bar from the dark hallway. They've got a big wine rack on one wall, a blackboard wine list and charcuterie plates.

We had put our names down early at Mamasita, the loud and fun Mexican hotspot on Collins Street. That was a work of genius, because when six of us arrived, hungry, at the agreed time the queue stretched down the stairs and almost on to the street. We scoffed elotes callejeros - grilled corn on the cob covered in cheese, chipotle mayo and lime juice. Crispy tostaditas came topped with slow-cooked pork shoulder, and crab, avocado & tamarind mayo. Soft tacos with braised ox tongue & cheek; quesadillas with chargrilled chicken, coriander and cheese. We washed all the delicious, big flavours down with jugs of margarita.

For some reason I'd never been to Melbourne before. It won't be the last time, as by the end of that Friday it had already climbed pretty high up on my list of favourite cities. Riverside bars, little lanes, shopping, trams, a top notch food scene and a wine region an hour away. That's where we found ourselves late the next morning, contemplating our breakfast of two dozen oysters and a tasting flight of the sparkling wine range at Domaine Chandon in the Yarra Valley. The winery was set up by Moet & Chandon in the eighties, ostensibly as an insurance policy on their Champagne production. If their plan is to replicate Champagne as closely as possible, they are doing a pretty good job. The climate and soil conditions are ideal, and the quality of the fizz is fantastic even though they lack the underground chalk cellars of their home region.

Lunch at Yering Station was spectacular, and would have been even more so if it hadn't been raining - the restaurant has a terrace overlooking farmland to hills beyond. After a wine tasting with the friendly staff in the original 1859 winery building, we headed through to the sleek, modern restaurant to indulge in European-influenced food. Perfect sweet crispy-edged scallops with corn salsa and avocado puree followed by rare beef fillet with port jus almost had me falling asleep in the car on the way to De Bortoli. The 'sticky experience' tasting flight quickly fixed that though. The famous Noble One botrytis semillon in all its marmaladey, honeyed perfection was followed by two barrel-aged tawnys, then a fortified and barrel-aged Noble One (a bit like Madeira) and finally a liqueur Muscat with flavours of raisins and toffee.

We unanimously agreed that dinner back in Melbourne should be light and late, so Izakaya Den in an unmarked basement on Russell Street was the perfect choice. The star of the numerous tapas-style izakaya dishes was the tuna tataki. Perfect cubes of tuna, briefly seared on four sides and placed on a blob of wasabi mayonnaise were so mind-blowingly fresh and good we couldn't resist ordering more.

Like any gastronomic city worth its Maldon sea salt Melbourne has a fantastic food market - the Queen Victoria Market. It's not as touristy as London's Borough Market and not as overwhelming as Barcelona's La Boqueria. Coffee and croissants followed by spicy lamb borek saw us through our hangovers perfectly on Sunday morning.

By Sunday lunch, back at MoVida, we felt as if we had been eating all weekend - but there are still so many dozens of restaurants, bars and wineries which we didn't have time to discover. There is only one thing to fix that - book flights back as soon as possible.