The Mouth: Plenty to beef about in heart of Sydney’s luvvie-dom

Bill Gates thinks the entire developed world should switch to eating synthetic meat. Kitchen Confidential’s The Mouth reckons some may beg to differ after finding this gem in the dark heart of Sydney luvvie-dom.

Bill Gates would have to be the weirdest Bond villain of all time.

Not even the franchise’s current politically correct producers, who are right now surely cooking up a film in which 007 foils a plot to kill off the use of new pronouns (“The Spy Who Loved Xe”, perhaps?), could have come up with this guy.

Think about it.

Dorky guy makes good and becomes mega-billionaire.

Then things take a darker turn and he turns out to be something of a sex pest, at least if some of the stuff that came out of his divorce case is to be believed.

And now?

Well, he’s become Mr Public Health – weighing in not just on vaccines and pandemics but also our diets.

The Oklahoma smashed fried onion cheeseburger.

Bill Gates thinks the entire developed world should switch to eating synthetic meat.

To cut a long story short, Gates thinks the entire developed world should switch to eating synthetic meat.

It‘s all to “save the planet”, though this column suspects there’s a fair bit of control freakery and resentment that too many of us have nice things behind it as well.

The Mouth was thinking about this the other day when business took us in Balmain, a.k.a., the Insular Peninsula and dark heart of Sydney luvvie-dom, and we walked two blocks to find the source of the most incredible smell of sizzling, searing beef.

The pot of gold at the end of this rainbow was technically in Rozelle.

But extraordinarily, it turned out to be a classic family butcher shop that had given its front over to an operation called “Eat at Robs”, which bills itself as “The Australian home of the Oklahoma smashed fried onion cheeseburger.”

As Tobias Funke once said, “Oh, is there such a thing?”

Yes, there is, and it’s the greatest less-is-more proposition since the martini.

Beef and plenty of it, the smashed fried onion cheeseburger.

Eat at ROBS, Australian home of the Oklahoma cheeseburger.

We watched in fascination as the griddle man did his thing: A fist-size hunk of beef would be topped with a nearly as large pile of slivered onions and smashed with something that looked like it came from the plasterer’s aisle at Bunnings.

Served with cheese on a soft potato roll, the whole thing was an exercise in softness and simplicity in a hard and complex world and had the right amount of grease to let you know this was still no health food.

A fist-size hunk of beef topped with cheese and slivered onions.

It was just what we needed on a blustery day, and there is no way the experience could be re-created in a lab.

Which is why this column thinks it is time to draw a line in the sand.

Driving has been ruined by speed cameras, we’ll be wearing masks forever on planes to indulge the neurotics, and it’s pretty clear there’s a push on to do to drinking what they once did to smoking.

At least let us have our beef, and if you can’t have it at one of the fancy pants steakhouses that charge $80 for a puck of filet, have it at Rob’s.

Originally published as The Mouth: Plenty to beef about in heart of Sydney’s luvvie-dom