What do you get when you combine one of the city’s favourite Italian party places with Scarborough’s favourite Mexican hotspots?

All will be answered on Friday, July 25 when Beaufort Street’s Si Paradiso takes over sibling venue El Grotto for one evening of Mexitalo good times.

Expect pizzas and Italian snacks remixed El Grotto style served alongside the bar’s cocktails and wines from charismatic Paradiso wine guy, Bruno Serra. The good times start from 5pm.

Slow-cooked barbecue meats and bottomless drinks at Busselton Pavilion

Platters of slow-cooked meats. Bottomless drinks. Serious fire cooking: just three things to expect at Busselton Pavilion’s recently launched Boozy BBQ Weekends.

Available from 12pm on Saturdays and Sundays, this meal deal includes platters of barbecue meat, sauces and sides, plus a two-hour bottomless drinks package that includes the tavern’s own Pit Boss IPA, an exclusive beer brewed in collaboration with the team at Rocky Ridge Brewing.

“We wanted to create something generous, social, and worth planning your weekend around,” says Brendan Pratt, the tavern’s head of culinary. The package is $85 per person (including alcoholic drinks) or $55 (non-alcoholic drinks). Bookings are essential and can be made online.

The sound of Margaret River (wine)

It’s raining. It’s pouring. But that’s not stopping doctor Jo Burzynska from exploring. (Which in her case, means the Margaret River region ahead of her appearance at November’s Pair’d wine and music festival).

A New Zealand-based wine writer, sound artist and researcher, Burzynska is currently in the southwest gathering field recordings which will be used to create soundscapes inspired by the region and its key wine styles.

According to Burzynska, what we hear influences how we taste things, so by pairing the right soundscape – or “sonic fingerprint” as she likes to call them – with the right wine, it’s possible to detect different flavours and nuances in the glass. Equally important, however, is what we feel.

“Texture is really important in both wine and sound but it kind of gets forgotten,” says Burzynska, who writes about wine for the New Zealand Herald.

“People talk about texture on the palate when it comes to food. There’s texture in the timbre of a sound as well. All these things are interlinked. By bringing them together the right way, we can make something special happen.”

These soundscapes will be played at various Pair’d festival events including Nature’s Table and The Grand Tasting.

Fresh-faced Vietnamese snack bar North 54 opens on Oxford Street

Xin chuc mung Bac Pham and everyone involved with North 54: a cheery Vietnamese deli and snack bar that opens today at the former Gigi’s Bowls and Three Sisters site in Leederville.

The opening menu reflects Pham’s “authentic-but-not-traditional” cooking credo and includes banh mi cradling XO mushroom and eggplant and sate roast pork. (Banh mi fillings, incidentally, are also available in rice and noodle bowls.) The snack section might be small but it’s certainly mighty: fried chicken wings are slaked in a fish sauce caramel while pork and prawn springs rolls are accompanied by Pham’s hauntingly good coriander and chilli “green sauce”. North 54 is open from 10am to 3pm, Tuesday to Saturday.

Reasons to escape north this winter

For anyone craving some winter sun, a pair of festivals in WA’s north make ideal excuses to (temporarily) leave the wet and cold behind.

The first event off the rank is Kununurra’s Taste of the Kimberley (August 15-17), a weekend long celebration of the Ord Valley’s First Nations and farming culture.

After that, it’s Broome’s turn to host festivities with the historic pearling town playing host to Shinju Matsuri (August 23-September 7): a 16-day celebration of the region’s multicultural heritage that includes a diverse, mixed food scene shaped by Indigenous, Asian and European influences.

To help travellers on their way, more than 4000 discounted flights to Broome on Virgin Australia and Nexus Airlines are being offered as part of the government’s Affordable Airfares Program.