Betty's Soup Kitchen

Coleen and I are safely back in Elmira.  Well, we're back, anyway.  Though the pastor mowed twice, the yard still looks like a sugar cane field right before harvest, and the vegetable garden will likely produce a bumper crop of burdock and Queen Anne's lace.  My ear is still popping from the flight from Alice Springs to Sydney; I'll probably have it checked on Tuesday.

One of the things I have not commented on in recent years is the experience of eating in Australia.  There are several aspects of this:  dining out, grocery shopping, and meal preparation.  Not so many years ago, food in Australia was quite inexpensive, but the last few years have seen steady increases in food costs.  Thus year, we saw saw breathtaking prices for bananas, a whopping $13/kg in most markets -- after the conversion to pounds and figuring in the exchange rate, that would be roughly $6.50/lb in US dollars, or more than 13 times what we are used to paying in the markets here.  The short-term forces on this have to do with the floods in January and the tropical cyclones in March that damaged the current crop.  There are longer-term issues, too.  The Australians import no bananas, supposedly to protect the domestic crop from disease, but more likely to keep prices high -- a practice that should sound familiar to people in the USA.

Students find it a challenge to stretch their food budget to cover the month.  Sydney has been especially hard, since the kitchen facilities at the Y Hotel are pretty minimal.  Once we leave Sydney, we stay at YHAs, all of which have sufficient kitchen facilities so that students can prepare their own meals and save some money.  (We will begin staying at one of the YHAs in Sydney as well starting in 2012.)

While in Sydney, students hunting for meal bargains often come across some very nice places.  Betty's Soup Kitchen, located on Oxford Street a few blocks east of Hyde Park, was an excellent find.  The students organized a final group dinner and invited Coleen and I along.  The place is cozy and charming, with a picture of the founder, Betty Ehrlich, looking over the diners.  The restaurant accommodated our group quite well, even treating one of the students who had come with little money to a free dinner.  Meals are simple:  soup, pasta, shepherd's pies.  There is a salad bar as well, and a very tasty bread comes free to the table.  Prices are very good:  soup begins at $7.50, and I saw nothing on the menu over $20.  I had a very generous nacho plate for around $11.  Like most tex-mex dishes I have sampled in Australia, it was much sweeter than what an American would expect, but as long as one refrains from the comparison, it was very tasty.

The service was friendly and homey, reminding me of diners like Cozy Corner here in Elmira, or Frank's in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  We were there on a Thursday night, so I do not know the traffic they get at other times, though I suspect that they get waiting lines like Frank's does at certain times.

So, for future reference to students and others spending time in Sydney:  check out Betty's Soup Kitchen, 84 Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, phone 02-9360-9698.  With good simple food, excellent prices, and pleasant service, it's a great value for the budget traveler.