Web Development Live

EPAM Systems, a software outsourcing services company, has announced the acquisition of B2BITS, a provider of solutions and consulting services to Capital Markets organizations within the financial services sector. According to the company, with this acquisition, EPAM now covers the entire value chain from domain knowledge and process consulting through customized high-performance architecture as well as development, testing and 24/7 support. Mark Bisker, CEO of B2BITS and industry veteran with over 25 years experience of leading technology development organizations at such companies as Schwab Capital Markets and Lava Trading heads EPAM’s new Competency Center.Competency Center consultants will be located in all major financial centers across the US and Europe, while production and support teams will be tightly linked into EPAM’s distributed development organization in Eastern Europe to combine cost efficiency with domain knowledge and strict SLAs.B2BITS has been delivering pre-built solutions, customizable frameworks, specialized testing tools as well as process consulting for Client Connectivity, FIX, FX, Options, Fixed Income, market data feeds, exchange gateways and electronic payment services since 2000.

Consona Corporation, a provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software and services for the enterprise, recently made an announcement about acquiring substantially all assets of Configuration Solutions. Configuration Solutions, headquartered in Portage, Michigan, is into development of product configuration solutions for to-order manufacturers.Once the acquisition is complete, Configuration Solutions will continue to operate from its headquarters as a product line of Consona ERP, serviced by dedicated sales, support, services and development staff. Consona will maintain the Configuration Solutions brand and product names and remain committed to the ongoing sales, maintenance, support and enhancement of Configuration Solutions product and service offerings to meet the needs of both existing and future customers, said Consona. combining the resources of two leading companies, wel be able to provide more proactive service and support to our shared customers, said Bill Haynes, vice president of sales for Consona ERP.

Haynes added that the acquisition will not impact Configuration Solutions partner relationships with ERP solutions that compete directly with Consona ERP. t is our ongoing objective to provide unsurpassed service and support egardless of the ERP foundation a customer is using, he said.Ryan Colosky, former vice president of sales for Configuration Solutions, has assumed the role of general manager of the product line, reporting directly to Scott Malia, general manager of Consona ERP. After 16 years of focused dedication to the industry, Founder and CEO Dale Colosky has decided to retire.

Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.

Synplicity, supplier of solutions for the design and verification of semiconductors, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Synopsys, a provider of software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing.

When completed, the acquisition will expand Synplicity product portfolio and extend the market reach of its industry leading products. Under the terms of the agreement, Synopsys will pay USD 8 cash per Synplicity share, resulting in a gross transaction value of approximately USD 227 million, and approximately USD 188 million net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to close in the second calendar quarter of 2008, and after the closing, Synplicity will become part of Synopsys, and Synplicity stock will cease trading. ynplicity strong product portfolio, expertise, and customer reach will be ideal complements to Synopsys, said Aart deGeus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys.

he combination will expand our presence in the systems and mid-tier market segments, will support our strategy to provide rapid prototyping capabilities to a broad set of customers to enable much faster software development, and will enhance Synplicity already strong offering in the FPGA implementation market.The acquisition is expected to help the companies accelerate the revenue growth in the rapidly growing market for SoC verification solutions. According to the Synplicity, the acquisition also provides the opportunity to leverage Synopsys advanced IC technology to further improve Synplicity FPGA synthesis products, and Synplicity will gain an expanded product portfolio with which to serve its approximately 1,800 customers.

Their joint statue towers above the passers-by in
Swanston Street, but their story has been a cause of mockery since
as long ago as Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life (1903).
They are usually known as Burke and Wills, respectively the
Irish-born leader of the expedition aiming to cross the continent
from south to north (returning proved to be the problem) and his
young surveyor. The order was derisively reversed in the would-be
movie comedy Wills and Burke (1985) where the acting of the camels
was more expressive and certainly more doleful than the principals
- Garry McDonald as Burke, Kym Gyngell as Wills and Nicole Kidman
as the actress Julia Matthews. The tale of the doomed explorers was
recently revisited in Alan Attwood’s novel, Burke’s
Soldier (2005). Now their turn has come again, and strangely,
in the first novel by Kevin Rabalais, The Landscape of
Desire.
Born in Louisiana, Rabalais now lives in Melbourne, but his
American origins may have led to the jarring descriptions of
ranchers and rustlers with whom Burke deals while Police Inspector
at Beechworth in the 1850s. Its title a dreamy blend of concrete
and abstract, the novel is an extended imagining of sketchy periods
in Burke’s life.
Beechworth, for instance, was more secure employment than the
prospects of finding gold for the young man “who sailed to exhume
his fortune from the tainted land” - Australia. Nevertheless Burke
chafes, eager for glory, but infatuated as well with Matthews, who
teasingly signs her letters as C for Cupid, and whom Burke
obsessively watches on stage. He understands that “He has reached
the point in life where there is no return”.
Rabalais’ method is to approach this once-familiar episode in
the national drama from a number of oblique angles. He starts with
a brief, portentous passage: “Other items lie scattered, wreckage
across the primal earth.” This is all that is left of the baggage
of the venturers who reached as far as the wetlands around what is
now Normanton.
One of them survived, John King, “a white man, orphan of the
desert sea”. He tells the rescuers led by Alfred Howitt “I am all
that is left”. King has been succoured by Aborigines, who remain in
this book, as perhaps they were for King, apparitions, appearing
and disappearing in the landscape. Howitt dominates the early part
of The Landscape of Desire, before our attention is
shifted to the troubled life of Burke, the longings of Wills.
The boldest invention that Rabalais undertakes is to depict
Burke’s European life, as a lieutenant in the Austrian army. This
is one of those episodes that seems (not least for Burke) hard to
credit. For desertion on the eve of the invasion of Sardinia, and
for his gambling debts, Burke is dishonourably discharged. After
drifting back to Ireland, he heads for Australia.
Rabalais elides Burke’s later brief return to Britain in an
attempt to enlist for the Crimean War in which his brother was the
first British soldier to be killed. It is then with Burke in
Beechworth that Rabalais engages us. But before now we have been
inclined to wonder what is the larger import of the novel, vivid
and unexpected as are its vignettes?
Sometimes the prose is staccato, like the ominous voice-over in
a motion picture: “What will they find? Who will be alive? Who will
have been maddened by the desert silence?” At other moments
Rabalais searches characters’ preoccupations about how they will be
remembered. After the official photograph of the party as it
prepares to set off: “We are preserved for the record before we
fall outside of history.”
More intriguingly, King is made to ponder what legends the
Aborigines might make of these white men in their midst: “How long
would it take before they recited stories of the ghosts who came to
live behind them on the creek . . . We might become a tale they
could pass up to future generations like buckets raised from a
well.”
Or not. Rabalais leaves the Aborigines as silent, admonitory
figures. Tracing his own course, backwards and forwards in time,
rather than onward in space, his debut is carefully wrought, a work
of glimpses rather than dramatic revelations. Finally it chooses to
rest in enigma, leaving us no more sure of where we have been than
were the doomed explorers.
Peter Pierce is a former professor of Australian literature
at James Cook University.

Near the beginning of How Fiction Works, James
Wood announces that his favourite 20th-century critics of the novel
are “the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky and the French
formalist-cum-structuralist Roland Barthes”. His admiration does
not, however, prevent him from describing their ideas in his next
breath as “interesting but wrong-headed”. For at the heart of
Wood’s criticism is a quarrel with formalism.
This is not to say that Wood is reluctant to consider how
fiction “works” in the functional sense of the word. As its title
suggests, his third book of literary criticism is a kind of primer
that discusses the basic elements of fiction - language, character,
dialogue, and so on - drawing its examples from some of the
greatest novels of the past two centuries.
But Wood is deeply antipathetic to any suggestion that
literature might be understood solely as a collection of devices
and conventions. His response to an essay by the American novelist
William Gass, in which Gass slices one of Henry James’ characters
into a list of tropes, is unequivocal. Such an approach, he argues,
is “deeply, incorrigibly wrong”.
The observation that literature is a structure of words is
little more than a truism. It takes no account of why we read in
the first place. The most important thing is always how a fictional
representation relates to life.
At the bottom of all Wood’s inquiries is an abiding concern with
“the real”. There is no necessary contradiction, he argues, between
fiction’s artifice and its capacity to depict reality; indeed, it
derives much of its potency from the necessary tension between
these two aspects.
How Fiction Works is, in this sense, something of a
manifesto. Like Wood’s previous collections of critical essays,
The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, it
stresses the importance of realist practice in fiction, and in
doing so advocates a certain stance toward literature itself.
Wood is interested, not simply in how fiction “works” in a
technical sense, but in the rather more elusive sense of how it
affects us, how it brings realities to mind, how it teaches us to
become better observers of ourselves and others. He is particularly
interested in its ability to convey psychological insight. He is
always reading with an eye for this “sudden capturing of a central
human truth, this moment when a single detail has enabled us to see
a character’s thinking (or lack of it)”.
For Wood, who greatly admires the Russian realist Anton Chekhov,
detail is the lifeblood of great literature. As Chekhov well
understood, we tend to give ourselves away in our smallest
gestures. It is through precision of detail and vividness of
metaphor that fiction addresses our sense of the real.
This fascination with detail is both a strength and a weakness
of Wood’s criticism. He is, philosophically and temperamentally, a
close reader who rarely feels the need to step back and take in a
novel’s architecture. The glaring omission from the book’s chapters
on the various aspects of fiction is plot. When Wood discusses
narrative he prefers to speak of the flaneur’s gaze and the
development of free indirect style, rather than the workaday issues
of dramatic complication, rising action and denouement.
That Wood is not particularly interested in the way narrative
pushes toward resolution - the way it seems, on some deep level, to
demand it - is significant. However incorrigibly wrong Gass may be
about character, he was right when he said that all stories are
“sneaky justifications”.
Wood has good reason to be wary of plot. As he was apt to point
out in his timely attack upon the overheated style of fiction he
dubbed “hysterical realism”, there is nothing that destroys a
fictional work’s credibility quite so effectively as one outrageous
coincidence too many. It is plot, more than detail, that pushes the
limitless variety of experience into a particular shape. Life
simply isn’t like that, as Chekhov observed; but stories and novels
certainly are like that, including those couched in Chekhovian
ambiguity.
Of course, part of the difficulty in talking about how fiction
works is that it refuses to be corralled. The Russian critic
Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the novel cannot be considered a
genre because it has no fixed formal properties; it is, rather, a
constantly evolving anti-genre that omnivorously gobbles up
techniques and dialects. As Wood puts it, the novel is “the great
virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules
thrown around it” - including his own.
In the midst of a spirited defence of realism against those,
such as Gass and Rick Moody, who have expressed impatience with its
conventions, Wood digresses to observe that certain works by Franz
Kafka and Samuel Beckett might not depict “likely or typical human
activity but are nevertheless harrowingly truthful texts”.
One takes the point, but this is lame. It blithely goes against
so many of Wood’s arguments. Suddenly he wants to have his realist
cake and eat it. The “real” obviously won’t do as an explanation of
a story in which a man turns into a giant beetle, so “truth” steps
in to rescue an obviously important work from critical oblivion.
The “real” is fundamental to literature, it seems, except when it
isn’t.
By making reality interchangeable with truth, effectively at his
own pleasure, Wood makes both concepts promiscuous.
On this question, How Fiction Works might have
benefited from a more concerted engagement with some strong
exceptions to the general thrust of its argument: Laurence Sterne’s
classic anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, for example, which is
about the impossibility of realism; or more recent novels, such as
Catch-22 or A Confederacy of Dunces, which would
appear to be excluded from Wood’s definition of comedy on the
grounds that they are much too funny.
In The Irresponsible Self, Wood made it clear that he
regards farcical or satirical humour as an inferior mode, and this
preference was a feature of his critique of the hysterical
realists. But (as long as we are throwing the term about) there is
certainly no shortage of “truth” in Joseph Heller’s brilliantly
absurd anti-war novel.
Wood is aware of this promiscuousness and the equivocations it
requires. Realism, he acknowledges, is an indistinct and
problematic term; less an identifiable genre than an impulse in
fiction. He attempts to work around this difficulty by coining a
rather feeble neologism - “lifeness” - to denote “life on the page”
evoked via the “highest artistry”. This concept, he suggests, might
be applied to any style of fiction. But this makes “lifeness”
itself close to a truism: it says that what works, works.
Wood is nevertheless right to suggest that formalism on its own
can never be enough; it will never feel like a satisfactory
explanation of a great book. While there are cases where it could
be argued that authors have succeeded in wresting language away
from its denotative quality to revel in the free play of sound and
rhythm - certain passages in James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, for
example - no piece of writing, not even Finnegans Wake -
can set up permanent camp in pure abstraction without ceasing to be
language at all. In this sense, fiction does always enter into a
relationship with a reality beyond itself and can evoke the truths
of lived experience.
Wood’s deserved reputation as an important critic rests upon his
willingness to insist upon this central humanist impulse of
literature. How Fiction Works is a pithy, lucid,
inconsistent, argumentative and opinionated piece of popular
criticism. It deserves to be widely read.

Red Hat, leading open source solutions provider, has acquired Amentra, a provider of systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems development and enterprise data solutions.According to a Press Release the acquisition of Amentra will provide a solution-oriented depth to the JBoss middleware business. Amentra would operate as an independent Red Hat company.

This acquisition is designed to deliver products, programs and services to help enterprise customers accelerate their business and technology transformations, including BPM and SOA, and the transition of their production environments to next-generation, open source middleware architecture based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Like a polished display case in a fusty museum - carefully lit,
gleaming like crystal, secure as Fort Knox - the glass salumi
cabinet, on a long and handsome pink marble table beside a
fire-engine red, pedestal-mounted Berkel slicer, is the
centrepiece.
It tells more of the story than any other single element within
the craftily designed, outrageously sexy Giuseppe, Arnaldo %26amp;
Sons: Maurice Terzini and Robert Marchetti’s homecoming
performance.
Beyond the dangling prosciutto and guanciale, it is the story of
a restaurant through value-adding to pigs. Primacy of produce;
clever branding; Italian heritage; modern Australian style and
simplicity. Walk around the salumi table a few more times, inhale
deeply, and you’ll soon understand a bit more about one of the more
exciting restaurants to open in Melbourne for years.
Not that there’s anything radical about the food orchestrated by
chef/partner Robert Marchetti and his team, a slightly more
ambitious version of the rustic tune they’ve been playing at North
Bondi Italian for several years. It’s good, honest and refreshingly
unpredictable/approachable food that stays true to the Italian
principle of respecting quality produce from the start. It’s a menu
as much about “food” as it is “cooking”.
And Marchetti cares about food more than most.
No, what’s exciting about GAS is not so much what you eat but
how you eat, the way the act of refreshment and nourishment can be
spun so many ways. The way it invites customers to get involved.
And for that, we can probably thank Marchetti’s partner Terzini, a
man who apparently never stops questioning the rules of dining,
never stops looking for inspiration, in this case with a nod to New
York chef/restaurateur Mario Batali.
Despite the money, despite the hype, GAS is just a place to eat
good, simple food inspired by Rome. It’s nothing more or less than
a great modern trattoria.
But the style element of everything - from the architecture down
to the printing of the receipt - has been orchestrated by one of
the true innovators of Australia’s restaurant industry, the man who
invented Caffe e Cucina all those years ago, and kept going with Il
Bacaro, Melbourne Wine Room, Otto, Icebergs Dining Room and North
Bondi Italian: Terzini, the Melbourne boy made good. Cast your eye
around - beyond the menu (which may have you pining for the back
streets of Trastevere) - and other elements provide essential clues
to the essence: the spotlit bread station, where each table’s
selection of grissini, focaccia, sourdough and casalinga is racked,
cut and doled out; or that marble wine “fountain”, behind a
ceiling-high stainless-steel silo-like racking system of bottles,
where four fresh, uncomplicated, food-friendly wines are literally
on tap above a pink marble trough for those who choose the “vini in
caraffa” option, the house wine you can feel good about.
And there is the floor staff, replete in butcher’s white cotton
jackets, jeans and Converse trainers. Where does he find them?
Comparing Giuseppe, Arnaldo %26amp; Sons to Rockpool Bar %26amp; Grill
is both inevitable and pointless: they sail different culinary
waters, delivering different dining experiences. Yet one cannot
help but compare the casual sophistication of Maurice Terzini’s
opening-month waitstaff with that of Perry. GAS cruises where
Rockpool has always struggled with the wind shifts.
And inevitably, as you sit in one of many variously tiled “pods”
that form the eating zones here, jumping out at you via clever -
almost theatrical - lighting from a stark, black backdrop that
extends through the restaurant’s ceilings and floors, there is the
food, from a menu with more departments than Telstra.
Slices of pink, fresh prosciutto ($12) from Lismore on waxed
paper branded “Salumi by Robert Marchetti”. Or fragrant, sweet
mortadella ($10) served warm with a never-ending supply of those
excellent breads and house-branded olive oil. A dish of fabulous
spaghettini with tomato, oodles of garlic and a swathe of briny sea
urchin roe ($24); orecchiette with an anchovy-laced broccoli sauce;
perfectly “bitey” pappardelle with a deeply flavoured, meaty ragu
of “wild boar” ($23, although we doubt there was ever anything wild
about the animal). A wild chicory (puntarelle) salad ($17) with
Sicilian anchovy, dandelion, a shallot dressing and a shaving of
Asiago (cheese), served with a selection of vinegars. Raw scallops
($15) dressed with oil, lemon, young rocket and slices of pickled
dwarf peach, looking suspiciously like olives. A lovely steak (La
Tagliata, $29) dressed with a tangle of spring onion, green
peppercorns, lemon, oil and fresh chilli. A pea, shallot and fresh
herb salad ($9) sprinkled with dried ricotta salata.
Or a $14 chocolate pot that is like eating a stiff, cool,
Italian hot chocky; an Italian trifle (zuppa Inglese, $22 for two)
that sings with fruit, almond, pistachio and grappa-infused
sponge.
Trust me; apart from the salumi, which - ironically - is not
only excellent but too expensive, eating here is great value for
money, because the food’s simplicity falls back on great produce
handled sympathetically, with true Italian feeling.
Inevitably, really, the most interesting question about this new
restaurant was never going to be “is it any good?” Of course it’s
good. It has the management, the staff (both in the amazing kitchen
and on the floor), the ideas, the resources, the look.
The question was always: “will it work?” Look at everything
Terzini has done in the past, and more recently with his sidekick
Marchetti on board and you cannot help but wonder how a business at
Crown provides continuity. And the answer is, it doesn’t. This is a
break, a development and, probably, a toe in the water of
potentially more lucrative waters abroad under the PBL
umbrella.
How does that affect - or disaffect - quite literally a
generation of Melbourne food and wine appreciators who grew up on
the style and substance of Terzini-conceived establishments? Will
we go to it despite it being at Crown? Or does the target audience
even include us? On the basis of a couple of early visits when
Marchetti and Terzini were around, the answer is, for me, “yes”. I
may not go as often as if the restaurant were in a
less-institutionalised location, a location without so much
baggage.
But I’ll go.
Perhaps mindful of this very Melbourne scepticism, this
expectation of what a Terzini restaurant is and is not, the boys
have over-delivered. So to the final question. Can they keep it
up?
And for that, we’ll just have to wait.
Score: 1-9: Unacceptable.
10-11: Just OK, some shortcomings.
12: Fair. 13: Getting there.
14: Recommended. 15: Good.
16: Really good. 17: Truly
excellent. 18: Outstanding.
19-20: Approaching perfection, Victoria’s
best.

Like a polished display case in a fusty museum - carefully lit,
gleaming like crystal, secure as Fort Knox - the glass salumi
cabinet, on a long and handsome pink marble table beside a
fire-engine red, pedestal-mounted Berkel slicer, is the
centrepiece.
It tells more of the story than any other single element within
the craftily designed, outrageously sexy Giuseppe, Arnaldo %26amp;
Sons: Maurice Terzini and Robert Marchetti’s homecoming
performance.
Beyond the dangling prosciutto and guanciale, it is the story of
a restaurant through value-adding to pigs. Primacy of produce;
clever branding; Italian heritage; modern Australian style and
simplicity. Walk around the salumi table a few more times, inhale
deeply, and you’ll soon understand a bit more about one of the more
exciting restaurants to open in Melbourne for years.
Not that there’s anything radical about the food orchestrated by
chef/partner Robert Marchetti and his team, a slightly more
ambitious version of the rustic tune they’ve been playing at North
Bondi Italian for several years. It’s good, honest and refreshingly
unpredictable/approachable food that stays true to the Italian
principle of respecting quality produce from the start. It’s a menu
as much about “food” as it is “cooking”.
And Marchetti cares about food more than most.
No, what’s exciting about GAS is not so much what you eat but
how you eat, the way the act of refreshment and nourishment can be
spun so many ways. The way it invites customers to get involved.
And for that, we can probably thank Marchetti’s partner Terzini, a
man who apparently never stops questioning the rules of dining,
never stops looking for inspiration, in this case with a nod to New
York chef/restaurateur Mario Batali.
Despite the money, despite the hype, GAS is just a place to eat
good, simple food inspired by Rome. It’s nothing more or less than
a great modern trattoria.
But the style element of everything - from the architecture down
to the printing of the receipt - has been orchestrated by one of
the true innovators of Australia’s restaurant industry, the man who
invented Caffe e Cucina all those years ago, and kept going with Il
Bacaro, Melbourne Wine Room, Otto, Icebergs Dining Room and North
Bondi Italian: Terzini, the Melbourne boy made good. Cast your eye
around - beyond the menu (which may have you pining for the back
streets of Trastevere) - and other elements provide essential clues
to the essence: the spotlit bread station, where each table’s
selection of grissini, focaccia, sourdough and casalinga is racked,
cut and doled out; or that marble wine “fountain”, behind a
ceiling-high stainless-steel silo-like racking system of bottles,
where four fresh, uncomplicated, food-friendly wines are literally
on tap above a pink marble trough for those who choose the “vini in
caraffa” option, the house wine you can feel good about.
And there is the floor staff, replete in butcher’s white cotton
jackets, jeans and Converse trainers. Where does he find them?
Comparing Giuseppe, Arnaldo %26amp; Sons to Rockpool Bar %26amp; Grill
is both inevitable and pointless: they sail different culinary
waters, delivering different dining experiences. Yet one cannot
help but compare the casual sophistication of Maurice Terzini’s
opening-month waitstaff with that of Perry. GAS cruises where
Rockpool has always struggled with the wind shifts.
And inevitably, as you sit in one of many variously tiled “pods”
that form the eating zones here, jumping out at you via clever -
almost theatrical - lighting from a stark, black backdrop that
extends through the restaurant’s ceilings and floors, there is the
food, from a menu with more departments than Telstra.
Slices of pink, fresh prosciutto ($12) from Lismore on waxed
paper branded “Salumi by Robert Marchetti”. Or fragrant, sweet
mortadella ($10) served warm with a never-ending supply of those
excellent breads and house-branded olive oil. A dish of fabulous
spaghettini with tomato, oodles of garlic and a swathe of briny sea
urchin roe ($24); orecchiette with an anchovy-laced broccoli sauce;
perfectly “bitey” pappardelle with a deeply flavoured, meaty ragu
of “wild boar” ($23, although we doubt there was ever anything wild
about the animal). A wild chicory (puntarelle) salad ($17) with
Sicilian anchovy, dandelion, a shallot dressing and a shaving of
Asiago (cheese), served with a selection of vinegars. Raw scallops
($15) dressed with oil, lemon, young rocket and slices of pickled
dwarf peach, looking suspiciously like olives. A lovely steak (La
Tagliata, $29) dressed with a tangle of spring onion, green
peppercorns, lemon, oil and fresh chilli. A pea, shallot and fresh
herb salad ($9) sprinkled with dried ricotta salata.
Or a $14 chocolate pot that is like eating a stiff, cool,
Italian hot chocky; an Italian trifle (zuppa Inglese, $22 for two)
that sings with fruit, almond, pistachio and grappa-infused
sponge.
Trust me; apart from the salumi, which - ironically - is not
only excellent but too expensive, eating here is great value for
money, because the food’s simplicity falls back on great produce
handled sympathetically, with true Italian feeling.
Inevitably, really, the most interesting question about this new
restaurant was never going to be “is it any good?” Of course it’s
good. It has the management, the staff (both in the amazing kitchen
and on the floor), the ideas, the resources, the look.
The question was always: “will it work?” Look at everything
Terzini has done in the past, and more recently with his sidekick
Marchetti on board and you cannot help but wonder how a business at
Crown provides continuity. And the answer is, it doesn’t. This is a
break, a development and, probably, a toe in the water of
potentially more lucrative waters abroad under the PBL
umbrella.
How does that affect - or disaffect - quite literally a
generation of Melbourne food and wine appreciators who grew up on
the style and substance of Terzini-conceived establishments? Will
we go to it despite it being at Crown? Or does the target audience
even include us? On the basis of a couple of early visits when
Marchetti and Terzini were around, the answer is, for me, “yes”. I
may not go as often as if the restaurant were in a
less-institutionalised location, a location without so much
baggage.
But I’ll go.
Perhaps mindful of this very Melbourne scepticism, this
expectation of what a Terzini restaurant is and is not, the boys
have over-delivered. So to the final question. Can they keep it
up?
And for that, we’ll just have to wait.
Score: 1-9: Unacceptable.
10-11: Just OK, some shortcomings.
12: Fair. 13: Getting there.
14: Recommended. 15: Good.
16: Really good. 17: Truly
excellent. 18: Outstanding.
19-20: Approaching perfection, Victoria’s
best.

Like a polished display case in a fusty museum - carefully lit,
gleaming like crystal, secure as Fort Knox - the glass salumi
cabinet, on a long and handsome pink marble table beside a
fire-engine red, pedestal-mounted Berkel slicer, is the
centrepiece.
It tells more of the story than any other single element within
the craftily designed, outrageously sexy Giuseppe, Arnaldo %26amp;
Sons: Maurice Terzini and Robert Marchetti’s homecoming
performance.
Beyond the dangling prosciutto and guanciale, it is the story of
a restaurant through value-adding to pigs. Primacy of produce;
clever branding; Italian heritage; modern Australian style and
simplicity. Walk around the salumi table a few more times, inhale
deeply, and you’ll soon understand a bit more about one of the more
exciting restaurants to open in Melbourne for years.
Not that there’s anything radical about the food orchestrated by
chef/partner Robert Marchetti and his team, a slightly more
ambitious version of the rustic tune they’ve been playing at North
Bondi Italian for several years. It’s good, honest and refreshingly
unpredictable/approachable food that stays true to the Italian
principle of respecting quality produce from the start. It’s a menu
as much about “food” as it is “cooking”.
And Marchetti cares about food more than most.
No, what’s exciting about GAS is not so much what you eat but
how you eat, the way the act of refreshment and nourishment can be
spun so many ways. The way it invites customers to get involved.
And for that, we can probably thank Marchetti’s partner Terzini, a
man who apparently never stops questioning the rules of dining,
never stops looking for inspiration, in this case with a nod to New
York chef/restaurateur Mario Batali.
Despite the money, despite the hype, GAS is just a place to eat
good, simple food inspired by Rome. It’s nothing more or less than
a great modern trattoria.
But the style element of everything - from the architecture down
to the printing of the receipt - has been orchestrated by one of
the true innovators of Australia’s restaurant industry, the man who
invented Caffe e Cucina all those years ago, and kept going with Il
Bacaro, Melbourne Wine Room, Otto, Icebergs Dining Room and North
Bondi Italian: Terzini, the Melbourne boy made good. Cast your eye
around - beyond the menu (which may have you pining for the back
streets of Trastevere) - and other elements provide essential clues
to the essence: the spotlit bread station, where each table’s
selection of grissini, focaccia, sourdough and casalinga is racked,
cut and doled out; or that marble wine “fountain”, behind a
ceiling-high stainless-steel silo-like racking system of bottles,
where four fresh, uncomplicated, food-friendly wines are literally
on tap above a pink marble trough for those who choose the “vini in
caraffa” option, the house wine you can feel good about.
And there is the floor staff, replete in butcher’s white cotton
jackets, jeans and Converse trainers. Where does he find them?
Comparing Giuseppe, Arnaldo %26amp; Sons to Rockpool Bar %26amp; Grill
is both inevitable and pointless: they sail different culinary
waters, delivering different dining experiences. Yet one cannot
help but compare the casual sophistication of Maurice Terzini’s
opening-month waitstaff with that of Perry. GAS cruises where
Rockpool has always struggled with the wind shifts.
And inevitably, as you sit in one of many variously tiled “pods”
that form the eating zones here, jumping out at you via clever -
almost theatrical - lighting from a stark, black backdrop that
extends through the restaurant’s ceilings and floors, there is the
food, from a menu with more departments than Telstra.
Slices of pink, fresh prosciutto ($12) from Lismore on waxed
paper branded “Salumi by Robert Marchetti”. Or fragrant, sweet
mortadella ($10) served warm with a never-ending supply of those
excellent breads and house-branded olive oil. A dish of fabulous
spaghettini with tomato, oodles of garlic and a swathe of briny sea
urchin roe ($24); orecchiette with an anchovy-laced broccoli sauce;
perfectly “bitey” pappardelle with a deeply flavoured, meaty ragu
of “wild boar” ($23, although we doubt there was ever anything wild
about the animal). A wild chicory (puntarelle) salad ($17) with
Sicilian anchovy, dandelion, a shallot dressing and a shaving of
Asiago (cheese), served with a selection of vinegars. Raw scallops
($15) dressed with oil, lemon, young rocket and slices of pickled
dwarf peach, looking suspiciously like olives. A lovely steak (La
Tagliata, $29) dressed with a tangle of spring onion, green
peppercorns, lemon, oil and fresh chilli. A pea, shallot and fresh
herb salad ($9) sprinkled with dried ricotta salata.
Or a $14 chocolate pot that is like eating a stiff, cool,
Italian hot chocky; an Italian trifle (zuppa Inglese, $22 for two)
that sings with fruit, almond, pistachio and grappa-infused
sponge.
Trust me; apart from the salumi, which - ironically - is not
only excellent but too expensive, eating here is great value for
money, because the food’s simplicity falls back on great produce
handled sympathetically, with true Italian feeling.
Inevitably, really, the most interesting question about this new
restaurant was never going to be “is it any good?” Of course it’s
good. It has the management, the staff (both in the amazing kitchen
and on the floor), the ideas, the resources, the look.
The question was always: “will it work?” Look at everything
Terzini has done in the past, and more recently with his sidekick
Marchetti on board and you cannot help but wonder how a business at
Crown provides continuity. And the answer is, it doesn’t. This is a
break, a development and, probably, a toe in the water of
potentially more lucrative waters abroad under the PBL
umbrella.
How does that affect - or disaffect - quite literally a
generation of Melbourne food and wine appreciators who grew up on
the style and substance of Terzini-conceived establishments? Will
we go to it despite it being at Crown? Or does the target audience
even include us? On the basis of a couple of early visits when
Marchetti and Terzini were around, the answer is, for me, “yes”. I
may not go as often as if the restaurant were in a
less-institutionalised location, a location without so much
baggage.
But I’ll go.
Perhaps mindful of this very Melbourne scepticism, this
expectation of what a Terzini restaurant is and is not, the boys
have over-delivered. So to the final question. Can they keep it
up?
And for that, we’ll just have to wait.
Score: 1-9: Unacceptable.
10-11: Just OK, some shortcomings.
12: Fair. 13: Getting there.
14: Recommended. 15: Good.
16: Really good. 17: Truly
excellent. 18: Outstanding.
19-20: Approaching perfection, Victoria’s
best.