Julia Charles’ beautiful, unpretentious photo compositions for our Café de France stationery.
Photography: Julia Charles. Plating up: Heidi Dokulil and myself for Good Habitat. Also starring: my wonderful French pocket knife, the Compagnon from Le Thiers.

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Café de France brings together the creative talents of restaurateur Rafaele Yon and designer Richard Peters, with writing, graphic style and Le Petit Journal produced by Good Habitat, a Sydney-based unit of writers, art directors and editors interested in things local.
(Good Habitat is a new working group founded by Heidi Dokulil, Beatrice Chew and myself.)
Please visit Café de France, 19 Havelock Avenue, Coogee. The food is wonderful!

One of the attractions of Chinabrenner is its refreshing elusiveness when it comes to being categorised. Is it art, food or design? Is it an installation or somewhere good to eat? One catalogue calls what they do ‘artistic cooking events’, which is probably the closest I’ve read so far, to a reasonably concise descriptor.

Thomas Wrobel (the one who cooks) and Jo Zarth (the one who designs) spent some (a lot) of time in China researching the idea of  ‘street as kitchen’ then brought their findings back to Germany to become artistic cooking events in Leipzig, Berlin, Essen, Milan —and I suspect more places than this.

In essence what you see, hear, taste, smell, feel—is a traditional Chinese street kitchen, picked up, and transported to you by two people with a deep fascination for a particular culture. In the near future I hope to return to Leipzig and visit Thomas Wrobel’s new but as yet unopened restaurant.

More, in much more depth, on Chinabrenner soon. The ultimate aim is to publish on paper. Blogs don’t do it for some things.

Last 6 photographs courtesy of Chinabrenner and Zarthcore

Thomas Wrobel

Jo Zarth