Dates: Feb 28 2018
Venue: The Leela Palace, Chanakyapuri

We are done with weddings in Delhi for now and it is the honeymoon season. To this end Australia seems to be a very popular destination and many of the newly weds are flocking there. Therefore the Visit Victoria event that we attended at The Leela Palace, New Delhi couldn’t have been at a better timing. what with summer holidays are just barely two months away.

The Library Bar at Leela has an alfresco arrangement where a host of bloggers / media had assembled. Colourful posters from the state of Victoria were hanging on the sides. Given our love for cricket, we already know Melbourne, the capital of Victoria. But there is more to that state as we realised during the brief introduction by Celia Ho, Regional Manager for Visit Victoria. Victoria offers great food and wine, verdant forests and wildlife, art, culture museums and sports of course. There is something for everybody here. She played a well made AV to make her point. We were frankly impressed.

But then there was more to the event. Being bloggers who cover food intensively, we had a delightful treat – a cook out by the celebrated chef Shane Quade from the fine dining restaurant LUME in Melbourne. He is the recipient of various awards internationally and is known for innovation and style. This was Chef Quade’s maiden visit to India and he seemed perfectly at ease with all the attention. His cooking style involved a combination of local produce with ingredients he had brought himself from Melbourne. He recreated the popular dish “Pearl on the Ocean Floor“, his Masterchef competition creation. It is an amazing dish made with a host of sea food and other forms of protein and herbs / seasoning from Australia. For our vegetarian palate, he also tossed up a yummy tomato salad. While we are no chefs, we watched with awe while the great chef created magic.

To sum it up, the Visit Victoria event was an eye opener. The mix of great restaurants with wineries, wildlife with kangaroo and penguin sighting and of course cricket – Victoria is in our travel bucket list now. So folks, Visit Victoria – it promises to be a Fun-Do.