Eating out
By Sally Hammond

Trans
Dinner Tuesday to Sunday
BYO, corkage $2 per person
Amex, BC, D, MC, V
523 Military Road, Mosman, Ph 9969 7275

Who's for a bit of theatre with their meal? Well, you won't have to take pot luck with these places. It's the ideal way to cook food evenly and keep the flavours right where they belong. It's also a neat and tidy way to combine all the ingredients and it saves time.
The clay pot is one-step cooking at its best. Dig around in the back yards of any ancient civilisation and you'll find broken pottery. Which figures because if you go back far enough, we all cooked this way - food in a pot and buried in a fire.
So we dug around the ethnic restaurants in this city and came up with four very different cuisines (Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese and African) that share this most basic piece of kitchenware.

Many fine Asian cooks swear by clay cookware as it stands high heat and cleans easily. This popular restaurant has the know-how on our favourite Vietnamese dishes - rice paper rolls, crisp pancakes and bowls of slithery stir-fries. But their Vietnamese claypot dishes are something else again. Being enveloped in a fragrant cloud as the lid is lifted makes a meal special. Tran's shin beef curry with taro root cooked in a clay pot is served with rice paddy herbs ($22). There is vegetable curry ($17), prawns with baby bok choy and coriander ($20), ginger chicken ($20) - and drunken cow. Yes, you read that right - a whimsical name for veal claypot with red wine ($18).

Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Edition Sunday 04 May 2003.