Jennifer Cooke

The authors tell us in the preface that DONE LIKE A DINNER “is the result of ten years of eating at bistros, brasseries, cafes, pizzerias, coffee shops, clubs, pubs and restaurants, all in the name of research.” The focus of these stories is particularly on gangland wars in Sydney and Melbourne from the 1980s to the first decade of the twenty first century. The ten stories are pieced together from newspaper reports, trial proceedings and through talking to family and other people who remember the incidents. Each chapter begins with an identification of the restaurant, night club or bar and includes in the first pages a recipe that might once have been served there.

A Very Fishy Murder, the first story, describes how Andrew Kalajzich of K’s Snapper Inn at Manly came to put a price on his wife’s head and eventually to kill her. In Chapter 2 Ducky O’Connor is killed in a crowded Sydney restaurant by mobster Lennie McPherson. McPherson re-appears in later stories. Chapter 3, Siege at the Spaghetti Speak-Easy, recounts how aboriginal juvenile delinquent Amos Atkinson, panics and holds thirty people hostage at Melbourne’s Italian Waiters’ Club. Finally in the last two stories we see Melbourne at the mercy of extended gangland wars culminating in the cold-blooded murder of Lewis Moran in 2004, and the impact of two decades of bikie gang vendettas in Sydney.… (mer)