The Blackmail » Food

The Hong Song

tristan — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 11:12:58 +0000

Text: Alex Whyte Images: James Nelson

Dan Hong first became known to the people of Sydney when he was awarded the Josephine Pignolet Young Chef of the Year Award. That was 2007. He then took some time away from cooking at Surry Hills’ Bentley Restaurant & Bar and, as part of his prize, chose to stage at a New York kitchen that at the time was on the razor’s edge of modern cookery, WD-50, under the wonky eye of chef Wylie Dufrense. Upon his return he made a name for himself at Potts Point’s Lotus, sending out what might be called bistro food, if only because you actually left sate having eaten an entrée, main and dessert. The similarities ended there: this was glowing, crisp, clear stuff, that didn’t rely on heft or bulk. There was playful thought and a conscious nostalgia on the plate – it was clever food, but far from dweeby. You could start with some pork, what appeared to be a massive piece of crackling, beneath it a slab of braised belly, sat in a hazel, porky pool studded with garden peas and sprigs of tarragon. Next, a sopping hunk of brisket, sticky with soy, beneath it some carrot puree, with confit garlic and chervil adding heat. To finish, a hot fudge sundae that could have been straight outta any stateside diner. Not really bistro food.

It was what might be called Fusion 2.0, in that Hong, like Momofuku’s David Chang, was able to borrow from Asian cuisine, take some western ingredients and western techniques and produce something that wasn’t completely naff. Something quite removed from the dreary things that made the ‘F’ word the scariest in food. A not-so-chance encounter with the man himself led to a whirlwind research jaunt around New York City, and to the opening of Ms G’s, a four-storey, mod-Viet monster just around the corner from Lotus on Victoria Street. There, he and co-chef Jowett Yu have expanded on the food of their childhood. So there are things like a flawless steak tartare replete with perfect yoke, Vietnamese herbs, and prawn crackers for dunking, and a killer take on prawn toast, served with yuzu aioli and a fistful of herbs. They sit alongside one of the best noodles dishes in town – pillowy egg numbers dripping with yarns of braised duck, a soft poached egg, and house XO sauce.

Within just a few months there were already whispers of another place on the horizon, and in May 2011 he opened El Loco, a taco, torta and dog shack within Surry Hills pub The Excelsior that owes as much to the global, sun-drenched street food of Los Angeles as it does Mexico. Some seem frustrated that a chef who is arguably the most talented of his generation seems content putting together crowd-pleasing renditions of cross-cultural classics, but one need only to listen to Hong talk about the food he loves to eat to get an idea of what it is he seeks to achieve. I sat down with him to get an idea of what that might be.

Alex Whyte: Obviously you grew up in a family where food was a big deal – your mum runs one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in town, Thanh Binh – were you always going to be a cook?

Dan Hong: Ahh, not really, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I finished school. I always cooked at home because my mum was always at the restaurants and stuff, but it wasn’t like I just cooked Asian food. It was Western food and I thought I was pretty good at it. Eventually mum just went, “why don’t you try becoming a chef?”. So I thought, yeah, I’ll just have a go at it.

AW: That was Longrain, right?

DH: Yeah, I gotta give mum props for getting me the job, she just called Marty (Head Chef of Longrain, Martin Boetz) up and went “uhhhh, my son has started cooking”. He gave me the job just as a favour to my mum.

AW: From there you did the whole Sydney fine-dining thing, working at the likes of Marque, Tetsuya’s and Bentley. You won the Joseph Pignolet Young Chef of the Year Award and chose to cook at WD-50 (in New York’s Lower East Side) as part of the prize. What was it that attracted you to that place?

DH: Well, at the time, it was when, like, molecular gastronomy was the shit, it was before cuisine naturale and all that. At the time that was what I was into, because I was working at Bentley, I was into Heston and Ferran and using all those chemicals and that – and New York, you know, everyone loves New York because it’s such a cool city, and I just thought Wylie was the best man to learn this stuff from.

AW: The reason I ask is because some people might find it strange that out of every restaurant in the world you chose there, a place that is well known as really pushing things in terms of the use of kitchen gadgets and what not – given that your food in Sydney is so reliant on big, clean flavours; given that it is defined by a lack of fiddly stuff.

DH: Yeah, but when I first started at Lotus I was like, “this is my first head chef’s gig, I want to show what I can do”, but because I took over from Lauren Murdoch, who was the opposite, like simple, good produce, boom, onto the plate, a lot of the regulars didn’t like my food. I used to have this ego, like “well it’s my food, I don’t care what you think”, but we lost a lot of regulars and I thought, you know, I am cooking for Potts Point here and after six months’ or a years’ time at Lotus I figured out what the clientele liked to eat and tried to find that happy medium between what I like to cook, to keep us excited in the kitchen and also what people like to eat. I guess you could say I simplified my food.

AW: I remember when you started cooking at Lotus it was great, because it was a time before the great wine bars and the keenly priced Dukes and Bar Hs of Sydney existed, and here was a place serving awesome, unfussy food with mains around thirty dollars. It seemed like you guys were full every night. What brought about the change in menu structure?

DH: We were just bored. I was bored of the whole sit down, entrée-main-dessert. I was sick of the fact that, for a main, you would have to have a huge 200 gram hunk of protein with a few veg, a puree, and a jus, and this and that. I just wanted to change it so people could try a lot more, share. That’s the way I like to eat now, I want to eat like I am in a Chinese restaurant wherever I go. So I want to eat as many dishes as I can before getting full. That’s where we wanted to go.

AW: Did this change spawn ‘The Cheeseburger’?

DH: Well, we changed the menu after me and Jow (his co-chef at Ms G’s, Jowett Yu) got back from our research trip for Ms G’s. We had so many great cheeseburgers over there, like heaps. We came back and were like, “fuck man, no one is doing an American style cheeseburger”, so we decided to do it ourselves.

AW: What percentage of customers would have a burger now?

DH: (Laughs) ummmm, I reckon about 80-90% of tables would have a burger, either to share or for themselves.

AW: I’ve always found it strange, in a good way, that it sits alongside this really deft, subtle Asian thing. Does it bother you at all that most of the people who go to Lotus nowadays are eating a cheeseburger?

DH: No not at all, not really, I think it is great. We sort of got a cult following, just through word of mouth and people finding out about the burger. I think it is really cool, we have never sold as much of a single dish as the cheeseburger.

AW: David Chang and Momofuku were obviously the key reference point when opening Ms G’s. What was it about Chang and his places that you found so inspiring?

DH: We just liked how he brought fusion back, but in a good way. He paired American food culture with his Korean culture and it worked well because of those big flavours you have in Korean and other Asian foods and that is what we really liked about it. Me and Jow both love Asian food, and we could connect with him because we also had this fine-dining/European training and both like the application of those cooking techniques to Asian flavours.

AW: Obviously in the same way Roy Choi and Kogi must have been a big inspiration for the sort of LA-style street food you’re doing at El Loco. Tell us a bit about those research trips you took over in the states.

DH: In LA it was fantastic, I just researched a whole lot of taco trucks on taco blogs and made a list and we drove around Hollywood, and just outside Hollywood to try around six or seven different taco trucks. Then the second night we did the whole Roy Choi thing. We started off at a Kogi truck in Eagle Rock, which we realised it was like an hour away from fucking Hollywood, then we went all the way to Culver City where Chego was and then ended up at A-Frame, where Roy cooked for us. It was pretty epic, but we were so stuffed on dude food that the next morning I went to Wholefoods and made my own salad with like kale and brocoli and shit, because I just felt so unhealthy (laughs).

AW: Obviously working alongside the Hemmes’ has opened up a world of opportunity for you, you’re still very young and already in charge of three restaurants. What is it like working alongside people like that, with such a wealth of resources?

DH: It is fantastic. If I worked for anyone else I don’t think I would have had anywhere near the amount of opportunities that I do working for Merivale. I am a lucky guy, for Justin to put that much trust in me and let me open these restaurants is just great.

AW: Well, where do you think you would be if you hadn’t got that job at Lotus?

DH: I don’t know man, it’s hard to tell. I reckon maybe I wouldn’t even be a head chef. Maybe I would still be on that fine dining angle, but my mind has totally changed between when I first started at Lotus and now. I used to care about getting a hat for Lotus or this or that. Now I just want a busy restaurant where people can eat tasty food in a casual setting and have fun, that’s what I look for in a restaurant.

AW: It does seem that way, that for now at least you’re very much happy with serving as many people as possible great food, but are we likely to see a scaled-down operation any time soon? Perhaps a Momofuku Ko or even a Sukiyabashi Jiro type place?

DH: I don’t know if you know that Mr G’s has been postponed to next year, but we have talked about having one part of Mr G’s as a 12-seater countertop thing where we can do essentially what Momofuku Ko does, but yeah, it’s just an idea, I’m not sure.

AW: For those who have not heard about Mr G’s, could you fill them in?

DH: Well it is going to where Tank (a CBD nightclub renowned for its crap music) is, so it is going to be massive, a 300 seater, it is going to be huge. We are going to do dim sum during the day and I guess it is just going to be modern Chinese, or my take on modern Chinese.

AW: That’s obviously next, but if you could open any sort of restaurant what would you like it to be?

DH: Umm, I guess it is still my dream to do a Momofuku Ko type thing. But I’d also still like to open an American-style diner, because there still isn’t really many places that have done it properly yet. Maybe a barbeque place with Asian flavours, sort of like a Fatty Cue type thing, that would be good over here. Or a ramen place, I’d love to do my own ramen, I am obsessed with ramen.

AW: Finally Dan, if somehow you were to get a week off, where abouts in Sydney would you go to eat?

DH: I’d definitely go to Cabramatta and just eat all around there, get my mum to take me around. Ah, what else. I would probably go to a few fine dining places like Sepia, Gastro Park, Marque, haven’t been there for a while. Definitely Ryo’s in Crows Next, that’s my fave, but I can’t drive… I’ve heard Hurstville is pretty good for Chinese, around that Beverley Hills area, it is supposed to be pretty cool. Maybe go deep sea fishing, catch my own fish and do stuff like that, I never get time to do shit like that!

Lotus
Ms G’s
El Loco

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Icy Poles & Sausage Rolls

tristan — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:15:52 +0000

Text: Mikey Gilles Images: Kingsley Ifill

For every 100 Australians who lug a backpack over to the Continent – drinking excessively five days a week, settling in East London and working in cafés with other Australians – there’s maybe one who doesn’t get stuck in that cycle for the entirety of his/her visa. There is also very occasionally one who takes what’s in front of them and comes up with something unique, boldly adding something new to the already rich cultural tapestry of one of the most developed cities on Earth. Brett Redman qualifies as one such (exceptional) drunk backpacking Aussie bastard in the motherland, proud owner of organically-providored, lakeside(!), East End-oasis café, Pavilion…

Mikey Gilles: Firstly, how awesome is it that your last name is REDMAN?! Do you get free tickets to the Wu turning up in your mail all the time?

Brett Redman: It was a bit tricky growing up, what with all the mistaken identities from his fans. I’ve learnt to embrace it now though.

MG: Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Too much caffeine today and that’s all I’ve thought about since I got your email address. So here we go with the serious questions: when did you first move to London and how long did you expect to stay for?

BR: I think it was 2005. Initially the idea was work hard for a year, improve my resume and move back and get a better job. Pretty simple concept really.

MG: Did you have heaps of cash saved, or did you just get into working the Australian-backpacker jobs like bars/restaurants/cafés/retail that you can do really hungover?

BR: I worked like 12 jobs a day before leaving so I had enough to be able to take a good (read: ‘shit paid’) job over here. In true Brett fashion though, I managed to lose a couple of grand on my way to the bank the day before flying out. Kind of meant I was absolutely skint when I arrived, so yeah, I took a job in a bar off Brick Lane and it was all sort of downhill from there for a while.

MG: What is the best method to make it through a shift in a café with a brutal hangover, incidentally?

BR: At the Pavilion we do an outrageously refreshing sparkling elderflower drink. That shit will get you through anything.

MG: How did your first Bethnal Green guerilla-restaurant idea come about, and how long did you do that for? Feel free to elaborate extensively, it was before my time in London so I’ve only heard Chinese-whispers…

BR: Ummm… Good question. Don’t really know myself. There wasn’t a plan as such. A friend of mine was running a Korean restaurant in the same space, which I used to frequent with friends etcetera. Think he got bored of running it and had loads of other stuff going on, so basically said if I wanted it I could have it.

It was a bit of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of thing. I only had about £1,500 to get it going but with a bit of foraging around markets and significant time spent in second-hand catering equipment yards, it managed to come together.

In the early days there was a lots of taking orders, running upstairs to cook the food and then running back down to make the coffees. I also had lots of willing and helpful friends and at one stage even had my Mum washing the dishes and working the floor whilst she was on holidays.

It only really lasted a year and then the site at the Pavilion came up. Probably lucky really, as, in the long term, it definitely wasn’t a sustainable venture.

MG: Was it a natural step to do a good, honest Australian-style café in East London? There are still so few decent coffees to be found around London.

BR: At the time, I think so. It’s what I knew, so it made sense to me. I don’t think you could come over here now and get away with what I did. The London coffee scene has grown astronomically in the last few years and now has some seriously great places. I think the key with the whole ‘Aussie-style’ approach is the combo of great food and great coffee. So many places do one or the other but not many can do both.

MG: I wish every lakeside kiosk in the world had you running it, at most of them I only have the balls to get an icy pole, since the sausage rolls and meat pies (aka ‘rat coffins’ and ‘maggot bags’) look like they’ve been in cold storage since the ’70s. At your kiosk, I want to order everything on the menu! How did the whole Pavilion thing come together? The location is unbelievable.

BR: Again, it was total chance. A customer of mine found the council’s tender document scrunched up on the sidewalk, thought it might be of interest to me, so left it with whoever was working at the time.

A friend of mine, who is now my business partner, was running a stall at Borough Market and also looking at getting into the cafe game, so we thought, ‘Why not do one that uses the best ingredients available at Borough?’ We already had the contacts so it just grew from there, really.

The Pavilion now is a lot different to the Pavilion of old. It took us a long time to break down this ‘icy pole and sausage roll’ culture you speak so freely of and start attracting different users. I remember being called a cunt and told it would never work ’cause I didn’t sell chips or coke.

It’s all changed now though. We get all types in, from the Hackney trendies to old school East Enders who wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else for their lattes.

MG: There are so many cute mums that frequent your café. Why do you think that is? Is it the gluten-free cakes? It can’t be the decadent Pavilion breakfast (so good).

BR: They come to perve on the hairy-chested male staff members. Just ’cause they’re mums doesn’t mean they’re not dirty perves like the rest of us. Fact.

MG: Has anyone ever fallen into the lake while you’ve been on shift?

BR: Yep. Quite a few times actually. We’ve had heroic dads leapfrogging the fence to pull children from runaway buggies, a novice bike rider going straight over the handle bars, a crazy man on acid strip naked and swim out to the fountain and an attempted (sadly it died) dog rescue when it fell through the frozen lake last winter.

MG: What’s the next step, I hear you’ve got a restaurant or a bar about to open? Are you doing that because you miss the kitchen?

BR: Pretty much. It’s an all day cafe/restaurant located in Borough Market. The kind of unpretentious casual place that I would want to go and eat in. Very much a culmination of all the things I’ve learnt over the past few years and a few extra things that I’ve not been able to do at the Pavilion.

I’ve been visiting lots of the farms and trying to get a better understanding of the produce, where it comes from and the people behind it.

MG: What does your perfect day off consist of in the London summer months?

BR: When I get one, it would normally be spent lying in the park with a cider, some cheese and a big stick of salami.

MG: Do you see yourself ever moving back to Australia?

BR: Definitely. Every time I go back I love it. It still feels like home but you never know. At the moment I’m just focusing on the here and the now and we’ll see what happens. I’m not one of those five or ten year plan people.

MG: Any advice for people who want to make the most out of moving to London?

BR: Oh shit. I really don’t know if I’m the one to ask. Some people seem to think moving to London is just like Halloween (e.g. an excuse to dress up like someone you’re not and act like a complete knob). I’d say to try and avoid that if possible.

MG: Finally, where do you see the calming world of café music going in the next few years? Last decade saw a stranglehold by the Café Del Mar compilations, The Streets and DJ Shadow, lately I’ve been noticing a strong ’60s garage push, and world music too… what genres remain to torture the barista?

BR: Don’t forget about god damn Macy Gray and I definitely walked out of a few places when that bloody Amy Winehouse was everywhere.

I’m voting for a return to radio. We’ve started putting on BBC Radio 6 quite a bit and at the old Elliot’s we were quite infamous for playing Radio 1 out of an old tape player.

MG: Thanks for your time, Brett, even though you’re in danger of turning English after all this time, you’re a bloody legend and an inspiration!

Pavilion Cafe

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Opimius & Allobrogicus

tristan — Sun, 01 May 2011 12:26:27 +0000

Text: Alex Whyte Images: James Nelson

Giorgio De Maria is perhaps the most approachable and endearing wine geek in the country. Beyond passionate, even bookish, he is more candid than the average sommelier – perhaps because he becomes so animated he cannot hide his secrets, perhaps because he is just more willing to share. This, coupled with a sweeping knowledge of the grapes of Italy, makes him a real boon for Sydney drinkers. In the world of cocktails, it is not uncommon to hear of mythical barkeeps whose personalities are as much of an attraction as the drinks they serve. This happens less in the world of wine, where pretence and rhetoric often come at the expense of personality, but with De Maria, you get the sense it is only a matter of time.

Picture this: a group of us are down at 121BC, his tiny bar and bottle shop in Sydney’s Surry Hills. As you should, we asked Giorgio to choose us a couple of bottles. A few minutes passed and he returns clutching two bottles with the most bizarre technicolour labels. What are they? A white (Paski) and a rosado (Volpe Rosa) by Cantina Giardino, both made from Campania’s Coda di Volpe grape. As he opens the bottles, telling us how cool it would be to drink them side-by-side, a plate of salumi hits the table. At once he becomes agitated. There is a look of concern. Hastily he puts down the bottle, runs to the other end of the bar and grabs another. “Wait, wait, you must try the Lambrusco with the salumi!” He grabs another five glasses (we have been here all of ten minutes and now have 15 in front of us) and pours us all a glass. You must try it with the salumi.

In both the bottle shop and the bar, the wines are arranged not by grape colour or variety, but geographically from north to south. It is a clever way of negotiating Italy’s treacherous glut of varieties and regions. As you enter the bottle shop, you’ll be starting at the wines of Valle d’Aosta. Move to the left and you’ll pass the likes of Emilia Romagna and Puglia, before ending up in Sardinia. On the other side of that glass sits the bar: a dark, sleek, 007-lab-like place, where De Maria and sidekick Kate O’Hara pour glasses and drop plates with considerable poise. There are only 20 odd seats, nearly all of which face the staff – a simple feature in which lies the brilliance of the place.

A blackboard lists whatever De Maria has decided to pour that day. There will be some fizz, perhaps a prosecco colfòndo (aged on the lees, with noticeable sediment), a cocktail (Negroni sbagliato’s anyone?) and whites, like cattaratto from Sicily’s Porta del Vento. Reds might feature San Valentino from the cultish Paulo Bea, and there is always one orange wine (the colour is the result of white grapes being treated to an extended period of maceration on their skins, much like a red wine), such as the mineral haze that is Benjamin Zidarich’s Vitovska. There is an emphasis on artisanal producers, on those who make wine naturally. Oh, and any bottle from the shop can be enjoyed in the bar for a mere $15 corkage, a proposition that represents real value, especially if you want to push the boat out a little bit.

Drinkers are very lucky to have a chef of the calibre of Vini’s Andrew Cibej, sending out what are essentially flawless bar snacks – things like balsamic-glazed pork ribs, hunks of just-warm mortadella topped with sweet, sticky onions, and hot, salty pillows of gnocco fritto, fried dough made for wrapping in salumi.

Sydney has been treated to the opening of several great wine bars in the past year. Places like Love Tilly Devine, 10 William Street, and The Wine Library make it hard to think of a city other than Paris where one can drink with such variety and individuality. But it is 121BC that seems to have achieved that combination of service, space, booze, and food that all these places strive for. I sat down with its architect, Giorgio De Maria, to get an idea of what he wants to achieve.

Alex Whyte: Giorgio, you are from Piedmont, an area of Italy renowned for its food and wine. What was it like growing up there?

Giorgio De Maria: I was always around food as my dad was always cooking at home, and from around the age of seven or eight years old I would always get a little wine in my water at lunch and dinner, but I never thought of it as something particularly good! I think the first time I really felt like I had discovered something was when I was about 15 years old. I think it was a Moscato. Like everyone else, I started with the easiest wine to drink and went from there.

AW: In Australia you started out at Vini, which at the time was one of the few places in town that good food and wine could be had in a dark, cramped, space without having to spend a great deal of money. It seems that with Berta and 121BC, the emphasis is still on welcoming as many people as possible.

GDM: That is really important for me. The instant somebody walks through that door I really like to make them feel like they are coming to my house. It is not necessarily about giving people fine dining service, but about having the attitude of trying to get everything perfect; of trying to make people happy.

AW: You had quite a bit of input into the design of 121BC. It’s a tiny space but it seems a very functional one. What sort of things did you think were important for a bottle shop or a wine bar?

GDM: In New South Wales, it is not possible to have one space where you can sell wine to take away and serve food and wine, so we decided a wall of bottles would allow people in the bottle shop you to see what was going on in the wine bar and vice versa. We wanted to give people the opportunity to walk into the bottle shop and select a bottle to have in the bar. Also we wanted to make the shelves a wine list defined by winemaking regions. If you have a look at the (print) wine list we have in the bar, it is structured in the same way.

AW: Understandably, a lot of people get overwhelmed by Italian wine because there are so many different grapes, so many different regions. How do you go about educating and encouraging people?

GDM: By serving a wine from each region, we get people to try the local grapes. 99% of the wines we pour are local grapes and while there might be, say, a Chardonnay from Valle d’Aosta, that is because it has become tradition to grow that grape there. A lot of these local grapes have a very small production, there is a wine from Lazio called Greco More made from a grape that only one producer still makes. I guess I am trying to encourage that sort of thing.

We list wines by the glass only by region, the name of the wine and the name of the producer. There is no indication of grapes because I think these aspects can be discussed when you speak to someone. If somebody walks in and does not want to ask the staff it can be hard, as there is not too much information on that board, but that is the best way for people to learn I think.

AW: The shop is both temperature and humidity controlled, and in the bar there are three fridges set at different temperatures. Why is the temperature that wine is stored and served at so important?

GDM: I sometimes try wines that I know in Italy on the other side of the world and I can tell that the wine is damaged, or that it is shocked. Sometimes the wine might recover, but other times it may not. So, for me, the temperature for storage and shipping is very important. All the wine we ship from Italy is stored at 15 degrees in a temperature-controlled container, and I see the bottle shop as a place where the wine can rest, so that when you buy it, it is in perfect condition.

Regarding the temperature that wine is served, if you were to serve a white wine like Radikon (Stanko Radikon produces a number of singular orange wines from several plots in Friuli’s Gorizia region) at five degrees you would not get any sort of flavour and you also might intensify tannins and components that would generally not be in a white wine, which can become quite unpleasant. If you drink the wine this way, you are not getting an idea of what the producer is trying to achieve. Without any exaggeration, I believe that each wine has a proper temperature, depending on tannins, fruits and any number of things.

AW: Another thing that seems to be a recurring theme – not only here, but also at Vini and Berta – is that markups on the wine seem to be very fair. Why do you set margins at the level you do?

GDM: Well, hmm… The margins are probably a little too reasonable [laughs], but the idea was to make especially the medium and upper range more affordable. I make things a little bit cheaper than other shops on the cheaper bottles but, when it comes to the medium or high-end stuff, my margin decreases ¬¬– whereas a lot of places like to keep a flat margin. The idea was to encourage people to drink and experience wine that usually they cannot afford.

AW: It must help that you import a lot of your own stuff. How long have you been doing that for?

GDM: I have been doing that with Vini for a year and half now. Most of the wines in Vini and Berta are exclusive to us and here we stock all those labels, but also try to specialise in good Italian wines from other suppliers.

AW: You travel to Italy once, if not more, a year on buying trips. What is it you look for in a wine, or in a producer?

GDM: I travel alone and I travel by car. Some producers might be ones that I have tried somewhere, some are ones that I have read about, but I always leave space for suggestions. I often discover a great producer through other producer recommending them to me. So, when you schedule a wine trip I think it is important to leave space for the unexpected.

AW: You seem to love wines with great minerality; wines that taste fresh. Is there any region or producer that you are finding particularly exciting at the moment?

GDM: Yeah, yeah! I am particularly excited about this Fiano, which is not here yet! It is a producer from Campania called Il Tufiello, and it is from a very small vineyard, less than two hectares. The vineyard is high on the mountain, about 800 metres above sea level. The wine has great minerality, there is a little bit of fermentation on the skins, and there is no addition of sulphites. I think it is a great expression of where it is from, and a great expression of the grape. He is also making wine from a second estate in Piedmont called Tenuta Grillo, which is once again very small, around twelve hectares. There he makes a Cortese fermented on the skins, and a beautiful Barbera d’Asti made in a way that is very old fashioned.

AW: Finally Giorgio, do you ever stop thinking about wine?

GDM: Yeah, ah, not really actually, not at the moment. Even now and then I have a break for Easter, but I am going down to Hobart so I am sure we will be talking about wine again!

AW: Thank you, Giorgio.

GDM: Cheers.

121 BC Cantina and Enoteca
4/50 Holt St (enter from Gladstone St), Surry Hills Sydney

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Carte Blanched

tristan — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:15:17 +0000

Text: Alex Whyte Images: Tom Lim, Duke Bistro & The Norfolk

With only a couple of years spent in professional kitchens, and at just 25, Thomas Lim is both co-chef at much-praised restaurant Duke – with former Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Young Chef of the Year Mitchell Orr – and responsible for the most edible pub menu in the city at The Norfolk. I caught up with him in an unusually quiet Duke dining room to figure out quite how it happened.

Growing up in Western Australia, Lim was exposed to restaurants from the get-go through his uncle’s popular Northbridge Chinese restaurant Choi’s Inn. On finishing school, he took a summer job at Fremantle’s most famous chipper, Cicerellos. Perhaps it was those soggy chips or the bleached, toothy grins of the moneyed customers which hinted that the culinary badlands of Perth were not going to suffice, as by the time Lim reached his twenties he had packed up shop to study at The Intercontinental’s Hotel School in Sydney.

Shortly after finishing his studies, Lim scored an apprenticeship at the world-renowned Tetsuya’s. Fifteen hour days were made tolerable by exposure to an unfathomable bounty of produce, and the opportunity to work among an absurdly talented group of chefs – including Martin Benn (Sepia), Darren Robertson (The Table Sessions), Phil Wood (Rockpool), Luke Powell (Tetsuya’s), and Dan Hong (Lotus and Ms G’s) – along with Tetsuya himself.

Cooking seemed to fall by the wayside for a short while after Lim left Tetsuya’s. However, at some point, friends were invited around for dinner again and before long this evolved into what he describes as “a project between myself and my housemates called The Duxford, a private dining club of sorts”.

A blog was set up to document the meals, a heap of private gigs started coming in and Lim begun helping out his old Head Chef from Tetsuya’s, Darren Robertson, with the odd project. Seemingly out of nowhere, a role as Head Chef at a yet-to-be-named restaurant above The Flinders popped up but the moment caught Lim off-guard. As a close friend of several of the restaurant’s owners, the fear of letting them down led to him initially turning down the job. Why? “Because I thought, ‘I can’t do this,’ I had never run a kitchen before in my life”.

After chatting to some fellow chefs, Lim realized that “you only get a certain number of such possibilities”. He accepted the role and through gift of gab went about poaching and gathering a team that now includes Mitchell Orr, close friend and go-to wine guy Joel Amos, drinks-whiz Charles Ainsbury and arguably Sydney’s hardest-working front-of-house Kylie Javier – a gifted group of people that Tom says he would have been “screwed without”.

The task then became to ensure that Duke maintained a distinct identity from the oft-raucous haunt it sits above. As Lim politely puts it, “if you go downstairs on a Friday night, the clientele down there would not be likely to come upstairs and eat, and vice versa”. It must have worked, as within a few months of opening the restaurant had received favourable reviews in all the requisite rags and remains full night after night.

In dubbing the food at Duke ‘dude food,’ Gourmet Traveller critic Pat Nourse nailed the post-Momofuku assurance that young chefs now seem to have in putting together a menu of stuff that they and their friends enjoy eating. I have heard others dub it ‘stoner food,’ a tag Lim is somewhat reluctant to accept. “I wouldn’t say the food we are doing is ‘stoner food,’ but the process is perhaps influenced by it, in that, while thoughtful, it can seem thoughtless. There are combinations that you would not expect and every ingredient can be anything. We do not discriminate between, say, using strawberry in a savoury dish and using tomato in a sweet dish.”

In the wrong hands such a seemingly haphazard approach could lead to disaster, but more often than not the food at Duke relies on subtle additions to familiar groups of flavours. Case in point: the boys wanted to put a prawn cocktail on the menu, but every faux-bistro, steakhouse and throwback joint in the country has one. So they took that flabby coral sauce and traded it for a slick, pitch-black one. Whilst Crystal Bay prawns with squid ink and strawberry cocktail sauce, seaweed and pretzel crumbs might sound a wee bit loony, they’ve merely taken the fruit-acid balance that made the original a classic through a colourful, ozone-filled trip.

This liberated approach to the construction of dishes also means that, like acknowledged influence David Chang of New York’s Momofuku restaurants, Lim does not feel obliged to make everything from scratch and is happy to use store-bought, everyday pantry products in the restaurant. “Sometimes there is no need,” he says. “Take something like Sriracha hot sauce – it is a perfect product, so I don’t see any problem in using it as long as you believe it.”

So aside from Chang, where does the inspiration for this free-form creativity in the kitchen come from? “I don’t really get motivated by specific chefs,” Lim says. “Sure I love people like [Chang], Michel Bras and Steven Harris, but I am inspired more so by different cuisines and their methods. Take the whole Tex-Mex thing in America, I’ll use ideas from that and mould them into the techniques we practice at Duke.”

Before opening Duke in November last year, Lim took a lengthy research trip around Europe. When asked to nominate the highlights, he rattles off a cross-section of joints that includes life-affirming marathons at locavore spots like Copenhagen’s Noma and The Sportsman in the UK, simple seafood cooked al la plancha at Rafa’s in Roses, Spain, and the gargouillou at Bras in middle-of-nowhere France, and Barcelona’s smoky, sardine-strewn den La Cova Fumada. It’s a varied list, so why those places? “Because, as well as the food, it’s all about feeling comfortable – you can wear what you want, you don’t feel like you need to sit upright, it’s not stiff – and it is important that you feel like that as soon as you walk into a restaurant.”

With no tablecloths on the table and what seems like carte blanche in the kitchen, what curbs the creativity of today’s young chef? Perhaps unsurprisingly, he cites costs. “I’d love to put things like scampi and other shellfish on the menu but they would blow out costing way too much. I just don’t think many of our clients would be willing to spend $60 on a tasting plate when the rest are $20. It just isn’t fair to them.”

Paris has been taken over by the bistronomy of places like Le Chateubriand and cave a mangers such as La Verre Vole, offering great food in dive-like spaces. In Los Angeles, people hunt down haute food trucks and gather for rowdy urban picnics at the cutlery-less A-Frame. Over in New York, they go see the bearded folk at Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for their fill of pizza, offal and craft ales in what could be a squat. Good food has been stripped of the pomp and poker-faces which for so long came with it and young chefs are now sending out plates that speak of themselves, their friends and their city. A new take on terroir perhaps, and – in the harbour city at least – Thomas Lim and his mates are leading the way.

Tom Lim’s food can be eaten at The Norfolk, 305 Cleveland Street
Redfern and Duke Bistro above The Flinders, 65 Flinders St. Darlinghurst
Sydney.

Next story: Enjoy The Silence – Depeche Mode

Who’s There

gabe — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:10:52 +0000

Text: Jill Greig Images: Knock Knock

When I catch up with Kurt Eckhardt it’s nearly a month since he first delivered a box of organic fruit and veggies to my door via Knock Knock organics. They reminded me of the food my Nan’s vegetable garden, which as a kid, I knew tasted different, but didn’t know why. Kurt’s boxes are full of things you might reject if you found them in a supermarket. Only you can’t find them there anymore. Apples are small and a bit spotty, the gnarled potatoes are uneven in size and caked in earth. It’s not a glamorous range of produce, but it’s noticeably plumper, more fragrant, sapid. Like my Nan, dottering around the garden with her watering can, someone has cared for these vegetables. Nurtured them, then delivered them to your door. I talk to Kurt about this return to basics and the importance of connecting with our food.

Jill Greig: Can you tell me a bit about how you got started and why?

Kurt Eckardt: Well basically organic food production, gardening, permaculture principles and things like that are a bit of a passion of mine. I have a home garden and I’ve studied a little bit in permaculture and I suppose I was always really surprised by the fact that the world had gone from these traditional values to these really crazy production methods and agriculture. The way that we are producing food is really unsustainable and laden with chemicals and really unnecessary production techniques just to make a quick buck but without an longterm solution to actually providing food to people on our planet. It’s kind of a new fashion now to become interested in organic food production, but it’s really just the way that things were done before the chemical companies came in with their weird solutions. So I became interested personally and learnt a lot about it and studied it and was growing food that way myself. I moved down to the South Coast, in Coledale, not too long ago and I realised that there isn’t much of an option down here especially to have access to organic food. In Sydney I think there’s a few more options, but I think even in Sydney it’s not really that affordable.

JG: It’s not generally much of an everyday shopping option. I guess sometimes it feels a bit ‘upmarket’.

KE: Yeah, and you’ve got to go out of your way to find it. I think that those things are changing slowly, but I found it weird that it was this really niche thing where you had to either go to a co-op, which can sometimes be daunting for people that aren’t familiar with that process – there’s a membership system and you have to bring your own containers – I mean I totally, wholly support the co-ops. I think they’re amazing, but it’s not so accessible for everyday people. And aside from that, as you said organics can be this upmarket thing where you either have to go to a market or to a fancy shop, which seems really alien to go and buy really down to earth, natural produce. So I just thought ‘how can I make it so I am providing things that I know are fresh and that I know are good quality and that I know are pesticide free and grown in a sustainable way, that’s also accessible and affordable so people don’t have to be on a big wage and don’t have to go out of their way to get. So it was a solution that way. I was looking for something to do and it seemed to make sense because it was a passion of mine.

JG: So how long has Knock Knock been around?

KE: I’ve been doing it for about six months, so it’s only quite new but it’s going pretty well. I’m never going to make heaps of money out of it, but it’s a way that I can enjoy my time and hopefully get by and hopefully help some people eat in a healthy way more than anything.

JG: Six months! It’s a very new project – what were you doing beforehand?

KE: Before I started Knock Knock I was working at a community radio station (2ser) in Sydney. I loved the station a lot and I got a lot out of it, but I’d been there for five or so years and was travelling from Coledale to there everyday and I needed a change, so I just decided to bow out of that, without really any idea of what I was going to do, which is a bit crazy but it worked out.

JG: Sometimes you have to do these things.

KE: You just have to make that cut at some point I think. Cut ties and figure yourself out because otherwise you keep putting it off and putting it off. So I got to the point where I needed to make a change. So I did. And this is where I ended up, so I’m really lucky.

JG: So is it just you running Knock Knock – is it a one man show?

KE: Yeah it’s just me. I do all the ordering, packing and delivery myself. And the website. That’s why if anyone’s familiar with it they’ll know that sometimes they’ll be missing an email here or there. I try and keep the communication up but sometimes that falls through because it’s quite a lot to take on. And I’ve been working as a gardener on the side to sustain myself while I kick it off.

JG: You’ve got a lot going on then.

KE: Yeah I do but there’s not a complaint at all for it because I enjoy it a lot and it was really a decision I made on my own. I got myself into it.

JG: You were saying that one of the good things about what you’re doing is knowing that you’re providing quality food. I assume you have relationships with the growers or the people at the markets that you go to – was it difficult to establish those relationships?

KE: I’ve been going to distributers. My long-term goal is to source produce directly from farmers. I think the future of this, not just for me, but for everyone is to develop more of a connection with their food, down to the point of actually getting it from where it’s grown. But at the moment I’ve been using distributors, which is really only one more step in between. The farmers drop it there and I can pick it up and deliver it in the same day, so at this stage it’s as close as I can get it.

JG: It’s not spending six weeks in a refrigerated truck.

KE: Exactly. Or six months with those snap freeze systems and the crazy refrigeration that supermarkets use. I think that’s a big part of it – it’s pretty fresh!

JG: It’s so strange because food is such an integral part of our existence, but there’s such a disconnect now in the way we source it, and it didn’t take that long to become like this.

KE: No only like 40 or 50 years really. It’s really weird and I just think that it’s so easy to not even think where your food is coming from – it comes wrapped in plastic with the weight and the price on there, the colour you want it, with no marks on it. It might not taste like anything but you think that you’re getting the nutrients because it’s there in your fridge or your supermarket aisles. They’re the habits that we need to break. And they’re habits. People aren’t doing anything wrong by doing that, it’s just what we’ve become accustomed to. People like you and I have grown up with that being the norm. To our grandparents that wouldn’t have been the norm – it would have been freakish to them when that started happening, but it’s just so easy. I still do it, if I run out of something I might run down to the local shop and get it. And I notice when I’m doing it, I stop and think ‘Okay, where is this coming from? What’s been used to keep the bugs off it? Why does it look so perfect? Will it have the nutrients I need?’ And I think that that’s really important and that’s part of it, just to realise where these things are coming from. You don’t have to be crazy about it. I think it’s really great to try your hardest to get these things in your life and to stop that cycle of buying this kind of corporatised agriculture, but you don’t have to restrict yourself and only get organic food and not get things that you want if they’re not in season. But I think it’s getting easier now to do something.

Knock Knock

Next story: One In A Million – Gibson Fox

Eat Here

gabe — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:49 +0000

Text: Gabriel Knowles Images: Eathouse Diner

Opening a restaurant probably isn’t the best way to make a buck. Or get a good nights sleep. As Bryan Brown says in one of those films where he plays a laconic character: “Why would you want to do that? You’re until midnight washing dishes and back up at dawn buying produce.” Lenna Boord, along with Age Durrant and Selena Murray, has just opened the Eathouse Diner in Sydney’s Redfern, an inner-city suburb on the cusp of full blown gentrification. Boord is on four hours a night sleep since the diner opened a little over two weeks ago, and it can’t have been much more in the weeks leading up to its launch either.

“To be honest if someone had sat us down at the beginning and said it’s going to cost this much and take this long we probably wouldn’t have done it. We probably would have looked for another site that had a set up kitchen or at least set up electrics,” she admits cheerily. That’s the thing about hospitality, it is, like so many of the best things that we do for each other, a task that can seem utterly thankless in its darkest moments but more often than not is the most rewarding we’ll ever do.

“We decided to do a diner because it felt more casual. It’s not precious. We want people to come in and relax so a diner seemed perfect for that. If we’d gone for white table cloths it would have felt fraudelent. We wanted to create an environment where people feel like they’re eating at a friends house and are relaxed,” Boord continues before explaining how her time spent in American diners has shaped her hospitality philosophy.

“The diner experience for me in America, was very humble so I wanted to bring that back here.”

While the title and counter may be straight out of an American diner there’s a multicultural feel to Eathouse, both aesthetically and in the kitchen. From the South American brunch items to the tapas bar decor and the angled-just-so-you-can-see-in-the-kitchen mirror there’s a little bit of everything from where the three friends have travelled. In Murray’s case, the former produce specialist has brought nearly all of the knick-knacks that adorn the diner back from her travels.

With a chef in Durrant who spent five years working in graphic design along with stints at Sydney institutions Sean’s Panorama and Longrain, the aesthetic is maintained. Generous servings are kept in check by large, stark white plates that ensure the nourishment on offer remains foremost in mind.

“We wouldn’t even try to have a restaurant if the food wasn’t the type of food we like to eat,” Boord says, “it’s a reflection of our collective personalities.”

“There’s talk of another bar but we’ll see. To be honest when we opened we were so behind schedule that we had to set a date to open on because we were losing so much money on rent. So we did and we’ve been so busy ever since we haven’t had time to catch up on things like putting tags on jars, getting a business card or finalising our website!”

Eathouse Diner

Next story: First Shot – Josh Robenstone

I Scream, You Scream

tristan — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:05:07 +0000

Words: Caroline Clements Images: Mario Camilo

Dancing in the dark and scooping ice cream for lickable New Yorkers, it’s all in a days work for this Melbourne girl. Caroline Clements talks to Laura O’Neill, of Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, in the Big Apple.

My first meeting with Laura O’Neill was at a church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was just before 8pm on Tuesday night. It was cold evening in May, given that summer was only weeks away and ice cream season had just begun. Fifteen minutes later music was turned up loud and the church hall was filled with almost 20 people dancing around in the dark. This is No Lights No Lycra, a one hour dance party, held every Tuesday night in New York, Berlin and Melbourne. O’Neill is one of the New York based Australians who run it.

“We do it here because I have a relationship with the pastor here, and we’d been doing some baking in the church before we opened the cafe as they have three ovens,” O’Neill explains. “So we’re pretty familiar with the space and he’s pretty open to community activities. They have a market there for Greenpoint foody people and a handful of bands that rehearse up in the chapel (apparently Grizzly Bear is one) so I couldn’t think of anywhere more perfect do it than there.”

But when she’s not dancing around in a dark church hall, O’Neill can be found sitting on one of Brooklyn’s main drags in an ice cream truck, scooping delicious organic Van Leeuwen Ice Cream. O’Neill is one part of the ice cream team she helped build with her husband Ben and his brother Peter, nearly three years ago in New York. A Melbourne girl originally, O’Neill was working as an event producer while holidaying in London, where she met American Ben (Van Leeuwen). One thing led to another and they decided to move to New York together.

Ben grew up in Conneticut where he had driven an ice cream truck when he was home on holidays from college in San Francisco. “When he’d come back he’d rent this ice cream truck to drive around, and it turned out to be incredibly lucrative and in one summer he was able to take himself around the world for nine months with the money he made. So he has the entrepreneurial spirit, but obviously it’s not very inspiring to be selling ice creams on sticks.” He wondered why people weren’t selling nice ice cream out of trucks, why the trucks weren’t beautiful, why they had these tiny little dark windows and why are they were noisey and dirty, and the idea for Van Leeuwen grew from there.

So began their mission to find the most delicious, organic ice cream they could serve from their ice cream trucks. However, they quickly learnt that all the ice cream in American, and also even in Australia, have all these additives in them that don’t need to be there. Turns out they’re only there to cut corners and costs and mainly just because it has become the norm in the process of industrial ice cream making. They wondered why they couldn’t make an ice cream just like ice cream you would make at home – with milk, cream, cane sugar, egg yolks, and whatever you’re using to flavour it – but on a large scale.

“We found this place upstate,” O’Neil explains. “They were sort of reluctant to make it this way, not because it wouldn’t work, just because no one else is doing it. They were making a lot of other ice creams there that were using a lot of guar gum and thickeners, stabilisers, milk powder and condensed milk, and we just wanted to do it simply, which is just how they do it in any good restaurant with a pastry chef making their ice cream.”

So began Van Leeuwen artisan ice cream. They cut back on the sugar content and the flavouring, they wanted every ingredient to be as pure as the ice cream base. “The chocolate we use is Michelle Cluizel, which is a really wonderful family business in France. Ben has actually just been over to a cocoa plantation in the Dominican Republic because we buy so much chocolate from them, so they took him over there to visit, which was really cool for him.”

That might explain why chocolate is O’Neill’s favourite flavour at the moment, “but last week it was earl grey, it always changes, I really love the affogatos too.” O’Neill admits she’s not a real sweet tooth, but likes Van Leeuwen because it’s not too sweet, with about 40% less sugar than most ice creams. “Though it’s tempting, I don’t go crazy, Ben does a bit, he loves sundaes, it might be an American thing though.”

Now three years later, Van Leeuwen have five large ice cream/coffee trucks (serving Intelligentsia Coffee), and a store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which opened earlier in the year. Their ice cream is also stocked in a number of foodshops and delicatessens around New York, and in pints in Wholefoods in the US (the world’s largest natural and organic retailer, with stores throughout North American and the UK). So some pretty great scooping for the first few years of business. I wonder if they have plans take Van Leeuwen down under? “Maybe,” ponders O’Neill, “I think it would be nice to have a store at home in Melbourne, but I feel like whatever happens in New York sort of trickles down into the rest of the world. When we opened two years ago I was like, ‘no way would Melbourne ever have fancy food trucks’. At that time all they had was was Mr Whippy, who occasionally comes out, and the donut truck at South Melbourne Market. I think it could work but it would be more of a weekend operation to begin. I think in Sydney at Bondi it could work.”

Thought it’s not the sort of truck that brings children running from their homes at the faint sound of a tinkering nursery rhyme, it certainly draws the crowds. Considering it is only really hot in New York for about four months of the year, you would want to make sure it was hard/fast business during that time. “Actually, we still have two trucks out in winter and people do still buy ice cream, believe it or not… we don’t have music though, you’re not allowed to in Manhattan. But we’ve actually been thanked by people for not having that annoying music anyway.”

Back at the church, O’Neill is dancing all the ice cream off in the dark, where the music is certainly welcome. She was leaving back to Australia the following day, and was looking forward to seeing how No Lights No Lycra was going back in Melbourne. So why no lycra? “Well you associate lycra with looking good, you’ve got to be in good shape to wear lycra, and people who dance, like professional dancers have legitimate dancing gear (often made of lycra) and NLNL is not about that at all. People can wear lycra though, that’s fine, but with the lights off it’s just about having fun and not being looked at and not feeling like you have to look right. I think the name is quite perfect, it says a lot in a few words.”

Van Leeuwen Ice Cream

Next story: Sofo So Good – Charlie Sofo

Cookes In The Kitchen

gabe — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:20:34 +0000

Text: Caroline Clements Images: Sophie Cookes

Wooed into business by a lady with a plate full of cupcakes, Sophie Cookes started her culinary career scooping ice-cream for her best friend’s dad. She has since worked in kitchens with the likes of Wendy Fogarty, Maggie Beer and Greg Malouf. Now, one half of Cookes Food, Cookes is a chef in her own right, running a small food shop/cafe/catering company out of well endowed open-plan kitchen in the Toorak Village in Melbourne. Caroline Clements talks to her about how many turkeys she’ll be stuffing for other people in the lead-up to Christmas, among other mouth-watering matters.

Caroline Clements: How did you get into food and cooking?

Sophie Cookes: I always loved food and for a long time I thought maybe I just liked eating…it turned out it was more than that.

CC: Where did it all begin? Give us some back-story.

SC: I have always loved cooking. Always. I worked for my best friend’s dad scooping ice cream for years and spent the whole time trying to work back of house instead of front of house. It took ages, but I finally got in there. I worked under a pretty funny chef, he had a soft nature and really warmed me to the idea. Finally, I broke the news to my parents that I wanted to pursue cooking as a profession, they thought I was crazy.

CC: Did you cook much before you could see over the bench?

SC: I did cook a bit as a kid but I was terrible, nothing worked. Cooking has certainly been a skill I have had to learn and study. Perhaps I wasn’t born with a natural ability, but with I was born with the love for it.

CC: Where did you learn how to cook?

SC: I went to France and studied cooking for a year in Paris, I got pretty plump! Then I went to London and got the best experience of my like working at Petersham Nurseries under Skye Gyngell. I didn’t have an apprenticeship and she told me not to do it as I would probably get too many bad habits. She took me under her wing and I stayed there for two years. We became close and she is definitely my biggest influence. She taught me about produce and ingredients and why it’s so important to work seasonally. Whilst with her I got to work with the LEGEND Wendy Fogarty (head of UK slow food), Maggie Beer, Alice Waters and Greg Malouf.

CC: That’s a pretty good resume to begin with. Where did you take it from there?

SC: When I got home I could not for the life of me get a job. I applied everywhere and no one wanted a bar of me. It was very disheartening. So I worked in a café, which I did feel was a step backwards, but that’s how I met Nicole who came in to sell me cupcakes. We got to talking, realised a shared love for food and a desire to do something different, and started Cookes Food.

CC: But there are plenty of catering companies out there, what is Cookes Food ‘bringing to the table’ that is so different?

SC: Everything in catering seems too big, too many people, too many of the same menus and too many of the same foods, touched and tiny! Ever noticed how bad food is at a catered event, and the bigger the party the worse the food is? We wanted to create something smaller and more boutique. Catering for people who REALLY like food, restaurant quality food at a catered event.
We change our catering menus each season and try to work with seasonality and locality in our minds. We run small cooking classes to meet new potential clients and give them a window into what we do. Opening our doors as a café is simply a further extension of us. Its casual, simple and constructed with the best produce we can get our hands on.

CC: So are your suppliers all local?

SC: Yes, we use some great local suppliers, but we are happy to take food from anywhere really. This winter we had a lady who was bringing us massive pine mushrooms from her garden at home. She would bring in box loads, and they were so huge. We’d serve one mushroom as a dish and it would take up the whole plate. People were struggling to get through them.

CC: What cuisine most influences your cooking style?

SC: I love people more than places; Alice Waters, Maggie Beer, Skye (Gyngell), Damien Pignolet, Judy Rodgers, Ruth Rodgers and Rose Grey…to name but a few. They have a rustic, unpretentious, natural style of cooking which is similar to my own.

CC: What is you favourite restaurant?

SC: My favourite restaurant in Melbourne is Da Noi – it feels natural and warm, and Sean’s Panaroma in Sydney.

CC: What do you look for when hiring kitchen staff?

SC: I look for someone who cares about what they are making, who likes food – you would be surprised how many people don’t. But actually, even when we are flat out, it seems to run pretty smoothly just with Nic on the floor and me in the kitchen anyway.

CC: How many turkeys will you be stuffing this year?

SC: We are just about to start taking orders. Just about every second person that comes in says they will order one, so we may have a whole kitchen full of the birds. There is no room for error here, as you can imagine. If I miss one order, that would be someone’s Christmas Day ruined. The other thing is, turkey doesn’t have a long shelf life, so I can’t get started early. I am going to start the puddings next week though.

CC: What’s your favourite cooking utensil?

SC: Pestle and mortar.

CC: What would be your last meal?

SC: Spanner crab with a glass of pinot grigio.

CC: If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be?

SC: Frida Kahlo – in Mexico.

Cookes Food was begun by Sophie Cookes and Nicole Debono Two years ago. They have just released their winter menu for 2010.

Cookes Food

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