You could be forgiven for thinking that Martini is Italian. The I on the end of her surname, the love of fresh herbs, her facility with pasta, the fact that until very recently she and her husband, Michael Sapountsis, owned a successful St Kilda pizzeria. And it was on an Italian passport that her dad, Pierre, migrated to Australia as a boy. But the Martini family comes in fact from Tunisia, and it’s in these North African roots that Karen Martini’s love affair with flavour began.
 
 
 

“My grandmother, Grace, my dad’s mum, was always cooking whenever we visited,” she says. “When we were there we were given something to do almost immediately. That sense of nurturing and family gathering around food started there.”

 
 
 
In the suburbs of Melbourne, Grace cooked okra and molokhia, she roasted peppers, fried sand mullets to serve with pumpkin, green capsicum, lemon and cumin, and stuffed fricassee sandwiches with tuna, hard-boiled egg and capers. “And that was what you had as a snack before lunch.” On special occasions, she made lamb couscous in the Tunis style, using shoulder layered with vegetables, and a complex mixture of the spices she kept in an old biscuit tin, “right down to the dried rosebuds that she’d picked from a bush in her garden”.

“And when I say they taught me, they didn’t ‘teach’ anything,” she says. You had to be standing in the right spot with your chopping board set up in the right position so that you could work through your own prep list, which was as long as your arm, and keep your eye on what Chef was doing and maybe you could learn how to make the hare sauce. “It was punishing but I wanted the knowledge, I was hungry for it. You had to be rather tough and… stubborn.”
 
Martini started cooking for herself early in her career, landing her first head chef gig at 20. It wasn’t exactly the plan, but after she’d returned to Melbourne having spent some time travelling after leaving Tansy’s, she didn’t see a lot that inspired her. Following a trial at a Fitzroy North restaurant called Haskins, the owner asked her why she wouldn’t take the sous chef gig. “Because your chef can’t cook,” Martini told him. He fired the chef and hired Martini instead. “And that was it.” From there, Martini never looked back, on to The Kent in Carlton with Rita Macali (“that was amazing”), and, in 1996, to Donleavy Fitzpatrick and Maurice Terzini’s Melbourne Wine Room, a St Kilda restaurant that was a game-changer in its day.
 
“I didn’t actually work under many chefs,” she says. “Once I had the basics from Tansy’s, I was a bit self-taught.” But the collaboration with Terzini proved pivotal. It was Terzini, who had moved to Sydney in 1999 to open Otto in Woolloomooloo, who convinced Martini to move to Sydney herself to open Icebergs Dining Room & Bar in 2002. She turned him down at first – more than once – but he persisted. His faith in Martini paid off. Between her talent and her willingness to work 100-hour weeks, she led the restaurant to win two Good Food Guide hats straight out of the gate and its Best New Restaurant award.

Every inch the playground for the rich and famous (Prince Harry, Beyoncé, you name it), Icebergs took Terzini’s renown from national to international, and boosted Martini’s profile to the next level. It was here she got her first break writing recipes, scrawling them on the backs of invoices until her new editor gently suggested she learn to type them. At 26, she’d never used a computer, let alone sent an email.
 
When her contract with Icebergs was up in 2004 she moved back to Melbourne. She and Sapountsis maintained their interest in the Wine Room, selling out of it in 2011, and in Mr Wolf, which they ran until this year. Martini didn’t down tools over these years. “I wrote, cooked and directed 250 menus at the Wine Room, and ran Wolf for 16 years, and none of that happened at arm’s length,” she says. She and Sapountsis also opened a venue in Ibiza called Cala Bonita in 2014, where they fed “every famous DJ on earth”. But over these years her focus broadened to include a lot more time outside the restaurants, raising her daughters, Stella and Amber, developing recipes for print, and working in television.

Just about everything about running a restaurant is more challenging now, Martini says. The margins are slimmer, customers are more demanding, competition is huge, and skilled staff are almost impossible to find. And yet despite all these things, and despite not having opened a restaurant in nearly 20 years, and despite the unique challenges posed by COVID-19, here she is again, on the tools at a buzzy, well-reviewed restaurant. How does she make that happen more than 30 years into her cooking career? How do you sustain that sort of performance at the top of your game?
 
 
 

“You stay true to your focus and beliefs about food and hospitality,” she says. “You don’t stray from what you know and love, and don’t get too caught up in the trend or the fad of the time.”

 
 
 
The pursuit of flavour is still what drives her. “My food has always been robust and honest: traditional techniques and Mediterranean flavours.” It’s still all about flavour-first now, she says, but the years have given her different ways to distil that flavour. That could mean jamón in the pan when she steams clams, or using black garlic and parmesan rinds to make an infusion. Fermented, pickled and preserved ingredients play more of a role in her cooking now, sometimes next to the fresh version of the same ingredient.