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Editor’s Letter

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Editor’s
Letter

 
 
 

MJ with the team from Emilio's Specialty Butcher in Rozelle.

MJ with the team from Emilio’s Specialty Butcher in Rozelle.


 
 
 

Welcome to Issue 14 in which we explore the theme of DIY – doing it yourself.
 
In People Places Plates, Pat Nourse profiles self taught cook and the king of food trucks in Australia, Raph Rashid. When Raph started his food truck business in 2009 he had no experience and in fact had never even driven a manual car, let alone a truck! Now with six food trucks and two venues, Raph’s story is one of determination, drive and doing it yourself.
 
Mark Best explores different paddock to plate models in his Spotlight On section – where the venues are located on-farm and utilise their own beef or lamb on the menu. The ultimate in DIY, the four venues discuss the challenges and opportunities of producing their own livestock for the menu.
 
This issue, What’s Good in the Hood does the NSW South Coast and despite the torrential, record-breaking rainfall, Myffy Rigby uncovers some absolute gems of coastal dining. There are lots of DIY inspired stories from a half eaten pie on a fence prompting a father and son to open their own pie shop in Ulladulla; to a Merimbula girl recognising the need for a decent watering hole in her hometown. Hit the road and discover some incredible dining along the beautiful NSW coastline.
 
Our Cut Two Ways for this issue is Goat – and it sure does shine in the hands of two of our favourite chefs Nick Stanton and Alex Prichard with goat from The Gourmet Goat Lady. Our featured butcher is Emilio’s Speciality Butcher – two butchers who decided to do it their own way by opening a butchery committed to ethical and sustainable meat.
 
Finally, Young Guns features one of the hottest young chef talents in the business – Rosheen Kaul from Etta in Melbourne. We talk to Rosheen about the challenges of her first head chef role and her DIY journey of developing her style of food through cultural and family connections, historians and anthropology.
 
The stories, photos and videos in this issue are brimming with inspiration, ideas and incredible people who have found a way to do it their way – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
 
 

Mary-Jane Morse
 
Meat & Livestock Australia
[email protected]
@_raremedium

 

Copyright: this publication is published by Meat & Livestock Australia Limited ABN 39 081 678 364 (MLA).

 
 
 
 

Editor’s Letter

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Editor’s
Letter

 
 

Welcome to Issue 13 of Rare Medium where I am proud to share with you the stories of just some of the wonderful women that produce, prepare and plate Australian red meat.
 
8 March 2021 marks International Women’s Day and I wanted to dedicate this issue to some of the Aussie women paving careers and leaving their mark across the traditionally male-dominated red meat and foodservice industries.
 
Until 1994, Australian women could not legally claim to be ‘farmers’ – the law defined them as domestics, helpmates and farmer’s wives. Growing up on a mixed farming enterprise and witnessing first hand the aptitude, tenacity and sheer hard work my mum put in to managing our herd of Angus cattle – this fact baffles me. At least now we are on the right path.
 
According to Department of Agriculture ABARES figures, women now comprise an estimated 32 percent of workers in agriculture. Looking to our future, women now represent 55 percent of university students studying agricultural science. They say the future is female – and I say the future looks bright.
 
In this issue we feature women through the supply chain – from the paddock, to the butchery and on to the plate.
 
Mark Best visits Maria Roach and her mother Betty who have single handedly run their own cattle property near Adelong NSW for most of their lives. In the January 2020 bushfires they lost a few hundred head of cattle and since then Maria has rebuilt every fence on the farm. Their story is one of resilience, dedication and determination.
 
We feature two young female butchers – Elke De Belder who originates from Belgium and is now finding her feet in the world of Australian butchery, and former chef Bonnie Ewan who was named the 2020 Apprentice Butcher of the Year. These talented young women are carving their own paths in a career heavily dominated by men – it’s not easy but they wouldn’t have it any other way.
 
Pat Nourse delves into the inspiration, application and dedication behind the impressive career of Fred’s chef Danielle Alvarez. Danielle effortlessly emanates such a feeling of warmth and kindness despite leading one of Sydney’s busiest kitchens – she is a chef that other women want to work for and it’s not hard to see why.
 
Finally, two tremendous talents take on the tri tip in our Cut Two Ways feature. Trisha Greentree from 10 William St and Fratelli Paradiso; and Jemma Whiteman from Cafe Paci turn out some tasty snacks perfect for summer snacking.
 
It is my privilege to have worked on this issue and to now share it with you.

 
 

Mary-Jane Morse
 
Meat & Livestock Australia
[email protected]
@_raremedium

 

Copyright: this publication is published by Meat & Livestock Australia Limited ABN 39 081 678 364 (MLA).

Editor’s Letter

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Editor’s
Letter

 
 

In this issue we put some weight behind a word frequently aired but often difficult to define – and explore what sustainability looks, and tastes like, through the red meat supply chain.
 
In his People Places Plates section, Pat Nourse talks all things sustainability with Josh Lewis of Fleet, La Casita and Ethel Food Store in the picturesque Brunswick Heads – a chef and restaurateur walking his own path and shaping a sustainable model that works for him.
 
Mark Best takes sustainability to the taste buds in his Spotlight On section, speaking with various beef brands with a claim in the sustainability space – from carbon neutral to highest animal welfare – and asking the question, what does sustainability taste like?
 
We head to Orange in NSW for our second episode of What’s Good in the Hood with Myffy Rigby. A hop skip and a jump from Sydney, this regional food and wine hub is brimming with good times and exceptional local produce plated up by passionate people. Do yourself a favour and add Orange to your hit list.
 
Our Cut Two Ways shines a light on the lamb neck and it certainly glows in the capable hands of Rob Cockerill from Bennelong and Daniel Puskas from Sixpenny who turn this humble cut (from Grant Hilliard at Feather and Bone) into dishes that dazzle.
 
This issue’s Young Gun is farmer Tim Eyes. Based on the NSW central coast, Tim’s number one priority is the environment and this impressive young beef farmer is keen to connect people back to the farm and show that agriculture can mitigate climate change.
 
What does sustainability mean to you?
 
 

Mary-Jane Morse
 
Meat & Livestock Australia
[email protected]
@_raremedium

 

Copyright: this publication is published by Meat & Livestock Australia Limited ABN 39 081 678 364 (MLA).

Editor’s Letter

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Editor’s
Letter

 
 

If 2020 has shown us anything it is that nothing is certain and whilst it is impossible to predict what will happen moving forward in relation to Covid-19, we can assume that the foodservice industry will continue to be impacted for the foreseeable future and beyond.
 
The foodservice community has demonstrated its resilience – your determination, your diligence and camaraderie are the true measures of hospitality. But if Covid-19 has taught the industry anything, it is that the model needs to adapt, offerings need to diversify and those with the ability to change will be the ones that survive.
 
The Australian red meat industry has itself faced a raft of challenges with foodservice shutdowns not only locally but around the world in every export market. Increased demand at a retail level somewhat softened the blow but demand for mince products led to carcase imbalances as premium cuts diverted from foodservice and into mince and sausages.
 
Moving back through the supply chain, livestock prices are at record highs as producers seek to restock herds and flocks after widespread rain brought some reprieve to long term drought conditions – meaning less livestock are available for processing.
 
The last few months have given me an opportunity to rethink what we bring you in our quarterly publication, to reconsider what matters and why. We have done some adapting of our own and this issue brings with it some exciting changes.
 
Firstly – I’m proud to welcome two incredible contributors to the Rare Medium family, each with their own dedicated sections. Pat Nourse, one of Australia’s most accomplished food journalists, takes on our new People | Places | Plates section – sharing the stories of chefs, venues and menus; while industry legend Mark Best brings us his Spotlight On section – an exploration of various components of the Australian red meat supply chain.
 
Our new What’s Good in the Hood section reflects the importance of community dining and celebrating neighbourhood favourites. First up we explore Sydney’s Inner West with the fabulous Myffy Rigby. If anyone is going to show us around town then it may as well be the editor of the Good Food Guide!
 
We also have a new Cut Two Ways section – featuring a different cut each time cooked by two different chefs and our Young Guns section that explores the stories of young professionals through the red meat supply chain.
 
The value of supply chain relationships has never been more apparent and I look forward to continuing to connect you with our wonderful Australian red meat producers, to grow and prosper together with whatever comes next.
 
Following your journeys over the last few months has at times been heartbreaking but more often than not it has been empowering. I hope that the stories of this issue inspire you as you have me – as together we come to terms with this strange new world.
 
 

Mary-Jane Morse
 
Meat & Livestock Australia
[email protected]
@_raremedium

 

Copyright: this publication is published by Meat & Livestock Australia Limited ABN 39 081 678 364 (MLA).

Spotlight On

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SPOTLIGHT ON:

FLINDERS ISLAND

 
 

‘Farm to table’ is the aspirational aphorism used by many chefs to emphasise a direct relationship between a farm and their table. At its best, based on the distance between paddock and plate and the degree of commitment from chef and farmer, it can form an almost symbiotic relationship. At the same time, it remains an ideal fraught with tokenism, bureaucracy and logistical challenge.

 
On Flinders Island, where a roster of talented chefs take residence and for the first time in years a fully licensed on-island abattoir is operating – Jo and Tom Youl of Quoin Farm appear to have cracked the code.

 
 
 
Flinders Island, with a population of just 900, is the largest of the Furneaux Group amongst a cluster of about 100 islands in Bass Strait between Tasmania and Victoria. While mostly known for its rugged natural beauty, it is also growing a reputation for its grass-fed beef with Quoin Farm amongst those leading the way.
 
“My family has been running this farm since 1932, it’s really diverse and productive land with a lot of beach frontage. It was originally purchased by my great grandparents with Tom and I buying it from my uncle in 2014. We are the first people to live here full time, it’s a great property and we love our life here with our three young kids,” Jo said.
 
The original homestead block was first cleared as part of the soldier settlement program, a government scheme designed in 1916 to develop rural areas, encouraging returned servicemen to become property-owning farmers.
 
The first step in developing the property for beef production was to fence out native animals, whose numbers had soared to almost plague proportions in response to pasture improvement on the island.
 
 
 

Jo Youl on her family property Quoin Farm on Flinders Island

Jo Youl on her family property Quoin Farm on Flinders Island

“When we took over the property it was running about 50,000 wallabies and thousands of wombats. We started off running 100 cows but they just couldn’t compete,” Jo said.

Tom built exclusion fencing around the entire property over the course of three years which means they can now safely invest in pasture development – realising substantial gains in productivity and allowing the family to now run upwards of 1,000 Angus cows for breeding.
 
While the heifers are generally kept to build the breeding herd, Quoin Farm steers are shipped to Tasmania from Lady Barron. Most make their way into the Cape Grim brand while the remainder are grain finished at the Powranna feedlot for export to Japan.
 
“We sell most of our steers at 450-500kg which is optimal for Cape Grim. We recently had some older steers weigh in at 600kg which is a bit heavy and a few that got left behind because they were just too big at 850kg,” Jo said.

Quoin Farm is set on 2,400 acres where Tom and Jo are working constantly to improve pastures and grow their herd of Angus cattle

Quoin Farm is set on 2,400 acres where Tom and Jo are working constantly to improve pastures and grow their herd of Angus cattle

One of the ironies of farming life on the island is that up until recently, if you wanted to eat Quoin Farm beef, the island’s only supermarket had to fly it in from the Tasmanian mainland. Fortunately, an on-island abattoir means that cattle weighing in outside of brand or market specifications have somewhere to go – while offering the opportunity for Quoin Farm to finally close the island supply chain loop.
 
The Davis Family reopened the Lackrana Meat Works 12 months ago after it had sat dormant for over two years. Managing director Charlie Davis said it took six months to bring the site up to scratch.
 
 

“It’s been a battle but the help from the locals has been phenomenal so it’s finally worked out. When you’ve got things like the abattoir processing local meats, it adds to the attraction to get people here,” Charlie said.

 
 
Jo and Tom opened their front gate as part of a virtual farm tour for the 2021 Tasmanian Red Meat Updates conference, to give an insight into life and red meat production in the Bass Strait. The virtual experience has now morphed into the Youl family’s vertically integrated luxe farm stay brand ‘On Island Time’ consisting of accommodation, restaurant, and tourism ventures; as well as on-farm accommodation for those wanting to experience life on a working cattle farm.

Island produced beef and lamb at the recently reopened Lackrana Meat Works on Flinders Island

Island produced beef and lamb at the recently reopened Lackrana Meat Works on Flinders Island

“People really get to experience life on Quoin Farm with the cattle around the cabins and witnessing the amazing life that they have. We are also lucky that we’re so close to the beach, so people get the farm stay along with a private beach literally a kilometre away,” Jo said.
 
Flinders Island Wharf Restaurant is a pivotal part of the On Island Time brand and does the heavy lifting for locals and visiting tourists. Essential to the operation has been a roster of some of Australia’s best chefs in residence including David Moyle, Jo Barrett and Alanna Sapwell; with next season welcoming ex-Three Blue Ducks head chef Josh McMahon.
 
“The Wharf’s been running for about four years and we’re really lucky we have had some amazing chefs want to come here to experience island life and showcase our great produce,” Jo said.
Current incumbent Pip Sumbak has been running Pip’s Plate for almost 10 years. She took the long way round the fire pit via a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney Uni, a stint on MasterChef and then island-hopping using cooking as her ticket between France, Spain, Indonesia and Fiji. Known for her spectacular open fire catering, Pip has been treating the island to her craft for the past seven months.

Quoin Farm offers on-farm accommodation for tourists wanting the ‘farm stay’ experience

Quoin Farm offers on-farm accommodation for tourists wanting the ‘farm stay’ experience

“Initially my brief was to come in and create a very simple bar menu for locals and tourists to have a drink and relax – some oysters, olives, nuts, island smoked fish dips, things like that, and only utilising island produce.”
 
“The biggest thing was to somehow showcase the island and create the kind of event that would pull tourists and the locals – and so we ended up creating an open fire cooking experience that we now do weekly at our Friday Night BBQ,” Pip said.
 
Pip’s barbecue experience is an open fire trellis in the style of Argentine chef Francis Mallmann. Local producers supply eggs, greens from their gardens, floral arrangements and edible herbs and flowers; and on the afternoon of our visit, Craig the fisherman drops off six gummy sharks. Now Pip also has the advantage of the local abattoir where she directly sources island beef, lamb and wallaby to showcase over flames.

Flinders Island Wharf Restaurant has included a roster of Australia’s best chefs including David Moyle, Jo Barrett and Alanna Sapwell

Flinders Island Wharf Restaurant has included a roster of Australia’s best chefs including David Moyle, Jo Barrett and Alanna Sapwell

“People come here expecting a restaurant experience and what they get is this very kind of rustic trellis hung with Quoin Farm beef, seaweed, gummy sharks, and local wallaby,” Pip said.
Pip Sumbak prepares Quoin Farm beef for her Friday Night BBQ at Flinders Island Wharf

Pip Sumbak prepares Quoin Farm beef for her Friday Night BBQ at Flinders Island Wharf

I can assure you that, having experienced Pip’s Friday Night BBQ, what ensues is a feast of epic proportions and a stunning showcase of Flinders Island produce.
 
“I was always drawn to experience style cooking – I like people to experience real food, to know where it came from and I love the reaction that people have watching their food get cooked on the trellis.”
 
“My first activity when I arrived was to get off the plane and go straight to the abattoir to meet them and understand exactly what they do. Having this direct relationship means that I can ask for specific cuts and preparations so it’s easy for me to carve on the night.”

“Living on the island has reminded me how important provenance is; we know the abattoir, we know the farmers, and that’s really special. What I take from this experience is that knowing how your meat is raised and killed is important – and that it tastes a hell of a lot better when you know where it’s from,” Pip said.

Pip’s first point of call when arriving on the island was to visit the abattoir

Pip’s first point of call when arriving on the island was to visit the abattoir

On their plans for the future, Jo is characteristically ambitious and upbeat.
 
“Medium term we would like to renovate more ground, we’re 65% improved at the moment on this block and it would be great to put in another 100 hectares of improved pasture. We’d love to buy some more land and to build the herd to 1,500 – 2,000 breeding cows – our aim is to keep improving and growing our herd.”
 
“Ultimately, we’d love to establish our own beef brand. That’s the dream; establishing our own brand and overseeing the entire process – working with the chefs who are cooking it and seeing our beef on the plate. We think it’s a really premium product and that’s what I’m really passionate about,” Jo said.

Quoin Farm - a story that almost writes itself and a business primed to launch its own beef brand

Quoin Farm – a story that almost writes itself and a business primed to launch its own beef brand

Hot Plates

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Black Angus striploin on the bone with herbs d’Provence butter & frites at Bosco

Black Angus striploin on the bone with herbs d’Provence butter & frites at Bosco

Shiny new to the Newstead restaurant scene, Bosco opened in October 2023 in a converted warehouse on Austin Street. From the team behind Bar Alto, the venue offers high ceilings, black brick walls and blackwood benches and tables – the dark interiors brought spectacularly to life by an open hearth with a custom made parrilla grill and open-fire oven.

 
 
Executive chef Sajith Vengateri has spent 30 years cooking in kitchens around the world including time in the Carribean and, more recently, a 15-year stint at Bar Alto.
 
“Bosco is loosely based on the foods of the coastal regions of France, Spain and Italy – showcasing the best local Queensland produce and cooking it simply over wood and charcoal. Our dry-aged black angus striploin on the bone is cooked over the parrilla on wood sourced from Stanthorpe,” Sajith said.
 
The blushing medium rare steak is sliced off the bone then topped with herb d’Provence butter made in house with a whack of herbs and other secret ingredients. A burning hot Bosco branding iron is pulled from the fire and used to melt the butter – smoke curls up into the rafters carrying with it the succulent scent of melted butter and herbs.
 
Served with ribbon-thin hand cut chips and a house-made veal jus, the dish is the epitome of simplicity done to perfection.

 

Lamb rump with smoked harissa yoghurt, herb oil & jus at Allonda

Lamb rump with smoked harissa yoghurt, herb oil & jus at Allonda

Open near on 18 months, Allonda is the sister-restaurant to NOTA Restaurant and Wine Bar located across the city in Paddington. Tucked away in a laneway space, the venue seats 90 and offers diners a European-inspired menu including a burrata bar.

 
 
Chef Sam Todd started his cooking apprenticeship at 15 and has cooked around Europe and Brisbane, finding himself now heading up the kitchen at Allonda.
 
“Allonda is focused on good service and good food offering small plates, pastas and large format mains – it’s casual with a bit of flair. The meaning of the word allonda is when you achieve the perfect balance of stock, butter, and cheese in a risotto – so there is a theme of balance in all we do.”
 
Margra lamb rump comes in whole to the venue and is cut down to spec, brined in a saltwater solution overnight, and then gently sous vide. The rump portions are then finished on the chargrill for service and served like a spectacularly colourful work of art with smoked harissa yoghurt, herb oil and jus.

 
 

What’s Good in the Hood

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BONDI

 

No other suburb encapsulates Postcard Perfect Sydney quite like this beachside village – even when filming in sideways rain and blistering wind.

 
The city’s best-looking suburb on and off the beach, here’s what’s Good in the Bondi Hood.

THE PROMENADE

 
Bondi Pavilion Shop, 4a Queen Elizabeth Drive, Bondi Beach
promenadebondibeach.com
 
This is some serious Bondi real estate. The Promenade, the largest beachside restaurant in Australia no less, is a neutral pallet of creams and beiges against the azure of Bondi Beach. Find it inside the heritage listed Bondi Pavilion, which has been a mainstay in one form or another of the beachside community since 1911
 
Equally, chef Chris Benedet (ex-Cirrus) offers up a very serious beef tartare. He mixes hand-chopped Westholme wagyu with a mix of pickled enoki mushrooms, mirin-soaked capers, fine herbs and house-fermented chilli and tops it all off with an egg yolk. On the side, smashed herby potatoes and an orb of puffy bread. Perfect carb-to-meat ratio.

TOTTI’S

 
283 Bondi Road, Bondi
merivale.com
 
Owner Justin Hemmes and executive chef Mike Eggert have most definitely cracked the code when it comes to that elusive combo of ‘beach pub, but make it fancy, delicious and approachable’. Find this unicorn out the back of the Royal Hotel. It’s the mix of cream linen in the restaurant and high viz during tradie hour in the main bar that makes Totti’s so very good. That, and the tender wagyu schnitzel served with a watercress side salad and a cheek of lemon.
 
Elsewhere, there’s the venue top-seller of gentle lamb ragu tossed through silky, house-made pappardelle, and the heftier smoked brisket ravioli. Can’t snag a rez in Bondi? There’s also Totti’s in the CBD, and Totti’s Rozelle.

ICEBERGS DINING ROOM AND BAR

 
1 Notts Avenue, Bondi Beach
idrb.com
 
Welcome to Icebergs, restaurateur Maurice Terzini’s stunning cliffside restaurant where there are no bad views, and no bad snacks. Underneath the restaurant, there’s the Bondi Icebergs pool, famous for its swimmers who pound the lanes year-round. Indulge under executive chef Alex Prichard, with the signature salt-crusted rib eye steak and tableside mustard service. The dining room is a make-a-booking-or-be-sorely-disappointed kinda deal, and for good reason. Between that breezy Italian-leaning menu, linen-clad staff and those ocean views, it’s a hot ticket.
 
After a recent renovation, the bar has become a draw in-and-of itself. It’s here you’ll find a juicy cheeseburger on a potato bun, hotdog with perfect snap, a rump cap steak, and a lineup of very delicious cocktails. No need to book, just drop by from the beach for a serve of skin-on skinny fries with those same stunning view. Bliss.

THE DEPOT

 
132A Warners Avenue, Bondi Beach
link.com.au
 
Bondi has always been a strange but fabulous mix of wellnessmania and party vibes. And nowhere recognises that quite the way they do at the Depot. Guy (you might recognise the chef, surfer and free-diver from his show, Bondi Harvest) and Heather Turland (former gold medal marathon runner) run the joint.
 
It’s more than a cafe, it’s a hub where locals and visitors alike stop by for a green smoothie or a margarita; a 12-hour braised brisket, cheese and chilli jam toastie; or chai infused porridge. A chocolate, jam and almond croissant (so wrong it’s right) or a red rice nourish bowl. It’s that high-low mix that has people coming back. That, and a dining room that feels more like a lounge room filled with plants and cookbooks, surf mags and the smell of fresh-baked goods. Drag us away.

TAQIZA

 
The Hub at 75, Shop UG.03/79 Hall Street, Bondi Beach
taqiza.com.au
 
Taco party by name, taco party by nature. This mini taqueria, down the Hub precinct where you’ll also find Pasticceria Papa, Gelato Messina, and Da Orazio (more on that later), services the area with a staggering mescal and tequila selection (try the Tommy’s margarita), not to mention the birria taco. A specialty of Jalisco, that’s slow cooked beef served with a tomato-y dried chilli and coriander-heavy broth. That beef, all shredded and pull-apart tender, is combined with Oaxaca cheese, and placed on a fresh tortilla, painted in beef fat and then grilled till crisp. It’s served with that broth on the side, which is further amped up with chickpeas and egg noodles. Hot, spicy, moreish. Or check out Carbon, the group’s newly renovated Mexican steak house concept on Bondi Rd.

BONDI TRATT

 
34 Campbell Parade, Bondi Beach
bonditrattoria.com.au
 
One of Bondi’s oldest running and most loved venues. Affordable, casual and all-welcoming, chef Joe Pavlovich dishes up a menu that speaks to the all-day vibe of the place. A venue that’s long been loved by Sydney hospitality and Bondi locals as a recovery spot, staff here know how to deal with tender customers.
 
Try the lamb kofta pizza – parmesan, provolone, cavalo nero, kalamata olives, caramelised onion and spicy lamb mince, and a drizzle of harissa spiked yoghurt combine to offer an oozy, cheesy, hot and spicy combo guaranteed to bring the most lifeless soul back from the dead. All in a room directly across the road from the beach. Take a swim, book a table, rule the day.

DA ORAZIO

 
The Hub, Boheme, Shop LG 09, 75/79 Hall Street, Bondi Beach
daorazio.com.au/
 
Plenty will know chef Orazio D’elia for his focaccia and woodfired pizza – and well they should, those puffy, blistered bases are hard to beat. But consider also the arrosticini – the Abbruzzese special sees tiny pieces of salty lamb skewered and cooked gently over charcoal, served in their own ceramic skewer jug, ready for a squeeze of lemon. There’s also the wagyu collar ragu tossed and layered with silky kerchiefs of fresh pasta served over whipped ricotta. Long lunches are the order of the day here. Start with a spritz and settle in.

BURGER PARK BY FISH SHOP

 
Shop 3/17 Warners Avenue, Bondi Beach
burgerpark.com.au
 
Chef Joel Bennetts’ brand new burger joint offers both on and off-menu fun, in a cute corner Bondi locale. If you know what to ask for, you might find yourself with a double smashburger, the patties all lacy and crisp, with a chunky tartare-esque burger sauce, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles and white onion on a potato bun from Organic Bread Bar.
 
On-menu, there’s Bennetts’ tribute to the old school milk bar works burger with a chunky grass-fed beef pattie, thin slices of pickled pineapple, and salt baked beetroot, all on one of those locally made potato buns. A juicy, delicious, updated Aussie classic. Find yourself at Fish Shop but craving a steak? The team are adding one to the menu – expect a Ranger’s Valley sirloin served with lashings of salsa verde butter.

What’s Good in the Hood

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ADELAIDE HILLS

 

You could argue South Australia is one of the most diverse states in the country when it comes to its landscape, its food production, and its incredible wine scene.

 
You’d be hard-pressed, however, to find anywhere quite as enchanting as the Adelaide Hills. A real natural beauty, in every sense of the word.
 
Here’s What’s Good in the Hood Hills.

Myffy in at Magill Estate – the home of Penfolds

Myffy in at Magill Estate – the home of Penfolds

 

THE SCENIC HOTEL

 
Old Norton Summit Rd, Norton Summit 
thescenichotel.com.au
 
A very special pub experience tucked away in Norton Summit. Sit on the balcony and watch the lights of Adelaide twinkle below, warm your toes in front of the open fire in the dining room, indulge in a few rounds of snooker (be warned: locals take it VERY seriously) or grab a group of mates and set up for the afternoon at one of the communal benches in the garden.

The menu is dialled in for comfort. Blushing slices of rump steak are served with local carrots, roasted until sticky. Make sure to order the lamb pie with its spectacularly short crust pastry. They’re all about utilising the whole beast here, breaking down a whole lamb, using the leg, shoulder and backstrap for roasts; whatever is left is minced for that pie. Oh, and don’t miss the juicy American-style cheeseburger with housemade ketchup.

SUMMERTOWN ARISTOLOGIST

 
1097 B26, Summertown 5141
thesummertownaristologist.com
 
A closed loop restaurant specialising in regenerative farming part-owned by renowned winemaker Anton Van Klopper, the winemaker behind Lucy Margaux wines. Hyper local, hyper seasonal, hyper delicious.

 
The menu changes weekly – sometimes daily. And while the restaurant has had a rotation of chefs pass through the kitchen, chef-buddies Jude Hughes and Calum Horn have settled in for the foreseeable future. The menu might include a barnsley chop, or hogget with mustard and lentils – the kitchen really is at the mercy of whatever the seasons throw at them. On our visit, that translated to a delicately made haggis (AKA Scottish incense) served with leeks, carrots and charred toast. Incredible. 

THE LANE VINEYARD

 
5 Ravenswood Ln, Hahndorf
thelane.com.au
 
Chef Tom Robinson (ex-Four in Hand under Colin Fassnidge, back in the day) works with very special produce at this winery-restaurant, located on The Lane vineyard. A beautiful, open plan setting allows the sun to filter in, making it a gorgeous setting for a long lunch. Horseradish, specially grown for Jurlique at the farm next door, is usually reserved for beauty products but today it’s shaved over gently cured furls of pastrami.

House-made sourdough is served with a very respectable amount of cultured smoked garlic butter. Elsewhere, an addictive mountain pepper brown sauce is served alongside house-made boerewors – part of a nose to tail experience showcasing Angus beef produced five minutes down the road by The Lane CEO Jared Stringer. 

DIRTY DORIS DINER

 
6 Strathalbyn Rd, Aldgate
dirtydoris.com.au
 
Generosity is the name of the game at this diner, where diner food rules. Four words for you: Breakfast Ice-Cream Sundae Negroni. Yes, it’s real, and yes, you can get it at this cute little Aldgate eatery where more is most definitely more. Whether that’s breakfast for supper (there’s a whole page devoted to pancakes, and you can order them all day) or supper for breakfast – perhaps the butcher’s cut steak special and a glass of wine?

 
To take away, there are tins of fancy maple syrup, local coffee beans and hot sauces, everything you need to up the umami quotient in your home kitchen. What started as chef Denny Bradden’s last-minute dinner after a busy service has now turned into a menu favourite. Yes, all hail the cheesy ragu toastie and those that order her. May it be a glorious reign. 

CRAFERS HOTEL

 
8 Main St, Crafers SA
crafershotel.com.au
 
A gorgeous sandstone-hewn boutique hotel built inside a heritage pub with one of the most impressive wine cellars in the country. There’s plenty of representation from the locals including Gentle Folk, Ochota Barrels and Lucy Margaux and if you’re really keen to push the boat out, the grand crus go as deep as your pockets will allow.

 
A jewel in the Hills offering boutique accommodation upstairs and fireside dining downstairs, you could really lose yourself for a few evenings here. There’s no need to leave, really. The menu spans a mix of old favourites all with a strong French accent (hello, French onion soup, crumbed chevre and steak frites) with a few choice snacks if you don’t want to leave the bar’s toasty open fire. There’s even a blackberry clafouti for afters. 

PATCH KITCHEN & GARDEN

 
143 Mount Barker Rd, Stirling SA
patchkitchen.com.au
 
Chef-owner Andrew Davies (he’s the guy behind Adelaide favourites Osteria Oggi, Press Food and Wine and Bread and Bone) is the mastermind behind this sun-drenched restaurant, set in an old sandstone architect studio. Originally the local post office and many business iterations since – it is now a haven for locals and visitors alike serving a seasonal, locally produced menu.

 
Dishes here are elegant in their simplicity. Goat ragu dresses house-made gnocchetti sardi with bitter greens; braised oxtail with root vegetables and creamy mash wards off the winter chill, and a rich chocolate tart punctuates proceedings nicely. The perfect setup for a long lunch.

Tasty Meats

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BRESAOLA PIZZA

 

ELEMENTI | PADDINGTON

Three friends were sitting in a bar and decided that they were going to open a restaurant. Enter Elementi, a neighbourhood Italian restaurant in Paddington.

 
 
Open for three years, the venue is built around a beautiful wood-fired oven and designed to feel like you are at a friend’s house. With 70 percent of their customers showing up as regulars, they’re obviously getting it right.
 
“We are an Italian restaurant that serves what Italian’s eat. Our customers like the food and the familiarity that we offer – we know their names and what they like. Our menu changes every three months, but we have weekly specials – a pasta special, a pizza special, a main special – we aim to create trust with our customers and to give them something new every time.”
 
In 2023, chef Stefano Spataro attended the Pizza World Championships in Parma, Italy. He competed against 450 of the world’s best pizza makers finishing 97th – and the number one spot in Australia. Accordingly, the pizza at Elementi is exceptionally good.
 
“Everything I am doing here is based around fresh ingredients and using produce as local as possible. We try and make and process as much as possible in house. Nothing comes out of a tin. My natural sourdough starter I have been feeding for six years, and the lady who gave it to me had been feeding it for five years prior – he even has a name, Tutti Frutti.”
 
This simple and classic Italian pizza is built on a sourdough base with fresh mozzarella, fior di latte, taleggio and a sprinkle of parmesan. It hits the blistering hot oven, fueled by Queensland sourced red iron bark, then topped with paper thin slices of fresh bresaola, broadleaf rocket, toasted hazelnuts, and balsamic vinegar from Modena.
 
The base is Tipo 00 flour sourdough base, fresh mozzarella, fior di latte, taleggio cheese, sprinkle of parmesan – into the oven – then topped with fresh bresaola, broadleaf rocket, toasted hazelnut and balsamic vinegar from Modena.

OVEN BAKED LAMB SHOULDER

 

GRECA | HOWARD SMITH WHARVES

Taking pride of place on the bustling Howard Smith Wharves precinct, Greca has cemented itself as one of Brisbane’s best loved restaurants and is constantly heaving with hungry diners keen to explore its modern Greek menu.

 
 
Greca is the sister restaurant to the Apollo in Sydney, part of chef and restauranteur Jonathan Barthelmess suite of venues in the Apollo Group. Group Development Chef Oscar Solomon has eight years under his belt with the group, having started his apprenticeship at the Apollo, and now splits his time between Sydney and Brisbane.
 
For Solomon, lamb shoulder is the dish that people want to eat when they head to a Greek restaurant – and with rave reviews in both Sydney and Brisbane, the Apollo or Greca are certainly the place to experience it.
 
Square cut lamb shoulder is rubbed with a house-made spice rub then placed in a tray with tomatoes, dried spices, bay leaf, thyme and cinnamon. Chicken stock and lemon juice are added then it is covered and cooked for 12 hours on very low heat. The next day, the lamb is removed, and the liquid strained off and turned into a lamb reduction. To serve, the shoulder is re-roasted for crispy skin and served with a big dollop of greek yoghurt tzatziki, lemon juice and olive oil.
 
“This lamb shoulder dish exists in two cities, at our sister restaurant the Apollo and here at Greca. I don’t think our restaurants would exist without it – it’s pretty much the cornerstone of the whole restaurant,” Solomon said.

 
 

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Wagyu cooked on Binchotan with Horseradish, Bush Tomato & Emu Egg Sauce

Wagyu cooked on Binchotan with Horseradish, Bush Tomato & Emu Egg Sauce

The Gourmet Traveller 2022 Restaurant of the Year and 2023 South Australian Restaurant of the Year – Restaurant Botanic sits nestled amongst 51-hectares of the picturesque Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

 
A meal here will take at least four hours with over 20 flavour combinations by chef Justin James showcasing unique Australian ingredients.
 
Perhaps one of those combinations will include a piece of cross bred wagyu from the Rangers Valley WX series – where one great ancient breed meets another to create flavour, performance and quality.
 
Portions of striploin or ribeye (depending on availability) are cooked directly on Japanese binchotan charcoal until medium rare, rested, and sliced. Each slice is brushed with bush tomato brown butter and finished with a spice mix of black pepper, fennel, coriander, juniper and Davidson plum.
 
The wagyu is plated on a bed of juniper in a bowl, alongside Illawarra plum that has been covered in green ants. The entire bowl is smoked with juniper from the garden and covered with a lid to capture the smoke. On the side, horseradish leaves are dressed in bush tomato and a sauce made of cured emu egg, seasoned with wattle seed and bee pollen.
 
Chef Justin James says the dish is a balance of technique and theatrics – but essentially, it is all about the deliciousness of Australia’s best produce.
 
“The dish showcases multiple techniques while keeping the integrity of the wagyu; most importantly it is delicious and fun to eat. The guest lifts the lid and encounters the smoke of the juniper – it is recommended to grab a slice of beef, wrap the horseradish leaf around it and dip into the emu egg sauce. The plum is intended to enjoy at the end as a palate cleanser – something light after the rich wagyu,” Justin said.

 

Roasted Lamb Shank with Peas a la Francaise, Onion Gravy & Yorkies

Roasted Lamb Shank with Peas a la Francaise, Onion Gravy & Yorkies

Tucked away in the hinterland about 45 minutes from Byron Bay, the Eltham Hotel is rolling out perhaps some of the best pub food in the country.

 
And why wouldn’t it be with star chef Alanna Sapwell-Stone heading up the kitchen? Harnessing her love of nostalgia and putting a special Sapwell spin on things, ensures a menu heavy with highlights, and a line out the door.
 
Case in point, a lamb roast dish well and truly worth travelling for any day of the week. Lamb shanks are browned all over in a hot pan then slowly roasted in a low oven with mirepoix, stock, and red wine. The fork tender shanks are served on a bed of creamy mashed potato with onion gravy, peas a la Francaise, and a huge Yorkshire pudding for mopping up every last morsel.
 
It’s a challenging time for many and as the cost of living continues to soar, we seek the familiarity and comfort of days gone by. Eating evokes memories and dishes like this one meet perfectly at the intersection of craving comfort, budgetary caution, and rapturous reward.

 
 

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The latest venue from the team behind Bistro 916 and Pellegrino 2000 channels New York steakhouse vibes with big steaks, big booths and big booze.

 
But it’s not just steaks on the plates – and we do love a good steak around here – at Clam Bar the Hot Plate is a large silver slab gloriously adorned with thick slices of juicy blushing lamb.
 
The Barnsley Chop of Gundagai Lamb will set you back $54 but every bite will be worth it. A thick cut of lamb from the saddle including a cross section of loin, fillet and belly; at Clam Bar the Barnsley is a beast. Simply salted, oiled and cooked over flames, the produce does the talking. Sliced and served with your choice of condiment – for us it was anchovy butter for that extra dash of decadence. Don’t forget to add a selection of sides because, balance.
 

 

If a roaring furnace and the salubrious stoking of red-hot coals gets you going, then Arkhe is the place for you.

 
Settle in to watch the kitchen team, led by chef Jake Kellie, artfully use the various elements of fire to bring to life exceptional South Australian produce. Case in point – this wagyu rump cap by way of Mayura Station.
 
At Arkhe, they use an on/off method of cooking. First the whole rump cap is seared on all sides over fire than it takes turns in and out of the wood fired oven for multiple periods of cooking and resting. The idea is to bring the meat up to temperature slowly while developing a really good crust. The result? Perfection. The thick hunk of beef is evenly cooked from top to bottom, end to end – perfectly pink and meltingly tender.
 
A Hot Plate to savour – the beef is sliced and served with chestnut mushrooms cooked in a basket on the coals, burnt onion and celeriac.
 

 
 

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MARK BEST SHARES THE LAMB

Australian lamb is renowned for its quality

Australian lamb is renowned for its quality

My enduring memory of Sunday mornings as a kid was being woken by the crackle, pop and smell of a mutton roast in the Sunbeam frypan.

 
The spuds were added to the golden fat fairly early and were only distinguishable by texture and shape due to the amount of lamby goodness they had taken on board. It was a family tradition where the Sunday roast was big enough to go into heavy rotation for the remainder of the week as cold cuts and sandwiches of white bread and cauliflower pickles.
 
Sheep meat has always been part of the Australian appetite and if I had to choose one meat to describe our cultural diet – sheep meat would be it. According to the OECD the global average per capita consumption of sheep meat was 1.8kg, while the average Aussie’s was approximately 5.9kg and rising.
 

Australia has long had an affinity with sheep with the first settler’s relying on them for meat, primarily, and wool being the secondary product. John Macarthur changed that equation establishing the wool industry at Elizabeth Farm in NSW with such success that Australia ‘riding on the sheep's back’ was coined due to the degree of wealth generated by the wool clip.

Things have come full circle however with an industry shift from predominantly wool to an increased emphasis on meat production over the last three decades underpinned by lamb production and corresponding improvements in lambing rates, genetics and carcase weights.
 
Sheep meat’s position in consumer diets around the world varies greatly, subject to a range of cultural, economic, social and geographical factors. It is considered the preferred meat in many countries – especially those with predominantly Muslim populations. Surprisingly – at least to this chef – China has the world’s largest sheep flock with 95 percent of it being consumed locally.
 
In Australia, lamb enjoys strong awareness and preference from a long history of consumption. Immigration and our burgeoning multicultural mix have long been Australia’s strength and accounts for our increasing taste for sheep meat. While traditional mutton is on the decline, there is an increasing consumer demand for Australian lamb within large demographic segments where sheep meat has traditionally constituted a major part of the diet.

Australian White ewes at Tatty Keel – a purpose bred meat sheep

Australian White ewes at Tatty Keel – a purpose bred meat sheep

 
 
As consumers continue to dine out in increasing numbers, demand for sheep meat in foodservice is growing. The quality and diversity of Australian lamb means it is now often the first choice amongst a younger, cashed up dining public. A bonus is that lamb has no religious or cultural restrictions – a distinct advantage in a culturally diverse market. As a protein choice, lamb stands deliciously on its own as a simple grilling or roasting cut – or is a willing cipher for your creativity.
 
It is this broad ability that has me turning to lamb time and again, whether for family or function, there is nothing better than lamb for scalable deliciousness. Here are three of my favourite ways to prepare lamb – raw, roasted, and a wow-factor sub for the Christmas ham.

 

Sichuan-style lamb tartare with nori crisps

 

Serves 6

 
Cooking and eating in China gave me the taste for Pixian or Doubanjiang – otherwise known as Sichuan broad bean paste. Cooked until fragrant with the addition of Sichuan pepper, garlic, ginger, sesame oil and green shallots it makes the perfect, heady counterpoint to the richness of finely diced lamb leg as a Sichuan-style tartare.
 
Make sure to prepare and serve immediately with the nori sheets. On the rare occasion that there are leftovers – it makes an exceptional spicy burger patty.

Ingredients

 
600g boneless lamb leg
10ml cold pressed sesame oil
30g Sichuan broad bean paste (Pixian or Doubanjiang)
10g tomato paste
50g tomato ketchup
120g spring onions
30g chopped ginger
20g chopped garlic
10g Sichuan peppercorns
24 sheets Korean nori sheets
 

Method

 
Trim lamb of all sinew and finely dice. Heat the sesame oil and add Doubanjiang, tomato paste, garlic and ginger and cook quickly until fragrant. Add tomato ketchup. Allow to cool then add to meat. Add finely chopped spring onions (green and white parts) and add to the meat mix. Dry roast Sichuan peppercorns and grind finely then add to the meat. Mix well and adjust seasoning. Serve with nori sheets.

 

Lamb rack with fondue of sweet onions and medjool dates

 

Serves 6

 
For such an exceptional cut of lamb I served a fondue of small white onions finished with finely shredded mint and a compote of Aussie grown Medjool dates. It’s a dish I learned from the great Alain Passard at Arpége and cheekily used to audition for Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.

Lamb Rack Ingredients

 
2 lamb racks
Salt flakes
Freshly ground black pepper
 

Method

 
Carefully remove skin from the fat cap and score fat at 1cm intervals diagonally and then repeat to achieve a fine crosshatch pattern. Don’t cut into the meat. Season liberally with salt and pepper. Roast fat side up at 170c for 40-45 minutes until 60c at the bone. Rest in a warm place for 15 minutes and carve.
 
 

Fondue Ingredients

 
1 bunch green onions
100g salted butter
3 sprigs mint
1 tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground white pepper
100g Medjool dates
50ml orange juice
 

Method

 
Trim the onions and slice very thinly then add to a heavy based pan with the diced butter, salt and pepper. Cover with a cartouche and cook over a low heat until the onions are soft and emulsified with the butter. Thinly slice the mint and add to the onions. Deseed the dates and cut into quarters. Place in a small pan with the orange juice and cook slowly until soft. Serve the lamb with a spoonful of the fondue and date to the side.

Glazed Christmas lamb long leg with mint verde

 

Serves 6

 
I have long been a fan of the traditional long leg – from the H bone to the shank. Leaving the muscles attached means there is less shrinkage and the muscle fibres remain elongated, finer and more tender – just a pro hack chefs. This also presents exceptionally well.
 
This Christmas I will treat the long leg like a ham and score the fat in a traditional cross hatch pattern and stud with cloves. You can use your own glaze recipe or mine made by simmering homemade apricot jam [from dried apricots: if you know, you know] thinned with cider vinegar and spiced with star anise, cinnamon quills and fresh bay leaves. Brush glaze on as you roast the leg for some hours in a slow oven for a true festive delight.

Lamb Leg Ingredients

 
1 lamb long leg
2 tsp salt
1 sprig bay leaves
10g cloves
 

Method

 
Remove the skin from the lamb and score the fat in 2cm intervals. Preheat the oven to 160 Celsius. Stud the lamb with cloves at intervals and pin bay leaves. Place the lamb onto a baking tray and season well. Brush on the glaze and cook for 1.45 – 2 hours depending on your preferred doneness. Brush on the glaze every 15 minutes or so. Serve with roasted potatoes and the mint salsa verde.
 
 

Glaze Ingredients

 
100g apricot jam
6 star anise
1 tsp white peppercorns
2 cinnamon quills
50ml cider vinegar
20ml light soy
50ml water
 

Method

 
Bring all ingredients to a boil and then leave to infuse for at least an hour
 
 

Verde Ingredients

 
1 bunch mint
3 tbls tiny capers
1 tin anchovies
1 lemon juice and zest
100ml olive oil
 

Method

 
Pick the mint and then blend with remaining ingredients to a smooth paste.

 
 

People Places Plates

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Nagesh Seethiah

Manzé

Nagesh Seethiah outside his restaurant Manze in North Melbourne.

Nagesh Seethiah outside his restaurant Manzé in North Melbourne

“I’ve been thinking about goat,” says Nagesh Seethiah. Specifically, he’s been thinking about New Year’s Day in Mauritius, when he was growing up.

 
The whole family would get together with several other families at his maternal grandmother’s place in Cottage, on the northern side of the island. New Year’s is big in Mauritius, bigger than Christmas, and a big celebration called for a goat or two, with the families making a day of it, everyone pitching in to cook every part of it.
 
“For lunch, you’d have all the cuts that are easy to cook quickly, including the offal, and then we’d break down and set aside the cuts that need longer cooking, like the legs and the shoulders, for dinner.” Seethiah’s mum, Canta, liked to take charge of lunch, the specialty being a dish called cari endan, or ‘inside curry’. “Each piece of offal would get sliced separately, the heart, the liver, marinated in lots of ginger and garlic, chillies, salt, and some of my grandma’s masala,” says Seethiah. “It’s quite a light, bright sort of masala, with cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon really prominent in it.”
 

Goat leg and liver at Manzé - Nagesh recalls New Year’s Day in Mauritius as a big celebration that called for a goat or two and cooking every part of it.

Goat leg and liver at Manzé – Nagesh recalls New Year’s Day in Mauritius as a big celebration that called for a goat or two and cooking every part of it

Let’s pause here for a moment for a word on Mauritius and its food. Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa, 1,100km east of Madagascar. The island is small – about the size of Maui, or a 30th of the size of Tasmania – and when it was first discovered by Arab sailors around the year 975, it was uninhabited. The Dutch took possession in 1598, then the French took over in 1715, before losing it to the English in 1810, and it remained a primarily plantation-based colony of the United Kingdom until independence in 1968.
 
Under French rule the population was made up largely of enslaved peoples from Mozambique, Madagascar and Zanzibar, brought over to work the plantations, while British owners of sugarcane estates brought in indentured workers and soldiers from India. Today Mauritius is a developed democracy with a culturally diverse population. It’s the only country in Africa where Hinduism is the majority religion; school is taught in French and English, and most people speak Mauritian Creole at home.
 
In the kitchen, the influences of Indian, Creole, French and Hakka Chinese traditions come together. Rice and bread are staples, and daubes, patisserie, dim sum and spring rolls share space in the national cuisine with biryanis, curries, and other Indian and Tamil dishes. That daube has evolved in the centuries since French occupation to feature plenty of ginger and green chilli along with the thyme and tomatoes, and will more likely be made with lamb or chicken instead of the beef you’d see in Provence.
 

At Manzé, the restaurant and wine bar Seethiah opened in North Melbourne in 2021, the set menu might open with poutou, a fluffy steamed rice and coconut cake descended from southern India’s puttu, served here topped with a coconut chutney and pickled beetroot, alongside gram boulli, “boiled chickpeas” with chilli, and a golden fritter of sprouting broccoli with hot sauce.
 
“It’s about framing what’s available to us with Mauritian flavours,” says Seethiah. Filling a samosa with cauliflower, for example, rather than the traditional potato and pea curry, puréeing the stalks so it’s got that starchy base, and then putting raw romanesco through it.
 
 

“My food is really just pulling on those threads of flavour from our childhood and adapting them to the ingredients we have here.”

 
 
Seethiah makes a superb broth, coaxing worlds of flavour from the likes of Malabar spinach and ginger, or okra, choko and tomato – often using ingredients grown for Manzé. This might be followed by a daube of wild venison or a grilled fish. Lamb is a regular feature of his menus; blackened rump fragrant with masala, perhaps, showered with ribbons of sorrel.
 
“We’ve also grilled saddle of goat at Manzé, marinating it on the bone, treating it like lamb, and that was really good,” he says. A sear on the fire and then a slow smoke, and taking it to the same pinkness of lamb: delicious. “We’ve served goat cutlets at our pop-ups, too, with lots of pepper, and they taste very similar to lamb. Tastier, even.”

At Manzé, Nagesh frames local and seasonal produce with Mauritian flavours.

At Manzé, Nagesh frames local and seasonal produce with Mauritian flavours

The thing that perhaps keeps more people from cooking goat is its gaminess, Seethiah reckons, and that little bit of extra chew. “But I think for our application, where we can lean on strong marinades and spices, it works really well. I don’t find goat that far a step from lamb, really.”
 
Back on the island on New Year’s Day, meanwhile, the goat offal has been marinating in spices and aromats, and it’s time to cook. Nagesh’s mum stir-fries the offal over a wok burner in the outside kitchen. It’s a dry, quite spice-heavy stir-fry, south-Indian style, with plenty of onion.
 
“Everyone sits down to eat this lunch of quite spicy offal, and then we go pretty much straight into it from lunch, setting up again, breaking down the rest of the goat and setting things up for a longer cook – a braise, really saucy curries, and that’s where the neck and the shoulder and leg come into play.”

Goat at Manzé is prepared with strong marinades and spices - here goat leg is rubbed in Masala spices and cooked over coals.

Goat at Manzé is prepared with strong marinades and spices – here goat leg is rubbed in Masala spices and cooked over coals

There’s a salad of cucumber and chilli on the table with some green mango through it, and the day is peppered with little fried things and other snacks. “Chilli bites, which are almost like a falafel mix made of split peas, with fried chilli and spring onion through it. Someone will have gone fishing and there’ll be vindaye, which is something like fish pickled in turmeric and mustard.
 
Seethiah ran a play on the New Year celebration for one of the pop-ups he did at Rockwell and Sons in Collingwood, braising the leg and shoulder of a goat overnight, and then grilling the liver and the heart before folding them through the shredded meat and the sauce, all over a base of shallots, ginger, garlic, lots of little Thai chillies and curry leaves. “We cooked off the base fresh for each plate,” he says.
 
 

“That was probably one of the most intense nights of cooking I’ve ever had – so hot and spicy every time you’re facing the stove, but so delicious.”

 
 
This was quite a while ago – three or four years, perhaps – and it’s useful to understand that Manzé existed as an idea and a series of pop-ups long before it settled into a bricks-and-mortar site. Seethiah is only 29 – young, perhaps, to be a restaurant owner – yet his path to being a restaurateur and heading a kitchen of his own hasn’t been perfectly linear, and cooking food from Mauritius was by no means always part of the plan.

Goat offal is marinated in spices and aromats then cooked hot and fast.

Goat offal is marinated in spices and aromats then cooked hot and fast

Nagesh Seethiah was born in northern Mauritius. His parents, Ram and Canta, moved the family to New Zealand when he was eight, to a hobby farm in Coatesville, just outside Auckland. They ran a few sheep and cows on the property and lots of chickens, grew their own vegetables and did a home-kill of a beast once or twice a year.
 
Seethiah didn’t know what he wanted to do when he finished high school, other than take his BMX and do a tour of the South Island, but he had a cousin studying at the ANU, so, with his parents’ encouragement, he moved to Canberra to study law and art history.
 
Australia gave Seethiah his first taste of hospitality life. He worked at Lonsdale Street Roasters in Braddon and at Stand by Me in Lyons, where he made the move from front-of-house to the kitchen. At Bar Rochford he worked under Ian Poy, a Noma alumnus, and then with Louis Couttoupes, a former public servant fresh from a stint at Au Passage in Paris, studying all the while. “I went to my graduation that year, had lunch with my parents and my partner, Sabrina, and then went straight back to do service at Bar Rochford.”
 
At the time, by his own estimation, he had no idea what he was doing. “I shouldn’t have been put in charge of a kitchen in my second ever cooking job, but Nick, the owner, was very trusting,” he says “I’ve come to learn, running my own venue, that a lot of the time you’re making this stuff up as you go along.”
 
The next year Sabrina landed a great job in Melbourne, and she and Seethiah made the move to Victoria. “We moved here on a Friday and I was working on the floor at Belles Hot Chicken in Fitzroy on the Monday.” The two years he spent working the floor at Anchovy, Thi Le and Jia-Yen Lee’s restaurant in Richmond, was a key inspiration. “I learned a lot there,” he says. “About making things from scratch. About Thi’s approach to cooking the food of her heritage. The way she gives that food the same or more attention, care and detail that we’re expected to put into other cuisines.”

Smoked goat leg and Manzé house masala.

Smoked goat leg and Manzé house masala

Let’s pull focus here for a moment: what is it about the food of Mauritius, say, or Vietnam, that could make it seem less deserving of attention than Italian, for example, or French food? “In our cultures we treat food as sustenance, it’s something that’s done at home,” Seethiah says.
 
 

“We acknowledge that our mothers are good cooks, but we don’t place a lot of value on learning to cook that food, or on food having cultural value. It’s about spending time in our careers caring so much about other people’s food, and then flipping the script and treating our own food that way. Seeing that our food deserves as much attention and detail, with ingredients and a price-point to match.”

 
 
There’s challenges here. Even Seethiah’s parents aren’t entirely used to the idea of the food of Mauritius as restaurant cuisine. “They support it, but they don’t quite see the point.” Then there’s the Mauritian people who come into Manzé and tell him that what he’s cooking is too expensive and isn’t really Mauritian food. There’s also the guy on the internet who likes to say that what Seethiah is doing is inauthentic, a joke, and that he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing – a curious charge to lay against a chef born and bred on the island.

Memories of Mauritius - goat gets the Nagesh touch at Manzé.

Memories of Mauritius – goat gets the Nagesh touch at Manzé

But there’s also the Mauritians who visit Manzé and delight in seeing the flavours they grew up with presented in a new light. “We had a couple come in a few weeks ago, maybe a bit older than I am, and they said, ‘we don’t know you, but we’re so proud of you, thank you for doing this’. That made me think, well, some people might not like it, but there is value in this.”
 
This is food Seethiah learned to cook from his mum and his dad, and from his grandmother. It’s a conversation in progress. “I’ll be on the phone to Mum on a Monday, saying, hey, I’m thinking of doing this. Mum will say, ‘that won’t work’, and then I’ll do it anyway, and then she’ll come in a few weeks later, try it, and say, ‘oh wow, that’s good’.

Stir fried goat liver with cumin and curry leaf at Manzé.

Stir fried goat liver with cumin and curry leaf at Manzé

For Nagesh Seethiah, the feeling that he’s on the right track comes most powerfully when he’s at the stove and suddenly feels transported from the restaurant kitchen in North Melbourne back to being eight years old again in Mauritius.
 
 

“I feel a really intense wave of nostalgia, and I suddenly feel really proud. I think, this is it: this is what we’re chasing. Scaling that up, and feeding 150 people a week with that feeling – that’s when it feels right.”

 
 

 

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Ben Russell

Rothwell’s Bar & Grill

 
 

When it comes down to it, a lot of comfort is about familiarity. Dad’s curry. Mum’s soup. The smell of something cooking away on the stove or in the oven at your nan’s house when you’re a kid, or the things you ordered at those first restaurants you visited with the family.

There’s certainly more than a few Australians today who get a bit misty-eyed thinking about the heyday of the prawn cocktail and the steak Diane because they were there for it, living in that time and place. But what about the familiarity of dishes that didn’t get cooked in your house, or the other places your family went to eat? How do you explain their hold on the public imagination?
 
The Beef Wellington at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill in Brisbane is a case in point. It’s a dish of British/French origin that has been around for at least a hundred years. Why exactly is it enjoying an unlikely renaissance right now at the hottest restaurant in the humid, subtropical climes of the Queensland capital?
 
For Ben Russell, there’s no mystery to its success: it’s about quality and it’s about deliciousness. A chef who has worked right across the spectrum of the familiar and the unfamiliar in his life in restaurant kitchens, Russell takes the view that the magic of dishes like Beef Wellington lies in taking combinations of ingredients and techniques that have stood the test of time, and honouring them with cooking that is all about quality produce and careful, honest preparation.

The Beef Wellington at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill, Brisbane.

The Beef Wellington at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill, Brisbane.

On his menu at Rothwell’s there’s a French onion dip among the appetisers, and an entrée that brings together prawn, avocado, lettuce, and cocktail sauce. There’s Caesar salad blessedly free of grilled chicken. There’s Martinis and Bloody Marys at the bar, there’s a seafood platter to share, and there’s trifle and madelines for dessert. But it’s about timeless elegance and not a retro trip.
 
 
 

“It’s not about trickery here,” says Russell, “you know what you’re in for.” There’s no side-eye, no riff or remix – the bat is played straight, and the result is dishes that surprise and delight with their freshness and immediacy.

 
 
 
A beautifully lit room, with lots of marble, big chandeliers, dark-green leather booths and well-chosen jazz, makes for a fitting backdrop. With Dan Clark, the operator behind 1889 Enoteca and one of Australia’s savviest wine importers, backing the place, the food is complemented by a list rich in treasures – 18-year-old Krug and JJ Prum riesling on by the glass, magnums and jeroboams of Gravner and Cornelissen, and a sea of Burgundy.
 
The thing about classics is that they’re classics for a reason. “They may not always be prepared in the best possible way from the finest possible ingredients but it’s easy to understand their appeal,” write Simon Hopkinson and Lindsay Bareham in their book, The Prawn Cocktail Years. “If one bothers to prepare these and other dishes that predate the whim of fashion in food then it is a revelation how good they can be.”

Rothwell’s Dining Room: a big-city restaurant replete with marble, chandeliers, dark green leather and jazz on the stereo.

Rothwell’s Dining Room: a big-city restaurant replete with marble, chandeliers, dark green leather and jazz on the stereo.

Which brings us, of course, to Ben Russell’s Beef Wellington. Here’s how he does it.
 
First, the beef fillet. Russell goes grain-fed because he thinks it’s firmer and holds up a little better in the way it cooks in the Wellington, which essentially steams inside the pastry. He sears the beef in a hot pan, brushing it liberally with Dijon mustard.
 
Next comes the mushroom duxelles – rather than slicing and pan-frying the mushrooms in batches, Russell roasts them off whole in a pot to cook all the water out of them and to intensify their flavour, then blends them and presses them for a couple of hours to squeeze out any remaining moisture.
 
Then the crêpes: flour, eggs, milk and a little bit of beurre noisette. He lays a crêpe out on the bench, layers on about a centimetre of the mushrooms, then the beef fillet. It’s rolled, wrapped in clingfilm and goes into the fridge for a couple of hours to set before he wraps it in a layer of butter puff pastry, egg-washes it, and then adds another layer of lattice pastry, and more egg wash.
 
Then it goes into the Rational at 200 degrees till it hits an internal temperature of 35 degrees. Wrapped as it is in pastry, the meat comes up to a nice medium rare as it rests. The thickness of the pastry is the tricky part, Russell says: if it’s too thick, it won’t cook through before the beef is done.

It’s served with a red wine sauce – red wine and port reduced with lots of shallots and thyme on a veal-stock base.
 
 

“We carve it in half in the kitchen, and it goes out on a large oval plate looking very decadent with an antique silver jug of the sauce on the side – it smells rich and warm with the puff pastry and the mushrooms and the red wine sauce.”

 
 
“When you’re eating it, even though that layer of Dijon is just brushed on, it’s something that I think is a pleasant surprise. Fillet steak, mushrooms and pastry are not necessarily hero ingredients on their own but together they’re sensational. It’s an experience to savour. It’s a good time.”
 
To drink? Dan Clark imports some pretty radical wines but he says he likes to pour classics with classics. “Top-end Yarra Valley and Margaret River cabernet work really well with the Wellington. Cullen, Moss Wood, Wantirna. Or brighter shiraz – Dune in McLaren Vale and Izway from the Barossa Valley do the job nicely as well.”
 
To game it out even further, Russell suggests Martinis at the bar beforehand, then settling into a booth for some raw seafood and oysters or a crab salad, maybe the tagliatelle with sea urchin, then your Wellington and sides to share, maybe a tarte tatin or a crème brulée afterwards. “And then we have an Armagnac trolley, so if you want to get really comfortable, we’ve got bottles there dating back to the 1920s. And that’s your Rothwell’s experience.”

Ben Russell grew up in Burnie in the northwest of Tasmania. His first cooking job was at 18 at the fabled Jimmy Watson’s on Lygon Street in Melbourne, a third-generation business with a focus on wine. It was his next job, though, that made him the chef he is today.
 
Run by British chef Donovan Cooke and Melbourne chef Philippa Sibley, Est Est Est was famously uncompromising. Cooke was a protégé of Marco Pierre White, and he and Sibley shared a vision for a restaurant that hewed firmly to the traditions of the French restaurants where they’d worked in Europe.
 
They made pot-au-feu of beef, oxtail terrines with root vegetables and grain mustard. There was always a pigeon dish on the menu, alongside stuffed and braised pig’s trotters à la Pierre Koffmann, and Pithiviers of quail and foie gras, and every scrap of it was made by hand, from the puff pastry down.
 
“Six double shifts a week was our roster, so 14 hours a day, six days a week,” says Russell. The kitchen was not well equipped – at first it didn’t even have a coolroom. “We’d buy in everything every day, get there in the morning and crack on, making everything fresh every day from scratch, no room for error. If something went wrong, there was no back-up plan.” As intense as it was, he says, it was also what he’d been searching for.
 
 
 

“I was looking for something that was all-consuming. There was no time for anything outside that job.” It was unbelievably gruelling, but, looking back, he says, it crammed 10 years’ worth of learning into just three years.
Ben Russell at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill.

Ben Russell at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill.

After he left Melbourne, Russell bought a one-way ticket to Paris. He went south, immersing himself in the culture of southern France, and cooking on yachts on the Mediterranean. Here he reacquainted himself with daylight, joined the dots with the produce he saw in the markets, and cured himself of the urge to push everything through a chinois.
 
Coming back to Australia three years later, Russell approached Matt Moran for a role at Aria in Sydney. At Aria, he found scope, support and structure. A place with both coolrooms and back-up plans, and somewhere a young chef could learn about the business of running restaurants beyond the knives-and-fire side of the operation. He flourished under Moran’s mentorship, and Moran in turn tapped him to lead the company’s expansion into Queensland, with Russell opening Aria Brisbane for them in 2009.
 
Under his care, the restaurant ran for 10 successful years, and signalled a watershed moment in Brisbane for finer dining. It also gave Russell the opportunity to find his own sound. Having opened leaning heavily on the dishes for which Matt Moran was known – confit pork belly with apples, Peking duck consommé – it shifted over the years to less butter and more tomatoes and olive oil, an affinity with the flavours of the Mediterranean that can be seen in Russell’s cooking to this day.

Classics for a reason - the steak tartare at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill.

Classics for a reason – the steak tartare at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill.

Our times shape our restaurants. For Ben Russell and Dan Clark, the Rothwell’s conversation began during the pandemic, and this shaped its direction. “Dan and I have both been in the game long enough that we wanted to make sure we were going to be commercially viable in the long term,” Russell says. They were talking about a big-city restaurant, and about longevity. All the places they shared as points of reference – The Savoy Grill and The Wolseley in London, Balthazar in Manhattan among them – had all been running for many years.
 
Then there was the site. Thomas Rothwell hung out his shingle as a tailor here on Edward Street in the heart of Brisbane in 1885. When Clark and Russell looked to register “Rothwell’s” as the name of the restaurant, they found it was already registered by another business. Just adding “Bar & Grill” to get it over the line, Russell says, brought a lot of what he and Clark had been discussing into crisper focus, and the menu and wine list followed suit.
 
 
 

“We wanted the food offering to be really classic, to focus on execution, and on having dishes that people recognise,” Russell says.

 
 
 
He’s not really the sort of chef who looks to cut corners, so while he’s not looking to reinvent the wheel with the menu, he still puts in an awful lot of work under the hood making sure everything’s as good as it can be, whether it’s enriching the ragù for his rigatoni with beef cheeks or sourcing rolled saddles from Margra for the roast lamb served with braised peas with bacon and shallot.
 
On the grill, Russell prefers anything dry-aged to be grass-fed and on the bone. When he buys wagyu from 2GR or Westholme he likes the less obvious cuts – chuck tail flap, tri-tip. “And those cuts sell,” he says. “I think sometimes people make the mistake of underestimating customers in Brisbane and what they want, somehow thinking all we want to eat up here is a fillet steak with a lobster on it or something.”
 
After cooking in Queensland for more than a decade, he says it’s just not how things are. “We sell a really good cross-section from the grill of everything from the high-marble wagyu to the dry-aged grass-fed meat.”

Roast lamb with braised peas, bacon and shallot at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill.

Roast lamb with braised peas, bacon and shallot at Rothwell’s Bar & Grill.

And the runaway success of the Beef Wellington? “It’s ended up more of a feature than we initially intended,” Russell laughs. “I certainly didn’t think I’d be making Wellingtons all day every day, but it’s strangely a dish that everyone seems familiar with.” Familiar, and comforting, he says, even though it’s not a dish common to home kitchens or even that many other restaurants. He estimates that half the people walking through the door ordering a Beef Wellington at Rothwell’s have never tried one before.
 
It’s a situation that Russell finds rewarding. Taking the focus on reinvention, he says, allows him to put the execution and delivery of the food first. “I’m really happy that everything we do is classical; maybe 15 years ago I wouldn’t have been. But for me at this point in my cooking career and my life, I really like doing this – it’s very satisfying.”
 
The pleasure and pride in the kitchen at Rothwell’s are felt in the dining room. If the first Beef Wellington of your life is here, with Ben Russell running things chances are it won’t be your last. And hey: the Wellington you order today might end up your go-to comfort dish of tomorrow.

 

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Beef, salt and fire: the making of a modern masterpiece.

 
 

The luxuries of the table are many and varied, but rare is the delicacy that gets the mouth watering in quite the same way as a really good steak. It’s a dish suited to celebration like few others: it makes a grand statement as it’s borne to the table, it looks good, it smells good, and is eminently suitable for sharing. It’s also a dish that is seldom better than with a really great bottle (or two) of red wine. And, on the flipside, a really great bottle of red wine (or two) more or less demands a great steak.

Beef, salt and fire: the making of a modern masterpiece at Woodcut.

Beef, salt and fire: the making of a modern masterpiece at Woodcut.

It’s a dish that’s revered as the bistecca Fiorentina in the hills of Chianti, the Chateaubriand of Paris and the prime rib of the great steakhouses of Chicago and New York. It’s celebrated by the gauchos on the pampas, with a braai on the veld, in yakiniku in Tokyo, the gogigui of Seoul.
 
It runs the full spectrum of popular culture from Fred Flintstone’s dinosaur rib-eye to being the capper of the menu at the world’s third highest-ranked restaurant on the 50 Best list, Asador Extebarri, a grill in the Basque Country where chef Bittor Arguinzoniz takes decade-old cattle and turns them into what are widely recognised as some of the very finest steaks of the world. Yabba dabba doo is right.
 
And Australia, as a producer of top-drawer beef, more than holds its own when it comes to the matter of steaks to be reckoned with. There have been periods in restaurants when chefs in the pointy end of the business were ambivalent about the place of the big steak, but right now that steak holds pride of place, often boxed out on the menu to stand alone, a special event served to share, or the pinnacle of a degustation.
 
Right now you’d be hard-pressed to improve on the steaks served at Rockpool Bar & Grill, Firedoor, Gimlet, Cutler & Co and Woodcut. How do they do it? We spoke to the people in charge to find out.

Ross Lusted

– Woodcut, Sydney

 
 
When Ross Lusted set out to open Woodcut, in the new Crown casino in Sydney, he didn’t want it to be known as a steakhouse, but he knew he needed to serve a steak that was world class. “It had to be exceptional,” he says. So he started talking with Anthony Puharich, of Vic’s Premium Quality Meats, about a program for Woodcut that focussed on flavoursome beef, sourced largely from New South Wales.
 
For the T-bone that’s now the flagship of that part of the menu, Rangers Valley Black Market Premium, Lusted says, ticked all the boxes: a local producer, Black Angus stock, raised on pasture and finished on grain for no fewer than 270 days, producing a five-plus marble-score product and aged for six weeks.

Ross Lusted with Woodcut’s flagship T-bone - Rangers Valley Black Market Premium.

Ross Lusted with Woodcut’s flagship T-bone – Rangers Valley Black Market Premium.

For the cooking, Lusted is typically precise. The wood? Hardwood that burns slow, smokeless and very hot. The salt? Olsson’s Marine Mineral Fine Grey, which tastes like the ocean. Oil? Not on meat that is this well-marbled – it doesn’t need it, he says, and the oil can just burn and taste acrid. What’s the meat cooking on? A fine rack set about 10cm over the coals, so the meat gets a crust without the burnt, carbonised taste that could be left by heavier grilling bars.
 
Cooking the beef on the bone preserves the meat’s “sweet natural flavour”, and Lusted starts the room-temperature steaks over coals of ironbark standing on the bone, which allows the heat to move through it and into the centre of the cut. He then grills the wider sides fast over intense heat to form a crust before resting the meat above the grill in the smoke, allowing the residual heat to finish cooking it to medium rare.

Lusted cooks the steak standing on the bone allowing heat to move though it into the centre of the cut before grilling the sides fast over intense heat.

Lusted cooks the steak standing on the bone allowing heat to move though it into the centre of the cut before grilling the sides fast over intense heat.

“A well-rested steak will carve easily and have a consistent colour from the crust to the bone,” he says. He’s appalled at the idea of resting hot meat on a cold plate, even at home. If you don’t have a rack, he says, let the steak sit uncovered on two or three forks so the air can circulate around it.

 
 
And a final word of advice: now that you’ve done the work, don’t ruin it. “The best thing about the steak is the steak,” so with all this good flavour and texture, don’t do anything else to the steak other than lay in some good side dishes as support. At Woodcut that’ll be their burnt-tomato ketchup, tomato salad and baby lettuce, seeded and hot mustard, horseradish cream, whipped bearnaise and veal jus, and maybe the macaroni and cheese made with Berkelo bakery’s Khorasan pasta if you want to really go for it.
 
“There’s always a wow when that steak arrives.”

Lusted says “the best thing about the steak is the steak”.

Lusted says “the best thing about the steak is the steak”.

Corey Costelloe

– Rockpool Bar & Grill, Sydney

 
 
They call it the ballet at Rockpool Bar & Grill. It’s the special dance that a chef new to the grill finds themselves doing as they try to simultaneously pull dozens of steaks from their storage drawers, while keeping the steaks already on the grill moving, and feeding the fire so the whole thing doesn’t come to a halt in the middle of a roaring service.
 
The new person on the grill has put six or seven steaks on in one call, says chef Corey Costelloe, but there’s 20 different steaks on the menu and they’re all in different drawers, and you’ve got 250 in for lunch. “And when you first start you forget which one is where, and you’re spinning around going through them, meanwhile thinking, ‘shit, have I left something on the grill too long,’ so you turn around to check your steaks and then you turn around back to your drawer and then there’s another steak coming in, and you end up spinning, spinning doing the ballet.”

Corey Costelloe prepares a David Blackmore Mishima steak - Mishima are extremely rare and only available at Rockpool Bar & Grill and Burnt Ends in Singapore.

Corey Costelloe prepares a David Blackmore Mishima steak – Mishima are extremely rare and only available at Rockpool Bar & Grill and Burnt Ends in Singapore.

It’s a dance he has long since mastered, but when he first started at Rockpool Bar & Grill, it was all new. “I’d come from a seafood restaurant, I was all about fish.” The learning curve was steep. Looking back now, from his position as the chef across three locations of Rockpool Bar & Grill in Melbourne, Perth and his home city of Sydney, a brand that is completely synonymous with ultra-premium beef, Costelloe has a pretty good idea of what a top-quality steak looks like in Australia.
 
 

“Our absolute baller right now is David Blackmore’s Mishima.” Mishima, he says, is a tiny little island in the south of Japan, a dot on the map, and their animals were never bred with the British breeds, so they’re some of the oldest Japanese breeds you’ll find. “When we do a 650-gram Mishima wagyu steak on the bone, that’s the $350 steak that makes people say ‘wow’.”
Two cuts in one - the David Blackmore Mishima Chuck Roll at Rockpool consisting of the denver and chuck eye cuts.

Two cuts in one – the David Blackmore Mishima Chuck Roll at Rockpool consisting of the denver and chuck eye cuts.

But with a list of steaks sometimes 20 cuts deep on the Bar & Grill menu, there are other paths to ecstasy.
 
 

“Take a look at the grass-fed rib-eyes from southern Australia, from Tasmania, the Victorian hinterlands,” says Costelloe. “Somewhere where they’ve got plenty of grass to eat and plenty of sunshine throughout the day – there’s not much that’s better than one of those. I can’t afford to eat a $350 steak, but I’ll sit in the bar at night and smash a Cape Grim rib-eye – they’re just delicious.”

 
 
This kind of intimate familiarity with the very best meat in the country can make ordering a steak elsewhere a challenge. “There was a period there where it was very hard to get a well-cooked steak in a restaurant; I think that’s why the steakhouse has triumphed these last 10 years.”

David Blackmore Mishima at Rockpool - a dance with decadence.

David Blackmore Mishima at Rockpool – a dance with decadence.

Lennox Hastie

– Firedoor, Sydney

 
 
Not everyone welcomes crying in their restaurants, but at Firedoor they’re used to it (in a good way). Their signature steak has brought more than a few diners to tears, Massimo Bottura among them. After the Italian chef wept with joy eating his steak, Lennox Hastie smuggled one back to him when he went to Modena to visit.

Hastie believes steak reaches its full potential through the passage of time - at Firedoor beef is aged anywhere between 150 - 300 days.

Hastie believes steak reaches its full potential through the passage of time – at Firedoor beef is aged anywhere between 150 – 300 days.

You might have seen Hastie on Chef’s Table talking about the work he put into developing a program for ageing his meat for unusually long periods of time. The drought plus the pandemic knocked the whole thing for six, though, and for the first time in seven years he found himself starting from scratch. He now sources beef across a few different producers including Rangers Valley, O’Connor, Coppertree Farms, and David Blackmore.
 
 
 

“Right now, we’re running 260-day dry-aged Black Market Rangers Valley as well as a 150-day dry-aged retired dairy cow,” Hastie says, “but last month we had 300-day aged full-blood wagyu which was a completely different experience – rich and buttery but with a complex sour cherry and spice flavour that I find more redolent in wine.”

 
 
 
And like wine, all this beef can be enjoyed young, Hastie says, but it’s through the passage of time that it really achieves its full potential. He chooses the rib-sets for ageing himself, grading them on appearance, taste, touch and smell, picking out well-marbled sets before testing their pH to confirm their suitability for extended ageing. His exactitude is serious. “Depending on the producer, kills are only occurring every fortnight or month and we only find the top three percent of each batch suitable for ageing.”

Steaks at Firedoor are cut to order on the bandsaw and grilled over grape vines or spent wine barrels.

Steaks at Firedoor are cut to order on the bandsaw and grilled over grape vines or spent wine barrels.

Hastie then dries the sides for two weeks, renders the fat down from the animal and then paints the sides with that rendered fat, sealing any exposed meat, preparing them to age for anywhere between 150 and 300 days, depending on the size of the animal and how it ripens.
 
In service they’re cut to order and grilled over gnarled 80-year-old grape vines. A Spanish flor de sal is the only addition to the meat. “The rich flavour and texture is intrinsic to the animal, the ageing process, and grilling over an open wood fire,” Hastie says. “Each aged rib-set has its own unique flavour, ranging from hazelnuts, toasted popcorn, and aged sherry through to black truffle, foie gras, and parmesan.” The flavour even varies from one end of the steak to the other, much like a cheese. “The flavour is so complex that we serve it unadorned with just a fresh salad or some charred greens on the side to clean the palate. We don’t offer any condiments or sauces as accompaniments.”
 
The fat is too precious to waste, and the trimmings, which are rendered slowly in the wood oven, are deployed in roasting vegetables (“potatoes and cauliflower are particularly good”), and in washing a whisky to make the Tallowed Roy, a Rob Roy with a Firedoor twist.

260 day dry aged Ranger’s Valley Black Market Rib Eye - the steak that brought Massimo Bottura to tears.

260 day dry aged Ranger’s Valley Black Market Rib Eye – the steak that brought Massimo Bottura to tears.

Andrew McConnell

– Cutler & Co and Gimlet, Melbourne

 
 
Trends have come and gone over the 13 years that Cutler & Co has enjoyed a place as one of Victoria’s finest diners, but the rib-eye has been a constant. “From day one at Cutler & Co we’ve offered the same 1.2 kilo dry-aged large-format steak,” says owner and chef Andrew McConnell. “And it’s the only thing that has stayed on the menu that whole time.”

Andrew McConnell says the 1.2kg dry aged rib eye at Cutler & Co is the only thing that has stayed on the menu in the restaurant’s 13 year history.

Andrew McConnell says the 1.2kg dry aged rib eye at Cutler & Co is the only thing that has stayed on the menu in the restaurant’s 13 year history.

When McConnell opened Cutler & Co back in 2009, he says he wasn’t cooking a lot of steak at home and it wasn’t that easy to find one that was perfectly aged and cooked over wood with skill in a restaurant. “When I go out, as much as I love multiple courses and trying new things, sometimes I just want something that’s benchmark, something that’s simple and delicious. It’s also nice to offer a dish in this environment that’s not intimidating, something you can roll up your sleeves for and share.”
 
So it was when he came to Gimlet, the smash-hit restaurant he opened in the Melbourne CBD in 2020. “Gimlet was designed to be a big-city restaurant with a great dining room and a great cocktail bar, and a grown-up big-city restaurant needs that big steak. It’s something classic on the menu that really signifies quality.”

Gimlet’s T-bone is roasted at 400-500 degrees over coals in the wood-fire oven McConnell designed himself.

Gimlet’s T-bone is roasted at 400-500 degrees over coals in the wood-fire oven McConnell designed himself.

A steak making a statement was written into Gimlet’s DNA – and into its blueprints. Working with the kitchen designer, McConnell designed a wood-fired oven with a stone base and a pit in the base that his chefs can brush the coals into, with a rack set over it. “So we’re roasting our T-bones over coals in a wood-fired oven. It’s really cool.” Acting a bit like a Josper, sitting at 400 or 500 degrees, the intense heat creating a crust quickly. It’s pretty special, and it adds another layer of flavour.
 
As impressive as the oven may be, the other big advantage McConnell enjoys today in the steak stakes is in sourcing his meat. In 2015, he opened Meatsmith, a speciality butchery on Smith Street in Collingwood, and today he and his business partner Troy Wheeler run four branches across Melbourne, which gives him enviable choice for his restaurants. “Working with Troy, we’ve been able to develop a great program for meat at Gimlet,” he says.

Beef farmer Matt O’Connor hand selects 20 rib sets a week for Gimlet which are then dry aged at Meatsmith for six weeks before being sliced into T-bones and delivered to the restaurant.

Beef farmer Matt O’Connor hand selects 20 rib sets a week for Gimlet which are then dry aged at Meatsmith for six weeks before being sliced into T-bones and delivered to the restaurant.

Cattle farmer Matt O’Connor selects about 20 rib sets a week for Gimlet from pasture-fed animals, primarily Angus and Hereford, with a marble score of six-plus. “That’s quite high for pasture-fed beef,” says McConnell. “I think about one in 100 come through like that.” These go into Wheeler’s care for six weeks of dry-ageing before they’re cut into the T-bones delivered to the restaurant kitchen.
 
 
 

“It’s about provenance, it’s about how it’s selected in the abattoir, it’s about how it’s butchered, it’s how it’s aged. It’s a process,” says McConnell.

 
 
 
The amount of thought and work put into these epic steaks suggests that the perfect piece of meat, cooked with confidence, is as much a measure of the worth of a restaurant as anything else on the menu. “Eating in fine-dining restaurants isn’t always about technique and small plates. It should be about quality.”

Other Epic Steaks of Australia

 

Bistecca, Sydney

Bistecca alla Fiorentina, Riverine T-bone, $160/kilo
 

Icebergs Dining Room & Bar, Sydney

150-day grain-fed 500g rib-eye, crusted in Olsson’s sea salt, market price
 

Gaucho’s, Adelaide

650g grain-fed T-bone, dry-aged 28 days with char-grilled lemon, smoked salt, and olive oil, $80
 

A Hereford Beefstow

1.5kg 200 day grain-fed tomahawk steak carved at table $160′
 

Rosetta, Sydney and Melbourne

Cape Grim 36-month T-bone 21-day dry-aged, $165
 

Rothwell’s, Brisbane

800g T-Bone, dry-aged 4-6 weeks, $140
 

Porteño, Sydney

750g bistecca ‘ethically farmed Tasmanian pasture fed’ T-bone, $105
 

Society, Melbourne

Smoked Wagyu prime rib with wasabi and crème fraîche butter, sweet onion and shoyu koji jus, Japanese pickled cucumber, $245
 

Victor Churchill, Melbourne

1.2kg dry-aged Rangers Valley Black Market bistecca $185

 

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Trevor Perkins

Hogget Kitchen

Trevor Perkins at Hogget Kitchen in West Gippsland.

Trevor Perkins at Hogget Kitchen in West Gippsland.

You wouldn’t call the concept for Hogget Kitchen tricky. The way Trevor Perkins tells it, it was as simple as a conversation he had with his mates Pat Sullivan and Bill Downie, winemakers both, over a meal of local, very fresh produce and local, very drinkable wines, and saying “why can’t we just do something like this, but as a restaurant?”

 
 
Hogget is the result, a place where a casual, friendly air on the floor is balanced by some real rigour and passion in the kitchen. It could well be the very picture of country dining in Australia right now.
 
The restaurant is set on a building leased from Wild Dog Winery, perhaps the oldest winery in the Gippsland region, overlooking a valley planted with riesling, gewürztraminer, merlot and a variety of other grapes. In a paddock just past the carpark graze alpacas, woolly and serene. The big deck of the restaurant is stacked with neat cordons of chardonnay and shiraz cuttings bound for a variety of barbecue rigs, many of them welded up by Perkins himself.
 
We’re five minutes out of the West Gippsland town of Warragul, and about 100 clicks east of the Melbourne CBD. The land is lush, the soils volcanic, the rainfall high – almost certainly some of the richest agricultural land in Victoria. Farming around here is typically sheep and cattle, the sheep a mix of merino wool and prime lamb, with lamb being the majority.
 
Hogget Kitchen takes its name from the word used to describe an animal that is older than a lamb – between about nine and 18 months – that doesn’t yet have the two teeth that would mark it as a mature ewe or ram, and its meat as mutton. But it isn’t a restaurant concerned solely with the meat of sheep. A meal here might trip open with a fine little shortcrust tartlet of roe from trout up the road at Noojee, or a creamy dollop of Gippsland rabbit pâté paired with a chutney made of medlars, everyone’s favourite strange medieval fruit. This is a restaurant that follows the rhythm of the local seasons and supply.

Hogget Kitchen overlooks the vineyards of Wild Dog Winery.

Hogget Kitchen overlooks the vineyards of Wild Dog Winery.

Perkins takes Monkery and Chamela, two ripe, fresh cow’s milk cheeses made by Rachel Needoba at the nearby Butterfly Factory micro-dairy, and dresses them with celery oil and herbs picked wild around the shire. The flowers of borage, pea, pineapple sage and society garlic, the feathery tops of fennel, leaves of nasturtium, sharp wood sorrel, sweet basil and the perfume of lemon balm. Fillets of the superb garfish that Bruce Collis catches at Corner Inlet, meanwhile, appear delicately grilled and accented with lemon myrtle from the property’s small orchard of natives, and slivers of loquat from Perkins’ mum’s tree. It’s confident cooking, considered and with a light touch that’s easy to like.
 
But there is no better example of what Perkins is about as a chef and what Hogget is about as a restaurant than how they handle lamb. “Since we opened in 2017, we’ve never used boxed meat,” Perkins says. His dad, Graham, was a butcher, and the ability to break a lamb down and then put all of those pieces of meat, all those bones and organs, to good use in the kitchen are the skills he wants to preserve and pass on. “Teaching our next generation of chefs technique and respect to the whole animal,” he says.
 
Whether it’s East Friesians from Guendulain Farm at Yarragon, Rylands from Seaview Park Farm at Mountain View, the White Dorpers Tim Wilson runs at Lardner, Wiltshire Horns from Drouin, or any of the Dorpers, Suffolks, Poll Dorsets or other lamb, hogget or mutton he sources from his mates at Radford’s Abattoir 10 minutes away at Warragul, the approach Perkins takes is the same: a hand-saw and a boning knife.

Gippsland lambs hanging in the cool room - Hogget Kitchen has never used boxed meat.

Gippsland lambs hanging in the cool room – Hogget Kitchen has never used boxed meat.

The carcases hang for a week before they’re boned, and the team will bone as many as four at a time depending on how busy things are at the restaurant. “We break the lamb into thirds on the rail then process the cuts on the benchtop,” Perkins says. “We remove the fillets and kidneys first then split the forequarter from the third rib closest to the neck. We cut just below the hip joint to remove the barrel from the legs.”
Trevor breaking down a lamb carcase at the restaurant.

Trevor breaking down a lamb carcase at the restaurant.

A typical breakdown might be bone-in shoulder, square-cut forequarter (with the shank, neck and brisket bone removed), the eight-point racks (chine off, cap on, “but not Frenched!”), backstrap, rump and fillet (all cap on), belly and short-cut hind legs (shank off). The bones – chine, H-bone and brisket among them – go into stocks and sauces, the trim gets pickled and boiled, and the sweetbreads, kidneys and liver get looked after as the precious jewels that they are. “The offal really speaks to the quality of the animal you’re dealing with,” Perkins says. “You can tell a lot from its flavour.”
 
Smoking and grilling are Perkins’ weapons of choice for lamb, the Kamado Joe in the kitchen and the grills outside getting a good workout. But while Perkins cut his teeth as a country cook, growing up nearby in Moe and doing his apprenticeship at Da Nunzio’s, he also worked with Philippe Mouchel at Langton’s in Melbourne, so there’s more going on here than turn-and-burn. A glance at the shelves loaded with cookbooks in the private dining room, reveals the breadth of his interest. There’s plenty on butchery, charcuterie, meat, and cooking with fire, but also Ducasse, Escoffier and Guérard, and next to them, volumes from David Thompson, Christine Manfield and Sean Brock, as well as plenty on the food of Mexico.

Trevor preparing lamb crepinette using diced leg, kidney and liver.

Trevor preparing lamb crepinette using diced leg, kidney and liver.

Black beans and Oaxacan cheese go into a golden empanada served at one end of the meal at Hogget, alongside a round of an American-style blood sausage, fried off and topped with quail egg sunny-side up, while at the other end of the menu the dessert is built around limoncello, the sour-sweet pudding plated with citrus curd, macadamia-nut praline and an ice-cream flavoured with clementines.
 
Buying lambs whole calls for planning in the kitchen. The lamb necks and shanks get saved up for ragù for pasta, for navarins, for shepherd’s pies, or other braises. Briskets are scored and seasoned and given six or eight hours in the smoker. Sometimes the menu will name a particular cut – lamb shoulder braised and served with artichokes, for example, or sweetbreads put into pithiviers and teamed with salsa verde – but more often than not it’s simply listed as “Gippsland lamb”, which gives the team maximum flexibility on the cuts they choose on a given day, whether they’re going to be deployed as barbacoa to be stuffed into tortillas at one of the occasional “Fiestas de Trevo”, or simply grilled and served with brassicas.

A ‘Gippsland Lamb’ dish featuring rump, backstrap, a lamb crepinette of leg, kidney and liver, and crumbed brain.

A ‘Gippsland Lamb’ dish featuring rump, backstrap, a lamb crepinette of leg, kidney and liver, and crumbed brain.

 
 
 

The highlight of lunch for a diner lucky enough to visit in the spring might well be grass-fed Gippsland lamb spread across a platter to share: juicy loin and tender braised shoulder complemented by the dense flavour and texture of shank, with a golden garnish of airy puffs of deep-fried brains. Garden-fresh peas, asparagus and broad beans provide the green top notes, while crépinette, rich in the flavour of kidneys, and a jus made with lamb’s fry bring the bass notes. It’s a bravura performance.

 
 
 

Trevor’s dad’s butchery tools on display at Hogget.

Trevor’s dad’s butchery tools on display at Hogget.

It’s tempting to say something like “what Trevor Perkins doesn’t know about lamb isn’t worth knowing”, but he’s far too modest a guy to go for that. And he’s also very quick to say that the lamb he knows is Gippsland lamb. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had lamb from anywhere else.”
 
As timeless as Hogget Kitchen’s setting seems, the valley isn’t cut off from the trends and realities of the wider world. Take the price of a whole lamb. When Hogget opened back in 2017, Perkins was paying around $7.60 a kilo for a carcase; today it’s more like $12 a kilo – an increase of nearly 60 per cent in under five years. When a body coming in at Perkins’ preferred weight of around 22 kilos now costs $260, the ability to make every gram of that animal count in the kitchen and on the plate becomes that much more vital.
 

 
 
 

Why 22 kilos? Between 22 and 24 is the sweet spot, as far as Perkins is concerned, for fat cover, flavour and tenderness in a Gippsland lamb. This is not a stance struck by a chef being difficult – Perkins is not going to send a carcase back because it comes in at 25 kilos – it’s just an observation made by a guy who has cut up a lot of lambs, who pays attention, and who knows what he’s doing.

 
 
 

And maybe that’s what Trevor Perkins is all about, at the end of the day. He’s a doer. He’s not cooking over fire because he saw it on Netflix or Instagram, he’s doing it because he’s on a property that generates tonnes of vine clippings, because he likes building barbecues, and because it’s a great way to cook lamb. He’s not on a DIY trip making things from scratch because it’s trendy – it’s in his blood.
 
He grew up, camping with his parents nearly every weekend, chasing trout in the hills and trapping rabbits, and fishing for gummy shark, flathead and Australian salmon with his grandfather, Richard, at Ninety Mile Beach, always cooking over open fires. As he got older, he’d go out shooting, or taking a bow to stalk deer. Jenny, his mum, has always grown fruit and vegetables at home, and Perkins’ partner, Kylie, runs Hereford cattle, some of which end up in the Cleaver dry-ageing cabinet at the end of Hogget’s bar. He’s a doer, but he’s also clearly someone who understands that it takes a whole lot of people working together to make food great, whether it’s the people who make the wine, or the people who grow the food, the people that he’s learned from, or the people that he teaches.

Beef dry ageing onsite including Hereford produced by Trevor’s partner Kylie.

Beef dry ageing onsite including Hereford produced by Trevor’s partner Kylie.

The blackboard by the open kitchen is chalked with dozens of names of the people and properties that supply Hogget. Holy Goat and Gippsland Jersey among the dairies, the Chapmans, Jones and Jim’s Spud Shed for potatoes, and shout-outs to the growers of everything from the blueberries and the figs to the quails and the rabbits. One corner is just marked “Friends”. You quickly realise that what you’re looking at isn’t a supply chain, but a rich web of relationships, of season, landscape, weather and friendships.
 
“Baw Baw Shire here is amazing, and the access to good food that I have here gives me such a huge platform to showcase what we can do,” Perkins says. “It’s taken me a long time to find my identity and figure out what we do here. But with the help of a lot of other people, I’ve seen that in pockets of the country you find groups of people coming together to express what their region is all about.”

 

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Words: Pat Nourse. Photography: Luke Burgess

 
 

At Tom McHugo’s, Tom Westcott and Whitney Ball are making the case that pub food can be bigger and bolder than you might think, without losing touch with the people.

 
 
Tom McHugo’s straddles the corner of Macquarie and Argyle streets in central Hobart, a solid two-storey brick building just a couple of blocks up from the docks. Its original name is still etched across the façade in capital letters a foot high: HOBART HOTEL. There’s not much that screams “fancied-up pub” when you push through the doors: carpet on the floors, stools at the bar, scars on the timber of the tabletops. But look a little closer.
 
There are no pokies here, and no TVs either. Hell, even the eight-ball table has gone, a quiet casualty of the pandemic. What on earth do people do here? Well, for one thing they like to come in, hang out and talk.

Tom Westcott outside Tom McHugo’s in Hobart.

Tom Westcott outside Tom McHugo’s in Hobart.

If you’re from Hobart, chances are pretty good that you’ll run into someone you know on any given evening. The booze is also undeniably outstanding. Check out the taps: it’s not just that you’ll find beers from local heroes like Two Metre Tall here – they’ve got hand pumps for them as well. There’s a banger wine list, too. The place has vibe. And, thanks to Tom Westcott and Whitney Ball, it has one of the most interesting pub menus in Australia.
 
Westcott braises arrow squid with merguez sausage and serves it with bomba rice, purplette onions and turnips. He presses mutton shanks and serves them with cavolo nero, rice polenta and lamb sauce. He takes blue mackerel, grills it whole and pairs it with pickled onion, mustard cream and toast.
 
Shoulders of lamb from Littlewood Farm in the Coal Valley are salted down, smoked cold and then air-cured, before being braised with bay and celery and plated up with endives and figs. Beetroots are dressed with a spicy green zhoug, grilled gem lettuces with a miso made with tomato and bread, while golden chicken “spare parts” from Rosella Roost get teamed with something Westcott likes to call crack sauce.

Whitney Ball pours a beer from the Two Metre Tall hand pump.

Whitney Ball pours a beer from the Two Metre Tall hand pump.

Better still, it’s not a two-menu situation with good food for the dining room and scraps for the punters cropping up the front bar. The same great produce goes into all the pub standards.
 
Want a snack after you’ve been bending the arm all afternoon? How about a roll stuffed with hot house-made pastrami and pepper gravy, on some nice fat chips? Or braised short-rib on a steamed bun with plum sauce? You want a steak? How about a hanger from an English Longhorn, with Cafe de Paris butter and savoy cabbage or aged rump cap, grilled and served with charred eggplant, radicchio and olive and red wine vinaigrette? You want a pie? How about a minced lamb and black pepper number riding a wave of mushy peas? And hey, even the Worcestershire sauce is made in-house. Not for nothing is Westcott’s Insta-handle @dementedfermenter.
 
Before he was into the ferments, demented or otherwise, Tom Westcott was a guy who grew up on farming and forestry country on the Tasman Peninsula about 90 minutes southeast of Hobart. For half of that time the family was on a sheep farm, which meant they ate a steady diet of mutton. Westcott reckons it wasn’t until he got into restaurants as a glassie and kitchen hand when he moved to Hobart to study media, that he first ate lamb.

Hot house-made pastrami roll with pepper gravy.

Hot house-made pastrami roll with pepper gravy.

Westcott’s mum was a community nurse who fed the family from books by the Nursing Mothers’ Association and the CWA. “It was all pretty simple,” Westcott says. “We always had chickens, so we had a lot of egg and bacon pie, and maybe vegetables from the garden with a roast once or twice a fortnight.” His least favourite of the dishes on high rotation with Mum was a version of chow mein. “Frozen peas and corn and mince and rice, all cooked in one not-hot-enough pot. No.”
 
So how did we get from there to here? From tepid chow mein to hand-pumped craft beers and rillettes with Tropea onions and house-made pickles? Where exactly did Westcott get led astray? He’d been kicking around in kitchens in Hobart for a few years, but as it turned out, one venue made all the difference.
 
Taking a punt and sticking his head through the door at a new place opening up on Murray Street in 2010 was a turning point. Garagistes was opened by Luke Burgess, a Tetsuya’s-trained chef with experience at Noma, and his partners, Katrina Birchmeier and Kirk Richardson, and drew national attention in a way that was unprecedented for a restaurant in Tasmania. Not that this was apparent to Westcott, who was still rocking a rat’s tail at the time and had never filleted a fish.
 
 
 

“It was still just a building site when I went in,” he says. “They hadn’t opened yet, and I’d been pushed to go by a friend of Kirk’s.” Despite the rat’s tail, Burgess saw something in Westcott, and he ended up staying for two years: “it was pretty formative for me.”

 
 

Working with Luke Burgess at Garagistes encouraged Tom to think bigger.

Working with Luke Burgess at Garagistes encouraged Tom to think bigger.

It was at Garagistes, he says, that he realised that cooking could take you places, and that you could think bigger. The kind of passion Burgess put into the work, Westcott says, was something new to him, something he’d never seen in or out of the kitchen.
 
“I’d never seen anyone talk to a room full of people about an idea and be able to take them all with him – all of a sudden you’d be in service and the food you’d been talking about was hitting a table in front of you. I really didn’t understand where I was, or what I’d gotten into. It was kind of baffling, but I went along for the ride.”
 
It was a steep learning curve. “Luke actually summed it up for me when he said I needed to learn to slow down.” For the years he’d been cooking prior to Garagistes, Westcott says he’d been focussed on doing volume, “but I’d end up in the shit because I didn’t have the skills to manage time”. He understood the cookery part of cooking and the science of what was happening at the stoves, but the management side of things, and bringing it all together on detailed plates in a serious service wasn’t in the skillset.

 
 

“I really had to grow up a little bit. I’d just treated it as a laugh before that rather than a profession.”

 
 
 
“Garagistes opened it up as a career path for me, and made it apparent it wasn’t just about slapping food on a plate and flirting with waitresses.. and being a ratbag. It was actually about having some credibility, learning about food and being a part of what now in Tassie is a movement.”
 
The menu at Tom McHugo’s is littered with the names of the seven different vegetable growers that Tom Westcott works with, Provenance, Fat Carrot Farm, Tony Scherer and Sulyn’s Garden among them. It’s the same with the meat. Littlewood, the lamb producer in Coal Valley, has been there since day one. “We’ve always used Sophie Nichols’ lamb. I can get it every week, I know where it comes from, I know who she is and what she believes in and how she farms. And it’s not static.”

Tom has used Littlewood Lamb in the Tom McHugo’s kitchen from day one.

Tom has used Littlewood Lamb in the Tom McHugo’s kitchen from day one.

Westcott says he enjoys the changes in size and flavour of the meat he buys in. “Sophie’s not selling stock to a market where it has to be exactly 22 kilos dressed-weight every week.” You get through winter and the lambs start to get fatter and have more interesting flavours, he says, or the fat-content changes, and the kitchen changes tack with it.
 
 
 

“Rather than it just being chops and roasts, we’ll still do a roast but it’ll be muscle-seaming a leg and offering different cuts from the leg as we go. We’re keeping our butchering skills sharp and other guys in the kitchen get to see a whole animal and learn how to butcher it, and people coming for a meal get to taste something different.”

 
 
 
A relationship with the Huon Valley Meat Company, and with Vincent Macdonald, one of the company’s sales and product development people who cooked at The Agrarian Kitchen and worked at Brae for a while, has proven significant. “Vinnie understands the challenges of getting a consistent supply of good-quality meat at a restaurant,” says Westcott. And he’s a very effective salesman. “He can call me and say, ‘I’m five minutes away, I’ve got 15 kilos of beef liver and 10 kilos of oxtail, I thought you could probably use it,’ and I’ll just say, yep, great.”

Tom takes whole animals and teaches his team how to butcher them.

Tom takes whole animals and teaches his team how to butcher them.

A surprise delivery of 25 kilos of beef offal isn’t every chef’s idea of fun. Especially when you’re gearing up for the 250-plus covers that Tom McHugo’s does on a good night. But it’s curve-balls like these – a box of crepinette or hearts or tongues showing up at the kitchen door – that Westcott says makes the job worthwhile for him. No guts no glory, if you will.
 
Offal isn’t something Westcott grew up with – it was something his Mum and Dad had only had bad experiences with in their own childhoods – but he has certainly made up for lost time at Tom McHugo’s.
 
 
 

“We’ve had it on the menu from day one, and people were onto it from day one,” he says. “It wasn’t like we had to educate anyone. They were just there for it.”

 
 
 
And Westcott is there for them. He puts beef heart into Colombian-style blood sausages, sauces lamb faggots with leek gravy, and complements the fat of lamb ribs with lemon, pepper and house-made fish sauce – an old favourite from the Garagistes days. Beef tripe gets braised with spring garlic and last year’s tomatoes and finished with hard cheese from the larder, while beef tongue is grilled and partnered with oca yams and bitter leaves, and shin and tail make their way into dumplings with daikon in broth.

Grilled beef tongue with radish and gastrique.

Grilled beef tongue with radish and gastrique.

Then there’s the haggis bao.
 
It started with a call from Macdonald when he was first at Huon Valley Meat, going over the full list of things he could source. “He said to me, ‘can you use whole plucks from sheep?’” (Plucks being all the organs from the chest cavity – the lungs, heart and the liver.) Westcott says he wasn’t really thinking ‘novel and interesting’ so much as ‘how can I preserve all this offal?’
 
He played around with a few dough formulations and different ways of cooking before settling on the bao that graces the menu today. A yeasted dough is proved overnight, rolled into discs, wrapped around the filling, and proved again and then deep fried. The exact make-up of the filling varies from week to week, but it revolves around a mix of beef and lamb trim, kidney and liver, and lungs if they’re available. A bit of onion and freshly ground barley in place of the pinhead oatmeal that’s traditional in a haggis. Mace, ginger, black pepper, fennel seed and just a little dried and smoked chilli, and a Sichuan-inspired chilli oil with loads of garlic, Sichuan pepper, coriander and last summer’s dried chillies. “It’s been a fixture for a year now,” Westcott says, “and what arose out of someone saying, ‘can you use this?’ is now a necessity.”

The Tom McHugo’s haggis bao.

The Tom McHugo’s haggis bao.

Consider the beauty of the haggis bao – a crunchy shell covered in beautiful, crisp little bubbles, giving way to the doughnut-like softness of the interior. “The filling is soft and luscious, and moderately spiced. Nothing about it says offal,” Wescott says. “You could just give it to someone and say, take this fried meat thing, and they would devour it happily.”
 
 
 

If Tom Westcott has a message for people cooking and eating in pubs in Australia today, it’s this – pub food is the hawker food of Australia. “It provides the locale for the working class and white-collar to be on an even footing, tradies and lawyers and nurses and teachers.”

 
 
 
Everyone comes through the doors at McHugo’s, and they all end up sitting next to each other, eating the same thing, drinking the same stuff. “And that’s the most important thing to me, making a space that’s accessible to everybody,” Westcott says. “You don’t have to be limited by the pub format. You don’t have to push the boundaries, but you can always be passionate about the food you’re producing.”

Pub grub - crepinette of goat shoulder, liver and heart with rice polenta and spigarello.

Pub grub – crepinette of goat shoulder, liver and heart with rice polenta and spigarello.

 

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It’s not a sprint, they tell you, it’s a marathon. But in professional cooking it can be both. Take a look at Karen Martini’s career arc.

 
 
Starting work in restaurants when she was 15 years old, she was quick off the blocks, putting in the hours in one of the most demanding kitchens in Victoria, and leaping into her first head chef role at just 20. But these achievements were only the beginning of a career marked by sustained performance and a willingness to forge her own path, not least in choosing to open a high-profile new restaurant this year – her first major opening in two decades.

Martini has stayed at the top of the game for a long time. In fact, if you happened to be flipping through the 1996 version of Rare Medium, you could find her laying out her ideas on the topic of serious meat at The Melbourne Wine Room, the restaurant at The George Hotel in St Kilda, in these very pages.
 
 
 

“We have had a char-grilled rib-eye on the menu since we opened, and I don’t think we’ll ever be able to take it off,” says 1996 Karen Martini, pictured in one of those slightly-out-focus, on-a-tilt shots that defined food-magazine photography in the 1990s.

 
 
 
She describes a 500-gram steak that was inspired by a three-inch-high T-bone popular at a hotspot called The Tuscan Grill. “It’s a big steak, but most people get through it.” At the time Martini was serving her big steak crusted with Sicilian sea salt, and dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and lemon – a dish that went on to become a signature at Icebergs Dining Room & Bar when she made the move to Sydney to open it for fellow Melbourne restaurateur Maurice Terzini in 2002. It has graced the menu there ever since.
 
What strikes you reading this piece nearly 25 years later – apart from how perfectly contemporary Martini’s food sounds – is her focus on flavour. “I really enjoy something that does have a bit of marbling running through it,” she said back then. “I think you get a lot more flavour compared with something like a tenderloin, which I find can be a bit bland and squishy. I like something with more flavour. If I ever do use eye fillet, it would probably be something like ox, with a really beefy flavour.”

A 1996 issue of Rare Medium featuring Karen Martini and the popular 500g rib eye at The Melbourne Wine Room.

A 1996 issue of Rare Medium featuring Karen Martini and the popular 500g rib eye at The Melbourne Wine Room.

For most of the last 20 years, most Australians would know Martini best as the grounded, very approachable voice of good food on Better Homes and Gardens on Seven, in her recipe columns for Sunday Life, Good Food and Good Weekend, and in her eight (going on nine) books. You’ve seen her on TV, braising lamb chump chops with allspice, or in print slicing rump steak, laying it over a pile of Russian red kale, endive, and radicchio for maltagliati of beef. Or bringing together influences from both sides of the Mediterranean in meatballs made with both baharat and pecorino, saffron and dill.
 
It’s exuberant cooking, fresh with leaves and herbs and often layered with multiple dressings. That maltagliati, for instance, is complemented with balsamic vinegar, swirled through the pan the meat’s cooked in, and also topped with ricotta. Martini has such a knack for keeping things light and fresh, and a gift for making her food approachable, it’s easy to forget that there’s a very serious chef with a very real focus on technique and consistency behind the smiling and the toss-and-scatter cooking that have endeared her to a generation of viewers and readers. Karen Martini can really cook.

Martini has a knack for keeping things light and fresh.

Martini has a knack for keeping things light and fresh.

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”.

Martini douses bavette in a solution of tomato essence, tamari and vinegar before it hits the grill - served with Cafe De Hero butter and a wedge of lemon.

Martini douses bavette in a solution of tomato essence, tamari and vinegar before it hits the grill – served with Cafe De Hero butter and a wedge of lemon.

When Martini decided she wanted to cook for a living she figured she needed to go somewhere she could learn all sides of the job. This led her to Tansy’s, a Melbourne restaurant run by Tansy Good and her then partner and co-head chef Marc Bouten. Good and Bouten had a reputation for being uncompromising – something that is reflected perhaps in the subsequent success of people who worked there, chefs Andrew and Matt McConnell, Philippa Sibley and Rita Macali, and bar czar Gerald Diffey among them.
 
 
 

“That was the foundation of cookery for me, all the French basics,” says Martini. “I spent three-and-a-half years with them, which in that kitchen was quite a long time, like a life sentence.”

 
 
 
Tansy’s was tough, but it fast-tracked her skills, whether it was making sauces, bavarois, stocks, or pastry. “We were boning boxes of hares, we’d pluck and gut guinea fowl, and skin eels,” she recalls. Good and Bouten were every bit as particular about their red meat, too. “We had the most amazing ox fillet on the menu with a bone marrow and shallot sauce – a Bordelaise, essentially. We only used beef with a lot of flavour, which back in 1989 meant it was grass fed, the fat was yellow, and it was aged.” When Martini says “ox” she’s talking about beasts with some age on them. “These were animals that were always three, four, five years old.

Martini’s foundation of cookery came via a 3.5 year stint at Tansy’s.

Martini’s foundation of cookery came via a 3.5 year stint at Tansy’s.

“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.

After learning the basics at Tansy’s, Martini was mostly self-taught and landed her first head chef gig at 20.

After learning the basics at Tansy’s, Martini was mostly self-taught and landed her first head chef gig at 20.

And so things went, happily, steadily, until the opportunity to run the food at a Melbourne landmark came along. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image – ACMI for short – is a museum dedicated to film, television and video games. ACMI is the centrepiece of Federation Square on the banks of the Yarra, in the heart of the Melbourne CBD, and reopened this year after a five-year, $40 million renovation. Martini, along with Sapountsis and caterer Michael Gebran, a partner in Hospitality M, their new boutique hospitality group, is across all of ACMI’s food, from the sandwiches and (excellent) popcorn through to its 150-seat flagship restaurant, Hero.
 
In opening Hero, Martini found herself reckoning with the stresses of the pandemic, but also with the more personal question of whether the city would show up for her. There are plenty of examples, after all, of good prime-time ratings being no guarantee of a busy restaurant.
 
 
 

“The pressure I felt was in not having opened anything for such a long time,” she says. “I just didn’t know how we were going to be received, especially in the climate that we’re in.” Hero opened nonetheless and received a hero’s welcome. “So much better than it needs to be”, said one key review.
 Hero - the new flagship restaurant at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Federation Square.

Hero – the new flagship restaurant at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Federation Square.

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.

Martini says success comes from not straying from what you know and love.

Martini says success comes from not straying from what you know and love.

The red-meat hero at Hero, meanwhile, isn’t a big rib-eye, but a bavette. A 420-gram piece of steak that Martini douses in a solution of tomato essence, tamari and vinegar before it hits the grill, with the intention of making a very full-flavoured piece of meat even more flavoursome.
 
The thrill of cooking for people, the inspiration is still there, she says, whether it’s in the season or in the markets, or just looking at a really nice piece of fish or meat. “It’s a weird love affair, but as a chef you’ll stay focussed if you stay close to what you love.”

The pursuit of flavour is what drives Martini’s cooking - robust and honest food using traditional techniques and Mediterranean flavours.

The pursuit of flavour is what drives Martini’s cooking – robust and honest food using traditional techniques and Mediterranean flavours.

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So you want to open a little something of your own? Raph Rashid has two questions for you. What do you want to get out of it? And who is your customer?

The food truck OG - Raph Rashid.

The food truck OG – Raph Rashid.

“I think it’s good to quantify what you feel like your return should be.” And Rashid doesn’t just mean the bottom line. What do you want this business to do for you? Make you money? Let you express yourself? Change your community? Give you a vehicle to explore something that you’re interested in? Save the world? Buy yourself a job you like? All of the above?
 
“What are the metrics to your success and happiness?” If that’s outlined and you’re happy with that, he says, you need to figure out who your customer is. “That idea of that customer doesn’t have to stay set in stone, but you have to have an idea of where this person is. Does this person actually exist? That’s huge for people.”
 
About once every two weeks someone who wants to open a food truck hits Rashid up on Instagram, and he hits them back with the two questions. “And then if they’ve thought about it, and say, ‘this customer exists at this farmer’s market on Sunday and I’m willing to go there and do this for them every Sunday’, then cool. But if they’re like, ‘oh, we’re just gonna park up outside the MCG and you know’, I’ll say, that’s fine too, but you probably need to put in a little bit more work. You might not be able to park there. And does that person coming out of the MCG really want to eat a Scotch egg right then? You’ve got to think about those things. I return to these questions all the time.”

Raph runs three Beatbox Kitchen burger trucks, three Taco Trucks, a Beatbox Kitchen diner and Juanita Peaches, a combined burger and donut shop.

Raph runs three Beatbox Kitchen burger trucks, three Taco Trucks, a Beatbox Kitchen diner and Juanita Peaches, a combined burger and donut shop.

This is not to say Raph Rashid asked himself these questions before he opened his own thing. Right now, he runs three Beatbox Kitchen burger trucks, three Taco Trucks, a bricks-and-mortar Beatbox Kitchen diner on Sydney Road, and Juanita Peaches, a combined burger and doughnut shop in Brunswick that is home to the trucks. He’s the author of three books, has been by turns a graffiti writer, a teenage T-shirt mogul, a recording artist and a sandwich hand, and last year made his first-ever TV series, Mean Cuisine.
 
If you’re looking for a through-line there, it’s doing it yourself. His first book, Behind the Beat, has nothing to do with food – it’s all about hip-hop producers. But it’s about their home studios, taking you inside the spaces where the likes of Cut Chemist, Madlib, Mario Caldato Jr and the late MF Doom and J Dilla did their work.
 
 
 

“I was deeply into home studios and how people were DIYing their own music. One of my favourite albums of all time was DJ Shadow, and he made it all at home. I thought, people need to see what’s going on here.”

 
 
 
Whether it’s skateboarding, graffiti, hip-hop or taco trucks, Rashid deep dives into subcultures, and takes his time to absorb the details while he’s there.
 
When you take a look at the (many) cookbooks on his office shelves, beyond the extensive taco and hamburger literature – you might discern a bias for chefs who forge their own path: Roy Choi, David Chang, Gabrielle Hamilton, Fred Morin and David McMillan, the guys from Joe Beef in Montreal. “I still trip on the new Joe Beef, you know – Surviving the Apocalypse – how’s that timing?”
 
Then as you walk past a stack of shelves towards the other end of the room, the cookbooks and bottles of mustard give way to more 1970s copies of National Geographic, and scale models of treehouses. Less Enrique Olvera, René Redzepi and fermentation, more Ken Done, Henry Darger and books about crochet, tissue paper and kite craft. A poster dominates one shelf with the legend THEY DRANK ALL THE MILK AND ATE ALL THE BUTTER.

Raph’s wife Beci says he loves learning and is always on a mission to better himself.

Raph’s wife Beci says he loves learning and is always on a mission to better himself.

Now you’re in the workspace of Beci Orpin, designer, prolific author and Rashid’s wife, the mother of their two sons, Tyke and Ari, and his key creative collaborator. Take a look at the titles of the (many) books Orpin has produced and it’s not hard to see why they’re kindred spirits: Make & Do, Find & Keep, Take Heart, Take Action, Watch This. “Beci is the DIY queen,” says Rashid.
 
Orpin says Raph is a unique individual – incredibly motivated and never reliant on anyone else to make things happen.
 
“His best skill is making things happen and I think that’s the difference between him and others – everyone has ideas, but not everyone can make them happen. He has many ideas and some of these ideas reach obsession level, and he will obsess over them until they become a reality.”
 
 
 

“He loves learning and is always on a mission to better himself and he’s genuinely passionate about anything he decides to undertake. He has a lot of energy, and reacts greatly to the energy of others.”

 
 
 
“He also loves food. Like really, really loves food, and the satisfaction he gets for cooking and providing for others. At least once a week he’ll revel in a weekday meal he has cooked for our family, especially if the kids love it. Those small things are never lost on him.”

For all his obsessiveness and attention to detail, when Rashid started out back in 2009, not only did he have essentially no experience running a food business of his own, there was also no one doing food trucks he could ask for advice. Oh, and he’d never driven a manual car before, let alone a truck.
 
The learning curve was steep, a waking nightmare of missing staff, melting ice-cream and faulty power circuits. Driving back from working his first music festival, the safe fell out of the truck and onto the freeway, along with all the weekend’s takings. He also didn’t have a kitchen, or anywhere else to prep. He just did it.
 
 
 

“I just parked the truck next to my house, and we would just prepare on the street.” He was running a lead over the next-door neighbour’s house to plug in the power because he didn’t have a driveway of his own to park on. “Then you call the meat guy and the fish guy and the vegetable guy and say ‘okay I’m ready for deliveries because my fridge is on. It was insane.”
Taco truck tools of the trade - flank steak and tortillas on the grill.

Taco truck tools of the trade – flank steak and tortillas on the grill.

But he stuck with it, got a small warehouse, added some more trucks, and then outgrew the warehouse and now he’s the guy people go to, asking how they can get their dream on the road. And he’s there for them.
 
Rashid’s knowledge was won the hard way, but there’s no secret to his success that he won’t share. What’s the spicing in his short-rib sausage sandwich? (Sweet paprika and mustard powder.) What kind of chillies go into the oil that fires up his sweetbread tacos? (Habaneros.) How does he get that texture in his glazed oxtails? (Shred two thirds of the meat once it’s tender, keep the remaining third on the bone, simmer them together for another 15 minutes, then give them a blast in the oven.) Just ask.

Raph’s knowledge was won the hard way but there’s no secret to his success that he won’t share.

Raph’s knowledge was won the hard way but there’s no secret to his success that he won’t share.

His understanding of the microscopic details of hamburgers is quite remarkable, even in this burger-saturated day and age.
 
Proportion, patty shrinkage and the exact tang of the sauce? He has spent literally hundreds of hours thinking about the blend of meats that go into the burgers at Beatbox, having bought a bench top mincer to work it out himself, but he’ll tell you everything he knows at the drop of a hat. “I’m not a closed book. There’s no secrets.”
 
He even has a history of the burger in Australia mapped out in his head. You want to hear it?
 
In the beginning there was the fish-and-chip shop burger. Fairly lean mince, maybe topside, usually formed into a ball which the cook would smash down as they went (“so they were ahead of the smashed-patty game,” Rashid laughs), trying to cook it quickly. There’d be some onions that’ve been grilled – sitting up the back, or off the grill to the side. Then there’d be some lettuce mixed with cabbage, “a classic chip-shop hack” to maintain crunch. There’d be tomato, which some places would grill, (“which I never liked”), and then there’d be a grilled bun that would potentially be a day old. “Around here it’d be Morgan’s hamburger buns. They’re the hamburger-bun bakery of Melbourne. They’re pretty wide.”
 
Most people were usually using margarine on the buns and toasting was generally done under a salamander. “Not direct heat, which is okay, but it does dry out the bun.” And then you’d have tomato sauce, and probably a Kraft single for the cheese. “Some places would pre-season the meat, which would make the meat go like sausage, because the salt breaks down the protein structure and it all joins up, which makes it a bit rubbery.”

Hot burger tip: don’t pre-season the meat - the salt breaks down the protein structure and makes the texture rubbery.

Hot burger tip: don’t pre-season the meat – the salt breaks down the protein structure and makes the texture rubbery.

Then came McDonald’s and the other American burger chains. The points of reference for young adults now, Rashid says, are big-chain fast food, while their parents would have grown up with the fish-and-chip shop burger first. In making his own burgers, he wanted to straddle both worlds, and also bring in what he’d seen travelling in the US.
 
 
 

“I thought there was a distinct west coast/east coast style of burger. The west coast being like In-N-Out, and the east coast being more like a pub-style burger. The east coast had a fatter patty, juicier, bigger and nothing was very sweet, no brioche or anything like that.”

 
 
 
He’s also a big believer in the way a place feels. More than the actual burger, he says, it was “the feelings of conviction and honesty” that won him over at a lot of the mom-and-pop burger stands he visited in the US.

The Raph Burger - the outstanding result of much burger research.

The Raph Burger – the outstanding result of much burger research.

The result of all this obsessive R&D was the Raph burger: lettuce, tomato, red onion (raw but thin), gouda cheese and a little bit of sauce that’s pretty neutral but has some tang. “You never want the sauce to be a crutch – we’re not saying, ‘oh cool, we’ll mayo it up and that’ll keep everybody sweet’.”
 
In 2009 it was 180 grams; now it’s 155. “I thought, we’ve gotta serve this medium, and it’s gotta be heaving and medium and if you cut into it, it’ll be juicy.” Then, he quickly worked out – “No, actually, I didn’t work it out quickly at all, I stuck to it for a long time.” Rashid slowly worked out that it was freaking people out and slowly readjusted to people’s expectations. He went with less meat and a wider patty and everything else had to change around it.
 
He also changed his cooking technique, adding a couple of little taps into the meat with the side of the spatula when he was grilling, which, though seemingly a small change, did a lot to release the fat inside the patty. “Just to get it breathing: a loose patty is ideal.” If you could have the meat going straight from your mincer, then hand-formed and onto the grill, says Rashid, that’s perfect.
 
You’re making a burger, not a steak, so you’re not salting it ahead of time and then bringing it to temperature. “It’s a different thing. You need texture. You want all the nooks and crannies, you want the fat to flow through.”

Raph has a remarkable understanding of the microscopic details of hamburgers.

Raph has a remarkable understanding of the microscopic details of hamburgers.

“I’ve also learned that it’s not just about fat content.” He started with about 80:20, which is about what chuck has naturally. “That’s definitely the beginning, but there’s a lot of nuance in that. What fat are you going to use?” Today there’s a lot of suet in the Beatbox mix, the fat from around the kidneys.
 
 
 

“It’s got a good melt-point, and that’s important. I’ve seen patties that look great, but you put them on the grill and all of a sudden it’s shrunk to nothing and you’re basically cooking in grease.”

 
 
 
Where the conversation has ended up with his suppliers is a mince that gives minimal shrinkage and has plenty of delicious fat.
 
“When we opened it was basically 80:20 chuck, but that’s gone up too, so we needed to flex.” Now any week it could be a mix of chuck, brisket, flank, maybe some knuckle, the mixture determined by what they’re processing and what they’re selling. “And that helps us deliver a juicy, flavoursome hamburger at about $14. It’s not proprietary – anyone can walk up and get this mince today.”

 
This, says Rashid, is where your relationship with your butcher should come in. “You want to get together on a spec that they can follow and help your business. I started with Nino and Joe’s Meats in Brunswick, and now I work with a company called Provenir, and they operate a mobile abattoir.”

Raph works direct with his supplier for a burger mince that gives minimal shrinkage - using an 80:20 ratio based on available cuts like chuck, brisket, flank or knuckle.

Raph works direct with his supplier for a burger mince that gives minimal shrinkage – using an 80:20 ratio based on available cuts like chuck, brisket, flank or knuckle.

The level of care, animal welfare and transparency Provenir offered him was key to choosing to work with them.
 
“There was so much stuff going on behind the curtains with butchery when I first started this,” Rashid says. “We’d even have some people working for us saying things like ‘if no one’s going to know the difference, what difference does it make?’. But that’s not what my business is about and that’s not what I stand for.””
 
Let’s turn the questions we started with back on the man himself: who is his customer? And what is he looking to get out of doing all this? It’s safe to say that with his businesses humming, even in the face of the challenges posed (especially to food trucks) by the pandemic, Raph Rashid has a good idea of who his customer is, and what they want. But now that he’s been doing this his own way for a while, what are his metrics for success?
 
“Being profitable and not confusing this with greed keeps us on a sustainable path,” he says. Did the customer have a good time? Would they come back? These are things Rashid thinks about a lot. But at the end of the day, he says, all he really wants is a relatively busy business that can turn a profit and keep people employed and learning.
 
“I’m really happy in the day-to-day hustle of it all.”

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Danielle

Alvarez

 

Born in Miami, trained at The French Laundry and Chez Panisse, and now head of the kitchen at Fred’s in Sydney, Danielle Alvarez is one of the brightest lights in a new generation of Australian chefs.

 

Danielle Alvarez at Fred’s in Paddington.

Danielle Alvarez at Fred’s in Paddington.

It’s quite the sight, the lamb leg hanging by a string: five kilos of top-quality Australian meat dangling on two feet of twine, gently turning in front of a fire, right in the middle of a busy kitchen right in the middle of Fred’s, one of the fanciest dining rooms in Sydney.

 
 
But this is Danielle Alvarez’s kitchen, so it’s not a provocation so much as an invitation. A declaration rather than a dare. And whether that declaration first hits you in the eyeballs or the nostrils, it bypasses the thinking part of your brain and goes straight to your subconscious with one very clear message: this is going to be delicious.
 
The leg has been tunnel-boned to remove the aitchbone, seasoned with salt, garlic, thyme, rosemary, and black pepper, tied to make its shape even, and then hung from its shank in front of a high fire of ironbark and charcoal. There it gently turns, the world’s most basic rotisserie, powered by only the heat of the fire and the occasional tap from a passing chef, until maybe an hour later when the leg is cooked to a juicy medium.
 
In the spring Alvarez might send out the lamb with peas and grilled artichokes and a bright-green oil she makes with green garlic. Or perhaps zucchini flowers stuffed with greens. In the summer, she likes to pay tribute to the southern-French origins of gigot à la ficelle with another Provençal classic, the tian, for which she takes the ingredients of a ratatouille – eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes and peppers – and assembles them into a layered pattern cooked as a gratin. Sometimes she’ll serve the leg with the addition of some lamb racks that have been grilled whole then sliced into cutlets. Sometimes she won’t. One thing that’s constant is a lamb jus ladled on top. One of the benefits of getting in whole lambs on a regular basis is having plenty of bones to make a good sauce. And the other final flourish? Just look to the title of Alvarez’s new book.

Fred’s grilled rack of lamb with gratin of stuffed zucchini flowers and jus.

Fred’s grilled rack of lamb with gratin of stuffed zucchini flowers and jus.

In Always Add Lemon, which has just been published by Hardie Grant, the food is very like what is served at Fred’s but Alvarez has chosen to write it less as a restaurant book and more as instructions for good cooks who want to make their food great. She makes the sort of intelligent, perceptive observations on stocks and brines and breadcrumbs that benefit the professional as much they do the home cook, and the page she gives over to “Chardonnay and honey vinaigrette, and how to dress a salad” should be required reading for anyone who picks up a fork.
 
While the lamb leg à la ficelle is eye-catching, for the most part Alvarez cooks meat the way she cooks everything else, putting the produce ahead of the technique, and letting the season guide her creativity. She flips the script on short ribs, poaching them instead of braising them in one recipe, while in another she takes the flanken-cut of the same short ribs – a cut also called asado-style, cut across the grain into narrow strips – and grills them simply with salt and olive oil (and lemon). Lamb leg gets threaded onto skewers for spiedini with flatbreads and “harissa-ish” sauce, while a nice big côte de boeuf gets a reverse-marinade treatment, grilled then rested on a bed of rosemary and thyme.
 
 
 

Alvarez is passionate about using only meat that is raised to the highest ethical standards. “If you ever had to choose between spending a bit more on organic vegetables or spending a bit more on organic pastured meats, you should definitely spend a bit more on pastured meats,” she writes.
Danielle puts produce ahead of technique and lets the season guide her creativity.

Danielle puts produce ahead of technique and lets the season guide her creativity.

There’s plenty to learn in the book about Alvarez herself, too. You can learn, for instance, that the food she cooks today is mostly a product of her professional cooking life in California. But her passion for food came before that, growing up in a Cuban American household in Miami, watching her mother, Rosa, and Aida, her Cuban grandmother, in the kitchen.
 
“Cuban food in our house was a lot of stews that had come originally from the mountainous regions of Spain,” she says. The base ingredients of onion, sweet peppers, and tomato – called a sofrito in Cuba – formed the basis of almost everything. “There was an economical factor to it, too,” says Alvarez. The women of her family cooked a lot using secondary cuts of meat like flank of beef – and were experts at using the pressure-cooker to take something cheap and turn it into something delicious, all within an hour.
 
“One of my favourites is called ropa vieja, which means ‘old clothes’. You take flank of beef, pressure-cook it until it’s shreddy and then make that sofrito base of onion, tomato and capsicum, then pour the shredded beef back in with some of the broth and make a stew with a spice mix involving cumin and oregano. And probably MSG.” With a little bit of white rice on the side and black beans, that was a dinner that was on the Alvarez table at least once a week.
 
It’s also a long way from pretty much anything Alvarez puts on her menus today. Her food at Fred’s is Mediterranean via California, with those southern French, Spanish and Italian traditions accented occasionally with the shishito peppers, Turkish chilli and kombu that are part of the scene in her adopted home city of Sydney.
 
On the odd occasions she chooses to make Cuban food in Australia, Alvarez says, it just doesn’t taste the same. “I think this is where emotion and food come together: it doesn’t take like my mum’s, it makes me miss home more, so I just avoid it entirely.”

Danielle’s passion for food came from watching her mother and Cuban grandmother in the kitchen.

Danielle’s passion for food came from watching her mother and Cuban grandmother in the kitchen.

It was Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook that first took her from Florida to California. “I read it as a student in culinary college and thought, my god, there could be nothing better.” The stories about the farmers and suppliers – the lobster fisherman on the east coast, the orchard where they’d buy their fruit – all of this was foreign to Alvarez growing up in Miami. “We just didn’t have produce like that.”
 
She wrote a letter to The French Laundry and was accepted as an intern in 2006. If she had been drawn in by romantic ideas of the restaurant’s approach, her first experience there jolted her into reality. “I walked in and I was a little bit early because I wanted to be on time. I’ll never forget it: a chef said to me, ‘don’t ever show up early again’. I said, oh, god, why? And he said, ‘when you do that someone has to stop what they’re doing to show you around and everything in a restaurant has a time. Everything is timed to the minute, so you can’t just be throwing that out’. I thought, wow, okay, this is not what I thought it was going to be.” Alvarez learned a great deal from that experience, “and I learned a lot about what I didn’t want to explore.”
 
The local sourcing of produce turned her head. As an intern she spent time picking herbs and vegetables from the kitchen garden to be served the same night. “I thought that was magical,” she says. On the flipside she saw what she considered an exceptional amount of waste “to get to that level of perfection”. Sifting through “incredible things” purely to find 50 pieces that looked exactly the same. “I just didn’t see the charm in that.”
 
The restaurant where Alvarez found her sound was also in northern California and, like The French Laundry, it had a notable reputation for the quality of its ingredients. But in just about every other respect, Chez Panisse was a very different place.
 
Alvarez was hired in 2010 and her first few years, she says, were very challenging. On a typical day, she’d sit down at 1.30 in the afternoon at a picnic table under a wisteria with the head chef and the other four cooks to talk about what was on the menu that day. The head chef would write the menus, Alice Waters, the restaurant’s founder would approve them, and the head chef would give the team a very rough outline of what they had in mind. Beyond that it was up to the chefs to go into the kitchen and make something incredible out of this idea. Steep learning curve? And then some.
 
 
 

“I’d worked at a few places that didn’t have recipes and that was okay,” says Alvarez. “But they weren’t Chez Panisse, which was this major institution. I thought that someone had to step in and tell me how to do it, because I wasn’t sure that I knew.” But they didn’t. “You just had to get into the kitchen and fake it till you make it in a lot of ways.”

 
 
 
“It had to really sing. It had to be a perfect representation of the produce, of the moment and of the head chef’s vision for it, and there were a lot of decisions about that which came down to you.” But for all its challenges, it was, she says, a dream job. “As a young chef I don’t think I could’ve had a better experience.”

Fred’s 800g grilled grass-fed rib eye with bay leaf and kombu.

Fred’s 800g grilled grass-fed rib eye with bay leaf and kombu.

She was at Chez Panisse on the tail end of four gruelling, very rewarding years, when an enquiry came via a friend from Justin Hemmes. The owner of Sydney restaurant group Merivale, Hemmes was looking to open something like Chez Panisse. Was Alvarez interested? After flying to Sydney to inspect the shell of the building, she found herself invited by Hemmes and his sister, Bettina, to sketch out an idea for the kitchen.
 
“I imagined it as this very open, farmhouse sort thing I’d seen in Napa at really rich people’s estates,” she says. It wasn’t a set-up she’d seen in a restaurant before, but she had done many a catered dinner in similar spaces and thought it could work. “And Justin said, ‘cool, this looks great, let’s do it’, and they proceeded to build the restaurant around that. And that in a way became the brief for what Fred’s was going to be.” Alvarez moved to Sydney in 2014, opened the doors at Fred’s two years later, found acclaim nearly instantly, and has cooked for booked-out services ever since.
 
Chez Panisse remains the gold standard in the US for farm-to-table cooking, and it also remains a chief inspiration for Alvarez. “Alice was doing farm-to-table 50 years ago before that term existed.” Alvarez says Waters’ focus wasn’t originally about the connection with small, local, sustainable farms for which the restaurant is now known: it was about getting the freshest possible produce, and that meant going direct to farms in the area.
 
 
 

“Their approach was purely from a flavour standpoint. And that 100 percent still stands; cooking this way isn’t just good for the environment, it’s also the best-tasting food.”

 
 
 
Having women leaders like Waters in restaurants is essential for the viability of the trade, Alvarez says. She acknowledges that chefs who are men don’t get asked about men in the kitchen, but wants to talk about her experience as a woman in professional kitchens, she says, because she thinks there are a lot of women who want to hear about it.

"I’m proud to be a woman chef that other women want to work for."

“I’m proud to be a woman chef that other women want to work for.”

“If I was to say one thing to women,” she says, “it’d be that I’m proud to be a woman chef that other women want to work for. It’s important just to be visible, to be encouraging, to help women see that there is a path in this career that is amazing.” And a life in restaurants is not something that has to end if you decide to have a family and have children, she says, whether you’re a woman or a man.
 
 
 

“If you’re a talented, caring, strong individual, there are ways of building things around you. We need more people like that, and the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from joining an industry that has given me everything.”