Delicious Top 100: Winning is not an easy recipe for Fred’s debut head chef Danielle Alvarez
FRED’S debut head chef Danielle Alvarez has won just about almost every food award Sydney and Australia has to offer — now her team has claimed top spot in Delicious magazine’s Top 100 restaurants.
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IT’S hard to imagine any chef in the world who can look back on the past year with more satisfaction than Fred’s debut head chef Danielle Alvarez.
Showered with just about every food award Sydney and Australia has to offer, Alvarez and her team can also now end the year atop the coveted list of Delicious Magazine’s Top 100 restaurants.
In doing so Fred’s, a 60-seat Merivale venture in Paddington, beat out some legendary restaurants including Quay (7), the painfully hip Hubert (11) and Brunswick Heads’s famous Fleet (3), which routinely tops ‘best of’ lists across the state.
Not bad for a rookie year.
The big question now is, how does a restaurant with nothing left to win tackle a sophomore year?
“People often say: ‘What now’ but I have some very big plans for 'what now’,” said Alvarez, who is toying with the idea of a Saturday morning produce market as well as contributing to an edible schoolyard.
“I like to think that now the first year is over we can really start to get good. And for me personally I’m really excited about getting more into exploring that connection with family and food and improving the restaurant in every way possible.”
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But American-born Alvarez’s debut as head chef came loaded with risks.
She was rolling the dice in Australia, a country that her mentor and idol Alice Waters refuses to travel to because of the marathon flight.
Then she embarked on an almost-all female kitchen — a ratio that eventually levelled out to a 50-50 male-female split.
She was also adamant about bridging the gap between her kitchen and sustainable producers while under no circumstances relenting to big suppliers — a move which often resulted in criticisms of her prices.
“I guess you could certainly call this past year as challenging,” said Alvarez, who has emerged from the experience in a way that can only be described as “triumphant”.
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