Chef Melissa Palinkas dishes up an abalone treat at Young George

Baby abalone, fermented fennel butter, oyster mushroom and guanciale by Melissa Palinkas, chef-owner, Young George, East Fremantle.

Baby abalone, fermented fennel butter, oyster mushroom and guanciale.

We’ve espoused the virtues of a traditional husband-and-wife restaurant team here many times. When it works — usually with a man in the kitchen, a woman out front, but not always — it can transmit an enormous amount of warmth and pride to customers. Some of our favourite eateries work just this way.

But what about a same-sex partnership? One of Perth’s (well, East Fremantle’s) best-loved and most successful small restaurants is a classic “partners in life, partners in business” relationship without the baggage of tradition.

Young George is a wife-and-wife team: Susan Whelan running the floor and managing while Melissa Palinkas commands the kitchen. Palinkas commands much more, of course.

The WA Good Food Guide named her its 2019 chef of the year in acknowledgment of her bold, robust and original dishes, which might be described as haute dude, and, more broadly, the success of the restaurant.

Dishes such as her smoked pork jowl with fermented cabbage, apple, gochujang, maple and puffed grains, or buttermilk roast chicken with oyster, bacon and seed stuffing and chicken jus, have found their way into the hearts of locals and Perth diners. (They make a distinction in the west.)

“At my restaurant I am the executive chef and my wife, Susan, runs front of house. Simple,” says Palinkas.

Her first kitchen job was at the Brass Monkey, a pub in Perth. Stints in London and Dublin followed, setting Palinkas up for her first head chef role at The Cabin, a hunting-lodge themed Mount Hawthorn bar, for four years.

Then she was ready to do it for herself. “I set up Young George five years ago,” Palinkas says, “and I’m known for being a champion of sustainable, seasonal produce; a passionate advocate for zero waste and my ‘nose to tail, root to shoot’ food style. I also have eliminated 95 per cent of single-use plastics from my restaurant.”

If only more restaurants would embrace the same cause.

The backstory

“This dish encompasses every aspect of my food philosophy: sustainability, supporting small producers and zero waste,” she says. “I learned the value of not wasting food as a child. My mum was a thrifty cook, utilising everything, wasting nothing.

“On weekends Dad drove out to a local farm just outside of Perth, where he would buy an old sheep and some boiling chickens — the ones that didn’t lay any more — to fill our freezer. We didn’t eat best butcher cuts. We ate what I would call peasant-style food but, man, it was so good.”

That same approach informs this dish.

“It combines under-utilised ingredients with the original approach Young George is known for. Coming up with ways to minimise wastage and create something delicious is what keeps me excited as a chef. This dish is me on a plate.”

The produce

For some, Palinkas says, by-product “means trash”.

“Rather than discarding a potential food source, I work with smaller suppliers like Fins (seafood wholesaler) to explore opportunities to rescue produce rather than it going to rubbish. That’s how I ended up with these amazing baby abalone, which are a by-product of abalone farming.”

The partners at Fins appreciate how serious the chef is about zero-waste.

“Because more babies are produced than needed during farming, they offered them to me instead of discarding them. I jumped at the chance to create a dish.”

The method

Palinkas sears the abalone as you would a scallop, quickly but with a nice crust.

“Then, separately, I saute locally grown oyster mushrooms,” she says.

“We love to use house-made ferment liquors as seasonings and dressings, and in this particular recipe we use fennel ferment liquor, made from discarded stalks, which I deglaze the mushroom pan with, before emulsifying some butter into it for the sauce.

“The dish is finished with thinly sliced house-cured guanciale (pork cheek) blow-torched and some crisp, shaved fresh fennel dressed in lemon and olive oil. Final garnish is a fennel frond.”

The twist

“Creating dishes from by-products and secondary produce really excites me,” Palinkas says of this uniquely West Australian take on the classic combination of shellfish/mollusc and cured pork.

“We are in a privileged position to have access to some of the best produce on the planet; how can we allow it to go to waste?

“Being able to work with suppliers and producers who share my values means I can help reduce their impact on the environment, be creative, teach others to think outside the box and be original.”

And that’s a win in anybody’s language.

The price

$27.