Shannon Martinez: queen of the vegan kitchen
Once mocked by mainstream chefs, Shannon Martinez, the ham-tattooed, self-taught pioneer of vegan cooking, is returning from a cruel setback to have the last laugh — and forge new frontiers.
So much about Shannon Martinez doesn’t make sense. Australia’s poster girl for vegan food eats meat and has a ham tattooed on her arm. She gets death threats from militant vegans and yet she broadly supports their cause. She is a cooking-school dropout who was spitting fake blood as a guitarist in a goth rock band while her fellow contemporary chefs were learning their craft.
Then, just as she was turning heads with her bold and pioneering vegan cuisine, she was struck down in the middle of last year by a brutal cancer diagnosis amid Melbourne’s tough Covid-19 lockdowns. Suddenly both she and her hugely popular Melbourne vegan restaurants Smith & Daughters and Smith & Deli were fighting for survival. Plus she split up with her long-time partner and even broke a toe for good measure, all within a few months. “Cancer, Covid, break-up, moon boot. Yeah it was pretty heavy,” she says.
That was then. Martinez, now 39, breaks into a huge smile as she strides down a street in Collingwood past a row of former factories towards the place that has kept her sane throughout these challenges. It is also the place she hopes will become the launch pad for sending her vegan restaurants not just national, but global. “Sorry about the noise,” she says as she opens the glass door to the refurbished former fire station that has become the new site of her Smith & Daughters restaurant and its more casual sidekick, Smith & Deli, that replace her Fitzroy venues. We are instantly hit by a cacophony of drills and hammers as a small army of workers tries to meet the opening deadline, only weeks away. A woman nearby is sitting on scaffolding, painting a giant flower on the wall, while another female artist is putting the finishing touches on a wall sketch of a 19th-century lady in evening dress.
To escape the racket, Martinez takes me to a “back office” the size of a broom cupboard and peels off her leather jacket, revealing a patchwork of tattoos across her arms, hands and back. With her short cropped blue-black hair, black beads, silver cross pendant, flowing black dress over yellow and black tartan pants and black boots, Martinez could have walked out of a goth zombie movie.
It’s another thing that doesn’t quite make sense about her. No one says the country’s best-known vegan chef should fit the old stereotype of a hippie-dippy, Hare Krishna-chanting, mung-bean-eating, Greenpeace-loving activist. But Martinez is the polar opposite: a rock chick turned chef who just happens to have a unique talent for restaurants that cater for the public’s growing demand for plant-based food, free of any animal-sourced products.
“I guess that my chef story is definitely not the standard one,” she says with a laugh so loud that it momentarily drowns out the drilling in the next room. “I’m still figuring out this shit. This morning I was trying to make this amazing Greek burnt milk and also cabbages with [vegan] meat for my new menu. I’m trying to work out what the best textures are. That’s the stuff that really gets me going, I love it.” Martinez doesn’t need questions to make her talk. She is a big personality, with a booming laugh, a quick smile and a love of profanity. She commands attention naturally.
Like many who stumble upon vegan food for the first time, Martinez says that as a young girl growing up in Melbourne she had no idea what was possible. The notion that it could taste almost the same – and better – than real meat, seafood or dairy seemed inconceivable.
More than 70 per cent of her customers now are non-vegan and The Australian’s food writer John Lethlean says she’s connected with a growing market of patrons who want to eat differently. “What interests me, and where she’s had such traction, is that she taps into that broad desire from a lot of middle-aged, middle-class people to consume less meat, not only for nutrition reasons but environmental reasons too,” Lethlean says. “I think the media has beaten a path to her door, not vice versa, because a) she makes vegan food a bit sassy, b) she’s not actually a vegan herself, which everyone finds intriguing, and c) she’s a rock’n’roll chick, not a waif in the forest living on brown rice and mung beans.”
A rock’n’roll chick was what Martinez wanted to be. Her mother, a Harley-riding fashion designer, raised her with musical instruments. “Mum put a violin in my hands when I was four and it took off from there,” says Martinez, who also plays clarinet, saxophone, double bass and bass guitar. Her parents divorced when she was eight but her father, a Spanish engineer who came to Australia in his teens, also ensured that food was a major part of her childhood even if the word vegan was unheard of. ‘“For my Spanish family, like any wog family, food is it,” she says, laughing. “Literally everything revolves around food, all the stereotypes are true.”
Martinez began to cover her body with tattoos as a teenager and played bass guitar in school bands before progressing to bands that played industrial goth music. Cooking was always her other love. She began a cooking apprenticeship in Melbourne but dropped out in the first year to tour the world with her then husband, a professional skateboarder. She travelled from 2000 to 2006 cooking for touring skateboarding teams – “kids who were too drunk to eat anyway”. She even went on the Vans Warped US Tour with her own goth band, spitting fake blood on stage. “It was so reckless, but that’s what you do in your twenties,” she says.
Caught between her love of music and food, Martinez asked her mother which one she should choose. “Mum told me, ‘Whatever you think about when you go to sleep and when you wake up is what you should choose’. It was always food that I thought of most,” she says.
Having returned to Melbourne and still without any formal training as a chef, Martinez worked in pubs, trying to learn all aspects of hospitality. Then one day in 2007, while she was bartending at the East Brunswick Club, the chef walked out, saying he was going to the bank. “He never came back,” she says. “I helped out in the kitchen that night, and I never left the kitchen again.”
Martinez says customers soon began asking for vegan dishes. “I knew about vegetarian food but vegan food was completely new to me. So I started doing some research and found this store with all Asian mock-meat products like vegan lobsters and vegan prawns. I had never seen this sort of stuff before. I thought vegans just ate lentils.” So in the kitchen of the East Brunswick Club she made a vegan version of the classic pub dish chicken parma. “And that was literally the beginning of everything,” she says. “The vegan parma ended up outselling the real chicken parma by three to one. It made me realise there was a huge demographic of people who were not being catered for.”
Rock star Pink visited twice with her entourage to order Martinez’s vegan chicken parma, as did Cyndi Lauper. Martinez revelled in this new and offbeat culinary playground. She began to make up her own recipes, challenging herself to make plant-based versions of other favourite things. A vegan mortadella, for example, begins as a dough made from flour, kneaded under running water until the starch washes away leaving pure gluten protein. “Then we add colours like dehydrated beetroot powder and flavours like spices and miso. Some of the ‘meats’ we make are smoked, too,” she says.
It wasn’t until 2012, when she set up a pop-up kitchen selling only vegan food at a market in Collingwood, that she realised the potential of what she was creating. “We opened up a thing called South and it was nuts... everyone else [working at other pop-ups] was standing around twiddling their thumbs while we had long queues. And I was like, ‘OK, we can do this’.”
In 2014, Martinez opened the vegan restaurant Smith & Daughters and the deli Smith & Deli. Customers flocked to them and for the first time, vegan food slowly infused into Melbourne’s mainstream dining scene. “I think it changed the way people see vegan food,” she says. “We have turned it from a Hare Krishna kind of hippie vibe into an actual dining experience with a wine list and everything else. I want to make vegan food normal. In fact, I want to be able to stop using the term ‘vegan food’ and just call it food,” says Martinez, who has also been a guest chef and judge on MasterChef. “I’m coming from a meat-eater’s perspective and I am doing dishes you won’t normally find in vegan restaurants because I want to do the sort of food that I grew up eating, especially the European influence.”
The vegan journey has not been without bumps. Despite the success of her Smith eateries, fellow chefs looked down on the notion of vegan food, especially when it was prepared by someone who wasn’t classically trained as a chef. “A lot of chefs took the piss early on,” she says. “Vegan food wasn’t taken seriously in the slightest. I also wasn’t taken seriously. I didn’t have what they call pedigree, as in ‘did you work for this person or that’ – I was like a rogue goth chick who learnt to cook vegan food in pubs.”
The acceptance of vegan food is still a challenge for some. “I’ll have big burly dudes coming to the restaurant because their wife or daughter want vegan food and they always make the same comments. They give me the stare and say, ‘Ha ha, don’t worry, I’ll go and get Maccas on the way home’. Once I had someone pull me out of the kitchen and put his finger in my face screaming at me in the middle of a full dining room saying I was lying because the food didn’t look vegan and I was tricking him. But when meat-eaters tell me that, it’s like, ‘I’ve done my job’.”
And then there are the vegans themselves. Martinez tells me she “loves” most vegans, but she doesn’t love the minority of militant ones who cannot accept that she runs vegan restaurants without being a pure vegan herself. “I used to get death threats all the time,” she says. “If you look at Facebook I have been banned from lots of vegan groups; online people can be pretty brutal at times.” But she says there is less hate these days. “I think people have realised that I am not taking the piss and that I care about the same issues.”
Many vegans choose to shun animal products for reasons of animal welfare and in the belief that it helps the environment. It’s an emotive topic that has become fodder for culture wars. Martinez says she is about 95 per cent vegan these days, and although she still eats some meat, seafood and dairy, she wants to see a world where people eat fewer animal products. “I am not preaching veganism, I am preaching eating better. But I get it. If you spend your life as an activist and this bitch comes in who has a ham tattooed on her arm and becomes a vegan poster girl, I’d be kind of pissed.”
Lethlean says of Martinez: “For whatever reason, she’s very well connected in the ‘straight’ cheffy world – that’s how she gets on things like MasterChef, which as we know is very influential with teens and adolescents. This platform alone must make her fairly influential in terms of starting the discussion among families – why no animal products? So if she’s been a part of the conversation about where our protein comes from and how it is reared and what are the consequences – and she most certainly has – then she’s done a really good thing.”
Martinez says there is now a far greater acceptance of vegan food in the mainstream restaurant scene. “I’ve had chefs who once took the piss call me up and ask for vegan recipes,” she says. “Places like Vue de Monde now have vegan degustations. That would never have happened five years ago.”
Martinez’s ascension received a cruel setback in July last year when she was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, a type that is uncommon and difficult to treat. “I had one night where I cried my eyes out,” she recalls. “Yeah I was frightened, but my mum is a cancer survivor and so I decided to just get on with it.” For two months she went off social media and began chemotherapy, at the same time working to keep her Smith businesses afloat in the face of Melbourne’s Covid-19 lockdowns. “My own house became my HQ,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed out of the house after treatment started and I spent the time on the phone to my guys at the restaurant trying to keep it going.”
Around the same time she broke up with her boyfriend of four years and then shortly afterwards broke her toe. “It really was the worst year from every angle,” she says. But rather than wallow in her bad luck, Martinez used her time in treatment and in lockdown to hatch new plans. She wrote a vegan cookbook for chemo patients, focusing not on individual dishes but on levels of energy, knowing that one day a cancer patient has the strength to cook something elaborate but the next they can barely put something in the microwave. She also wrote a six-part comic strip series called The Adventures of Chuck, about the importance of surrounding yourself with a strong support network, with all proceeds going to cancer research.
She was also asked to help create a vegan menu for Lona Misa, an Italian eatery at the Ovolo hotel in South Yarra, which turned out to be an unexpected challenge given an unhelpful side-effect of chemo. “For about four months I couldn’t taste anything, and I was trying to put a new menu together,” she says. “There were nights when I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do? What if it doesn’t come back? Then my livelihood is gone.’”
She winged it, using her experience and relying on the taste testing of fellow chefs. But during this grim period she also hatched her most ambitious plan – to open up a bigger and more stylish Smith & Daughters and a Smith & Deli under the same roof in a new space in Collingwood. “The restaurant will be very dark, sexy and moody, very Vivienne Westwood, elegant goth,” she says. “But the deli will be very European in style, a place where I can go back to my Spanish roots.”
Martinez has finished her treatment and now that she is clear of cancer she is determined to forge ahead rather than dwell on the past. She is playing with new frontiers for her food, with new vegan versions of ricotta and blue cheese and new versions of brisket, roast beef, prawns and fish, among others. “I try with these things and I often fail at first, but I am fine with failing because in the end it has to be spot-on,” she says.
As we speak, the noise from the workmen becomes deafening until we are shouting at each other to be heard. It’s time to end the interview but my final question to her brings the most surprising answer. After such a tough few years, what do you want from 2022? “I want to go global,” Martinez replies with a grin. “I want to have Smith & Delis all around the world. Imagine a Smith & Deli at Dubai airport – a country where there are so many vegan eaters? Yep, that’s what I want. To make this a global franchise.”
A global Aussie vegan franchise sounds about as far removed from the hippie roots of veganism as you can get. But maybe with Martinez, it is time to expect the unexpected.