Pure South Dining’s Philip Kennedy says market the Tasmanian brand on quality, not price

RESTAURATEUR Philip Kennedy just can’t get enough of fresh Tasmanian produce.

Pure South restaurant owner Philip Kennedy is a long-term champion of Tasmanian produce at his acclaimed 15-year-old Melbourne eatery. Picture: NICOLE CLEARY

IT’S a cranking spot,” says Philip Kennedy. “It doesn’t get any better. Maybe you could be in Crown [Entertainment Complex] for a bit more traffic but not the traffic you want.”

He means foot traffic. We are sitting at Kennedy’s restaurant, Pure South Dining, on the south bank of the Yarra River in inner-city Melbourne. A stream of smartly dressed office workers flows past as we talk over breakfast.

When Kennedy orders a “magic” coffee, I feel like a country cousin not knowing what it is – a double ristretto, topped up with steamed milk, that Melburnians froth over. But only for a moment: at Pure South it’s hard to feel anything but pride and joy in coming from Tasmania.

The whole place is a shrine to our produce and the farmers who grow it. Not that you’d know it at first glance from the pared-back interior of the casual dining room downstairs and fine dining level above.

“I don’t want it to be a bright, brash commercial brand,” says Kennedy. “If it said ‘taste of Tasmania’ in flashing lights, I don’t think I’d be proud of it. I like the way it flies slightly under the radar.”

It’s not until you see the menu that it hits you fair square. It is an honour roll to our producers, from Flinders Island Lamb and Mount Gnomon Farm to Anvers Chocolate and Pyengana Dairy.

Don’t be thinking Kennedy is a johnny-come-lately getting on the Tassie bandwagon after all the hard branding work has been done. He opened the restaurant in 2003. This man was ahead of the curve.

The story begins when Kennedy and elder brother Tony were walking along Southbank and discovered the prize site for lease. They were on the lookout for a space in which to start a contemporary steakhouse and it fit the bill.

They planned from the outset to source top-quality beef from Tasmania.

“We had a notion you could take steak from King Island and open a modern restaurant that was based around provenance and different cuts,” says Kennedy.

By the time they launched, they knew they could bring much more to the offering, with a wealth of suppliers.

Kennedy remembers sitting at the Furneaux Tavern on Flinders Island in the months before Pure South opened, and the pub chef pointing out a small boat chugging into the harbour.

“This will be my menu tonight,” she said. Kennedy got goose bumps when the cray fisherman arrived half an hour later to deliver two eskys of stripey trumpeter, flathead, garfish and cray.

“How good was that?”

Kennedy had just found his first cray supplier.

“This kind of extraordinary produce had been flying overhead, landing at Tullamarine and going on to Hong Kong and Tokyo,” he says. “The best Tassie stuff didn’t even land in Melbourne or Sydney.”

That was about to change, with the brothers flying produce in by small plane from the islands and, increasingly, other parts of the state.

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THE restaurant opened to fantastic reviews by influential critics and quickly became a fixture on the busy strip. A few years later Tony sold his share to Kennedy and two other staff members and moved to Tasmania, where he owns the Shipwrights Arms Hotel in Battery Point.

Philip Kennedy, though, remains passionately involved in Pure South. He expanded two years ago, moving fine dining upstairs, freeing up the riverfront level for a more casual offering.

On Monday night, Pure South and visiting superchef Tetsuya Wakuda cooked up a storm for 130 guests hosted by Brand Tasmania, which is also running the Tasmania Stand at the Fine Food Australia 2018 premium trade show in the city this week.

The six course wine-matched degustation dinner included Lease 65 oysters and King Island wallaby and beef.

Given the depth of Kennedy’s involvement in the scene, and his restaurant pre-dating by some years Hobart’s thriving high-end paddock-to-plate eateries, how does he think we can best protect our product and the lifestyle that enables it to flourish?

“The beautiful thing we found, an honest story, is what the rest of the world wants and nobody has,” says Kennedy.

“The quality, the biosecurity, the clean, green freshness, and the world’s best-practice and produce story can’t be [allowed to be] overtaken by some commercial animal that goes in and mass produces and shags the whole thing.

“You can do it at a larger scale, though, so long as you keep doing it at quality, not volume.

“I think that’s the risk, that we’ve told the story and everyone’s eyes have turned to Tasmania, and then somebody goes in and tries to strip it. That’s how the Tasmanian brand might die.”

Market the Tasmanian brand on quality, not price, he says.

“Just keep it premium. It’s really simple.”

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