Tasmania’s most influential chefs: 12-7
THEY are Tasmania’s top culinary creatives making their mark across the state. We continue our count down of Tassie’s top chefs.
Taste Tasmania
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We’re getting to the pointy end of our count down on Tassie’s most influential chefs.
These are the people who work tirelessly to raise the bar on creating new and interesting food offerings. Collectively, they run the kitchens producing some of the state’s most exciting menus - the ones who have been driving an influx of hashtag-chasing food experience tourism.
Increasingly now, visitors are prioritising restaurant bookings over hotel bookings, basing weekend jaunts to the apple isle on when tables at big-name eateries are available.
But Tassie’s burgeoning food scene is not for visitors alone. The industry’s newfound confidence is fuelling change from within and encouraging fledgling chefs to take to the wing and carve their own niche. And from that we all benefit.
In Day 4 of our five-day series, we continue to count down the top movers and shakers in the Tassie food industry, chosen for their influence on shaping the state’s dining scene.
12 OSKAR ROSSI and FEDERICA ANDRISANI
Fico, Hobart
Italian-born Andrisani says she is always thinking about food. In her hometown of Naples she says everything is driven by what your next meal is. A stroll through the markets in the morning would often have her pondering on what to eat for lunch and dinner. But on coming to Tasmania in 2014, on the arm of her beau Rossi, she discovered a dearth of decent food offerings.
This cultural lacking motivated the pair to open Fico, the much-lauded Macquarie street eatery serving silky pastas “the way pasta should be eaten”. Andrisani and Rossi have both worked from the ground up, sweating it out as apprentices in a two-michellin star restaurant in Italy for very little pay, seven days a week. And it was that gruelling hard work that gave the duo a grounding for their own venture.
Fico has quickly become known as a restaurant that’s notoriously hard to get in to. The pair’s home-style cooking embellished with plenty of flair is garnering a national audience – to the amusement of Andrisani.
“I just cook,” she says. “I just make some food and sometimes I am happy with what we cook and sometimes I’m not really happy, and I always think we can do better and better. I think this is just the beginning of something good. But not good enough still.”
11 MATT BREEN
Templo, Hobart
Chef Matt Breen’s CV reads like a Good Food Guide: Templo, Smolt, Frank and Saffire. And his restaurant’s awards tick off just about all the major critics in the food rounds: gongs from Gourmet Traveller, The Australian’s Hot 50, The Good Food Guide and The Financial Review’s Top 100.
Breen cut his teeth overseas at restaurants in Italy, the UK and Argentina before returning to his home state of Tassie to open up this small, 20-seat neighbourhood food venture.
The eatery’s Italian-inspired menu is winning over more than the local neighbourhood though, with standout dishes such as chargrilled carrots paired with homemade stracciatella, along with pesto made with leftover carrot tops.
And in a theme that seems to emanate through all the state’s foodie hit lists, Breen champions the locavore movement, with his veggies coming in fresh from a 20km radius.
10 CHRISTIAN RYAN
Aloft, Hobart
Could there be a more inspiring location for a top-notch restaurant than this top-floor spot at the end of Hobart’s Brooke Street Pier? Head chef and co-owner Christian Ryan – who also has a stake in popular burger joint The Standard – has taken the lofty ambition of offering a tapas-style, Asian-leaning dining experience. The successful result is this much-lauded eatery set within a vibrant space that has cemented itself as an epicurean hot spot.
After stints learning under the watchful eye of ched Philippe Leban at Mona’s The Source and a posting in London where he worked at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant the Savoy Grill, Ryan’s extensive knowledge of the Tassie dining scene was sought after in March this year by the Delicious team for the judging of their Tasmanian Produce awards, along with his mentor Leban, now of A Tiny Place.
Aloft often tops the lists of must-try eateries in our humble state, and that’s mostly thanks to Ryan’s fun approach to dining.
The food is full of flavour, is fun to share and is dished out in a fun space.
His generous share plates are conversation starters on their own with their punchy flavours, such as the pleasingly crunchy master stock pig’s ear with prickly ash, or the turnip cake with kunzea and black vinegar mushrooms. And people are turning out in droves for a taste.
“There is so much opportunity to get great produce down here,” says Ryan.
“The best thing about Hobart is that we’re taking what Mona and David Walsh gave to us and we’re pushing on our own a bit now. We’re offering our own experiences and not just relying on [Mona] to bring people here for that.”
9 KOBI RUZICKA
Dier Makr, Hobart
With a recent nod by the New York Times in its listing of top 52 places to travel in the world, Ruzicka’s wine bar cum restaurant has certainly turned the global gaze firmly onto humble Hobart.
It has a lot to do with this Melbourne-born chef’s whimsical creations, such as his ‘carrot’ – which like going down Alice’s rabbit hole is an inverted reality, familiar but strange. What is presented as a carrot is in reality a perfectly assembled miniature of deconstructed parts. There’s a fleck of green that resembles a mini carrot top, along with a conical wafer of orange - the root - filled with a savoury custard.
Not doubt this playful approach to food stems from Ruzicka’s time working for quirky UK chef Heston Blumenthal at his three-michellin star eatery Fat Duck in Bray, England.
“The aim is to cook with exciting ingredients and apply varied and unique techniques,” says Ruzicka.
The menu is degustation style, bar Sundays when it’s a more relaxed share-plate style offering.
Aside from time with Blumenthal, Ruzicka’s other training came from stints in de Wulf in Belgium and the former Relae in Copenhagen.
Happy to team with other Hobart food creatives, Ruzicka has also worked at a few pop ups with Fico duo, Oskar Rossi and Federica Andrisani.
8 ANALIESE GREGORY
Franklin, Hobart
It’s amusing to know that the first ever kitchen job that Franklin chef Analiese Gregory applied for she didn’t get. It was at a bistro on the north shore of Auckland and the then 16-year-old Gregory had little kitchen experience, despite her father being noted Kiwi chef Mark Gregory.
These days Gregory runs her own show. And her menus have attracted a lot of praise for their displays of restrained talent and bold offerings.
She says her five years of training under chef Peter Gilmore at Sydney’s Quay restaurant gave her the skills to handle the logistics of leading Franklin, which among other skills involves dealing with multiple small producers who between them supply enough vegetables for the packed out, five nights per week, service times.
Was it hard for Gregory to take the baton from former trailblazing Franklin chef David Moyle when he left 15 months ago to open Melbourne’s Longsong?
At first, yes, she admits: “You have to tell yourself that you’re not going to care about that and you’re going to go in your own direction and do your own thing and do what you think is right.”
Well, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
And as seemingly every conversation on Hobart’s food scene at the moment, no matter how brief, inevitably turns towards Franklin, our guess is that Gregory has successfully stamped her seal here, too.
7 SCOTT HEFFERNAN
Frank and Suzie Lucks, Hobart
Not that long ago, the terms ‘eating out’ and ‘Tasmania’ seemed like oxymorons. But in a few short years those perceptions have been turned on their head, and it’s mostly thanks to innovative chefs such as Scott Heffernan who have led the way in the state’s culinary revolution.
Heffernan, founder of much-loved Salamanca institution Smolt, sadly now closed but funkily rebadged as the fresh pan-Asian eatery Suzie Luck’s; and the Argentine-inspired Frank at Franklin Wharf has long been ahead of the game.
He’s recently consolidated his holdings by selling the West Hobart Smolt Kitchen offshoot in a bid to refocus his energy on his drawcard offerings.
In an industry where loyalty is everything Heffernan has been brave enough to shake things up. His dramatic and bold rebranding of Smolt — a Hobart institution — was a big gamble, that is now paying off.
But as much as he makes all the ‘big boss’ decisions, he remains firmly aware of what’s happening on the ground around him.
Heffernan is respected in the industry for his role in fostering the next generation of chefs. While other establishments can have high turnover of staff, Heffernan’s team remain steadfastly loyal. It’s a testament to his team attitude. He rarely uses the first person ‘me’ when speaking, instead always falling back on ‘we’, stressing the group effort that goes into delivering two world-class establishments.
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