PRINCIPLE PLEASURES
It ain’t just pizza and it ain’t just salad. Melbourne’s Harley & Rose is serving the best of both and so much more in a smart-casual setting where good times with good friends just roll.
Josh Murphy and Rory Cowcher from Melbourne’s Harley & Rose offer their top hits to share with friends.
Who said that good things never come from a hangover? Chefs Josh Murphy and Rory Cowcher, alumni from Andrew McConnell’s stable of restaurants, were in the US researching ideas for the business they wanted to open together in Melbourne’s west. Then they made a stopover in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest festival. Eight days later, a little over-refreshed, they f lew to New York and staggered into Roberta’s, the pizza joint in Brooklyn.
“We had a bottle of red wine, charcuterie, amazing salads and a pizza, and that way of eating struck a chord with both of us,” says Murphy. “It wasn’t something we’d considered doing because what we’d previously done was a bit more restaurant, a bit more refined. So this was where the idea for Harley & Rose really came from. We agreed that this is one of the best meals we’d had in months and maybe it was something that we needed to look at.”
Simplicity is at the core of Harley & Rose, something that’s apparent in the recipes Murphy and Cowcher shared with a group of their friends for this month’s issue.
Given their experience at Roberta’s, pizza was always going to feature. The West Footscray site came with a pizza oven (although they replaced it with a custom-built wood-fired Polito), but neither chef had much experience making bread so “knowledge was limited and most mistakes that could have been made, were”.
“We knew what we wanted to achieve in the end, which was a crisp base and a chewy crust,” says Cowcher. “We talked with Mike Russell from Baker Bleu in Elsternwick about flour options and this was our starting point. We did small-batch trials at home in our ovens and barbecues while we were renovating the restaurant. It took a couple of months of fine-tuning to get it right, but we can safely say that we were able to make an original dough recipe to add to the eight million others out there.” Not all the dishes spent so long in development.
The roasted carrot salad came into being because they had huge heirloom carrots delivered at the same time they had a surfeit of chillies in the storeroom. They had intended to grill the carrots but, because of the size, tossed them into the pizza oven to roast slowly and then, to use up some of the chillies, made a fermented sauce. Instant hit.
The lamb meatballs came about because Murphy loved the spicing of the lamb sausages that Ish Tosun used to make at his now-closed restaurant Gigibaba, while Cowcher created the risoni for the dish.
“Once we found the site and the idea, getting the recipes and the menu together was really quite easy,” says Cowcher.
Murphy agrees, “It was like we suddenly saw that having pizza and salad was one of the best things you could eat.” Harley & Rose, 572 Barkly St, West Footscray, Vic,
(03) 8320 0325, harleyandrose.net.au