HOME GROWN
It took chef and TV personality Massimo Mele time to find his feet back in Tassie after years in Sydney, but local growers showed him the way forward
Chef and TV star Massimo Mele returns to Tassie
He was wrecked in the days after Dark Mofo last month and he probably won’t wish to make potato gnocchi filled with sheep’s cheese for a while, having sold 1000 portions of it at Winter Feast in Hobart. But chef Massimo Mele is delighted to be back in the thick of the Tasmanian food scene.
After he returned from more than a decade in Sydney, the chef and TV personality was concerned he was not finding his place here. Now, bolstered by the success and camaraderie of Winter Feast and his role in an ambitious paddock-to-plate project unfolding at the new Peppers Silo Hotel in Launceston, Mele, 37, is finding his groove.
He grew up working on the floor of his Italian parents’ Glenorchy restaurant, La Bella Napoli, going on to do his apprenticeship at Hobart waterfront restaurant T42, moving on to Mud Bar & Restaurant in Launceston and then spreading his wings beyond the state.
Working closely with celebrity chef Pete Evans at the Hugos Group in Sydney, Mele rose fast through the ranks and went on to appear on cooking shows Ready Steady Cook, Yes Chef and My Kitchen Rules.
Today, as food director at the new restaurant Grain of the Silos, Mele is working with head chef Peter Twitchett to source 80 per cent of their ingredients locally.
“This project for me is about provenance, quality and community,” Mele says.
The 80 per cent local goal demands an ever-changing menu that responds to seasonality and availability. That brings an extra layer of pressure to the kitchen but also offers opportunities.
“Training someone up to be produce-driven is really difficult,” says Mele. “To run a produce-driven restaurant at this level is difficult.
“And Grain is huge [seating 140]. It’s so easy to pick up the phone and order something. It’s a lot harder to say, ‘let’s change the menu … I have been introducing ‘let’s go to the Harvest and Farm Gate markets and ask the stallholders what’s coming’. It is initiating that conversation, which is rare now.”
The Silo hotel developer, well-known Launceston car dealer Errol Stewart, is Mele’s father-in-law. Stewart, smitten with the challenge of transforming the disused 1960s Kings Wharf concrete silo barrels into a $25 million hotel, only turned his mind to the food offering recently. He is on board with Mele’s love-yourlocal-produce plan.
Mele took Stewart, Twitchett and the Silo hotel and restaurant managers on a road trip a few months ago to talk to farmers about supplying the restaurant, sometimes by growing crops specifically for it.
“Being a chef, running big restaurants, most of your time is taken up by trying to screw people down for prices, for your bottom line,” says Mele.
He tells TasWeekend that spending time with extraordinarily hardworking farmers helped him to shift from that default position. He says Stewart was also “blown away” by how hard they worked. “It’s a tough gig being a potato farmer,” says Mele.
The Silo opened with a party on June 1 for more than 1000 guests, including the Premier and a phalanx of national media. In its first month, Mele says the Launceston public has shown its support with strong patronage and the kitchen team is achieving its 80 per cent local quota on the lunch and dinner menus. It has more work to do to bring the breakfast buffet and function menus in line with the produce goal.
When TasWeekend visited Grain for lunch, 30 local producers were listed on the back of the menu, from Shima Wasabi and Tamar Valley Truffles to Robbins Island Wagyu beef, Flinders Island lamb and Erinvale Farm potatoes. Next month, they will all be invited to attend Grain’s first Meet the Producers long lunch open to the public, with single-grower events to follow monthly. In Tasmania, as indeed in many foodie capitals, the “paddock-to-plate” descriptor can induce a few eye rolls. Mele points out Launceston and Hobart have an advantage over most other Australian cities in delivering the real deal. “You can do it here because of the proximity of growers, not just because of the produce [quality],” he says.
Mele’s world changed when he bumped into Kristy Stewart at The Taste festival a few years ago. They had worked together at Mud years before but hadn’t seen each other again for a decade.
“We didn’t like each other [then]. She was the boss’s daughter and I was the head chef and I could have been a little hotheaded,” he says.
Three years later they are married and living in Taroona with their son Max, who turns two this month.
It was on Mele’s frequent trips to Hobart to visit Kristy that he began to rethink his frenetic Sydney existence.
“This place had changed and so had I,” he says. Moving south three years ago, he commuted to Sydney until last December.
“I was at the shack down at Cremorne [on the South Arm Peninsula] at Christmastime and I caught my first crayfish. I’d been on the boat all day, and floundering the night before, and cooked this beautiful feast. And I just thought, what am I doing? Every time I was coming back to Tasmania I wasn’t really here. I was on my phone and email with the pressures of Sydney.”
Splitting his time between the two places also meant it was harder to make his mark back in Tassie.
“It wasn’t enough that I had a profile and was coming back,” he says. “When you’ve been away and haven’t been that interested in the place, people pick up on that vibe.
“You need to earn your stripes again. You can’t come back and say, ‘Hey, I’m Massimo. I’ve been killing it in Sydney and I’m going to kill it here’. That’s not necessarily the way it works in Tassie.”
Watch this space for his next passionately local projects.