Dennis Yong Meet the chef making magic with leftover bread and surplus produce at a new Melbourne bar.
“Before I got into cooking, I wanted to be an environmentalist,” says Dennis Yong, chef and mastermind behind Parcs (parcs. com.au), a rescue-food and ferment bar on Melbourne’s Little Collins Street. “This is about both things at the same time.”
In a repurposed pizza joint, Yong’s eatery wears the mission to rethink waste on its green-painted sleeve (hint: say “Parcs” backwards). The menu revolves around offcuts from popular CBD restaurants Aru and Sunda (until last year, Yong was a chef at the latter), remixed with “unpretty” produce from markets. “I just picked up 200 kilograms of surplus plums from a farmer in the Yarra Valley after someone cancelled their order. Amazing fruit was going to be binned. I spend my days thinking, ‘What’s new that I can do with what nobody’s using?’”
So come hungry – and curious. Yong’s Malaysian roots show in avocado kaya and flashes of heat but dishes originate from “everywhere and nowhere”. He flips cacio e pepe with noodles instead of pasta, subbing cheese for miso fermented from leftover bread. Fried rice turns an umami cartwheel with reworked fish belly, before landing on op-shop plates. Almost everything here is living its best second life. Behind the bar, Darren Leaney turns scrap sunflowers into “wine” to spike highballs.
Being super-sustainable gives Parcs an edge right now but Yong hopes his ethos is standard restaurant practice soon. “Chefs can have a huge impact on the waste problem by starting with what’s in front of us, rather than thinking about a dish first and sourcing ingredients. We don’t want to drop the plate and run – we’ll talk you through the dish’s backstory, the idea.”