ONE-BITE WONDERS
Now you see them, now you don’t. Michael Harden looks at the rise of the snack attack.
Snacks are having a moment. Once mostly associated with fatty, salty things served in bars to soak up booze and stimulate thirst, snacks are now colonising a larger slice of real estate on Australian restaurant menus. Boosted by the ever-changing flexibility of dining habits and a generation of chefs eager to embrace their inner snacker, guilty pleasures is becoming a work of art.
“I’ve always been a snacker,” says Aaron Turner, chef and co-owner of Geelong’s Igni restaurant, where every meal begins with a tableload of snacks that range from a bite-sized shred of chicken skin topped with cod roe and smoked ocean trout to house-made guanciale wrapped around tiny grissini. “I don’t eat a lot in terms of lunch and dinner but I snack all day. It’s something I picked up while I was working and travelling around Spain.
It’s the way I prefer to eat – small, intense bursts of flavour.”
Spain’s tapas bars have been influencing Australian menus for a while now, taking the snack baton from the previous, formal French-style of amuse-bouche, hors d’oeuvres and canapés. But modern Australian snacks take their cues from all over, from the street food of places like India, Mexico and Vietnam to the traditions of meze and aperitivo. The one or two-bite morsels are designed for palate impact, playfulness and as a way of scene setting for the rest of the meal.
Alanna Sapwell’s Esmay pop-ups, most recently in Noosa and Brisbane, have become renowned for the intricate and finely calibrated snacks she creates. Finessed mini-masterpieces like a smoked eel pain perdu topped with pickled shallots, barbecued celeriac and fermented celery leaves might be gone in a bite-and-a-half but it’s a memorable and tone-setting mouthful.
“It’s a fun and interactive way to kick off a dining experience and being able to use your hands adds to your senses and also encourages people to let their guard down and relax,” says Sapwell. “You can be bolder in flavours with smaller portions and so it’s a way people can experience a lot more without just filling up.”
Turner likes the light-hearted nature of snacks.
“I love the idea of bringing all these snacks for people to start with because sometimes eating in a restaurant can be a little awkward, especially if you’re not a restaurant goer. But as soon as the table’s full of snacks, there’s joy at all these little things. It’s like an icebreaker.”
Thi Le’s superb Vietnamese blood pudding cradled in a lettuce leaf has been a one-bite staple of her Melbourne restaurant Anchovy since it opened. Le says that because the “Vietnamese ethos is that you snack all day” she was always going to have some snacks on her menu but she’s bumped up the number over the years.
“It makes business sense because the snacks push the spend up,” she says. “But I also see it as a great way to showcase the restaurant in one or two bites and it gets people intrigued. People like variety and when we have a load of snacks they tend to eat more adventurously too, rather than sticking to the entrée-main-dessert format, because they can try different things without having to commit to a large portion of food.”
Matt Moran has been thinking a lot about snacks recently, ahead of the new bar he’s opening next to his Sydney restaurant Aria in the first half of the year that will concentrate almost exclusively on small one- or two-bite snacks. He’s had a couple of “activations” in the space, collaborating with the crew from Maybe Sammy cocktail bar, and serving up snacks like prawns and abalone toast and fried duck dumplings.
“A good snack is something you put in your mouth and immediately go, ‘I want more’. But there’s nothing left, and that’s the point,” he says. “It’s a way to get people excited. It can be delicate or hardy but you must be able to eat it with your hands and so it should only be one or one-and-a-half bites at the most. You want to be elegant about it – nobody should be feeling they have to cram the whole thing in one bite, especially if they have a small mouth.”
At Hobart’s Fico, Federica Andrisani and Oskar Rossi’s snack game is based around their Italian heritage.
“When we think of snacks, we always think of something that goes with bubbles or an aperitivo, using local products in an Italian way” says Andrisani. “It’s the beginning of the meal so there needs to be balance, between salty and crunchy with some acidity to get the saliva glands going. It should leave you wanting more.”
“It should also feel playful,” adds Rossi. “When you see all those snacks land on the table at places like Igni or at LuMi, you feel like you’re a kid in a candy store with all those flavours to play with.”
So how will snacks fare given all the associated distancing and non-sharing rules imposed by the pandemic?
“It was a conscious decision when constructing Esmay in Covid times to make it snack-focused to begin with,” explains Sapwell. “This gave a way to keep the feeling of ‘sharing’ by breaking the barriers and interacting yet keeping it individual; providing an elevated yet approachable eating experience. I also wanted it to be an accessible price point as I’m sure everyone has been hit in some way this year. This was our way of giving an abundance of food without it blowing out of control.”
Snacks are also labour-intensive, particularly when serving between eight and 18 of them to every table, like at Igni, and this leads to its own conundrum in the time of Covid.
“We used to have one person who just worked on the snacks,” says Turner. “But we can’t afford that now with limits on the number of people allowed in the restaurant.
So, until we can serve more people, we’ve altered the snack portion, serving less but more filling morsels, like a pippi doughnut with sour cream.”
Snacks seem ideally suited to this strange and particular moment in modern Australian dining. It’s not just their individual, single-serve nature but also the welcome sense of fun, playfulness and versatility they bring. It may be that snacks are making a play for a more permanent place on modern menus.
“A good snack is something you put in your mouth and immediately go, ‘I want more’. But there’s nothing left, and that’s the point.”