Shannon Martinez
Smith & Daughters, Melbourne, Vic
Few people can carry off the “rock star chef” label but Shannon Martinez passes that test with flying colours. It’s not just her excellent sense of style, raucous sense of humour wrapped around a sharp wit, or the frank way she expresses herself to signal a low tolerance for bullshit. Above all this, it’s that she’s managed to nail a manoeuvre that has a dizzying degree of difficulty: creating food loved by vegans and non-vegans alike.
Martinez has been instrumental in popularising plant-based eating in Australia. This year, ever the pioneer, she combined her two businesses - Smith & Daughters and Smith & Deli - under one roof in the fashionable inner Melbourne suburb Collingwood, making it the biggest, best-looking vegan hub in the country. It overhauled perceptions of what a vegan restaurant can be with a sharp, dark and handsome aesthetic and a menu that offers plant-based versions of everything from spaghetti carbonara and chicken schnitzel to deli meats, cheese and doughnuts. She’s also the executive chef (with chef Ian Curley) at Lona Misa, the signature restaurant at Ovolo South Yarra that offers vegan and vegetarian dishes, has written three mega-selling vegan cookbooks (with a fourth on the way) and is a constant at food festivals, music festivals, conferences and charity events and makes regular appearances on television and in print. Just reading her CV can be a little exhausting.
Perhaps the best way that Martinez has been able to bridge the vegan-omnivore divide is that she is not a vegan herself. Though she eats very little meat – her plant-based eating passion is fuelled by the damage untrammelled meat-consumption can cause the environment – she hasn’t ditched it altogether because it helps her create vegan versions of meaty dishes. Her method when creating a new recipe is to first cook the traditional version and then adjust and tweak flavours until the vegan recipe is as close as it can possibly be to the original. As the surprised look on many a hard-core carnivore’s faces when they taste Martinez’s plant-based meatballs or calamari or risotto alla Milanese attests, her palate is one of the finest around.
Shannon Martinez’s talents as a chef would always have allowed her to go a long way in her chosen profession but her skills as a fine and effective communicator, skills that have allowed her to overhaul attitudes to veganism and create a little harmony in the often-fraught relationship between vegans and non-vegans, are what make her truly remarkable.
There are bars where booze is the main focus and food barely gets a look-in. And bars where it’s all about the snacks, and drinks seem almost an afterthought. Then, there’s diminutive Paloma, a buzzy Gold Coast Goldilocks of a bar in beachy Burleigh Heads, which appears almost effortlessly to get the balance just right.
Of course, lineage helps. When Paloma’s owners chef Alex Munoz Labart and wife Karla kicked off nearby Restaurant Labart in 2018, it was hailed not just for its refined, produce-forward, mod bistro-style fare, but also for its adventurous largely minimal intervention wine list.
Paloma, which opened last November, continues the charge. Conceived originally as a neighbourhood bar, the Munoz Labarts hoped the tiny tenancy on bustling James Street would become a groovy spot where locals could congregate, and a cool setting for Labart diners in search of well-considered pre and post drinks.
But it’s fair to say, it’s evolved into something more significant. In months it’s become a destination which, like Labart, is helping reshape tired assumptions about the Gold Coast.
If you’re after dinner, Labart remains the best go-to. But Paloma’s snacks will give you compelling reasons to linger longer while you explore just one more glass. It’s no disrespect to Paloma’s impressive nature-friendly drinks roundup to say the bar’s small plates give these mainly small-batch choices a run for their money – particularly when Munoz Labart personally mans the pans.
The food options aren’t overly tricky. Simply listed on a single page, they morph regularly. It’s an offer anchored by traditional favourites – perhaps great oysters with a sharp mignonette dressing, beef tartare, a juicy steak frites with peppercorn sauce, the perfectly proportioned La burger or occasionally, a lobster sandwich.
Classic snacks-with-a-twist ensure interest levels stay high, supple folds of jamon Iberico come out dialled up with brightly pickled pimenta de bico, or there’s a Labart carry over – creamy burrata with strawberry, cucumber and basil oil. A recent standout addition is the buttery, deeply savoury caramelised onion tart, dished with an umami-boosting tonnato sauce and olives. In general? Expect a tasty, textural, fat, salt and umami party that shows off Paloma’s nuanced list to advantage.
The cocktail list is tight – just five house drinks, with classics on request. By the glass wine choices are equally strategic – perhaps Flora, a riesling blend from Austrian natural maker Michael Gindl, or a low-fi skin-contact trebbiano by Umbria’s Cantino Margò. Or maybe a Slovenian barbera or a glass of Bodegas Exopto’s easy drinking Rioja. Going by the bottle? A page of pet-nats and another swag of chilled reds present the perfect matches to Paloma’s elevated coastal fun times vibe.
Housed in a long, slender tenancy that subtly evokes the southern Mediterranean, the floor team under bar managers Elisa Rodrigues and James Burrell is as efficient as it’s friendly and welcoming. The venue’s no-booking policy is predictably smart. It may mean you have to take a walk or two around the block before securing a seat. But it will be worth the wait.
It would be easy to miss Van Bone. After all, it’s a 45-minute drive from Hobart in a town that’s really just a dot on the map. It’s low-slung and nestled into the gentle slope of a paddock that’s also home to a herd of grazing cows. But enter the dimly lit rammed-earth vestibule via a heavy timber door and you begin to get a hint of what’s to come – tomatoes on the vine hang from the ceiling for a final ripen, there’s a glimpse into the kitchen through a sliver of window and a shaft of light draws you into the dining room.
It’s the view that stops you there. Huge windows face north, framing lush farmland, the cliffs of Hellfire Bluff and then Maria Island in the distance. It’s breathtaking, all-enveloping and the perfect backdrop for chef-owner Tim Hardy’s quintessentially Tasmanian cuisine. With a focus on local and foraged ingredients, supplemented by their own vegetables, Van Bone offers guests dishes that are often surprising and always delicious. The 14-course menu changes regularly and each course is explained by either
Hardy or restaurant manager-owner Laura Stucken (Hardy’s fiancée). It could include fatty pork jowl
sliced paper thin and served with coffee kombucha, jalapeños from the garden drenched with apple cider vinegar Hardy made five years ago with seasoning provided by salt made from local seawater, collected by the pair on their days off. Hardy’s background at regional restaurants including Brae, The Lake House and Garagistes has informed his passion for hyperlocal and seasonal food, all of which is cooked over the open kitchen’s wood-fire oven and grill.
Dining tables of torched Tasmanian oak were created by Launceston furniture designer Simon Ancher and each of the 18 seats has an individual drawer of vintage cutlery to be used throughout the meal. Named for Van Diemens Land and a local surf break, the restaurant was designed by Stucken, an interior architect, and Hardy (a keen surfer) helped build it, along with the extensive permaculture vegetable garden and native landscaping (Stucken suggests a stroll around the property before dessert). It’s a long way to go for lunch, but every carefully considered element creates a truly memorable meal in a winning destination.
Dani Valent has been one of Australia’s best food communicators for 20 years, a journalist, food critic, travel writer, cook and cookbook author who has applied her intelligence, wit, knowledge and positivity across a range of mediums, from print, radio, television and web through to in-person cooking classes and charity work (she’s been a FareShare ambassador for nearly a decade).
It was already an impressive career pre-pandemic.
But then Covid arrived and struck a disproportionately severe blow to the industry she knew and loved. Valent opened the tool box and went to work.
At a time when everything was uncertain and chaotic, Valent brought her journalist skills into play. She became an information portal for the hospitality industry and for hospitality workers, including the many foreign workers who were on visas and so cut adrift. She waded through the daily-shifting and often contradictory information coming from governments about what was and was not available to workers and restaurants in terms of financial assistance, what was happening with practicalities like density limits and mask mandates and kept that stream of information regularly updated.
Then there was her podcast, Dirty Linen, that she started during Melbourne’s first lockdown, in order to “cover the issues the hospitality industry finds hard to share in public”. The podcast, which is still going, consisted mostly of interviews with people in the industry – everybody from restaurateurs and chefs to producers, writers, foreign workers and international students. It was filled with a lot of practical information but it also brought home just how amazingly diverse the industry is and how many thoughtful people work in it. It also shone a light on how many moving parts go into every food and drink-related business, from day-to-day issues of sourcing staff and produce to issues around mental and physical health and wellbeing.
The reason Dani Valent started Dirty Linen was so “people could feel less alone and could see themselves in other people’s stories”. By communicating some certainty on a regular basis – whether that was the latest news on how to ventilate a restaurant properly, where hospo workers unable to access JobKeeper could get themselves a free feed (often from other restaurants, including the soup kitchen Valent worked on with Attica’s Ben Shewry) or all the latest in restaurant pivoting and side-hustling – Valent made an immense contribution to the wellbeing of the hospitality industry. And we think that kind of empathetic contribution is nothing short of outstanding.