Alicia Cheong

That was so uncool of me to ask that! I came in for lunch a couple of weeks ago and as soon as I got out the lift, I had a flashback to an eighties roller skating rink. It’s the exact same music. It’s so good.

Our playlist is Spotify so it curates it every day and night and you can see the difference at 10pm at night it just goes up and doesn’t stop, all the dance tunes. It does a pretty good job.

It does do a pretty good job. Maybe algorithms do work. But anyway thank you for your time, Alicia, I’ve really been looking forward to talking to you. Obviously you’ve been with and known that crew a while and then you’ve been traveling. But when did you first become a chef?

When I was 18. Seven years ago. I was cheffing in Singapore and I was studying there. I finished my studies and moved here for studies as well. That’s when I met Kent from Fancy Hank’s. I was just looking for a part-time job at that time. We started off in a fun way doing pop ups and Melbourne Music Week and I just got stuck in it.

I went in and he had no chef and I asked what he wanted me to do and he told me to just cook American barbecue. I told him I had no experience and he said, oh you’ll get it. It took me three to six months to get used to the smoker. We were doing the pop up and every week was something different, in terms of quality. We were really new on the whole scene. I don’t think there was anyone back then doing American barbecue so we were just playing around with it. The product got better and better every week and then it became Fancy Hank’s as it is today, which is pretty cool to see.

It is cool to see. You’ve come a long way in a short space of time, haven’t you?

I’m really lucky to have met these guys from Hank’s. We work really well together. We’re best mates. Me and Kent have been talking about this for about six years. Ever since I started working with him, he has been, what do you cook back in Singapore, what do you guys eat? We always used to cook at his house on the off days and he got really into Asian food and that’s when we started doing trips back to Singapore. We really liked the concept and Mike got on that concept as well. We were going to open something and then six years later we have finally go there.

For me, from then to now has been meeting the right people at the right time. We’ve been waiting for this thing to happen for so long. Which is why I left Hank's as well. I left Hank's when I thought I had done all I could do there and I thought I would go and travel. I went back to Singapore to be with family for a bit and that’s when I started working at Andre in Singapore.

That was also something I wasn’t expecting to do; fine dining, But I got in there and I thought I might as well challenge myself. It turns out it was a really good thing for my career. It was a real boost. I got to meet so many kinds of people. There were chefs doing collabs with Andre. It was a whole other world.

There are a lot of people in the kitchen in fine dining aren’t there?

There were probably 15 people in the kitchen and everyone had their own specific job that you do every single day. You come in at 9 in the morning and you stay all the way through to 1 the next morning. You know exactly what to do and there’s no talking.

There’d be none of this music either.

No. It was a really stressful environment. The first day I got there they wouldn’t let me do anything. They told me to stand there during service. So I was just standing at the dishwasher watching everybody and watching how it all worked. It was the only kitchen where nobody talks during service. The head chef just calls out the covers and then you just see the whole kitchen moves like clockwork and everything comes out at he same time.

At first I thought, how do they do it? Everyone was just quiet doing their own thing. There was no shouting or screaming. It is super organised. Everybody works every day. The restaurant doesn’t close. We used to do 6 days a week and only close when it is the restaurant holiday; a summer break and a winter break. You work with 15 people, the same people, every single day.

It has to be clockwork then, doesn’t it? You have to be able to get on with it.

It’s almost like muscle memory at the end of it. The set up is always the same. They are really exact in the set up. You use the exact same ting size and the same spoons in a certain station.

What section were you on?

I was on sauce.

That’s a pretty important section.

It was a pretty big section. I was directly under the sous chef at the time who became the head chef at the end of it.

How long were you there?

I was there for a year. They closed a couple of months ago. But the sous chef was there and he was the one making sure everything was perfect all the time. It can’t even be a wrong angle. You have to hold a pot correctly. You have to hold a spatula at the correct angle. I was like, why? But after a while you realise it’s about muscle memory and that’s why you don’t have to talk during service. It was really hard but it was a good experience.

You’d have to love it.

Yeah. I told myself when I started that I would only do a year. But you know when you’re leaving you get those love goggles, I thought about how much I loved the place. But I had told myself one year would be good enough to learn what I wanted to do. Especially learning organisational stuff and how to be a cleaner chef. The things they do there, one dish would probably have 20 or 30 elements in it. I know it takes two or three days to get to that point. The food is exceptional. Seeing the process of it, you can probably do it in Asia, but how do you do it in Melbourne? It’s a really hard thing to do here, especially with wages and stuff like that.

I hadn’t realised until recently that fine dining, because it has so many chefs in the kitchen makes no money, or at least, doesn’t pay very well, because there are so many wages to cover. If you’re working 9am to 1am, you’re not subscribing to the 38 hours a week model, are you?

It’s very different there. I think when you’re in those restaurants and in the top 50 of the world, people want to work for you and they are willing to put in 80 or 90 hours a week.

You’re not being exploited, are you? Because you are learning so much…or are you?

Well that’s a really hard question. I was a Singaporean in Singapore so I got a standard pay. Foreigners got lower than us and they are the ones working longer than us. That I feel is exploitation, but then they are really happy to work there. I think people want to work for their idols; celebrity chefs or whoever they respect the most. For that short period of time you can put in all that work and effort but it’s not a feasible of way of working throughout your whole career. Although some people can.

Did you do a bit more traveling? Your name popped up on a couch-surfing site. You listed a lot of places you’ve been to. Was it a tasting adventure?

What I did was I took nine months…I wanted to do a year but I ran out of money…I did nine months backpacking through China and Japan, Vietnam. I did one month in Japan which was pretty intense because I couldn’t speak Japanese and I was alone. It was very nice and the people are really nice. The food is exceptional.

Then I went to the US for three months. I went from New York to California. My sister lives in New York so I went to visit her. And I always wanted to take the California train that goes from Chicago to California and takes 56 hours. I said, I want to take the 56 hour train. I did that and people told me to go to Colorado in the middle, so I thought, sweet, so I did that. Then with my friend I drove all the way from California back to New York passing by small towns. I went to barbecue places…the kind of places I felt awkward being in because I was the only Asian in a barbecue place. They weren’t top barbecue places; they were the mom and pop barbecue places. I’d really want to go and my friend is American so I was the only Asian in the whole queue and there’d be big African American guys asking me what I was doing there. I’d say, I’m just ordering barbecue and they’d ask me if I knew how to eat barbecue and I’d be like, yeah. I’d wear my Fancy Hanks t-shirt everywhere I went.

That whole trip was about me wanting to learn about food from everywhere else. And also at the time I was really interested in beer so I was going around breweries all around the States and in Europe as well, trying beers. I’d worked hard and I deserved nine months. I met a lot of great people.

New Orleans was one of my favourite places to be. The people there are crazy. They party every single day.

They have an interesting style of food, don’t they, because it’s a mixture of Creole…

They’ve got Creole and Cajun influences. It’s all very soul food. They’ve got restaurants there that bring it up to the next level as well. You think that Americans only eat burgers and chips. They actually have a huge variety of food. Being able to see regional cuisine and how its affected by geography and where it is on the map and immigrants was really cool.

Here though, it is a more hawker style barbecue? Have you brought anything from your travels to what you’re doing here?

What we’re doing here is mostly Singaporean and Malaysian. We tried to do really authentic street food but we can’t really do it in this space. Because of the karaoke bar, we pushed it more towards just off the grill, off the barbecue. The venue is limited in the sense that you only have the barbecue and there’s not a lot you can cook off a barbecue. We took Singapore barbecue, so basically what they have in hawkers’ centres in Singapore and Malaysia and influenced it with a bit of American barbecue so there’s a lot of smoking here. Then I incorporate some techniques from Andre, like garnishes and making powders, dehydrating. Nothing fancy, but trying to make it look a bit prettier. The menu is always revolving but I think what we are sticking to is just barbecue from south-east Asia. That’s what we’re doing.

In terms of what you’re burning, it seems to depend on who you talk to as to what’s best, what are you cooking on?

We cook over three types of charcoal. We use binchotan, Japanese charcoal, that’s oak charcoal. It holds the heat really long and they stay in the whole briquettes, in the extruded form, so it’s easier to move them around. Especially in our barbecue because we have a yakitori grill, so it’s two bars and we only cook our skewers over it. That way we can ensure we have the highest char in the shortest time. It’s very expensive but you have to pay for what you get. The other stuff we get is the Australian extruded charcoal which is what we use for our regular grill and we use a wood called Mali, which I think is an Australian wood for our chicken wings.

We use three different things because they break down into different shapes and sizes and we need that to fit in the different grills that we have. We are looking at getting some wood and smoking some stuff over the charcoal barbecue as well. We’ll put wood on the barbecue pit and hang chickens over the top to get the smoke flavour.

Is the difference that the American barbecue is low and slow? So you’re bringing the brisket down from Fancy Hank’s and finishing it here, and the rest is over the grill?

Yes, everything is over the grill. We’re doing two things at Hank’s. We are smoking our brisket there and we smoke our beef tongue. But our brisket uses a different rub to Hank’s. We use a citron pepper rub. The American barbecue is more using black pepper as a base for the rub, we use the citron pepper so it’s more fruity and a bit tangy. It can create a numbing feeling so people are like, what is this? Some people eat it and think there is something wrong but you just have to ride it out and get a bit of a high from it.

I had the brisket when I was here and the eggplant. I really loved that as well.

We are doing a lot more vegetarian options right now. I’m just realising how good it is to barbecue vegetables. I always thought you couldn’t put veggies on the grill, but you actually can.

Are there things that have surprised you about what people are ordering?

I’m surprised at how many people are trying different things. We put the tongue on and the duck hearts as a… …

Test?

…as a a funny thing. I didn’t know who would order it but they are getting really good feedback. They are actually the best feedback we get. It’s funny. We have $2 skewers on Tuesdays and I had a couple come in yesterday and order one skewer of duck hearts and they tried it and they thought it was really good and ordered three more.

It’s good, isn’t it. There is such a stigma attached to offal here, whereas in lots of other countries, they eat it all.

I used to grow up drinking offal soup and it stinks. It has a really porky flavour. The pork in Australia isn’t as porky as it is in Asia. In Asia when you buy pork, it has a stench and you know you are eating pork. Here it has a really clean flavour. All the things I grew up eating, you can’t get here. Deep-fried intestines is a really good beer food that we had back in Singapore. But here people say it’s gross.

That doesn’t sound so good [laughing]…so with your beer interest, have you selected the beer here? Are you going to start making the beer?

Maybe we’ll change the rooftop to a brewery.

Nice.

No, so the cocktail list started with me and Michael the venue manager. We started the base of it. I put in the flavours I wanted. A lot of Asian bars in Melbourne have very standard flavours. They use a lot of yuzu and very typical Asian flavours. I wanted our menu to be more exciting and exotic, but still things you can get in Melbourne. We use a lot of preserved mandarins here. We have a cocktail which I think is off the menu now, it was a seaweed brine that was really weird, which is why we took it off the menu.

You have to try these things.

I liked it but people thought it just tasted like the ocean. Oscar Eastman who used to work at Eau de Vie is the one who created the cocktail menu for us. We did the concept and he pushed it into execution. He makes the beautiful cocktails we have now. We have one that is selling really well now called the Copicabana. It’s espresso martini but with a Singaporean coffee. Singapore coffee is almost like Vietnamese coffee. It’s mostly Arabica and is very strong and black with a big fragrance to it. We normally drink it with condensed milk or evaporated milk and sugar. People love it. It hits you. It’s full of sugar.

You were saying you’re all best friends, does it feel like an extension of your home when you come to work? Is it like hanging out at your other house?

Well, yes and no. I didn’t realise how stressful it is to open something. I think in the first two weeks we were very busy because of the hype. We were all really stressed out. Now its calming down and you can see it will gear up for summer. We’re in a period where we want to enjoy ourselves for now before we get slammed again. The owners are all my friends and we work really well together and I think that’s why I’m not afraid to give ideas and they’re not afraid to give criticism. They’ll tell me if something isn’t as good. It’s good because then I can fix it. It’s good to have those kind of people working with you.

Also they believe in the concept a lot. All five of us have been to Singapore and Malaysia multiple trips. They’ve tasted the food first hand and they know the vibe we are going for and the music we are going for. That’s how the idea was brought to Melbourne pretty easily because we did so many research trips. Food wise, it’s the flavours of South East Asia but the whole atmosphere should be like Asia. Here you should feel like you’re in Chinatown in Asia. When you go up to the rooftop you should feel like you’re in an Asian beer garden. Hopefully it works and we get busier.

Listen to the conversation here.

Heroes

Levels 1-3 188 Bourke Street, Melbourne