When I arrive at , Domenico is busy making pasta. Owner Andrea Da Como pours me a beautiful glass of Barbera and before I know it, I’ve embarked on a glorious ride of a conversation with Domenico, including a tour of the kitchen and some of the most wonderful descriptions of team work in the kitchen I have ever heard.
I’ve interrupted you making pasta. What were you making out there?
We are making tagliatelle, ravioli, gnocchi. We make pasta every day. We are very lucky because from day one we have been so busy. We make pasta every day, ragu every day, fish every day. It is beautiful working like that because every night we pretty much finish everything and the next day we start again fresh.
Do you use Italian flour for your pasta?
Yes, we use petra flour which is for tagliatelle and chitarra. Then we have caputo flour for gnocchi and another flour, molino dallagiovanna, for all the other pasta. I’ve found these are the best flours.
Do you think the diner can discern the difference, I mean a non-Italian diner?
Definitely. That’s why I do it. Especially in the last 10 years. Lots of places are doing pasta so we want to do something different in the market. I am so sure you could tell the difference. It’s a little more effort for us but you can tell the difference. The tagliatelle pasta is egg and flour and is a dough you can easily do with your hands. Cavatelli dough is a dough you need to make elastic and you need to work in the machine, so it needs a stronger pasta flour. It’s water and flour so it’s different. You can even tell from looking at it. If I show you, you can see. Do you want to come in the kitchen?
Of course. And you’d need different pastas to hold different sauces?
Of course. Definitely. This one, do you see it? We use it for cavatelli, spaghetti. And we use that for tagliatelle.
Oh ok, that’s quite different. That one is quite yellowy.
That’s because it hasn’t been milled as much. They are all organic. So there we have the larder section, and then, come over here, here we do the main course and the pastas. Everything is ready to go for tonight. Here’s the pizza chef. This is our little kitchen. It’s nice and compact and very functional.
If you’re making from scratch every day, how long does that take? What time do you start?
This morning honestly I took it a little easy but usually I am here at 7.30am. I like to take my time to do the prep because the only time where I really enjoy my job…well, I enjoy my job all the time, I love it, it’s my lifestyle. I’m here 17 hours a day. I love it. But the time I am really making love to the ingredients and the time when I am really involved is when I am by myself in the morning. When the service starts it’s different. In the morning, it’s quiet. I can smell the fish and the mushrooms and I start the ragu and it’s calm and I’m alone. I do all my shopping, check everything is right. Then the boys start to arrive, slowly, slowly and the day starts to get more pressured. In the morning I like to chill out for a couple of hours and get everything right.
The morning is the best time of the day. If you want a good ragu and a good pasta, mentally if you have a hundred people coming in, you need to know you have good prep in the fridge. If you start service and you’re not prepared, you know it will be a bad night and I can’t concentrate then so it is very very important to get it right in the morning. After two or three hours of good work, your day will be fine.
It’s a really long day though.
It’s a long day, yes.
You’ve been doing this for almost 20 years.
I have only ever done this job. The first kitchen I was in I was 14 years old. And now I am 33. I’ve been doing this job for 19 years. I need to have an operation on both legs because my veins are coming out. I have always worked at this level. In Europe and here. I work very long hours. It’s the kind of job if you want to do it properly, you need to spend lots of hours at it.
You have to love it, don’t you?
For me it is not a job, it is a lifestyle. On my days off I’m here, in the mornings I’m here, I can’t wait to be here. The only other thing I do is riding and swimming. I do that in the very early morning; I go for a ride and then I come here. I enjoy it. By working like this, the boys arrive and half the work is done so they are relaxed. And guess what, it’s not even a month and the food to me looks beautiful and the team is functional. The other night I told them, we are not a team, we are an orchestra. Everyone is playing their own instrument properly. I am so happy about it. Not even a month and the food is beautiful, the place looks amazing and we are packed every night. I’m very very happy with that.
I feel as though you hit the ground running from an early age because you were in Michelin star restaurants pretty much from the start.
That’s pretty much where I started. My first job was in a Michelin star restaurant. From there it was always that kind of place in Europe. I came to Australia and worked in a few hatted restaurants.
You had your own place for a while too.
I had my own place for three and half years in Albert Park. That was my university. It was my first business and I learned a lot.
It must be so different being an owner as well as a chef.
It’s another thing, of course. It was crazy. I was 28 years old. I didn’t know anything about business. I thought it would be enough to be a great cook, but it’s not. Today this business has changed a lot. You need to give a package to your customers. You need good food but you can’t have a venue that doesn’t look very good. One of the beautiful things about Tipico is that it looks amazing. My first restaurant, I did it myself. I put a couple of things up myself, a couple of lights. It was sad to eat there even though the food was beautiful. It wasn’t the right place. I would do it again as long as I learned as much as I did then.
It’s all part of it, though, isn’t it? That was a chapter.
It was my university. I got a degree there.
Well done. How different is it to cook in Australia compared to Europe?
It is very different because here you have ingredients all year round. In Europe you have to be more selective during the year. You can find everything over there as well but it us not as easy as over there. Here it’s normal to have eggplant, zucchini, tomato all year. I don’t really see a difference in ingredients between Europe and Australia. When I arrived 10 years ago, things weren’t as good; tomatoes didn’t taste as good, vegetables and fruit didn’t taste as good. We have grown a lot. Especially here in Victoria. We have amazing produce. Just an hour out of Melbourne there are beautiful small farms. We work with all organic and free range stuff. Our veal for the coteletta comes from Gippsland. The pork is free range. We work with Ocean Made for the seafood. It is all fresh, nothing frozen. I think when you have the opportunity to work somewhere like here that is busy and where they can afford to buy good ingredients, half of the job is done. Many of our dishes have two or three ingredients and combined together, it is beautiful.
I know. I had the burrata the other night and it was so beautiful. I loved how oozy the cheese was and at the bottom of the plate once I’d finished there was a creamy, tomatoey, pestoy sauce for me to mop up with bread.
Yes and our kingfish crudo is just a little bit of orange zest and dill with a little bit of olive oil and it’s done. All our food is very simple.
We are not a team, we are an orchestra. Everyone is playing their own instrument properly. I am so happy about it.
I read a review of the food you were cooking elsewhere and they described it as being a twist on traditional food…
I used to in my first restaurant. It was a twist of Italian and Asian. It didn’t work. I am lucky to be Italian. That is the potential I need to use. I need to challenge my Nonna, I need to challenge the ingredients, I need to steal the ideas from Italy that are simple and nice. People appreciate that more than something elaborate. I grew up in Michelin star restaurants in the era of molecular cuisine and I was passionate about it. I wanted to be maybe the next Ferran Adria. As a young chef, in my dreams, I wanted to be the next Peter Gilmore.
When I started my job it was the beginning of all that, when I opened my restaurant, it had already changed. People were already going back to the traditional, simple food. I also think a lot of people wondered who I was when I opened my restaurant. Was I Italian? Especially without a name. It is very hard for a young man to go out there and do that kind of thing. It didn’t work. I started to become more passionate about other kinds of food. Of course passion is very important and it is wonderful to do what you love, but at some point, you have to do business as well. You can’t live forever with passion. I knew I had to change.
But even here, it’s not just traditional Italian. There is a little twist. It’s in my veins. I can’t really do spaghetti with tomato and that’s it, I would get bored, it’s not me. But I have found the right formula. To put just one touch on traditional food is even harder than cooking contemporary cuisine. Sometimes you need to study and research more. For example, our Tigella with the prosciutto and squaquerone, the traditional one is actually a kind of Panini, but here we make a little finger food with mayonnaise and tomato and a little bit of prosciutto with the squaquerone cheese made into a little mousse. It’s simple, small and people like it. That’s my new cuisine.
Do the ideas come to you easily?
Most of the dishes come to me when I’m riding. When I’m riding, my mind is free and I’m dreaming. Sometimes they happen in the kitchen, I see an ingredient and try something. Most of the time I have an idea, but the idea has to go on the plate. Sometimes it can take months. When we opened, I put the parmiggiana on the menu and took it off straight away and it has gone back on the menu today. I needed three weeks to find how to do it. Sometimes the idea can start from one place and then you find it in another spot because it doesn’t really work as you think or you find another way that works better.
There are many steps: the cost, it must be easy, it must be able to be delegated, the others have to be able to do what I do. The way I do the first one has to be forever, so you have to find a system because when I have other things to do, my boys will be in trouble during service if they don’t know how to do it. So there are many steps from the idea from the idea that comes from a ride or from an ingredient or from something I have seen before.
Does your staff have to be Italian?
No.
Are they Italian? I can hear a lot of Italian coming from the kitchen!
A few of them but there are a couple of guys who aren’t Italian. We try and run the service in English because most of them are here to learn English and they need it for their PR. But also to respect those who aren’t Italian. We actually started with all Italians and not one of them was a chef. When you open, it’s hard to get chefs to work for you because you’re new and people make sure you’re successful. Chefs know opening is a hard thing. The opening for me was Sunday to the next Monday not moving from here.
So there were no chefs at all, just a few guys helping me. We have a new guy today, he will be the sous chef and finally I can sit down, I can’t believe it. I’m so relaxed today. So slowly slowly, we have had chefs join us but what satisfaction to get guys who have never been in the kitchen running sections. One of them looks like he wants to keep going. It’s amazing.
It’s hard in the kitchen You must be a good leader to have got them to that point?
I think I’m the best leader.
Great. Why is that?
I say that because I love to work with people. I really love to have an idea, share it with you and make sure you can do the same. Also I want to do business. I don’t want to stay behind the stove and just cook. Hopefully this is the first restaurant and we can do something else one day and hopefully I can haven them running the kitchen and I can get out and do public relations and go shopping and research the product. That’s what being a chef today is. If you stay behind the stove…of course you have to cook and I do cook every day, but I have to make sure I delegate. By yourself you won’t go anywhere. If you are not a leader in the kitchen, especially when you have 150 people here, if there isn’t someone driving, where will you go? You need to be a good leader. It’s all about the team.
Do you show or do you tell?
Both. And I like to show once, twice, three times, many times. I’m not someone who says, I’ll show you once and you do the same. No way. Let’s do it together a hundred times, no problem. Every day I say, whatever has happened, it’s my fault, don’t you worry. It’s my responsibility. if something good happens, we are all together, thank you to everyone. If something bad happens, it’s my fault. When I see someone is tired, I don’t shout at them and make it harder, I help. Of course sometimes it happens, but just a little one. I won’t scream at people.
We respect everyone. That’s why I think I’m a good leader and that’s why they love me. I love them very much and believe in them. I think they’re important. As important as I am.
242 High Street, Windsor
Now let the conversation really come to life by listening to it here