Alejandro’s love of cooking and enthusiasm for life is palpable. When you listen to him, you get the feeling that it really wouldn’t have mattered what he did, he would have embraced it. Except, for Alejandro, he had to cook. Now, he not only cooks, but he shares his passion with his team at , shares his culture and pride in Peruvian cuisine with his diners, and promotes the produce of Gippsland simply because he believes in it.
How long have you been cooking?
Cooking professionally…I started when I was 16. I started at the Cordon Bleu in Peru, in Lima. Then I had a little bit of a break when I was 19, 20 because I studied Marketing and Business at Uni so I did a lot of work experience there with L’Oréal, Johnson and Johnson, and then I found out that although I liked Marketing and the business side of it, my passion was cooking. I decided to follow my passion.
Can the two go together? Can the things you learned in Marketing work their way into your food?
Definitely. Nowadays when I look back to the days when I made a deal with my father that I was going to be a chef and study part-time to be a chef while I finish high school then I’m going to take a year off to work as a chef but the plan was that I had to go back and study a career at Uni, was probably the best deal I have done in my life. It gave me the tools and skills of understanding the business component of a restaurant and how to communicate what I do, how to tell my story bit also how to tell the story of the people I work with; farmers, producers. That’s something that puts you ahead in the race.
When you went back to cooking…was this all in Peru?
Yes, I studied to be a chef when I was 16 and finished when I was 18 ½. I took a year off and went to New York to live that chef life, in Manhattan. I honestly loved it. It was everything that I thought it was going to be. I was very impressed with how the food industry was developing over there. New York is a city that blows away every single expectation and magnifies it.
When was this?
Late nineties to 2001. But the deal I had with my father was that I was going to have this year off and then I was going to go back to Peru and study for a proper career because being a chef back in those days wasn’t a proper career and wasn’t going to pay the bills or give me the kind of lifestyle that my father wanted for me. Through that year I called him and said, ‘I’m not going to go back, this it, I love it here, I have all these opportunities, I have people acknowledging my work and I am independent, I’m meeting a lot of people, I’m staying.’ He only said that I had promised him that I would go back and follow my studies and if I didn’t do that, I basically wasn’t a man. A man’s word is everything. I do admire that. You have to have consequences for what you say and promise. He just had to say that and I knew I had to go back.
I went back and studied Marketing and Business. I did all my marketing in health and skincare and beauty. It was fun. I learned a lot about how to build a brand and promote a product and how to communicate what you do. When I finished Uni I was promoted to being a brand manager fro Johnson and Johnson and I knew if I took that opportunity then, at 23, I would have to commit to it for a long time and I didn’t feel as though I should commit to it if I hadn’t finished experiencing the chef side of it. So I resigned and went to Barcelona to retrain. After being away from a commercial kitchen you get rusty, so using the knives and so on. It’s just not the same. While I was in Barcelona retraining, I applied for different Michelin star restaurants where I wanted to work. I got calls from a few of them and then I chose to work at Les Ambassadeurs in Paris at the Hôtel Crillon, a really well known restaurant, 3 Michelin. I liked it because they had a really strong exchange program with other Michelin star restaurants so they would send chefs to different Michelin star restaurants to learn what they were doing and they had to come back and teach.
So you were like spies?
Yeah but officially. I think it’s a great idea because sometimes we lose chefs because they just want to see something different and it’s good to get them in with a different teacher to re-inspire them. If there’s a contract that you have to come back and teach the others what you’ve learned, it’s great.
So they sent me to The Fat Duck and that was amazing. Especially because I consider myself very creative but what I learned there was an understanding of the ingredients, seeing them in a different way. Most of the restaurants see a carrot as a carrot only, but at The Fat Duck they see all the different options that a carrot can provide. That’s what I took from my time there. Not really all the molecular stuff that I did because that was good fun, but to replicate that you really need to have a restaurant like the Fat Duck running with 25 to 35 chefs in the kitchen and have all the equipment and have less sittings or less customers. I took the part about opening up your mind and opening up the approach on ingredients. A fish, for example, can be seen as we see cows; different cuts different treatments. Now Josh at St Peter’s is doing that, using the offal, using different cuts: the belly, the loins, the head, the wings, everything. I think that is something I have tried to do throughout my career. I try to utilise the ingredients in a basic way but to get the most out of them without transforming them that much that you can’t recognise them. The idea is to get the most flavour out of them.
Later you will taste carrots on rye cracker and basically everything comes from the carrot, except for the cracker. We slice the carrot and the centrepiece of the carrot with the tops and the stems have been used to make a puree. It’s just a simple carrot dish but I am pretty sure it will be the tastiest carrot dish you have ever tried.
Does that mean less wastage because you are more open to using the whole product?
We are definitely fighting a battle against wastage. Like many other chefs we are very conscious of sustainability and how to reduce wastage. In my case, being exposed to Gippsland and being exposed to meeting different farmers and producers has made me more sensitive to the effort these people go through and the difficulties they go through to be able to produce carrots or beef for our kitchens. I have exposed my team to that through the stories and the people and through trips to Gippsland. We have reduced our wastage to 45% just through that small investment of taking them to the field. They appreciate the ingredients more and have more care when they work with them. We have been training them for a long time but we have never had as strong a result as now when they see the reality.
I get that. I think people need the back-story to really understand. I spoke to Annie Smithers out at Du Fermier in Trentham and she has her own garden and 90% of her vegetables come from her garden and it has made her have so much respect for her vegetables because she knows what it took to get them onto the plate.
Also, it encourages us to buy seasonally. In the last three years we have been working with Gippsland producers and farmers we have been developing seasonal journals when we build menus and specials. It might sound basic and we might think that everyone does it but in reality, not everyone does it. We select our suppliers very carefully and we make sure they are the good carrots of the season and not carrots grown in a factory.
My cuisine is not traditional Peruvian, what we do is an interpretation of flavours, dishes, ingredients and stories from Peruvian culture.
You’re cooking Peruvian food here. Have things changed in Peru? Are chefs more respected now than when you started?
Definitely. Four Peruvian restaurants are in the best restaurants around the world. Peruvian cuisine is a very interesting cuisine because there is a lot of diversity in the ingredients and in influences: Chinese, Japanese and Spanish influences. All these cultures came to Peru at a certain point and instead of taking over or being taken over by the local cuisine; there was a marriage between both cultures where one was being complemented by the other one. For example with Japanese, we had Nikkei, which is what we call food with a Peruvian touch to Japanese cuisine. We grow everything in Peru except for a few things. Wasabi, for example, is something we don’t grow. Instead of using wasabi in Nikkei cuisine, they use different Peruvian chillies. So it’s Japanese cuisine but with a light touch of Peru. It’s the same with Chinese, Spanish and African. That’s why the food is so beautiful in Peru. You can still find very traditional Peruvian cuisine but then you have all these other branches to complement it.
Peru went through a very difficult time in the 80s, with terrorism and drug traffic, bringing us down as a community, taking our identity. When you thought about Peru or Colombia or Latin America in general in the 80s, you thought about cocaine or terrorism. We thought we would never get out of that hole. We always had Machu Picchu as a landmark for us but when you have something you take for granted, you don’t value it that much. We are not very good at soccer and being in Latin America and not good at soccer is not good either. Then in the mid-nineties, gastronomy started to boom. Chefs went overseas to study in international schools in Europe or in North America and they came back to Peru and started looking at Peruvian cuisine in a different way. They started to replicate what they saw there with Peruvian cuisine. One of those chefs was Gaston Acurio who is the father of modern Peruvian cuisine. He started the revolution and then chefs like Virgilio Martinez from Central (restaurant) and many others started to work it out in the country and then they took it overseas.
When I was in Europe I was helping the Peruvian consulate promote Peruvian culture in Europe and everything was through gastronomy. For us nowadays, we believe and it’s a fact that gastronomy saved the identity of Peru. Before when you went to Peru, every Peruvian had their head down, they weren’t proud of being Peruvian, now they all look at the sky, heads up and say oh yeah, I’m Peruvian. Our food is the best in Latin America, we keep on winning awards and we are so proud of that.
And you’ve brought that here, but what made you come to Australia in the first place?
I came to Australia just for a year’s holiday. I wasn’t planning to stay. A lot of people say that. I never even thought of Australia until a friend of mine came to Australia and was working at Bilson’s in Sydney in 2006 and he told me to come here and have a break. The food industry was booming in those days and I was looking for somewhere to go for a year. I didn’t want to go to America, or South America and I didn’t want to stay in Europe, so Australia sounded like the best place. I thought I’d come for a year and tick that off the bucket list. I arrived in Sydney and started working in a café on Manly Beach, thinking I wanted to party and travel. I got fired after two weeks of working there. It wasn’t for me at all. With all due respect to chefs who work in cafes, cafes are not for me at all.
I went back to fine dining and worked at Bennelong, and went to a restaurant called Salon Blanc at Woolloomooloo and through that path I started learning more about the Australian hospitality industry and I heard about this incredible chef, Frank Camorra who was opening a restaurant in Melbourne called MoVida, promoting Spanish cuisine and I thought that sounded great and I had seen what Peruvian cuisine had done in Europe so I was curious about this guy. I started following what he was doing, and I thought if he can do it with Spanish, I can do it with Peruvian and I started to draft a plan, with my marketing hat on, thinking about how to introduce a new cuisine into a country. I treated it as a new product.
I started with food festivals. I was lucky with the people I met along the way, very supportive people from the industry, guiding me. I did cooking demonstrations and then when I saw there was a demand, I started some pop up dinners and built a group of followers. After a couple of years they asked where they could learn more about the cuisine, so I started doing cooking classes. Then someone asked when I was opening a restaurant so then I started to plan for that. We opened the first restaurant in Sydney called Morena and that was a two year plan. The first year was fine dining and it was really good but it was financially exhausting. The second year was a little more fun dining, like Pastuso and it just exploded. The lease was finishing and I met my business partners now from San Telmo when I did a collaboration dinner with them. We sat down after the dinner and they asked me what I was doing. I told them my lease was expiring and I’d heard Melbourne was pretty good…what were they doing? So we had a few beers and we opened Pastuso.
That’s awesome. And are you able to replicate here all those facets of Peruvian food you talked about?
Yes. There is always a Japanese influence in our ceviche…we have a ceviche bar with a kitchen designated for ceviche. There are no stoves or anything; it is all raw and really fresh. We work with one of the best seafood suppliers in the market, Red Coral. They handpick our fish. Then we have the charcoal grill which is the Andes and Sierras represented in slow cooking over fire, curing our meats and ageing them. It’s a point of difference for us. There are splashes of Spanish cuisine as well in the menu. We change our menu every three or four months, so things come and go.
My cuisine is not traditional Peruvian, what we do is an interpretation of flavours, dishes, ingredients and stories from Peruvian culture.
Has your father experienced your food?
Yes. Not here, but he went to Morena a couple of times.
Were you able to say, I told you so, to him?
Definitely. And I have. Now in this new stage of my career, and I have this new project going to promote Gippsland, I feel as though everything comes back to being focussed and having a goal. It might sound cheesy, but you can work a lot and put in a lot of effort and tears but you need to know where you’re going. Without knowing that, all that effort won’t mean anything. You have to have a target and a goal. That’s what I teach my boys and girls in the kitchen. I support all initiative and I encourage them to find their own style in the cuisine.
Lucky me I can represent my culture and country with what I do and also represent myself but it is very important to know where you are going and what you want to achieve and the rest is just work hard.
19 ACDC Lane, Melbourne