Talking to Gabriel Alonso, you can feel his love for hospitality, food and the people he works with and cooks for. After our chat he took me on a circuit of so I could appreciate the dry ageing beef cabinet and the charcuterie larder which looked like a shrine to all things cheese and cured meat.
Hi Gabriel. Let’s start off with how long you’ve been a chef.
I’ve been a chef for nearly 10 years now. I started working in hospitality when I was 15 or 16; I went from kitchen hand to waitering, bartending, Then worked in the kitchen from about 16.
A lot of chefs I speak to get into it very young, and then the people who make a career change onto cheffing later are always envious of people like you who got into it young because you’ve done the hard yards and have the experience.
There’s always that thing, oh you’re younger me, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. Guys might come in at my age now, at 26 years old, and I’m already 10 years ahead. But you can learn from everyone.
So did you always know that you wanted to be a chef?
Yes, I’ve always loved cooking. I have a strong family background in cooking. My dad is Uruguayan and my mum is Greek, and my grandparents pretty much brought me up and there was always food. My dad is a big cook as well which is good.
Do you tend to like cooking food from that background?
It definitely has a big influence on what I do in terms of, not just creativity, but the palate and the centre of my dishes. They’re very wholesome. There’s a lot of love in them. They are very simple and without the love they wouldn’t be as potent as they are and should be. Simple things, like a tortilla we do is just caramelised onions, potato and egg, but done right it’s the best thing ever.
I was just saying to someone the other day, that I lived in France for a year and had friends who were always off foraging; getting mushrooms from the forest and shellfish from the beach and one of the best meals I’ve ever had was an omelette they made me with cepes from the forest. It was so simple, but so delicious.
The ingredients express themselves as well. We go up with my wife’s family hunting every now and then and on a good day at the right time of the year, you’ll get some rabbits and some mushrooms and you go home and have a cook up and it’s the best meal you ever had because it’s so good and so fresh.
I guess it’s the hunter gatherer appreciation as well.
Yes, you have a different value for everything. You don’t waste anything you find. You find a way to use everything. You can cure the skins and use the innards for something.
That’s the ideal really. Where were you before Juliet Melbourne?
I’ve been at Punch Lane for about four and a half years cycling through, before that, Smith Street Alimentari, MoVida, a place called Eat Drink Man Woman on Brunswick Street, I opened that up with the head chef of now St Urban, Dan who went into that and we’d worked with one another over a number of years. It was pretty cool to work with someone and see them develop and you develop in the process.
Are you the same age?
No, Dan is much more senior than I am.
You probably learned from him but he would have learned form you too.
I think that’s the key to keeping yourself fresh; always learning. It doesn’t matter whether someone has just walked in or if they have been there for 50 years, there’s always something to be learned from them.
Over the ten years you’ve been a chef, have you noticed changes in the industry?
There are definitely shifts. Trends in food are always cycling around. I think within the industry now you’re seeing a lot of different people coming in. When I started, it wasn’t as streamlined, you had to work from the ground up, whereas now I think people expect results a lot quicker and when they find the romance isn’t there and that there’s a lot of hard slog in between, they get perplexed by it and don’t have what it takes to continue. Those that do are generally the standouts and there are quite a few of them around here.
Do you have to tell people that it’s not for them or do you just allow them to discover that for themselves?
No I think that’s a personal discovery. There’s still an air of diplomacy I guess.
Of course. And gone are the days when you’d yell at your staff and belittle them for not doing it right.
That’s right. I’ve never believed in it. I’ve worked for people like that and yeah, you learn a bit but you also learn how not to be. If you want to get the best out of someone you need to learn what drives them. You make an investment in people and it takes a lot more energy to invest in people and find out what makes people tick, but for someone in my position now, that’s what you have to do. You can’t just berate someone because you’ll never get anything out of them and then you’d just be there alone.
It’s not like we’re trying to change the world, we just want to acknowledge that women in our industry produce a massive amount of things.
So to get to where you are now, do you think you need creativity, passion, persistence and drive; are those the things that make a good chef?
I think…I don’t want to make this sound wanky but a lot of the culture for chefs has been about being staunch and like rocks, but the key to any kind of business or development of any kind, be that personal or otherwise, is being fluid; saying yes to things. Nothing should be too hard. If it seems too hard, find a new way to make it work. That positivity and drive helps. Working with someone like Marty, the boss here, has really enforced that. He’s the kind of person that when we get bookings here, it’s not, ‘this is what we have and this is how we do it, here’s the menu and these are your options,’ we like to get to know our clients. We call them up and ask them what they’re thinking and get a vibe for it and tailor something around them. We like to invest something in them so that they get the best experience and we also get the best experience. I think that’s the key to longevity. Especially in hospitality. If you get back to the real meaning of the word, hospitality; you have to be hospitable.
It’s amazing how many places seem to have forgotten that.
Massively. That’s probably one of the biggest changes in the industry you asked about. Places have become more sterile and colder and more formulaic: ‘Have you been before, do you know how we operate?’
‘Do I need my dictionary to decipher the menu?’
Exactly. I just want to eat. Maybe get a little bit merry; sit at the bar and have a chat. That’s cool, that’s my night.
I’ve eaten at Punch Lane a couple of times and I love it because it’s so cosy and the food is a coming home kind of thing because it’s so delicious and not tricky. It’s creative but it’s not out of control.
It’s straightforward.
Yes. How different is Juliet to Punch Lane?
Punch Lane is quite structured in terms of an entrée, a main and a dessert. Here we base it a lot more on sharing. You can have a complete meal but it doesn’t necessarily have to be three courses. From a price point and sizing perspective, we encourage people to order quite a few things. It’s the kind of place you come and spend the night. We just want to have a chat at the bar with customers and ask them what they feel like. We have our dry ageing cabinet so it’s always fun to ask them if they feel like a steak and then we can tailor something around that.
It’s more than a wine bar?
Definitely.
But it’s different to a restaurant?
Yes. Cocktails have really taken off here in terms of giving us a status but wine is always gong to be the driving force. Punch Lane is a big wine institution and, as you can see, Juliet has a lot of wine.
And I was reading that 80% of the wines come from women producers. That’s obviously a conscious decision.
When we chose the name, the concept became quite feminine. Punch Lane feels more gentlemen’s club wit the old cinema chairs and dark, heavy woods. It’s very masculine. We wanted this to be more feminine. It’s still a basement and there are a lot of hard surfaces but there are soft touches; the curves, the accents that make it a feminine environment. It’s cool, especially with our women wine producers and I’ve been looking for different food producers we can use too. Some of our cheeses are made by women. But it’s not like we’re trying to change the world, we just want to acknowledge that women in our industry produce a massive amount of things.
Do you work between the wine list and the kitchen in matching some of those flavours?
We’re definitely working towards that. Our wines by the glass rotate every night. It depends on what people want and what gets opened. Depending on what they’ve got, we liaise with the bar. That’s the best part of my job here is that I can be on the floor and in the kitchen.
That goes back to the whole hospitality thing, doesn’t it, being able to embrace all aspects.
As a chef, it’s a really great opportunity to interact with your clients and find out what they want and develop that.
We were talking when I arrived about how the lights were hand-blown and everything down here has been made form scratch with lots of input from the team, so it feels as though you’re all really invested in this and you’ve been upstairs for a number of years, so it’s really like family here.
Very much so. In the first days we opened, people freaked out because they thought we’d been here forever. There’s a cohesiveness in the team because we’ve all worked together for a number of years so it doesn’t feel like a new venue.
How long have you been open?
About four months. It’s still early days but there was no big shebang. We just opened the doors which was nice.
In terms of the menu, you talked about the wines rotating, are you changing the food offer all the time?
Definitely. We have a couple of staples on there that stay on but we have a limited specials menu every day, well for the three days we trade, I’ll talk to suppliers and find out what’s current and what’s the best in availability and get it in and do something really special with it. This week we’ve got a beautiful artichoke wrapped in sardine and hard roasted and served with a beurre blanc. It’s really simple but super tasty. It’s fun.
37-41 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne