Nick Deligiannis

Hi, Nick, it’s nice to see you again and catch up. 

Thank you for coming. Welcome to Bar Sophia. 

It’s so nice here. It’s a lovely heritage group of shops along here. 

Honestly, I didn’t grow up on this side of town, but this strip is gorgeous and there are a few like this in surrounding suburbs. There’s really good eating, Central Park is down the road. I think the locals are really loving the diversity in the offerings around here. 

It does have that real neighbourhood feel and it feels like people would just wander down here and have dinner.

We get a lot of walk-ins and foot traffic along, not just Burke Road, but Wattletree, Malvern, from right down there as well. We are booked out most nights already, and then the walk-ins and the people that are actually keen to have a look at the venue, it’s largely people from around here. It’s great to see. 

It’s almost three years to the day when I spoke to you at Audrey’s in Sorrento. 

What a time. The past three years have been a real ride. Going from Sorrento, summers, loads of seafood, the brand new Conti to now cooking in a Greek wine bar in Glen Iris. I just love cooking in all different sorts of venues. As a chef, I want to cook as much food as I can. I don’t want to be stuck to one sort of way of cooking. It’s a new challenge. It’s a smaller space, it’s cooking straight out of a wood fire oven here. There’s no stoves or anything. We’ve gone from big kitchens with everything you can dream of to having a core oven and everything just comes under that. It’s pretty interesting. 

But you’re used to cooking over fire because you started off in your family’s pizza shop with a wood fire. 

Yeah, I grew up in a pizza shop. It’s still open now, it’s 30 years old. 

Amazing. I saw you did a pop up there with Anfa Thalassinos. 

We did a few. Anfa’s a good friend of mine. We met in Sorrento, but he was down at Hotel Sorrento and I was down at the Conti. We’ve developed a really nice relationship. We did a few pop-ups at dad’s. He is closed on Monday, so we thought, let’s just do an activation on Mondays and we sold out the first one in an hour, so we did a second one and then when I came back from Greece, we did another one. 

I saw that when I was looking back at your Instagram, also congratulations on your engagement. That’s so exciting. 

Yes. I grew up in Zack’s. Wood fire is definitely in my blood, but yeah, obviously transitioning into the sort of chef wear cooking when I left school. Um, and they did it professionally to now be back doing it. have been a real big circle. It’s an amazing way of cooking. it. There are no stoves or anything, everything gets done on the wood fire. It is a gorgeous oven. All the food is quite simple. It’s all in the mise en plus, all in the prep, we make a lot of flavoured butters and dressings. Greek food is very high acid and it’s simple at its core and at its best. I don’t over-complicate things. The oven’s essentially just cooking the protein perfectly and then just finishing with all these dressings and freshness and high acid. It sounds cliche, but we are really trying to use the best produce and let that speak for itself. 

I read that the influence for Bar Sophia is Athens Riviera? 

I think the food scene in Athens has really come a long way. It’s really modernised in the last few years. It has gone from taverns to actually having legit restaurants. I went just last year, and the service felt like Melbourne service, so still having a Greek philosophy of cooking, but actually having some good service, not just an old Greek man screaming at you from across the room, asking if you want more dips or not. It felt very modern in their approach. Places like Esencia and Manari Tavern and Pharaoh in Athens. I think we took a lot of inspiration from those places, keeping the ingredients as clean as possible, but really focussing on the dressings. It is hot weather food. Obviously when winter comes along, that oven’s perfect for braising overnight. At the moment, we cook out all our lamb overnight in the wood oven. All the residual heat from the embers that we used during the day, we adjust it, take some out, throw a log of wood in, and then we throw a few trays of lamb in there, and it cooks for…well, we left at 10 o’clock last night and I came at 9 this morning. So 11 hours in the wood fire, it just melts. It’s a very good way of cooking, but you do have to manage it. 

What do you do with the lamb? 

We do a sfakiano braise, which is a Cretan braise. We use a dry white wine, Retsina wine, Greek olive oil, black pepper, oregano, of course, salt, and then it’s like, it’s more of a confit than a braise, there’s no stock involved at all. It infuses and confits in the oven. We serve it with, again, oregano, a bit of a Aleppo pepper, olive oil, some lemon juice, and we send it off. That’s it. We’re not pureeing and swiping and thoughts. This is genuine, good Greek food. 

You were preparing zucchini flowers when I came in. 

It’s a Melbourne summer staple. In Greece, they do dolmades, or dolmadakia, but they also stuff pumpkin flowers and zucchini flowers there as well. We stuff them with mizithra cheese, which is a mixture of goat and sheep cheese. It’s like a ricotta almost, quite a creamy texture. We make it in-house. Then we fold through some wilted chicory, a bunch of herbs: mint, dill, parsley, and then we fry them as well. We have a little benchtop fryer in there. Oh, that’ll be just a little tempura room. Melbourne’s zucchini flowers, you get them for a month. So pretty much the whole of January you have these flowers and then come February, depending on how the season works out, they’ll die off probably end of February, and then we change from there. 

I do love when you come to really good restaurants, like the restaurants that you cook in, that it is truly seasonal, and that you can have those things that are treats, like Morel mushrooms, or zucchini flowers, or asparagus, or whatever it is, and that you do just enjoy it for the time that it’s in season. 

Not having anything cemented on the menu, is pretty important, because when winter comes around, and mushrooms are abundant, and truffles are abundant, I’m not going to put a tomato salad on the menu. They’ll come from Queensland, there’s no issue, but right now, we have beautiful tomatoes from Romaro Farm, so, I’m going to use them now, and as you have them in December till February, March. Then come winter, we’ll use mushrooms, we’ll use truffles, a lot of root vegetables, beetroot. I think that keeps offering really sort of stimulating people as well, you know? I don’t want to be a Greek wine bar that has to have a village salad, Greek salad on the menu. That’s just stereotypical, we are not giving the consumer what they deserve. 

Greek restaurants have been very stereotypical here: your trio of dips, your saganaki, kleftiko, that sort of stuff. It’s been the same for a long time, and I like seeing this new age, my generation of cooks, not bastardising anything, but just really embracing the parts of Greece: Crete, the Cyclades, the Peloponnese. It’s good to see that people are actually exploring what Greece is about. There’s a lot to offer besides saganaki and Greek salad. And there’s space for more. Greeks love eating food. I think people like eating Greek food. 

Nick Deligiannis, Bar Sophia

As you say, things have changed in Greece as well, especially around Athens, and I feel like we’ve had a new wave of Greek restaurants in Melbourne recently where people now don’t feel like they have to conform to this Melbourne idea of Greek restaurants. 

There are a lot of Greeks in Melbourne. And they have been here for a long time. My mum came on a boat in the ’60s. There’s more Greeks here than there is in Thessaloniki up north, the second biggest city in Greece. You’ve got Athens, then you’ve got Melbourne, then you’ve got Thessaloniki. Greek restaurants have been very stereotypical here: your trio of dips, your saganaki, kleftiko, that sort of stuff. It’s been the same for a long time, and I like seeing this new age, my generation of cooks, not bastardising anything, but just really embracing the parts of Greece: Crete, the Cyclades, the Peloponnese. It’s good to see that people are actually exploring what Greece is about. There’s a lot to offer besides saganaki and Greek salad. And there’s space for more. Greeks love eating food. I think people like eating Greek food. 

Yesterday I was in a cafe in Cheltenham, and I had halloumi, and I took a really great photo. My partner asked about the halloumi because a Greek guy he worked with on a construction site, when there was a barbeque, he’d cook halloumi. And then I was reading that you make your own halloumi. Is it a tricky process? 

It is time consuming. We use Gippsland Jersey milk, unhomogenised. It takes about four hours to get it to a point where I can portion it to cook it. It is a bit temperature focussed. We take the milk to 32 degrees, add some vegetable rennet to it. Then it’s all about patience. We cut the curds here, stir them, make sure we get it to a proper temperature, let them sink to the bottom, strain it, press it, and then poach it. The poaching is what makes the halloumi not melt in the oven. We poach it for 40 minutes, and then we have to brine it. Obviously, it’s just a fresh curd before you brine it. Once you brine it, that imparts all the salt. The brining process is actually pretty interesting. because you can add any flavours to this brine, and the Halloumi would just soak it all up, because the fresh curd is like a sponge. We just do straight salty, but you could add thyme, rosemary, any dry, hard herbs to it, so it’s a pretty cool process, because you can really impart a lot of flavour if you really want to. And then we roast it in the wood fire in a cast iron pan, and we just serve it with some lemon and olive oil, just keep keeping it at its core. It’s not rubbery, it’s like a marshmallow is probably the best way to sort of describe it, with a slight little crust on the outside, like when you toast a marshmallow over the fire. It’s just a beautiful way of eating halloumi. 

I need to come and try that, because I’ve never had fresh halloumi. 

Oh, haven’t you? You have to try it. Because it’s just a beautiful way of eating cheese. It’s a great story of sourcing the milk from Gippsland, getting it delivered here, they come in stacks of 10 litres. I’ll probably make about 60 litres of halloumi a week. It’s a big part of my week, but it’s definitely worth the labour. 

Do you have another prep kitchen?

No, that’s it. That’s everything in there. Honestly, a small kitchen is a blessing in disguise, from personal experience. I’ve worked at some really big kitchens and chefs can get lost in big kitchens, and they rely on the space, and they spread out, and that’s how they can develop bad habits and whatnot. In a kitchen, you have to know how to use your space efficiently, cook efficiently, stay clean, and actually it takes a lot of discipline cooking in a small kitchen, because it’s one wrong pot somewhere, one wrong tray somewhere, and it hinders your whole flow. We can fit three chefs in there on a service. I think it’s good space. One person doing the pass, one person doing the oven, one person plating all the cold food, all our raw seafood. We do two dips here. It’s just a small space, but it gets a job done. We seat 48 in the main dining room and 12 at the bar, so we can do 60 covers some, but, we’ll do two full turns on a Friday, Saturday. It does get busier, but honestly, it’s much easier to clean as well. At the end of a night, instead of spending two hours cleaning a kitchen, it takes half an hour. 

That’s good. This wasn’t a restaurant before? 

It was a bottle shop. Where the kitchen is now was the cool room for all the slabs, and along here was all the fridges. We had to start from scratch, and there was no gas plumbing in there. So, we didn’t really have to rip up any floors or anything and the toilet was already there. It was a stressful build for Michael and Marco, but they did a great job fitting it out. 

I’m always so amazed by the ghost of whatever was there before, like Juni in the city was an Officeworks, and this was a bottle shop. 

I think it’s cool being the first restaurant identity in the space as well. Because there’s so many times you open a new restaurant and people have these memories of previous businesses. This is my fifth or sixth restaurant opening, and every restaurant I’ve done has always had an identity beforehand, and it’s actually quite interesting being the first restaurant in a space, and people say, wow, we didn’t know this was even a thing. A lot of effort’s been put into the space and we just want to treat it properly. 

Since I saw you last, well, when I spoke to you, you had already won Young Chef of the Year, and then at Audrey’s, you got a hat. The restaurant got a hat. I think it’s because of you. That idea of awards and accolades and ambition, where does that sit with you? Where are you now, three years on? 

Winning those awards is amazing for morale. They give you the confidence push that you need. It doesn’t really matter a whole lot in the scheme of how you cook and how you approach things, because I think the real sort of satisfaction in these jobs is: does a team stay with you? Is the culture good in the restaurant? Is the restaurant busy. Absolutely, I’d love to win more, but I think more importantly, is my team happy, am I happy in the job? Are we busy enough to have more team members? Being acknowledged for doing your job is amazing and I’ve been through that and I hope there’s more, but I really like working somewhere where I’m happy to come to work. It is a cliche, a bit corny, but, if you work more than 40 hours a week in a space, you want to enjoy it. 

When you were in Greece, are there things that we just can’t do here because of produce? Or can you replicate what you had? 

I think the biggest you probably can’t do is probably beach dining. I’d kill for a restaurant on the water in Greece, to just be slinging fried seafood, and really clean produce. In Melbourne, I think that would be amazing to produce, but I think maybe our weather is probably a little bit too inconsistent. But I think Greece and Melbourne have a lot more in common than people think. Obviously, it’s very hot in Greece during the summer and obviously the tourism is massive, and people expect a certain product there. But I think the more that these chefs travel and these restaurants travel, it all becomes sort of a bit more similar in regards. Like I said before, the service reminded me of Melbourne service. They actually took it seriously, and it wasn’t someone just screaming at you. There’s more in common than people give it credit for. But, honestly, eating some fried calamari on a beach somewhere in Greece is one of the best things in the world. No one can take that away from you. That’s maybe something we probably can’t do here as often. 

Bar Sophia, 161 Burke Road, Glen Iris