Michael Flemming

Conversation with a chef: Hi, Mike, it’s really great to be here at Spaghetti Club surrounded by unpacking and set up.

Michael Flemming: All of our deliveries have come in, so it’s a bit hectic at the moment.

It must be quite exciting when things finally start seeming a bit more real. You’ve got all the pots, and the crockery, and the glasses.

Yes. Last week, this place was dramatically different and I was a bit worried we weren’t going to get there in time, but when everything was delivered yesterday, I was like a kid in a candy shop.

It looks beautiful. I came here when it was Klae, and it’s totally different. Can you talk me through what has happened in here?

When we took it over, Thai Bo, the owner of Mama’s Dining Group has a very keen eye for organising and making restaurants look beautiful, and so he redesigned this whole thing with Lucas, who’s also a CEO at Mama’s Dining Group. The vision was very much Nonna’s house from when Lucas was growing up; marble bench tops and lots of wood and shelving with nice decorations, which aren’t in yet, but they will be in next week.

The light fittings are fantastic as well.

Very old school Italian is the vibe.

I love it. There is really beautiful looking booth seating in a lovely mustard yellow. It is retro, but it’s so beautiful.

Very much Italian disco sort of vibes.

Nice. Is this the first time you’ve opened a place?

No, it’s not. I’ve opened a few venues. I helped Telina Menzies open the Gardiner Hotel in Malvern and I’d opened a restaurant in a town called Toowoomba in Queensland called Charred. This is the third time, and it doesn’t get any easier.

When you’re going to be the first chef, what does that involve for you?

I started three weeks ago with the group and pretty much just hit the ground running; organising suppliers, writing menus, hiring staff, talking with builders a lot at the moment, reorganising the kitchen lines and pretty much everything to do with the food side. I’m not sure if that’s the norm, but I’m a very hard worker and like to have my finger in all of the pies when it comes to the kitchen.

Did I read that Lucas Gugliandolo, one of the owners has a Sicilian background? Did you have free range with the menu, or did Lucas have suggestions for what you might go with?

Lucas was very involved. He is Calabrian rather than Sicilian. The idea of this restaurant was a nod to when he would go to his Nonno and Nonna’s house with his family, which they would do every Monday. And his Nonno, who used to be a chef, would pull out his cookbook and create dishes from there for the whole family. So, he’s had a big input on the food side of things. The recipes and everything are mine, but the dishes themselves really come from what he was eating when he was growing up.

That’s really interesting. He’s told you about those dishes, and you have put the recipes together?

I’m lucky enough that his sister that’s taken over from his Nonno is going to come in and talk me through sort of how they made their dishes and their family recipes without sharing too much, unfortunately. But that’s just how it is. It’s really going to be a nod to him and I hope that when this opens, that Lucas really sees what he had as a kid.

Fire is my love. I grew up cooking barbecues and I spent a year working at Arkhé in South Australia under Jake Kellie and I learned a lot about cooking with fire. Now I like to implement that in my food wherever I can.

Michael Flemming, Spaghetti Club

I’ve seen in some articles that they’re talking about handmade pasta and cooking over flame. You love a bit of cooking over flame, don’t you?

Yes, I do. We’ve invested heavily in a pasta extruding machine so that we can make all our own pastas in-house. I actually have an Italian pastry chef who came over from Italy three weeks ago. She’s going to come on board and take over our pasta and bread programs here at the restaurant. And then, fire is my love. I grew up cooking barbecues and I spent a year working at Arkhé in South Australia under Jake Kellie and I learned a lot about cooking with fire. Now I like to implement that in my food wherever I can.

How are your arms?

They’re fine now because I’m no longer a CDP or a commis chef. But when I was at Arkhé, they were pretty charmed.

Cooking over fire was where it all started for humans, but it’s such a process, and you really have to learn about it and how to keep the heat consistent.

It’s definitely something that doesn’t just come naturally to people. You need to learn about different types of wood and how to keep the heat with using wood versus charcoal. Charcoal will stay hot for longer whereas wood dies out if you don’t look after it and baby it almost like a child.

What wood do you like to use?

Red gum is predominantly what we use. I’ve got a guy that’s supplying us wood. He grows it all on his own farm, cuts it himself, breaks it down and delivers it. We are trying to stay as local as possible. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty expensive commodity to use in a restaurant. But I think that smoke brings a new element to food that a lot of people should explore as much as they can.

That’s not just for meat and fish? You would also use it for other things.

Yes. I’m going to do pickled chillies. They’ll get charred over the fire and then pickled so that brings a nice smoky flavour. Our foccacia will get finished in a little smoke oven that we’ve got next to the grill to give them a bit more smoke as well, and pretty much anywhere I can use it to add a different dimension to the food, I’m going to add it in.

It will smell so good in here as well.

It definitely will. Unfortunately, the exhaust system we have can be a bit loud. We’re working that out at the moment so that when we open, it’s not too loud and distracting for everybody.

You’ll just have to turn up the Italian disco. And people will be able to see it all, because that’s it over there.

Yes and we have an elevation grill, or an Argentinian grill, as some people would call it. It has a big cable system so we can move it up and down depending on how much heat we need.

How much wood do you go through when you’re cooking like that?

I worked it out last week. On a busy week, we’ll go through about a ton and a half of wood.

Where’s your wood pile?

We have a woodshed out the back, but there’s also a little wood section underneath the grill, which is nice.

Goodness. I was just talking to David Lakhi the other day at Little Black Pig and Sons, and he was talking about cooking things in the embers as well, once the fire has died down, you can leave things in overnight. It gives another element to the food as well.

The good thing is, we’ve got a smoker oven attached to the grill, so we can fill that with coals overnight and use it as a slow cooking method. We have lamb shoulder on the menu. So it’s something that we’ll do with lamb shoulder or ragus, for instance. It’ll keep it at a nice cold temperature and also implement smoke into everything.

You’ve done quite a bit of Italian cooking. At what point did that come into your career?

I actually grew up in a town called Myrtleford, in Victoria. Much like Griffith, there are a lot of Calabrians there, so I grew up around Italian food and Italian culture. And where I did my apprenticeship, there were a lot of nods to Italian food. But I really fell in love with it when I worked for Mike Eggert at Totti’s in Bondi. Being put on the bread section was pretty cool there, and the pastas as well, and just how much attention to detail there was in the food and how much culture and years of other people teaching at one another. I really loved that whole idea of Italian food. I’ve tried to stick to that as much as possible from then, with some variations like Arkhé which is very much modern Australian, with nods to Middle Eastern cooking and Asian cuisine. But apart from that, I’ve tried to stay with Italian.

You don’t want to give away too much about the menu here, but I guess the experience that you’re going for is really recreating that Monday night at Nonno and Nonna’s?

Exactly. We want people to come in here with big groups and try everything off the menu. Everything on there is designed to be shared between people, the pastas especially, and also our larger proteins. The snacks are going to be great little Italian snacks that everybody’s going to enjoy.

Will there be a big table down the middle of the room?

There’s going to be four smaller tables down the middle, but we can attach them to make bigger sections. There’s also going to be chairs all along the bar so people can actually watch the chefs cooking and plating everything.

You’ve been in open kitchens before?

Yes. Arkhé was an open kitchen, so that was fun, and Totti’s as well.

So you’ve become good at managing emotions and flow?  

Yes. Cleanliness, no swearing, no yelling. All things you’ve got to remember in open kitchens.

I guess with your team too, it’s almost like you’ve got to work out the choreography of moving around each other, too, don’t you?

I’ve been fortunate enough to work in some pretty well-designed kitchens and I think that this kitchen will flow very well during service. An added bonus, or theatrics, I guess, is that dockets will be called and all the chefs will respond at once, which is something that I always find enjoyable when I go to a restaurant and hear that.

Is that a, “Yes chef?”

It’ll be “Oui.”.

I can’t wait to come in for that.

Where did it all start for you? Did you always know that you wanted to be a chef?

No, actually, funnily enough, I wanted to be an artist when I was younger. I left school and did an art diploma. Drawings mostly. It was what I was into as a child. I kind of fell into being a chef. It was something I had always thought about, but a job ad came up one day for an apprentice chef for somebody that was pretty well known in Albury Wodonga and I just decided to give it a go and she hired me and then that was 14 and a half years ago and I haven’t looked back.

What do you like about it?

I like the pressure of cooking, which is a weird thing to say, but I think if you ask most chefs, if they say they don’t enjoy the adrenaline rush we get from this, then they’d just be lying, because if you don’t, then you’re not going to be a chef for very long. I love feeding people. I guess that’s something I grew up with all the Italian Nonnas, they would feed you constantly and that’s really stuck with me. Staff meal is very important to me because I want all of the staff to be fed. It’s those things that really keep me going. And just creating dishes as well. I’m my own biggest critic, but when I create something that I think is really delicious, it really makes me happy. Y

Everyone’s so vocal these days, and everyone’s a critic. Do you look at reviews and comments?

I do look at reviews. And for a very long time, I looked at reviews negatively, but a good mentor of mine really instilled in me that reviews are just constructive criticisms, 90% of the time, and you need to take it on board. At the end of the day, without customers, we don’t have jobs, so if they’re not happy, then we’re not really doing a good enough job. So, although the things that people say hurt sometimes, I really take it on board and make adjustments where I think we need to and then move on.

But you must have to filter that, as well, because I don’t think you can take all of that onto yourself, because some people are comparing it to something they’ve had somewhere else, or they’ve had a bad day.

There are some reviews that aren’t very well thought out, but you just take it with a grain of salt. If you need to change something to make the business better as a whole, then you just do that. Otherwise, you just apologise and ask if you can do something for them. Most of the time people leave reviews after they’ve already eaten and it’s on Google and you can’t contact them.

That’s exactly right. It’s a shame that happens rather than them talking to someone at the time.

The worst thing for me is customers leaving unhappy, and so, if somebody’s not happy, I’d prefer them to say something, and then I can fix it, or I can offer them something else. I’d rather people leave the restaurant extremely happy or at least better than what they were when they had the bad experience because that just builds into them then going to their friends and saying, don’t go to this place, we had a bad experience and there’s not really anything you can do once they’ve left.

It sounds like you’ve got a really good sense of hospitality and the diners, and then you also mentioned this idea of the team all being together and saying Oui, which I love. Was it easy for you stepping into that leadership role of head chef, did you have to think about what you would be like as a head chef, or did it come quite naturally?

I think most chefs have growing pains. I still remember my first head chef job and looking back on it now, I did a terrible job. But I grew from that and I was lucky enough to have some really good mentors that have run kitchens for many years and I take little pieces of each of them and put that into my management style. I love teaching young chefs and so my style is very much teaching rather than scolding. I remember as an apprentice getting yelled at and I didn’t really retain the information that I was getting yelled at about. I would prefer to have a conversation and say, hey, this is what you’ve done wrong, this is how we can fix it and move on from there. It also makes it easier as a manager if people want to work for you. There’s nothing worse than having to hire a new staff and if you’re not a great person to work for, unfortunately, they’re not going to stick around.

Absolutely. Was it important for you to move to other cities to cook?

It definitely was. Where I grew up, you plateau when it comes to food. It is country Australia, so, Parmis and chips are the way of the world down there. I really wanted to experience different foods and meet people from different countries, so going to Sydney and Brisbane and Adelaide and now Melbourne, was pretty key to me in my career and my progression.

It must have been great cooking in Adelaide.

It was. I loved living in Adelaide. Unfortunately, my family are all still in country Victoria and my wife’s family also are from there and so we made the hard decision a couple of years ago that we’d move to Melbourne to be closer to them.

I’d never been to Adelaide before, but I went last year and stayed in the Adelaide Hills, and I just thought how rich it was in so much good food and produce. We equally in Victoria have great produce and great suppliers and things as well. But it’s just such a little pocket of goodness.

It was a bit of a shock when I went there. A lot of people I’d spoken to said it was very “country town.” But I think that Adelaide as a hospitality scene has very much grown over the last 6 years. I used to love it. There were so many places to go and eat from the best restaurant in Australia to really good Chinese takeaway. It was nice to explore and go to Hahndorf, which is in the Adelaide Hills, a little German town.

What are you most looking forward to about opening Spaghetti Club?

Opening. I think. I love cooking and I’m really looking forward to having the restaurant full and listening to the music and hearing all the customers speaking and that’s really what I’m very excited for.

And just to finish with Mike, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

Learn as much as you can. Travel. If you get the chance to go overseas and learn over there, definitely do that. Don’t take to heart the downsides of hospitality because they’re not everywhere and at the end of the day, it’s just going to help you grow.

Spaghetti Club, 95 Swan Street, Richmond