Mark Tagnipez

Mark Tagnipez: You know, I’m just a cook.

Conversation with a chef: I don’t know that you’re just a cook.

Well, that’s how it all started. I had no ambition to be a chef. This was before being a chef was really cool. It was like anything: people just needed jobs.

Where was that?

I’m originally from LA. As soon as I turned 18, I gathered a couple hundred dollars and flew to Hawaii. I moved in with my cousin. My first job there was as a snorkel instructor. I needed more money because I was only getting paid seven bucks an hour, so I needed a job at night. Ever since I was 18, I’ve been working from seven in the morning to midnight, which was essentially chef hours. From seven to five, I was doing snorkel instructing, and then at night, from six to midnight, I was behind a deep fryer or behind the grill. This was 2001, 2002. Back then, kitchens were completely different. You could smoke cigarettes in the kitchen. I was just like, this is amazing. I had no ambition of cooking for the rest of my life. And here I am, 20-plus years later, still cooking. I just stuck with it, really.

You’ve been here from the start at Marmont. Obviously Grant Smillie brought you on because he knew you already, and you’d been working in his other venue. Is that right?

11 years ago, EP & LP opened up in West Hollywood. About 12 years ago, Grant moved to LA. Louis Tikaram was the head chef at the time, and I was the opening sous chef. A couple of years later, I got offered a job to move to Melbourne. I hopped on the opportunity. The same day I got offered the job was the same day Trump got elected the first time. Everyone was crying, saying, “Oh my gosh, I’m moving to Canada.” Then I got this opportunity to move internationally, and I was just like, “Whoa, all right, great.” It was spring, in November, and my hay fever was crazy here in Melbourne. I was like, “What’s happening to my face?” But still, I thought, let’s do it. My partner and I moved over here. Fast forward eight years later, Grant says, “Hey, I’m moving back to Melbourne. I’ve got the old Rosetta space.” I was like, “Oh, that’s beautiful. That place is amazing.” He said, “I want to do a California-inspired restaurant.” I was like, “Whoa. All right, cool.” And he said, “I want to name it Marmont.” I thought, that’s an interesting name, after Chateau Marmont. It was crazy because I was born on Sunset Boulevard, where Chateau Marmont is, and then you have photos of the Sunset Strip right over here. I was basically at home. It’s like a little piece of me here, in the venue. So I was like, let’s do it. I love Grant. I loved working with him. I didn’t really work for him directly because I worked for Louis, and Louis worked for him, but I still got to have many conversations with him and get to know him back then. I loved the guy. When he said he was moving back, I thought, if there’s anybody who could bring a crowd and bring people, it’s Grant. You know the place is going to be busy all the time. I could sell hot dogs and people would still come. I knew that all I had to do was make the food good.

It was crazy because I was born on Sunset Boulevard, where Chateau Marmont is, and then you have photos of the Sunset Strip right over here. I was basically at home. It’s like a little piece of me here, in the venue. So I was like, let’s do it. I love Grant Smillie. I loved working with him. I didn’t really work for him directly because I worked for Louis, and Louis worked for him, but I still got to have many conversations with him and get to know him back then. I loved the guy. When he said he was moving back, I thought, if there’s anybody who could bring a crowd and bring people, it’s Grant. You know the place is going to be busy all the time.

Mark Tagnipez, Marmont

I’ve seen the menu and read a lot about Marmont, about what you’re doing, and there are a lot of threads in that menu. There’s East Californian, Chicano neighbourhood style, and a bit of your Filipino heritage. How do all those threads weave in?

It’s funny. They say America’s a melting pot. It’s not. It’s a broken sauce. Collingwood is a melting pot. You have $3 million apartments next to public housing. That’s a true melting pot. You can’t see that anywhere in LA. Seventy years ago, certain ethnicities couldn’t buy property in certain areas. All the brown people had to live in certain neighbourhoods. I grew up in a very third-generation, fourth-generation Mexican American neighbourhood. That’s the Chicano neighbourhood. It wasn’t necessarily all Mexican, and racism was crazy. Racism is big in America, to where you are almost brought up to be racist against your own people. The third-generation Mexicans would be racist against the people who were straight from Mexico, and the people from Mexico were racist against the third-generation Mexicans. You see that, and then you’re like, how does a Filipino American assimilate to that? There was a cultural difference between me and my parents, and a generational difference. I was like, what am I supposed to be doing? How am I supposed to be acting? How am I supposed to be speaking? What’s my accent? All my friends had a Mexican American accent. What was mine? It came down to what type of food I was eating. At home, we were eating white rice and acidic, vinegary, citrusy foods that are Filipino. Every day at school, at baseball games, at my neighbours’ houses, everything was in a tortilla. Every Saturday, every Sunday, it was carne asada. That was how I grew up. It was 90 per cent Mexican Americans, so that was the food I grew up eating. That is the food I have an emotional relationship to.

I love fish sauce. But when I started cooking professionally, especially in the early 2000s, there was just butter in everything. The French influence was heavy. It was only French back then, or Japanese. Those were the two things in America. You had Cal-Italian, sure, but no one was cooking Chinese food if you weren’t Chinese. No one was cooking Thai food if you weren’t Thai. Those were only in specific neighbourhoods.

Growing up cooking professionally for French and Japanese technique chefs, cooking next to Mexicans, because everyone was Mexican, growing up with Mexican food and growing up Filipino, that’s basically how my style started evolving. At the same time, I understand I have to cook for the people. I have to understand the demographic. I’m cooking for Melburnians, and Melburnians are different. You’ve got people just across the road, people in the western suburbs who are celebrating something, and people from the north. They’re all different. I wish I could just say, “These are Melburnians,” but it’s not like that. Technically it’s a small city compared to LA, but still, they’re all so different. You have to play it safe a little bit. You have to be able to cater for everybody, especially for this dining room, but still leave your fingerprint on it. That’s the identity behind all of that.

If you have the food all together, the flavours make good sense in our set menus. There’s actual progression to it. But if you were just to take a look at it, you might think, “This is interesting. This is all very different from what I’m used to.”

Where do we see your fingerprint on it? Can you give me an example?

The fried chicken. Buttermilk fried chicken. Fermented chilli, probably not. A honey gastrique, probably not. But then you layer that and it’s rich. You’ve got your spices, the fried chicken’s kind of heavy, and then we’ve got our coriander pesto. We had an opening sous chef who was Italian, and every time I called it coriander pesto he’d get upset. But it’s nice and refreshing and vibrant. That would be a fingerprint. You won’t find fried chicken like that somewhere else. That’s just a bunch of layers of, “Okay, that’s Mark.” You see it in our mezcal-roasted lamb shoulder. That screams Latin all over it, but then it’s not LA, because I didn’t grow up eating lamb shoulder. But we’re cooking for Melburnians, who love lamb shoulder.

That is interesting. I remember speaking to a Mexican friend and he was talking about Mexico, rather than LA, and they were burying whole beasts in the ground, like a hangi style, from New Zealand, an underground oven. But I don’t imagine lamb shoulder in LA. It’s very hearty, and I don’t think it really fits with the vibe.

No, plus there aren’t a whole lot of lamb farms. All the lamb is imported from your neck of the woods, from New Zealand. That’s where all the commercial lamb is. Any time you have lamb belly or a rack of lamb, it’s always NZ. It’s amazing. You hear that it’s a perfect place to grow lamb. Or we have a whipped cod roe. People love whipped cod roe and flatbread, and it’s delicious, but we do ours with a salsa fresca, like a pico de gallo. We add that fingerprint. We have our little play on things, and how to make it fresh and less dense and more exciting.

I just had the truffle burger. So delicious, so rich. Thankfully, one of the front-of-house people suggested I get the cos lettuce with the green goddess, so I feel like I had a totally balanced meal. This is truffle season. Everyone goes mad for truffles in Melbourne. But I love that your truffle menu is really tight. You haven’t gone overboard. You’ve got the brie, the Wagyu rump cap, the burger for lunchtime and a dessert. It’s not too much.

It’s not too much. We have to play the hand that we’re dealt. We probably have the second-smallest kitchen in Crown, and probably one of the largest footprints, which also works out in our favour. We have to keep it tight. I don’t generally love a whole lot of crossover on the menu, but sometimes we have to do it based on space. You don’t want one person to accidentally order the wrong thing and then that same ingredient is in four different things. That’s kind of boring. We’re semi-blessed to have that. It works out for us because we have to streamline it. It also allows us to be very consistent with our food, because we’re working with these ingredients and focusing on making them as good as possible. We can’t have too many ingredients here, so we just make sure that whatever we can possibly do, we’re doing our best.

Have you taken things that already on the Marmont menu and added the truffle layer, or are these all new dishes?

These were all new dishes. I’ve been here for eight years and I’ve never really worked with these Manjimup truffles. Prior to this, I thought truffles were overrated. Black winter truffles, okay, cool. They are so expensive. They’re nice, but that’s it. Then I had these, and I’m learning so much about these WA truffles. When they are ready, how to use them, what they go well with. We’re trying to do something fun with a vol-au-vent and baked brie. I love baked brie en croute, especially in wintertime here. It would just be so nice. I’ve always wanted to put monkey bread on the menu, and I thought, well, this is a good time to do it. We’ll do a truffled anglaise. I actually like truffle in desserts more than I did before, because truffle does really well with dairy. I’m having a good time cooking and shaving truffles on things.

What is monkey bread?

It’s typically, or traditionally, brioche. A high-butter bread, nice and fluffy. We weigh it out to about 14 grams exactly and shape it. We roll it in cinnamon sugar, put it in a little bundt pan, proof it so it’s really nice and fluffy, then throw a little miso caramel around it. That gives a little texture to the bottom when it bakes in the bundt pan. You bake that, and you can pull it apart. It’s about 12 pieces baked together, so you can pull it apart with your hands. They come out in little balls, and then you dip it in the anglaise.vThey call it monkey bread because it’s meant to be eaten with your hands. It probably originated in the South, or the Midwest. I don’t really know the true history, but I know it’s made its way to California.vIt’s one of the things I just enjoy eating and enjoy making, because you’re really working with your hands. You’re tossing it in cinnamon sugar. It’s fun to make.

And then you’re eating it with your hands as well.

It’s more enjoyable. I like eating with my hands. I know a lot of people don’t. My kids certainly don’t because they have sensory issues. They’re like, “Keep my hands clean.” But I still do.

How often do you change your general menu?

We don’t change the menu as a whole. We have our staples and everything, and we tweak it seasonally. Mother Nature tells us when a dish needs to go. We are eating everything every day, every single piece of mise en place. The pea will tell you when it needs to come off the menu. Same with the tomato. It’s time to go. We shouldn’t be running corn in winter. I wish I could say June 1, but Melbourne seasons are different. Sometimes things last longer than they should, and you’re just like, well, it’s still really good right now, so we’ll keep it on. But once we get peas and we feel that they’re starchy, it’s like, we need a sense of urgency to change this dish right away, because we can’t serve that.

I think seasons are interesting here. I’ve been listening more when people talk about the Wurundjeri seasons, the First Nations seasons.

The six seasons.

Right. Some of them are quite a lot longer. They’re not even seasons in that European sense. It really is a response to looking at Country and seeing, as you say, being aware of the pea, but being aware of what’s around you. That’s possibly changing now as well. Climate change is changing that.

There’s a lot of ingredients that weren’t meant to be grown here. I wish I had a better education and more knowledge about what was here before, and if there was a sustainable way to grow it and produce that to scale. But the education really isn’t there.

There are a few people doing it, like Bruce Pascoe. Where we are was such a meeting place, they say, because it was where the brackish water of the river mixed with seawater, and there were stones there that they got rid of, and people would cross over in this area. It was all wetland, so it would have been a really rich area for fish and seafood. There were marnong daisies, where they eat the bulb. It is fascinating, but we’ve lost all of that.

That’s everywhere that’s been western-colonised, essentially. LA is a completely different place from what it was 150 years ago.

I remember reading when Marmont first opened…I think maybe it was a Broadsheet article…and someone asked you what you thought the signature dish would be. You said you’d let the people decide, and perhaps it was going to be the fried chicken. Is that the signature dish of Marmont?

I don’t know. I’d like to change it, and then every now and then you read a review about how the fried chicken changed someone’s life. Every time I feel that way, everyone’s like, “You can’t change it.” And I’m like, “Oh, okay.” It might just be my attention span.

The cookie is probably the signature dish that I didn’t see coming. Same with the cornbread. I didn’t see that one coming either. If I took it off the menu, I feel like a lot of the staff would be really upset because of how they’d have to explain it to guests. I don’t have to explain anything to the guests in the kitchen, but the staff do. Then I’d hear it from the staff.

I think those two things are probably the two homiest dishes. A lot of people can make them at home, but if they choose to cook at home, they probably wouldn’t make it at home. It’s not technical. It’s clean. You don’t have to mix together a whole bunch of ingredients. It’s just two bowls and a pan. I’m really surprised by those two items.

Steak night is big here as well.

Steak night is massive. We’re not a steakhouse, and on a Wednesday night we’ll do 300 steaks for the day. Right now we get our beef from Sher Wagyu. They do an amazing job. It’s local, and I love that. It’s served with what, for lack of a better term, we started calling Cali chilli butter because we didn’t know what else to call it. It’s just yummy, affordable food. It checks a lot of boxes for everybody. I think that’s why they love coming here for it, and we will never change that.

We just introduced a really cool half chicken on Monday that’s been inspired by pollo a la brasa, which is a Peruvian dish. I could eat chicken and rice every day. We don’t serve it with rice, but I could eat roasted chicken every day. To me, it’s one of my favourite chickens that I’ve ever had. Of course I’m going to say that, but it really is. I love it.

To say what the signature is…we sell more steaks than anything, so I don’t want to say that’s our signature dish because it’s just a steak. But across the city, people love a steak night. It’s everywhere here. You think about how many we sell, and the beef companies over here must be loving it. It doesn’t even need a beef lobby. It sells itself. You kind of love that about Melbourne. I never had a parma until about four weeks ago. I was really surprised. I was like, this is a lot. Are they always like this? And someone said, “In Queensland, they’re bigger.” I was like, what? I’m still learning about Aussie cuisine. Can you call a parma Aussie cuisine? I’m still learning after eight years. But to say what the signature dishes are, I guess those three items would probably be it.

I think that speaks to the fact that the menu has parts of you in it. Quite often chefs open these big-name restaurants, and they’re there for the opening and then they move on. But you’re still here. You must love it.

It’s a juggle. It’s a balance. Obviously the balance is pleasing the investors, pleasing the guests and pleasing your staff. We’ve really gotten lucky with staff who are on board with wanting to do everything, too. It’s, “Okay guys, let’s make the guests happy, and if we can make the guests happy, we’re going to make the investors happy because we’re going to have revenue. And let’s make ourselves happy.”

The culture in the kitchen here is such that the only reason people leave, unfortunately, is because of visa reasons. They can’t stay in the country and they have to go. We’ve got 70 per cent of our opening staff in the kitchen. They genuinely love each other. They’ll go up to bat for each other. Everyone’s very supportive. They hang out outside of work when they can. But it’s still very professional in there.

It must be your leadership style as well, do you think?

I think it starts with how you hire people. The recruitment process is a very big one. We actually have to talk about who we’re going to hire. Then there are the people you bring on around you. I really welcome feedback: how can we do things better? The sous chef doesn’t report to me; we report to each other. We have this real relationship about how we can make this place better every day, including our staff. How can we make them better, and how can they help make the place better?

That’s really it. We’re all swimming in the same direction. I’ve been really lucky with that, so I don’t want to leave the team. I love what we’ve built here. Everyone takes the food seriously, but we don’t take ourselves seriously. We can still have fun. We’re not a fine-dining restaurant where everyone’s stressed out all the time. If something’s not done right, we just say, “Hey, let’s cook this over again.” Or someone will say, “Mark, I need seven more minutes because I messed this up.” And I’m like, “Absolutely.” We’ll tell front of house, we’ll communicate it. It’s not the end of the world. We’re not saving lives.

No, but you are making life-changing chicken.

We want to, but we’re just part of it. As a chef, I don’t want to be like, “It’s all us.” No. We’re just a piece of it. We’re a facilitator, really, into anybody’s experience. The whole place is the experience. It’s not just us.

Having started out not really considering being a chef, and now that you’re all these years into it, what do you love about it?

I tried writing recipes all on my own, and the camaraderie in the kitchen is probably the best thing. To work alongside like-minded people, to work with your hands, to be on your feet and keep the blood moving. I have a heavy load of admin that I have to do, and if I’m at the desk for an hour, I fall asleep. I have to get up and get in the kitchen. I’ll be like, “All right, who needs a prep job? What can I help with, guys?” Just to get the blood moving, then I can go back down and tackle the admin again.

For the most part, in most kitchens nowadays, not like 20 years ago, because 20 years ago was a completely different type of culture, everyone’s got each other’s back now. Everybody’s lifting each other up. Twenty years ago, we were just trying to push the next person down so you could get promoted. That’s how it was. It was such a bad culture, but it was normal. Some people would turn up someone else’s oven so they would start burning stuff and look bad. That’s what it was like. Nowadays , we’ve got everyone’s back and we’re all going in the same direction. That’s what I love about kitchens nowadays, too. It’s more positive. And I don’t think it’s just this place. I think you could go into a lot of kitchens right now and you’ll see smiles, which is crazy.

With your experience and where you are now, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

There’s so much. Don’t give up. I’m not talented. I’ve worked with chefs who are talented. You just know they’re naturally gifted. It’s like, wow, you are talent. And you are talent with work ethic, and that is why you’re successful.

You’ve got to have grit. You can’t give up. You do the same thing, you do your 10,000 hours, and you’re going to get good at it. You might not be naturally talented right now, but you stay in there. It’s really cool how much hard work will get you somewhere. You just keep grinding it out, and eventually it’ll be like, wow, how am I here?

I don’t want to say I’m successful, because you measure success differently. Not a whole lot of people know who I am, and I’m not trying to put myself out there. I was really surprised when they said, “Hey, somebody wants to interview you.” I was like, “For a job? What are you talking about? Why?” Because I generally keep to myself. But to see what we’ve built here, I think that’s very successful. To see the chefs who are working here, to see front of house give positive feedback on the food, and to see them have so much buy-in on it and genuinely enjoy it…that’s what I love.

The hardest part, if you’re brand new to it, is understanding why you’re in it. If you want to make money, it’s probably not the best industry to join. If you are genuinely hospitable, it’s probably a really good place for you to be. After that, it’s easy, really.

Marmont, Crown Melbourne, Ground Level/8 Whiteman St, Southbank