I've had a few chats with Matti Fallon over the years and they have always been good ones, so when he suggested a catch-up over lunch, it was a hard yes from me. We sat by the front window of Mr Vincenzo's with Mornington Park and Port Phillip Bay across the road and we feasted: stracciatella, artichokes, walnut vinaigrette and peas, snapper crudo, zucchini flowers, ricotta filling and whipped avocado, rigatoni with wild garlic pesto and smoked mozzarella. So good! We decided to leave the chat until after lunch so in true lo-fi Conversation with a chef style, and because we had already been chatting over lunch, the actual conversation just continued on, so you might feel as though you have entered halfway through. Matti had worked at Rare Hare, Huxtable, DuNord, and had a residency at the Broadsheet Kitchen, as well as running a Kiwi pie business and had finally opened his dream restaurant, Colt Dining in Mornington. Three and half weeks after opening, he lost it all in a fire. I had been about to drive down the following week to chat with Matti and he sent me a photo and the message, Raincheck. But here we are, a year on and he has opened the glorious Mr Vincenzo's. We sat at a wooden table out the back which was the only piece of furniture to be saved from the blaze and launched into it all.
Matti Fallon: In retrospect, looking back now, the realisation is more scary than when it was happening. We were so "go, go, fix, fix, save."
Conversation with a chef: Did it happen during service?
Yes. It was a packed Friday night, bottlenecking when you go from your first sitting of mains and desserts at the same time, when you do that rollover, which is always super spicy in the style of, like, the kitchen that we have. We don't have specific pastry sections and things of that nature, so we just float and whatnot. It was insane. People were still trying to order as well. What happened was we had no idea what was going on. All of a sudden, the front of the building was starting to have a little bit of water coming up, and water doesn't just come up. Then it started an hour later in the kitchen, coming up again. It was basically rising up through the wall cavities around all the buildings until at some point, it started melting the pipes, anything that was PVC or plastic. More water would come. It started from the restaurant underneath us. Their electrical switchboard was on the back of their extraction area. All the air was pumping all the cavities full. But then nothing happened to us until maybe 40 minutes in. Suddenly it was substantial. Half the crew was mopping, and the front of house team were making barriers. And then, it was uncontrollable. We cut off all the water mains inside the restaurant. And then I was running around, and I bumped into a friend of mine who owned the bakery downstairs then another guy who managed the bar a couple of doors up. And he said, water is coming out everywhere. We managed to find the mains, which is in the part of the old building, which was heritage listed, so it was all blocked off. We had to break into that to turn it off and as soon as we turned the water off is when the fire really started because there were suppression systems in place that hadn't been activated. But we didn't know. We thought we would tell people we can't carry on, we'll come back tomorrow and clean up the water. That's what that's what our thinking was. Everyone was like, great, Friday night off. Let's have a couple of drinks. And then my cousin actually turned out to be the emergency plumber. He arrived and asked, what are you doing? I told him about the flooding and that he needed to fix it. I need you to fix it. Because we'd been on the terrace, we hadnt seen that the vents were all just pouring grey smoke which indicates instantly electrical fire rather than a normal fuel fire with black smoke. He said, you have to get out of here now. He called the 111 straight away. They were there within a couple of minutes. We managed to grab the computer, everyone's knives, which was a big, big deal, which I'm really, really thankful for. I grabbed a couple of bottles of wine and a slab of beer and thought, it'll be controlled, it's not even in our property. And then the next thing you know, we were sitting out there, and the neighbours' extraction completely caught fire. And then within 10 minutes, it was just all roaring. Then because we were doing a lot of bottle ferments in the front and doing our own booze I watched that section go up, and then right after that was the records. All the vinyl caught fire. I watched like a timeline of just knowing the place so intimately where everything was. From that point, it went straight into the kitchen, and the next thing to go was the deep fryer. It blew out part of the back wall and all the windows and and then just kept exploding. There was enough fat in there that it just kept on popping off and going everywhere, and it was all over within maybe 7 hours until they put the blaze out. There were three crews working from the back and two in the front.
There were five other businesses that were completely destroyed. Ours was destroyed but still in a repairable state, but because we couldn't get back to it for quite some time because it was classed as a forensic scene. Anything malicious or anything criminal got ruled out straight away, which is a very lovely feeling, but we still had to go through the process. But then we lost the building literally to mould from all the water coming in from all the mains that were leaking, and then, of course, the water they pumped on top of it to put out the fire.So that's how it all went down.
Because it was small enough insurance, not a lot of people going after each other's insurance companies, some of the smaller businesses got to get back on their feet, and their insurance paid them out. But beyond that, they reckon it's probably going to be about 3 to 4 years until we can get going in there. It's been a year now. Our landlord, absolute legend, total gentleman, really looks after us. He wants to push it all through. But then his part of the building was heritage listed. So there are the logistics of getting that reengineered. That's where we're at, basically. We have every intention of going back there. We are tried and true with the two venues now. There is a massive demand for it. People can really see what we're trying to achieve within this space as well. It's not just like another chain, like DOC and Gradi and things of that nature. We are independent, authentic, DIY. We want to do cool stuff.
This is not a lie in any way, shape, or form. We were shit faced drunk and it was the very next day. Probably 90% of the team were at my business partner’s house and a bunch of the tradies and whatnot. Everyone just came over. We all just got obliterated. At the time, I thought I might just go overseas for a while. And then I thought, you know what? Fuck it. Let’s just go for it. I said to my business partner, do you reckon you’ve got it in you to go again? We went out and made a drunken announcement to our whole team, we’re going again, who’s coming with me? And a testament is now they’re all still here. ~ Matti Fallon, Mr Vincenzo’s
How soon after that happening were you ready to start thinking about this one?
This is not a lie in any way, shape, or form. We were shit faced drunk and it was the very next day. Probably 90% of the team were at my business partner's house and a bunch of the tradies and whatnot. Everyone just came over. We all just got obliterated. At the time, I thought I might just go overseas for a while. And then I thought, you know what? Fuck it. Let's just go for it. I said to my business partner, do you reckon you've got it in you to go again? We went out and made a drunken announcement to our whole team, we're going again, who's coming with me? And a testament is now they're all still here.
Was the space already available?
This was this was a greenfield site. It wasn't tenanted. Our leasing agent from Colt asked if we wanted to have a look at the space? We looked at this. We looked at next to 10 minutes by a tractor, a shithole in Dromana which was uninhabitable. We were very staff focused at the time because we had sponsored staff. Mike had left his whole career to do it all with me. We had put everything we've got into it. So we went with this space. We got invited out to Point Leo Estate for lunch because they had suffered from the same sort of thing. They caught fire and lost everything. The GM there gave us some titbits of how they got through it and whatnot. And then that afternoon, we got a maxi taxi from Point Leo Estate to here, met the agent, and signed the paperwork. I had no fucking idea what I was going to do with the space or anything. The landlord offered 12 months rent free, we had to get a builder and we just went from there.
The first concept was where we are now, which will be the fine diner because this is lower rent, and it's more intimate, and we could probably get a lot more out of it. But then one great thing I've learned from my business partner from him being a chartered accountant is the scale to economy of our output. So we decided on a wine bar in the front, name undecided at the time. We've got Gilles, incredible sommelier. Weve got Mikey. Mikey was my sous chef at Colt. And I was like, I'll just put Mikey straight onto head chef. He proved himself in the pudding there and then I'll take the step back and do project management and get everything going so the boys can stay focused. And as you know, we were here painting everything ourselves and building everything, and it turned out we're much handier than what we ever thought we were. Apart from the plumbing, obviously, gas fitting, things of that that nature, we finished the plastering, did all the painting, did all the floors.
It's very good. That floor would be hard to do, wouldn't it?
It's eight coats of paint. It's ridiculous. You have to let it cure for a certain amount of time. The way that the concept came about, I was having a couple of wines out the front of the space once we knew we had the space. And I was thinking ok, a wine bar? Cool.Wine, vine, viniculture, something to do with wine. I thought of Vincenzo. And I think it was probably the week before my business partner's grandfather had passed away and his name was Vincenzo. And then I saw the photo of the Tutto Passa guy with the tattoo in Naples and I thought, that's it. We're doing Italian. It's going to be called Mr. Vincenzo's. It was perfect in terms of my business partner's grandfather. He moved here from Italy, started his whole family's business, tailors, and still to this day, they've got they've got a place in Rathdowne Street, early pioneers. And likewise with Colt, my grandfather was one of the first people to move to Mornington to do horse racing here. So hence the reason we called it Colt. It was like a homage to him. They've both been homages to our grandparents as well. We were talking before about nostalgia before. That's where a lot of influence comes from.
Well, yes, my jump to nostalgia was because I was thinking about you cooking different cuisines, but they all had a nostalgic leaning as well.
We’re very deeply ingrained in the component of making it financially viable for the artisans to survive. Like our fishmonger; he’s a local bloke who goes out in the gets his stuff from Port Phillip Bay or Western Port Bay. Whatever we get, we get. ~ Matti Fallon, Mr Vincenzo’s
When I first spoke to you, you were doing the pies, but you'd been at the Broadsheet Kitchen doing Chinese.
Chinese-ish? The white man's version of retro, accessible Chinese food in Australia, which my dear friend Tony Tan, explained the whole history. It was basically, Bob and Suzanne didn't want to have soggy chicken with Hainanese chicken rice, so we decided we needed to make money, we made sweet and sour chicken, lemon chicken, and we just dumbed it down for the Aussies. And then that was basically it. And that's why you always eat spring rolls and, you know, lemon chicken, honey chicken, spring rolls, sweet and sour pork. I fell in love with that stuff as a young fella. One of my really good friends growing up, his parents owned a Chinese restaurant, so I spent a lot of time there as a kid. Still to this day, I still can smell it and see it and feel it. We used to play Sega out the back, very nerdy and that was how that whole thing came about.
The pies were already going prior to that. I took a bit of time away from cooking. I wrapped up at Huxtable, it was the last job that I had, as a sous chef there, but I was young, with no business sense. I'd lost a business DuNord back in the day purely from not knowing shit about shit, to be honest.
Why did you choose something Nordic?
That was the brief. Prior to that, I was doing heaps of pop ups doing, smoked brisket and pulled pork and gumbo. And this was much earlier than that stuff was popping off. The Fancy Hanks boys and I would do pop ups at the Beaufort and Carlton. They'd pull up with their smoking trailer, and I'd be doing gumbo and jambalaya. It was a time when that pop up culture was huge in Melbourne. I guess it was huge around the world. People were just trying to find themselves outside of this very strict regimented cuisine based, Modern Oz, or whatever they called it, or your Asian fusion, or your all the way Italian authentic. Everything was very pocketed and boring. Or you if you wanted Vietnamese food, you had to go to some place that looks like a shithole in Footscray, but it was amazing. No one was really branching out, doing anything different. And so there was this pop-up period and that led a lot of people in a lot of different ways. A lot of the guys I came up with, people like Shannon Martinez, she was jumping all over. I think she took over a pub in Brunswick or Coburg, and she was pumping out vegan Mondays and that took off. People like Daniel Dobra was doing molecular gastronomy, Bomba rooftop, and like things like that. Nick Stanton was doing classic New York American food, and it was wild. Everyone was doing their weird little niches, and it was like everyone was really free for a while. Still are, I guess. It was a testament to the way people are cooking now and a fallout from working in old school kitchens. I worked at Longrain. I just did egg nets all day, every day. You box off your prep. You make egg nets. That's all you do. You go home. You smell like shit. You smell like you've been working the wok all day, and that was your entire career. And it was a privilege to work in these places back then because they were really good chefs, and you'd learn a lot of discipline and have the hierarchy of the kitchen, but you could've learned that same shit in a good pub or in a half decent French bistro. So I think there was a bit of a punk rock rebellion sort of thing where we were over it. That's where being able to hop and jump towards different things that caught your attention at the time was really good.
And that's where I did the Nordic thing. I was doing the pop up stuff, and then I wrapped up at Huxtable, and was looking for something new to do. And the guys that owned that said, hey, theres a Swedish fellow, he's got this cool little bar and he wants to put a food component in, and there was an untapped beautiful dining room. The kitchen was barely set up, and he said, look, I'll just take a percentage of what you do a week and help you get financed to get it set up, but I really want someone to do Scandinavian food. It was when Noma was surfacing and it really struck a chord with me because I really respected the way they were going, treating the nature forward component of how the cooking was and the process of obtaining the food rather than getting, and I still to this day I refuse to put shit on that comes from another part of the world. We won't put caviar on just for the sake of fucking caviar. It's just a bit boring and dated. But we'll use yabby roe and make a wicked sauce and stuff like that. So that was a big thing that spoke to me. It was about the time and place and the locality and the connection of what you're doing, and now moving forward with that as well, the connection's stronger now. We're very deeply ingrained in the component of making it financially viable for the artisans to survive. Like our fishmonger; he's a local bloke who goes out in the gets his stuff from Port Phillip Bay or Western Port Bay. Whatever we get, we get. So that was where that whole Nordic thing came into play, when I started bouncing down that track, and it got me to where I am. And then, again, nostalgia kicked in, and then kiwi pies were a thing. And then from there, Broadsheet asked if I wanted to do something? I'd spoken to them about me wanting to do a retro Chinese thing. It's just all this time and place again. I don't even know how it happens, to be honest. It's just like, Matti, hey, what are you doing? And all of a sudden you're just deeply ingrained in it.
There’s corny ways of saying it, and I’ll try to avoid them. But, honestly, it is truly the guest experience and not just for myself and not for reviews or anything, it is truly having the ability to give somebody an experience that they can’t provide for themselves and then being able to do that in an unpretentious way and make everybody feel like when you come to my restaurant, you are more than welcome to be there. If you’ve got $5 in your pocket or $5,000,000 in your pocket, you get treated the same way. ~ Matti Fallon, Mr Vincenzo’s
Well, I think to be successful, whatever that means, you've got the various threads that come together. You make really excellent food. You've got really great ideas for food, and your food's really delicious. That's number 1. But then there is your personality. I see the way you work with your staff and when we've been out places like, Broadsheet Christmas parties and openings, you're a people person. So I think that's the other aspect. You're likable. You're not a wanker. That's how opportunities arise, right? If you're open and you're easy to work with.
I'm always open to anything and where the ideas come from. There's no hierarchical idea that you don't get to think like that because that's not your position. If the dishwasher tells me there's 12 different ways to do it, like, with our current dishwasher, she's in her late fifties and worked in kitchens for years, and she just wants to wash dishes now. She's over being on the grind. But she puts our systems in place better than any fine dining kitchen that I've ever worked in, and the system works for the style. We've got a tiny little kitchen, tiny little space at the moment, and she just sorted that whole thing out for us. I think it's like the inclusive side of it. I started off washing dishes at the Portsea pub when I got kicked out of school and cut my teeth there and people took a liking to me for whatever reasons and showed me a few things here and there, and I just snowballed again. I've just been very lucky to be in the right place at the right time and work with the right people as well. And not burn bridges. Even if you stuff up from time to time, if you don't burn the bridge, then the bridge is always crossable. If you chuck a torch on that fucker, it's gone.
Is it what's kept you in it? We were talking before about how you're probably one of the most resilient people I know. You've really dealt with so much over the last few years, but what keeps you in this business?
There's corny ways of saying it, and I'll try to avoid them. But, honestly, it is truly the guest experience and not just for myself and not for reviews or anything, it is truly having the ability to give somebody an experience that they can't provide for themselves and then being able to do that in an unpretentious way and make everybody feel like when you come to my restaurant, you are more than welcome to be there. If you've got $5 in your pocket or $5,000,000 in your pocket, you get treated the same way. We don't give a shit. We are here to make your night or your day or your lunch, never fucking breakfast. Never ever. People can call me out on that if I ever sell out. But it is true, true. It always comes down to the guest experience. I know myself, I love to feel great when I go out. The reason I've moved back here to Mornington is that its where I grew up. When I was younger, my grandfather was quite a successful horse trainer, so we'd always go out for lunch and whatnot. I loved it. There's this place called Julius Caesar's where you'd go get your crayfish out of the tank and heaps of old school institutions. You'd go and it was special. The people were so warm. Now there's this, and I hate to use sophistication in a in a dirty way, but this sophistication becomes arrogance and it is very counterintuitive to what we're trying to do. If hospitality is our product and then we're trying to sell it, why do you want to get sold hospitality from an asshole, as opposed to people just being authentic and really warm. Honestly that is the reason I stay in that. That and I'm just obsessed with food. I'm nuts about it. Everything just draws me back. Every time I think I'm going to just take a little bit of break, I think, no, there's another project. My mind, my creativity, I'm very blessed, is very geared towards food and hospitality and experience and food and bev in general. My mind just clicks all the time.
I remember sitting down interviewing someone for a managerial job, and I was sitting with my head chef and they asked us what makes us so special? Why does everyone want to work for us, which is a really nice thing to hear. People want to work for us because we're good people, but we just do cool shit and if it isn't cool, then we just don't do it. It's varying stages of people's perception of cool, but I think lots of cool stuff is cool, and I really want other people to enjoy it. And that's how we keep evolving and doing it.
We've become very much more of a restaurant than the original concept of the wine bar just for the traction we've got. Part of building Vincenzo's was a healing process, not for myself, for all of us, my staff that stayed with me, which is pretty much most of them. We built it ourselves. We all discussed everything. There's no executive level in what we do. Everything gets decided man to man, woman to woman, human to human level. And everyone gets an input. No voice is unheard, especially Bob, our 80-year-old dishwasher. He puts his voice out there, and he's actually on the body corporate for this building, so he's really handy to have. But he's a legend. He says, I think you should do this. And we're like, sweet, Bob. Hes a super smart guy. We're very lucky to have people that follow us. I'm looking at the Colt sign now. It's spelled C o l t, not C u l t, but we have a cult following with our staff and the people we work with outside, within our trades, within our PR and marketing and things like that. Like broadsheet, especially. Those guys have got my back. They always have. They've done so much for me, but we all just work in a symbiotic nature.
It feels very community here as well. You were saying that around the time of the fire, everyone rallied, but even now you're open on Mondays, so a lot of the hospo people come and you just have a good time together. There's no competition or competition's a good thing when you all get on so well and you're feeding off each other and you're sharing. The more good places to eat, the better.
That's exactly right. We don't see anyone as competition because we are very niche. But there are very niche things around us, like Port Phillip Estate, Jackalope. We're not in competition with any of them because none of them are anything like us.
We're not chasing that style. We're just allowing ourselves to be ourselves within this space.We don't ever try and brand it as hospitality Mondays, because we don't want to isolate anybody, but we have a $75 set. Dishes we're working with at the moment to come onto the menu or what we've got left and what we're keeping from last week. We always have the staples, and then we'll sort of blow it out. And you get $75 that's accessible to all of our darling hospitality mates, because we know it's pretty dire out there these days as far as finances go. So that was what the main agenda was with that. But now we've got some traction. The best PR you can get is when you go to another restaurant, people ask, where should I go? I'm down here on holidays, and everyone's like, go to Mr. Vincenzo's. It's very flattering.
But again, community is everything. And outside of our hospitality and our business side of things, the community after the fire at Colt was just everyone outpoured so much. It was amazing; people giving us records and lasagnas dropped on our doorstep
We want to do this city inspired style of dining, or more world inspired style of dining in a place where I grew up. We all live just down the road and as you know, we’re arguing over what beach to go to between lunch and dinner service. It’s one of those serendipitous, beautiful moments. We lost everything to start again to get it all back in a much better, grander scheme. ~ Matti Fallon, Mr Vincenzo’s
You were telling me you've got a great story for me.
I do. This is something that's not on record anywhere. I came down the morning after the fire, and did some TV interviews. And then I was pretty shell shocked, and super hungover that day. But I came down I had to take my twin daughters to the doctors, and I thought Id just go and have a look, and take it in for the first time properly. I was standing on the side of the road, and this gentleman just walked up and said, that was your restaurant, wasn't it? He said he'd love to be able to help out in some way, shape, or form. I thanked him very much and I thought he's going to go run off to his truck and get us a veggie box or something. But he asked me for my number. He rang me later and told me about this concept of the number 8, as an infinite forward moving process. My mum's a naturopath. I worked in natural medicine for years. So this bloke caught my attention. He said that he lost his entire farm due to flooding and the only way he was able to get back on his feet is because all these eight people came out of the woodwork and it was a community outreach, and it was quite a big scale operation that he's got going on. He wrote me a cheque for $25k and something, the numbers added up to 8. And he said, this is so you can infinitely keep going. Your restaurant was amazing.I went there. I want you to keep going. Whatever you need to do with this money, you can do it. And I just broke down. I was already pretty emotional at the time, and I just dropped to my knees. And that was enough money for us to go, alright, it was the grease that the chain needed to go and off we went.
That's incredible.
We had him in for dinner about a month ago with funny enough, eight of his friends. And now we're going to be working with him in the future with his farms to produce what we're doing for all of the three venues that we'll have. We have gone from some terrible situation where we lost everything in the fire and we thought, shit, what are we going to do? To now having a restaurant that's open, getting rave reviews, the talk of the town. Last year, we had the hottest restaurant in town because it was freaking on fire.
But before the fire, you got rave reviews.
We were doing good things. The proof's in the pudding now that this area was dying for us to be, not us specifically, but this style of dining, this style of culture. After COVID happened, there was a big shift in the demographic of people here. People can work remotely and go to the beach with the kids and be done by 5. There's a lot of early thirties to late forties, big boom. And then there's a lot of there's a lot of old money here, which is now turning into rich grandchildren, which is fantastic for business. We want to do this city inspired style of dining, or more world inspired style of dining in a place where I grew up. We all live just down the road and as you know, we're arguing over what beach to go to between lunch and dinner service. It's one of those serendipitous, beautiful moments. We lost everything to start again to get it all back in a much better, grander scheme.
Five years ago I had lifesaving brain surgery. I had been at the height of my career, so to lose everything, start again, and then get back to the top and then be open 3 and a half weeks and then bang all over, start again. I've got 2-year-old twins, which is just going to be relentless for the rest of my life. As you said, being resilient, I never see myself as saying, you have to be strong, you have to be tough, you have to do this. It's not about that. I've really accepted my journey and what I want to do in life and who I see myself as within this medium of creative stuff, not as a chef being an artist or anything wanky like that, like the chef is the artist or whatever, but as a restaurateur, more so as a small business owner, I just want to be really good and creative and push what we can do, not just in this area, but what people can do across the board now and open that knowledge up to everybody as well. There's not much of a hierarchical situation. My business partner and I, we pay the bills, but we sit down every Monday with all the staff and go through whats happening. How are you? What can we do? What is needed for the business? It's very holistic and we're like, alright, let's just go.
We achieve so much more, and that's why people come to us to work rather than us going outward, looking for people. We still work in a pressure cooker environment, but in my 20 plus years in the industry, this is what we have now and what we had at Colt is, I think, the beginning of what a lot of people are trying to push as a new renaissance of life and balance and creativity and less job related and more lifestyle related hospitality, which means we can give back a hell of a lot more than just rocking up to a shift that you're scheduled to do and you dread. We work together, and we respect each other. I think that the culture thing comes from above always, and I've removed my ego quite a long time ago from learning from some of the biggest egos in the game, how not to have one. I think everyone has one in some way, shape, or form, but how to control it and not toxify the workplace. I want everyone that works for me feeling like they're top shit all the time because they are. They're super talented and they're here for a reason, but I don't want them to go, I'm top shit because I'm better Everyone fosters each other and it's just this gathering of knowledge, sharing of passion. Everyone teaching each other.
You say I've got difficult types of cuisine. Heaps of different people work for me as well, and I've learned so much from that as well. I think there's a lot more a lot more improvement to be done, but there's a lot a lot of forward shift in what we're doing. I always like having an open kitchen, no smoke and mirrors, no tempers, no egos. We enjoy being able to feel the energy in the room, and we're sharing the music. We hear the drinks going. You can see and feel the flow of the restaurant.
How wonderful. Lunch was so delicious. Thank you. And I can't wait for what's coming next.
I have lots more to come. Lots more conversations with a chef.
Mr Vincenzo's, 784 Esplanade, Mornington
Phot credit: Sally Goodall