Isaac Castellano

Conversation with a chef: Hi Isaac, how are you? How long has Dingo Ate My Taco been in the brewery?

Isaac Castellano: Almost two years.

It’s a great little precinct, isn’t it? How did you get into tacos?

Completely by accident. It was Covid, the end of 2020 and I was running a cafe in Burnley and that completely shut down. The owner didn’t want to open at all. I think financially it didn’t make sense for her. We closed that down and I was doing nothing. Kady and Paul, the owners of Dingo Ate My Taco had opened a food truck in my neighbourhood. I stumbled upon them and one of my friends was working for them, and so I just started doing casual work for them. And then I ended up coming on board and becoming one of the owners. It kind of accidentally happened. I didn’t have anyMexican or American or even South American background. I just ended up working for them and learned as I went along basically.

What was there to learn? Where did you start?

Oh, everything. I suppose we started more with the American and the Texas style barbecue. That’s what really grabbed my attention. The the smoking of the briskets and the smoked chickens and the smoked pork and then turning those into tacos. And hand making all the tortillas. That was basically it for the first six, eight months in a food truck in a park.

Where do you smoke all the meat?

Currently we have a big commercial kitchen in Melbourne, just on St. Kilda Road. We open that to the public two days a week. And we have big smokers inside. It makes the building smell fantastic. We smoke usually Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. And then if we’re busy, we do the weekends.

And do you have a food truck as well?

This is open five days a week at Mill Brewery. It’s been a fantastic partnership. We came here for three weeks and never left. That was two years ago. It’s an awesome little kitchen right in the front. We get to talk to our customers a lot, which we love and our customers can see us and interact. That’s priceless, really. Then we have the commercial kitchen on St. Kilda Road which we open two days a week. We do Wednesday, Thursday lunch and dinner. We get a great office crowd during lunch. And then there are some families around there. It’s quite commercial, a lot of offices.But there’s a few families around there that come Wednesday, Thursday night, we are just trying to slowly build up that crowd really.

So, you do the pulled meat and the tacos and are there sauces with those?

We make everything. That’s part of our principle. All of our sauces, all of our dressings, all of our meats and all of our tortillas. We make our own flour tortillas. We make our own corn tortillas. Corn tortillas are made every day. We now have a hand crank machine, we can pump them out. We smoke all of our own meats. At the moment we have about four or five sauces, depending on what we are doing during the week, but four or five salsas that are stable and we always have and they’re made every week.

Do you choose the salsas to go with particular tacos? I ask this because I have Mexican friends and they said that in Mexico, everyone just knows what salsa goes with what taco and here we tend to put the salsa on for people because they don’t know. And you also can’t have the sauces sitting out here as much as you can in Mexico.

It’s a real bummer with Covid not being able to do this. There’s a public health issue. We can’t just give them a squeezy bottle. We do it to a certain extent when we do special events. I call it the dress station. We give the customer the dress station. They can walk down, they can pick whatever sauce they want and they can pick whatever toppings they want and any sides. But our standard menu, it comes dressed. You’re getting what I tell you basically. And then we offer the customer a variety of spice level.

It’s quite common that you have a red salsa and a green salsa. But we do a variety of spice level and then we just normally dress the tacos for you. We occasionally give the customer their own choice. Especially when it comes to breakfast tacos. We have a choose-your-own-adventure breakfast taco where they can choose a tortilla, choose a filling. They might choose egg and brisket or egg and chorizo and then their own salsa. Mild, medium hot. Yeah.

Nice. And I saw some corn chips in there as well. A lot of corn chips.

With the corn chips, we make our own corn chips as well. A lot of them are chips that are the day old tortillas. We don’t serve tortillas that were made the day before, so they get chopped and fried. its good for us because we get to use them up and then they just taste great.

And you serve them with guacamole?

With guacamole, we do with the salsa. And we have queso, which is like American cheese sauce. It’s not too dissimilar to a bechamel though Americans would probably kill me for saying that. It’s kind of a bechamel, but it uses a more specific type of cheese that gives it that American taste, liquid cheese sauce. Its great.

So good. And then you have some vegetarian options as well?

Yeah, heaps. I think probably our most popular is our fried avocado. Its a beer battered avocado. It’s deep fried. And we do a pretty classic slaw, aioli, deep fried avocado. It’s cool. If you don’t like avocado, you’re not going to like it. I always tell people that, but it’s awesome. Like crispy fried avocado. It’s great.

Do you call it Mexican food or Tex-Mex or American Mexican?

We call it border food.

Border food. Nice. Do you read around that type of cuisine or watch YouTube videos?

Endless. I suppose like initially I really dove deep on the barbecue, and you can really nerd out on barbecue. It is its own area. I recently got to go to America and Mexico. I spent a couple months over there. It was incredible. But yeah, down the YouTube rabbit hole, sure. I’ve been there.

So did you eat your way around America? Where did you go?

We flew into LA. I spent about two weeks in LA and then we went to Oaxaca. Oaxaca is one of the food capitals of the world. It’s incredible. It’s this beautiful old city, an old state in Mexico. We spent just over a week in Oaxaca eating everything I could. I gained 10 kilos. It was crazy. And then we flew into Texas, into Austin and we spent, just over a week in Austin as well. Again, three or four barbecue places a day. I did the classic tourist thing and lined up at Franklin’s barbecue, it’s probably the be one of the best in the world, known for that for ages. And there’s a town just outside of Austin that has every barbecue place you can think of. It’s fantastic.

You’d need elasticated pants.

Yeah. I bought more pants.

Delicious. Were there things that you brought back from there that you’ve put into place here?

Knowledge? Absolutely. More than I can explain. It was really fantastic and eye-opening, especially with the barbecue, that was always something I was very passionate about. Just like the way they’ve handled it and the techniques that they do. Then the flavours in Mexico are just wildly different. We struggle sometimes here to get the right ingredients. We do our best. We have people growing stuff for us.

I had friends who talked about whole beast being buried and cooked underground. Did you come across any of that?

Absolutely. It’s called Barbacoa. Barbacoa tacos are amazing. Very hard to do with the health department in Melbourne. You can do it above ground. It is kind of smoked. It’s different. We do smoke pork butt and pork neck. That’s one of my favourite tacos is the smoked pork. And we do the lamb and the chickens in a similar way, but not to that extent.

And before tacos and the cafe how did it all start for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

Pretty much. My father was a chef and my grandfather was a chef and most people on my father’s side are chefs or bakers. So I grew up in it a little bit and fell into it after school. I did think, no, I’m not doing it, I’m getting out. Because you grow up with chefs and they’ll tell you not to do it. A lot. Everyone in my family said, don’t do it, don’t do it. And then I fell back into it. I was really fortunate. I had a lot of people who were really supportive of me, not just my family. I fell back into it very earl. I spent six months at uni and dropped out basically because I realised that this is what I was going to do anyway.

What did you start off studying?

I was studying paramedicine and business management. It was another passion of mine, but I ended up back in hospitality.

Did you do an apprenticeship?

I studied in school and then when I left school I worked at Melbourne University, the Members Club. So not an apprenticeship as such, but I did study it in school.

What is it that you love about being a chef?

It is a passion of mine. I love everything about being a chef. God, that’s a hard question to answer. I love working with people from every kind of background. I love eating. I like the adrenaline and the rush of the kitchen and I’m a bit of a sucker for the punishment. Being a chef and then owning a business and running a business is a bit of a sucker punishment. There’s nothing like it. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been in kitchens and just the stress and the, and the pressure and the fun, building a team and working with people.

Well you’re bringing a lot of things into play there as well being a chef and thinking about food costs and all that kind of thing. But when it’s your own business, it must be on your mind all the time.

Oh, yeah. It’s a different level of pressure and a different level of fun. For us it’s about creating a great place to work, a great business, a solid business and trying to have fun at the same time and trying to bring something that does exist in Melbourne, but maybe not the way that we see it, trying to bring something new with the Tex-Mex and the barbecue tacos and the breakfast tacos. That’s not something that you widely see in Melbourne. There are a lot of Mexican restaurants and there’s some really great Mexican food in Melbourne. But we’re trying to do something a little bit different and trying to put our own spin on it.

Where can people get the breakfast tacos?

We do breakfast tacos Wednesday and Thursday at St. Kilda Road and we do breakfast tacos here on the weekends, all day Saturday, all day Sunday. We really pride ourselves on our breakfast tacos.

You are relatively young, very young to have done what you’ve done. But what would your advice be to someone starting out?

Maybe controversially I would say, don’t, go straight to a trade school. Don’t go straight to culinary school. Beg your way into a kitchen and maybe wash dishes, at least spend a little bit of time in a kitchen first would be my advice. And then stick it out. You’re going to have shit days, we’ve all been there, but the people you work with and the love that is in hospitality is worth it, I would say.

Dingo Ate My Taco, The Mill Brewery, 40 Sackville Street, Collingwood