I always wanted Conversation with a chef to be about real conversations; talking to people who love what they do and allowing the conversation to go where it will. I spoke to Michael Bacash a few weeks ago on the eve of re-opening his long-running and highly acclaimed restaurant, Bacash after lockdown, and I absolutely appreciated his candour and his undeniable passion for seafood and for "getting it right". Michael does not mince his words and shared some interesting perspectives into the Melbourne hospitality world. And why shouldn't he? He has been part of it for decades and has a loyal following. I have been thinking ever since that conversation about eating the lush big scallops he told me about and whatever white fish is the one on the menu that day, prepared and cooked with respect by Michael.
Right, Jo, we're on. Let's go.
Excellent. What have I dragged you away from?
Dismantling a chargrill and putting the kitchen back together.
Wow. How long has it been since you were last open?
Well we were doing takeaway; fish and chips and that has been really busy, but we haven't traded as a restaurant since the 9thJuly.
That is so long to then get everything going again. I had your fish and chips on the lawn opposite you, by the Botanic Gardens and they were so amazing and the best fish and chips I have had for years and years, probably since New Zealand.
Yeah, well New Zealanders think they know about their fish, don't they?
We do. You and Fiona have had Bacash for 20 years, which is significant. To have the same place and to continue to be so successfulI have just been reading all the reviews where people say it's the best seafood in Melbourne and that you absolutely know what you are doing with seafood and fish and that is great in a town like Melbourne where everyone tends to go from one thing to the next, especially these days, that you have maintained such an incredible reputation. In fact, I was talking to a friend who said that Toofeys was his favourite restaurant as a child, so you have fans that go way back.
There's nothing magical about what we do with fish, but I've been fishing since I was a kid; I've been filleting fish, catching flathead, garfish, whiting, snapper and I just know fish really well.
I never actually got into this to be a chef; its not what I wanted, I just wanted to own a restaurant. When I finished school, I decided that I wanted to do hotel management, because I wanted to run a restaurant and Im not really sure why. My family was in hospitality and my personality trait is that, theoretically I'm a pleaser, so I like to do nice food and do professional food and with what I know about fishI wanted to do hotel management but you had to do a year in the trade so I thought I would do an apprenticeship and I started my apprenticeship with Bill Marchetti, who was at the Latin. Do you know who Bill Marchetti is?
No, I don't Im afraid.
Well the Latin was one of the best restaurants in Melbourne in the 1990s. But I started my apprenticeship with him when he was at a restaurant in Collingwood which is a Thai restaurant that is being pulled down now to put up flats. I didn't really know that I wanted to be a chef. You start your apprenticeship and you don't really know what you're doing and then all of a sudden, you taste something, or you finally understand coriander or you understand how beautiful a tomato can be or you taste something that is just delicious and that happens at the same time that you get off on the buzz of a busy service, and the combination of those things, if that grabs you, before you work out that being a chef is too hard, then youre trapped for life. But Ive never really been the kind of person who wants to stamp myself all over a plate of food. I actually want to, whilst producing as much food as I can to make a profit, I actually want to eradicate mistakes from what I'm doing because for me, good food is mistake-less food, not striving to do the amazing. Food to me is just not amazing. I don't understand how people are amazed at food. I don't understand why chefs do stuff to food so that people go, wow. It should just be beautiful. I don't understand giving people mouthfuls of food that are so small and then you have to wait 25 minutes for the next mouthful of food thats completely different and all it tries to do is to show off to the customer, theoretically how brilliant the chef is.
I hear you. I guess what you are saying is that you consistently offer up excellent, beautiful food and thats what hospitality is about, isn't it? Providing a lovely venue and delicious food and making people feel good about being there.
Well yeah and skinning a snapper and seeing the bloodlines bright red and knowing that there's not too much thats gone wrong for that fish from the moment it has come out of the water to the moment it has landed at the restaurant. And showing it respect and stacking it neatly in the tray and making sure it is covered in between services and making sure that everything possible is done to that fish but keeping a commercial mind as well, but everything possible is done to respect what that fish actually was, and this is going to sound crazy…and what it died for.
I distinctly remember buying a live crayfishI mean, I've bought a lot of crayfish, but it got delivered to me once at Toofey's from a supplier and it had been dropped and the poor thing, its legs were broken, its shell was cracked and when the delivery guy gave it to me, I opened the box and I looked at it, and I couldn't believe the terrible condition it was in. I took it out of the box, and I smashed it as hard as I could with a hammer to put it out of its misery and I gave it back to the driver. I rang the supplier and I said, what a shame that poor thing died for nothing.
Fish when it comes out of the water, filleted or whole, is just beautiful. It's just really beautiful stuff. The only time it's bad is when it hasn't been looked after; you've kept it too long, all sorts of stuff. But fish is beautiful.
I didn’t really know that I wanted to be a chef. You start your apprenticeship and you don’t really know what you’re doing and then all of a sudden, you taste something, or you finally understand coriander or you understand how beautiful a tomato can be or you taste something that is just delicious and that happens at the same time that you get off on the buzz of a busy service, and the combination of those things, if that grabs you, before you work out that being a chef is too hard, then youre trapped for life.
Absolutely. Nowadays it can be so tricky in lots of restaurants where they are doing many dishes and fish amongst them and they don't have time to train people to fillet, and they are getting them in already filleted, that must affect flavour and experience as well.
Especially because the worst thing you can do to a fish is wet it after you've filleted it and it's impossible for fishmongers to dry fillet fish; they just don't have time. But it begins the ageing process. I always used to do this thing in the kitchen where I'd get a whiteboard marker and I would keep trying to tell the staff to keep it cold; keep the fish cold and look after it. I'd draw a 1 on the bench and then I'd draw a 2, then I'd draw a 4, then an 8 and then a 16, and then I'd draw a 32. When the fish comes out of the water, it has no bacteria on it whatsoever. The moment you cut it, it's got 1, you leave it out of the fridge a bit longer, I mean the bacteria is growing, you put it on a slightly dirty chopping board and it picks up more, you put it into a tray thats not as clean as it should be, you don't cover it, you've got dirty hands, your knife isn't clean. All these different things are the difference between zero bacteria and however many bacteria it's got when it goes into the fridge.
The animal is completely intact when its skin is covering the flesh, the stomach lining it protecting the flesh from the acid and everything in the stomach is pristine. That's why it's alive. And as soon as you cut it, you break that level of perfection and then bacteria get into the flesh. Then you process it and put it into the fridge and the bacteria is going to multiply. But it's just a matter of whether its multiplying from 1 to 2 or 4 or 8 or whether it's starting to multiply from 26 000 or 1 million. That's the difference between fish lasting a long time and fish lasting just a few days in the fridge. It's what happens to it in between it dying and the flesh coming off the bone and it being exposed to a world it wasn't designed to be exposed to and how long you keep it under those circumstances. I'm raving, but it's a bit of mathematics, which a lot of people dont think of. Dont fillet a piece of fish and move it from one part of your chopping board to the other part of the chopping board, fillet it and put it in a stainless-steel tray. No matter how clean your chopping board is, it's going to be dirtier than a stainless-steel tray.
It's just this love and understanding of what fish should be. I've got to run a business and unfortunately fish is wild caught and sometimes it's not as fresh as you'd like it to be and it's not a perfect world and it gets handled differently and there are all sorts of things, but ultimately we are trying to look after our fish as best we can and let it speak for itself.
Beautiful. Now you've just spoken with a great deal of passion about that and you were talking before about the thrill of service and being in the kitchen and then being trapped for life, does it feel like a trap or do you still have the thrill of service? You obviously still have passion for the food you are preparing.
I love the thrill of service, but what I can't stand is the lack of respect. I'm too old to be working in a kitchen because the people I work with are now not just one generation or two generations younger than me, they are probably three generations younger than me. You hear them talk about old time football coaches and how they can't work with younger players anymore because they need to be treated differently than what they were treated. It's really hard for me to have someone come into the kitchen and they say they have worked somewhere really good and they can't even cut a tomato. If they cut a tomato into three wedges, they are all different shapes. And if they cut a lemon into four wedges, theres no consideration for the shape. Knife skills have goneknife skills and basic cooking skills have just gone out the door. And of course, you can learn so much on YouTube, but respect for knowledge or innate knowledge, is not understood.
To a lot of people, it would look like I'm just cooking a piece of fish, and on the surface, I am just cooking a piece of fish. But I've got a reputation with my fishmongers which dictates what they send to me and it dictates what I send back and what I complain about and it dictates when I ring them up and say that's the best I've had for a long time. We just picked up scallops yesterday that have come from a different side of King Island to what they normally come from and they are fucking amazing. They're big, they're translucent, theyre still in rigor mortis. We drive down to the processor and pick them ourselves. The guy thinks if someone is going to drive from a restaurant in Melbourne to a processor In Moorabbin to get to a scallop before they go to a fishmonger and get whatever a fishmonger is going to do to them, then they must be really careful. So they give me the best ones. There's a whole thing that goes toward making what we do here so good. But most of it is so innate; so lived and breathed instead of teachable and you know, you take me out of the equation and it falls apart.
Well, that's 20 years worth of word of mouth and people loving what you do. I think it's wonderful that you work with your partner, Fiona. Tell me about how you and Fiona work together in the restaurant. You said when I rang that she is the more creative half of the partnership.
Fiona is much more interested in food and wine than I am. I'm more interested in production and eradicating mistakes. I come in behind her and adapt what she wants to do to the commercial environment of a restaurant. We do wine dinners here with some of the best winemakers in the world. That sounds egotistical but it's the truth. Fiona has a really great relationship with all the wine people, and she knows so much about wine. And our food, because it's so simple, winemakers really like it to go with their wine when they do wine dinners. It's not like there are so many different flavours in the food that it's hard to match it with wine; there are one or two really fresh flavours with the food so it is easier to match up with the wine. We do really good wine dinners. A lot of the concepts for the food come from Fiona now, because I suppose I'm so busy making it and putting it into production and trying to teach people how to cut lemons.
175 Domain Road, South Yarra