Eileen and I sit down to chat by the open sash window in Napier Quarter, the cute blue stone wine bar on the corner of Napier and Kerr Street. Afternoon sun is glowing on the buildings opposite and deliciousness wafts out from the kitchen. After the chat, owner Daniel Lewis helps style my portrait taking, brushing away any stray dust from the outside wall…and from Eileen…This feels like family and it feels like home and I like that a lot.
Eileen, thank you for sitting down with me. I’ve just been doing some reading and I hadn’t realised and I’m sorry that I hadn’t quite realised that you opened here, then went away and now you’re back. Was it like coming home again?
I worked with Dan at Pearl in Brisbane. He owned a bistro/café in Brisbane, and I ran that as head chef for around three years. I told him I had plans to move to Melbourne and dan told me that he had plans to open a wine bar here, which is exactly what I wanted to come down and do. So I moved down here and helped him open this with Simon (Benjamin) and at that stage I’d come to Melbourne and I guess I didn’t really know many people in the industry and was working in quite a small space and it was good but I wanted to get out there more. I worked here for around six months and then I decided to go to Lûmé. I’d worked with Shaun (Quade) in the past as well, at Biota in Bowral and Urbane in Brisbane. He asked me to go and work with him at Lûmé, so I did that for around two years then Dan, Simon and I had a conversation and we decided that I would come back here with plans to do more things together. I’ve known Dan for ten years and we share a similar idea and we value the same things about food and about the industry. Coming back here was like coming home again.
And it must be good when you produce something iconic. Everyone talks about your rye toast with the boiled egg and anchovies. Someone said it’s one of the most photographed items in Melbourne.
I want to take it off the menu. It was a really simple dish we put on the menu a month after opening and it was a dish that we thought could go from breakfast through to dinner. It’s so simple; it’s rye bread with egg and anchovy and a salsa verde. It’s so straightforward and people just started really loving it, so we kept it on. It went into the Broadsheet recipe book.
That’s like the Hollywood star and handprint thing, you’ve made it.
But now I think it’s time to move on from that. We have a very local regular clientele here and they might miss it to start with, but I’m sure I’ll find something just as good to put on in its place. It’s a strange thing to become the dish of the restaurant.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it. Maybe it is just about its simplicity, the balance of flavours and textures and it looks pretty.
I always wonder why people still go on about that. I guess the next step at the moment is that we are all on the same page, Daniel, Simon and I. We want to take it up a notch. In November it will be the third year we’ve been open. It will still be quite simple and still focussing on the producers, the farmers, the artisans and all that, except we want to put in a little more elegance. I have an excellent kitchen team, so we’re going to step up a notch.
You just got the Time Out Best Casual Dining Award…
We still want to stay casual wine bar but a tiny bit more elegant than what we’ve been doing.
A lot of the chefs I talk to mention wanting to keep evolving and learning new things and trying new things and I guess that’s all part of the process.
We’re always keep a similar structure here and if we do want to branch out and do something different, then we’ll start another business, but we can still get more finesse and put a little more focus on the food when we get more kitchen space. At the moment, we have three square metres to cook in.
It’s tiny. It looks a bit like a horse’s stall…a lovely one, with the wood and the hanging dried herbs…
It’s a small space and we do what we can in that space. We’re opening up the Guesthouse next door, which has a small kitchen, so when we don’t have guests we’ll use that space.
Lûmé has a really big kitchen, doesn't it, which is mostly open…
Lûmé is pretty much all open apart from a small space round the back which you can’t really see. You’re on show all the time there. It’s a completely different kind of restaurant. They’re only open for dinner and lunches on Saturdays, so it was basically prepping all day and then service from 5 o’clock.
And you know who’s coming in because of the pre-booking.
It’s all pre-booked, yeah. So you’re preparing all day for something set that you know is very structured and that’s how you run the kitchen each day. Here, it’s breakfast, lunch, dinner. We’re open from 8 o’clock all the way through until 10 o’clock at night, so there’s not the time like there is at Lûmé to spend on each dish.
I wanted to move away from fine dining and get back into more casual dining. For me it’s more sustainable in my career.
I was just talking to Dan Hawkins at Prince Dining Room and we were talking about that whole sustainability thing. They run yoga sessions for staff and have access to the salt baths at St Kilda and we were talking about how we often mention sustainability in terms of the food we are using, but it’s about staff as well and definitely for chefs, it’s such an intense job that it is really important to put things in place so you don’t burn out.
At Lûmé I started doing yoga with the chefs as well one day a week. The team there works five days a week all together and very long hours. Here it’s more sustainable for the tea because we work less hours but none of us cross over and work together so it’s unfortunate that we can’t really do group activities because there’s always going to be someone here when you have your time off. It’s more sustainable because of the fact that you have more of a life balance, so time to do other things. I’ve got more projects on the go, like gardening and getting more into that. It’s great for me, otherwise it’s all kitchen and I want to do a bit of both. I want to understand the produce more as well. That’s my own personal project at home.
My nana inspired me the most. She had a huge vegie garden and was an ex-farmer growing up. She taught me a lot about farming. We used to go out and pick all our vegetables and cook from there. She used to make stocks and soups and chutneys. I learned that from her. Then when I started cooking, I understood food and I understood produce really well because I’d been brought up that way.
I love that. I spoke to Annie Smithers out at Trentham and she grows 95 per cent of the produce she uses and it’s given her a different respect for the vegetables, she wants to use it all and not waste it. I think it makes you really aware when you grow something from a seed and take it through to the plate, there’s almost a relationship there.
Much more. That’s why I’ve always had a strong relationship with the farmer. We use Day’s Walk, you can never find them anywhere because they don’t have a website or Instagram or anything. We use Somerset Heritage Produce and I use someone called Citrus Prime for all our lemons and he does experimental farming and we get bits and pieces from Ramarro as well. Each of those delivers so we are basically getting four days a week deliveries from different farms and I go and visit these farms so I have the relationship of what they’re doing as well as what we’re doing. I always train my staff to have complete respect for all of the produce that comes in. We focus so highly on the produce rather than the technique, so it has to be respected. Also the staff need to be educated where it’s coming from and how it has been selected. It’s extremely seasonal, so we will only use something if it’s in season and I can get it. I base the menu on what the farmers are growing right now, rather than creating a dish and then looking for the produce.
That’s so interesting. Quite a few people I’ve spoken to recently have mentioned that shift in menu creation from what used to happen, especially in French gastronomy where you worked to a recipe.
There is so much amazing produce here that I love using. I’m more European-influenced and when I was living in Queensland there was much more tropical produce available and I’m not really Asian-influenced so it didn’t really suit me and my menus. There are still a lot of amazing farmers up there but I would also go straight to the vegie markets and get my own produce from there twice a week. Moving down here, I loved getting everything locally that I love using.
It was definitely a learning curve because I knew the farmers and suppliers in Queensland and then I moved down here not knowing anyone and no one knew me and I knew I had to get myself out there.
How long did you cook in Brisbane? Did you always want to be a chef?
I grew up in Sydney and I moved to Brisbane. I always wanted to be a chef. I always cooked from when I was a child. I used to create my own cooking shows at home.
I used to do that too!
It’s funny, when I talk to other chefs, a lot of them did that when they were kids and I think, are we sad?
No, it’s great.
My nana inspired me the most. She had a huge vegie garden and was an ex-farmer growing up. She taught me a lot about farming. We used to go out and pick all our vegetables and cook from there. She used to make stocks and soups and chutneys. I learned that from her. Then when I started cooking, I understood food and I understood produce really well because I’d been brought up that way.
So I got into it quite young. I left school quite young, but I think I was too immature to grasp what I was doing and so I guess in my twenties I got fully into it. I say my career started more in Brisbane. Then I moved down to Bowral to work at Biota, I lived there for just under a year and then moved back to Brisbane. But it was always my plan to come to Melbourne, it just took longer than I expected.
I really loved working at Pearl with Dan. I went there thinking I’d work there for a year and then move to Melbourne and then three years later I was still there and it was time to move.
I like the idea of teams, or at least parts of teams, staying together in places for longish periods of time. Hospitality starts with the people and the nice experience they’re having of working in a place and wanting to stay there. You obviously have a good relationship with the people you work with and I feel like that’s passed on though the food.
You can definitely tell Dan and I have worked together for a really long time. The way we come up with ideas and future plans together, it seems to flow really easily because we are both on the same page about a lot of stuff. We fight like sibling sometimes, but not in a bad way; it’s always resolved and we always end up coming to a similar idea.
Hospitality and restaurants arelike family and any restaurant you work in, you spend more time than you do with your partners or real family. You eat together, you drink together, you work together. It becomes your family.
359 Napier Street, Fitzroy