Aitor Jeronimo Orive

Hi Aitor, and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Well, you’re actually having me. This isn’t your place, although it will be for the next three months. How did the pop up at Nobody’s Baby come about?  

You know people that know other people, a friend of a friend. I spoke to Gustavo, the owner, and we got rolling.

And you are highlighting or celebrating Basque food?

Yes, that is my heritage. It is what I like to cook, actually.

What will be on the menu?

We’ll have mainly Basque dishes and interpretations of Basque cuisine, some Spanish as well, because we can take from both sides Spain and France, obviously being in the middle of the Pyrenees. But the main course will be the Txuleta, which is a Basque way of doing a big ribeye steak bone in. That’d be the highlight.

The Basque country is fascinating. I’m a French teacher as well as a writer, and I know that the Basque people are fiercely proud of their own part of the world, and they’ve got a language that’s not like any other language.

Euskara. It’s a non-Indo-European language, a language isolate. They don’t really know where it comes from. That’s what makes us very proud.

A lot of the names of the dishes that you cook, do they have Basque names or do you change them?

Some do. I haven’t used a lot of the Basque names here because, for example, something that’s very typical in the Basque country is the sound CH is with a TX. So unless you know, I think it’s pretty hard for people to pronounce it or to know how to go about pronouncing it.

What is typical Basque food?

It’s very produce driven. The Basque country has a lot of mountains, but it also has a large coastal area. There are a lot of sheep and cows and a lot of produce from farms and the mountains and game and all that. But it has a very strong fishing culture as well. Everything’s cooked over charcoal mainly in the Asadores or Sagardotegi in Basque. They don’t do much to it, just get really good produce, whether it be beef or fish and stick it over charcoals. They use lots of garlic, lots of peppers as well.

What vegetable dishes are you serving here?

We’ve got piquillo peppers. They’re produced everywhere in the world, in South America, a lot as well, but these have a DO, like wines and products in Spain. They are from a certain region of the Basque country, Navarra, called Lodosa. These are wonderful. We just confit them and we serve them as a side with a steak. That’s a bit of a staple. You can have them on their own as well.

What a good combo. Does the Basque region have their own wines as well?

They do. I’m sure you’ve heard of Rioja. La Rioja borders with the Basque country in the south, and there’s a part of Rioja that creeps into the most southern province of the Basque country, Alava. So it’s called Rioja alta, which means high Rioja. So, technically, those would be Basque wines. Actually, I’m not trying to be biased, but they’re probably one of the best Rioja wines.

Are they easy to get here?

I’m not sure. I haven’t looked, but I’m sure you can get them.

You have to be wary of not getting too obsessed with accolades. It happens. You have to find your spot where you feel you’re happy with what you’re doing and you’re making other people happy. Also, I’ve always thought of cooking as, it’s something you make or you create that you get to eat as well. You don’t get to do that with other stuff. You can build furniture and sit on it, but I think with eating, you explore more of your senses.

Aitor Jeronimo Orive, Basque Txoko at Nobody’s Baby Bar

In some of the things I’ve read about you, you mention your grandmothers quite a lot. What are some food memories you have of their cooking?

One of my grandmothers is from the south of Spain, and the other one, the one that migrated here to Australia in the fifties, is from the Basque country. I always remember very fondly, things like croquettas, Spanish omelette, tortilla, those sort of homey things. More from my Andalsusian grandmother, because my Basque grandmother fled the Civil War. She was brought up in England for most of her adulthood before she came to Australia.

I read that you were born in Madrid, but you were raised in Australia, how did that come about?

My family came out here in the fifties after the Second World War. Mum was born here. They came out to Mildura. Mum was born in Mildura. I’ve never asked why Mildura, I have no idea. Later on they did move closer to the city. They moved to Frankston and that’s where I lived with mum. Mum went to Spain and she came back. I’ve always been back and forth from Spain and Melbourne, from Madrid to Melbourne, because that’s where Mum settled in Spain: Madrid, where I was born.

How old were you when you came back here?

The first time I came, I was 4 years old. And we came to live when I was nine.

Where would you say your heart lies? Or is it split down the middle between the two?

I’ve lived most of my life in Spain, more than Australia, but I was brought up here during my youth, so kind of both. Num’s always been very Australian, so, I would say both.

At what stage did you know you wanted to be a chef?

It was Mum’s idea, actually. I wasn’t the best student in the world. Mum was a teacher, so she wanted me to study, but she said, if you don’t want to study or pursue academics like uni, all and I liked cooking at home, so as a good teacher, she suggested, why don’t you study cooking? It’s something that you really like. That came from her, it wasn’t me.

Did you do that here?

No, I did that in Spain. You learn the basics in culinary school, but, let’s be honest, you don’t learn a lot of it, you learn more in restaurants.

You’ve worked in some top Michelin star restaurants. So from your learning days, what was the trajectory? How did you get into those restaurants?

Well, at first, I started working in pretty random restaurants, nothing fancy, high volume, in Valencia. That’s where I started being a chef in Spain. Then just through interest in meeting other chefs that have been in the more high-end fine dining sector, I started to get into it. That was the time when Ferran Adria was coming up, there was a big explosion of Spanish fine dining being at the top of the Mountain in the world. I just started applying to these restaurants to do stages in Spain and overseas as well.

Although it was your mum’s idea, what was it about cooking and being a chef that drew you in?

You’ve just brought back a memory, because I think I started really getting into it in high school here, in home economics. It was something that I enjoyed.

Often there’s lots of different parts, aren’t there? There’s the actually creating food, so being creative, then there’s also feeding people and the hospitality side, and then it can be the thrill of service, the adrenaline, and then I guess it’s the accolades as well. Do you draw on those factors?

Absolutely. You have to be wary of not getting too obsessed with accolades. It happens. You have to find your spot where you feel you’re happy with what you’re doing and you’re making other people happy. Also, I’ve always thought of cooking as, it’s something you make or you create that you get to eat as well. You don’t get to do that with other stuff. You can build furniture and sit on it, but I think with eating, you explore more of your senses.

I guess not every chef has that spark. Not every chef is looking to those top people, as you were, and thinking, I’d like to find out more by working in those restaurants. Was Mugaritz a hard place to work?

My first fine dining restaurant was Nerua, in the Basque country, Bilbao, which belongs to the same company as Mugaritz. They’re one star, they’ve been in the world 50 best when I was there. It was really hard in the beginning, making that transition from hotel kitchens or just normal restaurants to fine dining where the level of attention and detail is so much higher and the way you work…they kind of broke me down in a way. Everything that I knew just went out the window. I had to start again. But I’m very grateful to them now and I still have a very good relationship with them.

How long were you there?

I was there for about a year. Mugaritz wasn’t as harsh; bigger environment, a lot more chefs. They’re very polite people. It still had its hardness in like there were things that were tough to do technically. You learn a lot, but it wasn’t an aggressive environment. I think the Fat Duck was very more challenging in that sense. It was harder, more strict, not strict, just when you’re under so much pressure, people aren’t the nicest. But it’s normal.

Is it competitive? Is that what it is?

Very. I don’t know what it’s like now. For me, it was 10, 15 years ago. I’m sure it’s changed. It was just an environment where you had to go through the shit they went through, whether you deserve it or not. There’s some people that are not capable, and they get shit because they’re not getting their job done. It’s the same in any trade. But there you just had to cop it in the beginning, whether you liked it or not. It’s up to you whether you want to do it or not. A lot of people left.

I guess you have to have ambition or passion that allows you to see it through and know it’ll get better. Did you start picking herbs and peeling potatoes, or did you come in more higher up than that?

You start in those production kitchens where there’s no service, so it’s less difficult and tense. Then you just work your way through. Later on as a chef, you realise how that process goes in the sense that it’s about attitude. No one likes speaking herbs, but if you pick the best herbs, you’re going to move on to the next step, which is a staff meal or running a station. If you’re there picking herbs like you don’t want to be there, well you’ll probably be stuck there. That’s the way to promote people that are more valid than others.

When we say picking herbs, because someone for Christmas gave me the Ottolengi Comfort book and it is so great. His recipes involve doing a lot from scratch, which I love, and I’ve had the time over the holidays to cook a lot of the meals from the book, which has been the most I’ve ever dipped into a cookbook. But anyway, oregano, when you’re picking oregano, it is very fiddly getting each leaf. Is that what we’re talking? Each individual leaf, picking them off and making little piles? What’s the visual?

In the kitchens that I worked, I know that there was picking herbs, but it wasn’t like a whole thing that I can remember. There are other tedious jobs, but maybe not picking herbs, like peeling stuff or cracking nuts. I don’t think there were that many herbs in Mugaritz. At Mugaritz, there was a section for herbs, its own section where they picked them from the garden. But I was never in there, fortunately. It depends on the restaurant and what’s on their menu. I think Noma did a lot of herb picking at one stage. I haven’t been there, but from what I’ve heard.

Chefs have a lot of hacks as well, like things that make their life easier, that perhaps we as cooks at home don’t know about. I’m often really amazed by those really clever ways of doing things.

Yeah, chefs do. Just through sheer work, people come up with better ways of doing stuff. When you put so many hours into anything, and so many people in those big teams, you might have someone one day say, hey, chef, I’ve realised that if I do it this way, it’s better, it’s more efficient, or we use less of whatever. And then that evolves. People come up with things. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the head chef or the chef de partie. It could be a stagiaire.

You went to Singapore. Why did you decide to go there?

I was working in China, in Shanghai, for a little while. I was running a consultancy restaurant for a two Michelin star chef for Madrid Corp, Paco Roncero. It was casual, it was nice, but it just got to a point that I wanted to do something else. I reached out to the people from Mugaritz. And coincidentally, Ignatius Chan is really good friends with Andoni. They were looking for a head chef and it clicked and connected. They asked me, since you’re in the region, would you be interested in this? And I said, yeah, for sure. So then I was the head chef at Iggy’s.

That’s awesome. Then you had your own restaurant.

After three years, yes, I had my own restaurant with Unlisted Collection, which is a Singapore company that has several award-winning restaurants, one of them being Burnt Ends, run by a fellow Australian, Dave Pynt. Again, another opportunity came up and I took it.

I feel like that would be really challenging, running your own business in a different country. How do you go about that?

Oh, you just go with a flow.

That was Basque food?

It was. It was a Modern Basque food with a Asian touches. In Singapore, we have access to really good Japanese produce, and European.

I feel like the Singapore dining public are really receptive to things that are different and very into fine dining. Do you think the dining public are different here compared to Singapore?

I don’t think I’ve been here working long enough to find out yet.

Fair enough.

Check back with me in six months. But I think there’s a bigger will to spend more money on fine dining in Singapore than there is here. Also, Singapore is a very affluent country. I guess that helps. They’re really into any type of food as a nation.

I think that’s probably what I was meaning.

Australia is as well in its own way.

That step up, because already as a head chef, you’re thinking about numbers and money and budget and also creating menus. What changes when you become an owner as well?

Well, for me, it was a massive learning curve. I didn’t know much about that part of the business. I never got to see it at Iggy’s, which, in a way, was good. I didn’t have to have that responsibility, which is a big one. I really learned all that part of the business with Loh Lik Peng, who is the owner of Unlisted Collection. So, shout out to him. It’s the trickiest part. Cooking is, if you’ve got a knack for it, it’s easy. But the numbers are different. I can control what’s in the kitchen most of the time. Sometimes the numbers are something you can control, but you can’t control some expenses or whether you’re making enough revenue. Sometimes it can tricky. You have to be good at both. The good chefs are good at both. Or find a partner that’s really good at that part of the business.

What brought you back to Melbourne?

I’ve always wanted to come back to Melbourne. I didn’t think I was going to do it now. I thought it’d be later on in my career. But since the economic crisis in Singapore and so many F and B closures, we were one of the first effected. When we closed Basque Kitchen, I thought, well, now that I’m here, I may as well just go back to Australia. Why not? I made that decision with my wife. We talked about it. We thought, shall we go? And all my family’s here. So that’s probably why.

You’ve done a few pop-ups?

I’ve done a couple.

I feel like pop ups are becoming more popular, for want of a better word, in Melbourne, as a way for people to experiment and try some things out. I feel like it would be hard going into other people’s kitchens, but when you walk in somewhere, what are the first things you’re looking for or deciding on as to how you’re going to work in that space?

What I do, which I should be better at, when I walk into kitchens, I have a look at things over the top. I should look at it a bit better next in some places that I’ve gone in, I’ve just said, yeah, that looks good. And then I’ll figure it out later, which maybe I shouldn’t do that so much. But, you just find your way. You make do. I think if you’re a skilled chef, if you’ve got good baggage and good knowledge, you should be able to fix what you want to do with what you have. Obviously, if a kitchen is limited in some sense, you have to adapt. be very versatile.

Likewise, if you’ve been away from the country for a while, do you have to take some time to consider the culinary landscape and see what’s going on and what’s available?

In my case, I’ve been very lucky because since I arrived here and I started cooking, Frank Camorra from MoVida is a good friend of mine and he’s been super helpful. Any questions about produce, suppliers, he’s been there for me the whole time. Shout out to him.

I love it. I feel like you’ve mentioned lots of names of people being really helpful and I do love the idea of a community of chefs working together. Do you think that has shifted, that idea that people are less competitive and more willing to support each other?

I think so. At least from the people that I know, I can’t speak for everyone. But I think we should share and help each other. It’ll just make it better for everyone.

Well, that’s right. Hospitality, should be about community.

Absolutely. I want to talk about Michelin stars, because you’ve been in venues that have had stars and you’ve had your own star as well. It’s an interesting debate in Australia, because we don’t have Michelin stars yet. People are anti them or they are for them. We have the hats here, but New Zealand is launching the Michelin star program midway through this year. And they’ve had to spend a lot of money to get it. Do you think it’s important that Australia has Michelin stars?

Being selfish, thinking about myself, yes. For the country itself, I think it puts the Australian food scene more in the global scope of things. Michelin will do that. We already have the 50 best, but there’s not a lot of it here. So I think, yes, how are they going to go about that or if people want it or not? That’s really not for me to say. I don’t know if it’s expensive. I think we’re a pretty wealthy country, to be honest. I’m sure there are things that are way more expensive. But definitely for tourism, it does a lot. That’s why all the other countries bring it on board, or other non-European countries, because obviously in Europe, it’s something that’s been around for hundreds of years. I think it’s a plus. I don’t think it’d be negative at all. I don’t know the other agendas and who wants it, who doesn’t want it. That’s not for me to say.

I imagine it must be a great feeling to have a star. But then it does also add that pressure to keep it as well.

Yeah. It does.

Can you enjoy it, or is there a brief moment where you enjoy it, and then you have to keep knuckling down?

In my case, I just didn’t really think about that. Just keep doing what you do. For me and the team, we try to be better each day. You’re going upwards. We never thought of losing, but we thought more about gaining.

You’re here at Nobody’s Baby for the next three months. When people come to one of your dinners, what’s the best way for them to approach it?

They can do whatever they want, there’s no rules, but what I would do, how I would enjoy it, is I’d get some starters or tapas in the beginning. There’s a selection of them: gildas, which is a very typical Basque pinchos. It’s got a bit of bitterness, saltiness, gets you salivating, it’s a good appetiser to start with, then a few tapas. Then I would just go for a steak, steak, chips, salad, and some piquillo peppers and then dessert. That’s what I would do.

What’s your dessert?

My dessert would be a flan. That’s what I like. Cheesecake as well. That’s my wife’s favourite. She’s helping me, by the way.

Oh. Fabulous.

Well, sort of. No, she’s great.

To finish with, I often ask chefs, what would your advice be to young chefs starting out in the industry?

Just be passionate. If you really want it, just be passionate and work really, really hard. I think that’s something that’s missing nowadays. As my grandad would say, hard work never killed anyone. You get what you put into it, basically. So just work. If you’re passionate, if you really love it, set yourself some goals, even if they’re crazy goals. As a good friend of mine, Julien Royer from Odette said, aim for the moon, and wherever you get, I’m sure it’ll be good. That’s what I suggest young people should do.

Basque Txoko at Nobody’s Baby until April, 19-21 Toorak Road, South Yarra