Andrea Viglani

Hi, Andrea, it’s so nice to meet you. It’s beautiful in here.

It’s very nice today because it’s calm. We’re closed for lunch today, so the feeling is amazing and very relaxing. I will say, it doesn’t happen often, which is good.

I feel like you’re stepping off Nicholson Street, which is a really busy street, into a little oasis. I always love brick, and I always love a wall of wine.

There we go. We’ve got both here. We like to say that here is the new Lygon Street, I like to call it. You wouldn’t say you go to Nicholson as a destination, but in the last years, a lot of people do. We’re very lucky having Scopri, Bar Olo close to us. And look, we are in Carlton, but it feels more Fitzroy. Because across the road from us is Fitzroy. The feeling is a beautiful feeling, the feeling of Lygon, but over the years Lygon became a bit less Italian and more mixed, which there’s nothing bad with. In this area, literally, we are all Italian restaurants, which is a curious and funny thing.

It’s so nice. How long has Al Dente been here?

We’ve been here for six years now. The business started in 2020, so in the period of lockdown. I was working for Guy Grossi in the city at the time. Then we all know what happened, and the government said, “If you have a visa, go back home.” I’m not really the type of guy who gives up. I didn’t want to go home, especially as I’d paid taxes for six years already. I’ve been in Australia for 12 years now; at the time, I’d been here for six. I was two weeks away from applying for my permanent residency, and that’s what the government said: go back home. I said no. I started selling pasta from Instagram. I gave out some flyers on the street, to neighbours within the hour’s walk you could do during that period. Someone from The Age apparently picked up my flyer, which is a beautiful story, and that pushed me to be very, very busy.

I read that. How much pasta would you sell a week?

I remember there was one single day when we did $40,000 of sales. I’d run a kitchen; I was doing the rosters for Florentino, all the kitchen hands. I was very good at management. I ran pastry for a very long time and did many sections around the restaurants, but running a business of that weight was a different thing. We just didn’t give up. A lot of guys were in the same situation as me: visa holders who couldn’t work anywhere else. They came and helped me. It was a bit difficult because we didn’t know how to run a business properly. There were people helping us, journalists helping us, so we could sustain ourselves and get a salary, because there was no government support. That’s how I jumped in one week from an employee to a businessman. Crazy.

I remember those times quite vividly. You’d get the notice from the government that we were going back into a lockdown. Looking back, it seems like such a strange time. But I love hearing those stories of community and how people came together. I think that happened a lot in hospitality in particular, and just as well, because there were some pretty dire stories too.

So many immigrants had to leave. I was fighting for myself, but there are still guys who text me now and say, “Without you, I wouldn’t be here.” When you’re on a sponsorship, some of them we just gave food. Some of them we gave a place to stay during the day, and some money to pay the rent, and they helped us back. It was very difficult. When you don’t have any support, and you can’t work for anyone else because you’re sponsored, what do you do? Your life is here. That was tough.

When did you know that you could turn that business into a restaurant?

The story is a bit particular because we didn’t really do it. I always said that I would never run a business. I thought I was a very stressed person at the time, with my well-paid job, and I always said, “I’m not going to own my own restaurant. It’s just not what I want to do.” Then it just happened. When I felt that it could happen, I saw it, I visualised it, and I was like, “I can do this.” It just came naturally. I always knew that my life was going to be hospitality and cuisine, being a chef, although running a business now is taking me away a little from being a chef. It’s still the thing that makes me the happiest. How can you be happy in front of the computer for 15 hours? When you cook, you create. The satisfaction you get by the end of the day is something magical. Cooking is doing something for someone else, and if that someone appreciates what you’re doing, it creates a connection that is beautiful. A lot of chefs speak about it all the time. It’s something natural that connects family and all those things.

Opening a restaurant just happened. We saw a few places. We literally saw two; I was just exploring. When we walked in here, my business partner David, who’s in the kitchen right now, and I started punching each other while the real estate agent was walking us through. We both knew it was the right place.

What was this before?

This was a catering business. It could become a restaurant, but because it was a catering business, we also had big cool rooms and could have continued the deliveries if needed. At the time we didn’t know if the lockdowns would continue. Our main source of income was deliveries, and here we were still capable of doing it. We still do the same deliveries that we did in lockdown, even though our business is very different now. Some customers who purchased from us in lockdown still purchase now. We have an email list of 6,000 people that goes out weekly, and we change the special all the time. People still purchase.

That’s amazing. I think it’s even more incredible doing it so far from home.

Do you think if you’d stayed in Italy, you would have had your own business?

That’s a very good question, and I always ask myself that. If I’d stayed in Italy, possibly, but if I’d stayed where I was born, maybe not. I needed to move. I left home when I was 20. Leaving home puts you in a position where you have to wake up. If you don’t learn how to fix things yourself and act quickly to solve problems, you’re not going to make it. That mentality I started having once I left helped me become more like a business owner. I probably would have done it if I’d left for another city or started living by myself in Milan, which is probably what would have happened if I hadn’t come here. But at the time I was like, “I’m going to pick the place that’s the furthest.” I remember Googling, when I was 20, a place with a high level of hospitality where you could earn a good salary and have a good standard of living. Melbourne came up, so I started doing a bit of research. I don’t think we’re still number one now. Things are still okay, much better than many places. We consider ourselves very lucky to be here.

I’ve spoken to some French guys who have a place in Fitzroy, and they were saying it would be quite hard to open a place in France. There are a lot more rules and those kinds of things. Is that true in Italy?

I think it is hard, but going back now, I understand more. I understand what you have to do. If you have the right business plan, the right marketing behind it, and a good picture of how to make things become real, you can make a business anywhere. You just need to understand the demand. When we opened this restaurant, we had no idea about the demand. We wanted to do something that made us feel happy. We were doing this for us. But lockdown was a great success because we’d done what people needed. People needed pasta, restaurant-level pasta, because there were no restaurants open. In the first year, we didn’t think that was supposed to continue, and we did something different. The first year was tough. During the period we were operating, I was like, “Before, I’ve done something that everyone wanted, and now I’m doing what I want.” Once we found the perfect balance, we understood that what people want is what we really enjoy doing too. Before, it was all about ego: coming here and doing a seven- or eight-course degustation for $200, using herbs and particular things. It’s beautiful. That’s how I always cooked before, and it’s what I wanted to do when I opened the restaurant. But we realised simplicity and the family feeling we were discussing before are what bring people together. It brings people to the restaurant, and now it’s busy every day.

What do people order when they come here?

A must is the tortelloni cacio e pepe. I always say that my nonna would smack me on the head if she knew I was doing cacio e pepe like that. It’s a very simple dish, not super traditional. Most of our things come from tradition, because having knowledge of tradition is very important. Cacio e pepe is a bit of a twist on something very traditional. The difference is that you get the cacio e pepe sauce inside the tortelloni. When you cut it, you’ve got this oozy, cheesy pecorino that leaks out of the pasta. It pretty much doesn’t need sauce. We toss it with a bit of butter, a touch of chicken stock and pepper. That’s a pasta everyone wants.

I saw you in one of your videos listing as many pastas as you could think of in, what, 40 seconds?

How many pastas can you name in 40 seconds? I think I passed 40 in 30 seconds. Less than a pasta a second.

Do you make all those pastas?

We make many of them. I’m a dry pasta lover too. The restaurant is called Al Dente, and every now and then we put a good pasta dried by someone in Italy, on the menu. You can make dry pasta, but you’re never going to do it as well as those companies do.

Why is that?

Drying pasta requires big chambers and controlled humidity. You can’t do it in the sun, like they used to, but it’s a very particular thing.

I’ve spoken to other Italian chefs who’ve lamented produce here not having as much flavour as in Italy. What are your thoughts?

I could speak for hours about produce. There is some beautiful produce in Australia. I could argue that the lamb and beef we have here are much better than what you can find in Italy. It depends. Prosciutto: you can get prosciutto like you get from Italy. Tomatoes: no. You can get tomatoes [check]. I feel lucky here. It’s maybe easier in Australia to get a good Italian prosciutto than it is in Italy to get good Australian products. I consider Australia a very good and lucky place to be for produce.

I understand that, for some French people, not having foie gras because of laws, and for us Italians too… For example, I’m a brand ambassador for Prosciutto di Carpegna, which is the best prosciutto in the world. A lot of people say, “But jamón is better.” That’s not prosciutto; jamón is a cured Spanish ham. We can get prosciutto with the bone. Deboning does change the final flavour a little, because when you debone a prosciutto, oxidisation starts, air gets into the leg, and it changes a little.

Truffle is another thing. The best thing to do with truffle is pick it, clean it and eat it. I’ve even shipped truffle from Alba in Italy, the best truffle in the world, Tuber magnatum, and once it arrives at the restaurant it’s already been around for a week. It’s never going to be the same as in Italy. But then in Italy it’s very hard to pay staff to treat these products properly. In the kitchen right now, we’ve got five amazing chefs. They do their jobs very well and they’re well paid. They don’t overwork. We have the capacity here to have a roster where they don’t pass 30 hours; in Italy it’s not possible.

You were saying you always knew you wanted to be involved with hospitality and cuisine. When did that start? At what age?

When I was 12 or 13. My grandfather was a restaurateur. He opened a few hotels. His story is funny. He was an Italian butcher first; his father was a butcher. Then he moved to South Africa and discovered he could sell the bones of all the animals they were butchering, and he started making dog food. He started another business with it. Then he came back to Italy, opened a hotel, a restaurant and a pub. The pub is still run by my uncle. As a kid, one of my favourite things was going to my uncle’s pub, enjoying the time and preparing the dough for the pizza. The passion started very early. My grandfather would bring me into the garden, and I cooked with him as a kid. My mum always worked for my grandfather and my uncles. It was a family thing. As a game, when Mum and Dad came back from work, I’d dress up as a waiter and welcome them as if my house was a hotel. I think I burnt the kitchen for the first time when I was around 14.

Burnt the kitchen?

Burnt the kitchen. They always told me you learn by making mistakes. I took it literally.

Do you remember what you were cooking?

I think I was making a very simple cordon bleu, which is French. I put the oil on to fry it and got distracted. The oil kept heating up, and it caught on fire. In my family house, you can still see a wall in the kitchen painted black. That’s the reason why.

That’s a nice homage to your cooking career. What was the food you grew up on?

It’s funny. Now that I speak a lot for some of my favourite Italian brands, I realise how distracted I was as a kid. I had so many beautiful, traditional Italian ingredients around me: Parmigiano Reggiano, aceto balsamico, the best prosciutti, cured meats. We could speak about those for hours. But as a chef I always searched for different techniques. The Italian was just here; I had a bit of knowledge about it, but I wasn’t really studying it. I wasn’t seeing how lucky I was to be around all these products. I focused on things I didn’t have in Italy, mostly, as a chef. But growing up in Italy, pasta and pizza I would do every day. That’s what I grew up eating.

When I grew up and was studying, I worked in a Michelin-star restaurant that had a bit of an evolution of cuisine linked to tradition too. I always liked to experiment with new things. That’s why, around 18 or 19, I became head pastry chef. I really liked playing with techniques different from tradition. I don’t regret doing that.

Pastry has almost a science component because you have to be so precise, and understand the ingredients more, perhaps.

One hundred per cent. If you have a recipe and you need to make a beignet or a certain type of cake, you need to follow the recipe perfectly. That degree or gram extra could change everything. But at the same time, you can go freestyle with pastry too. If you do recipes multiple times, and you have a gel, or a semifreddo, or pâte à choux, a million things, you can replace ingredients. You might increase the dosage if you understand that more humidity will make it puff more. I’ve done a lot of freestyle pastry, which brings you a lot of mistakes, but mistakes teach you.

I remember speaking to Ben Shewry when he had Attica Summer Camp, and he was mastering a sponge cake. It took months. I think we forget that even really experienced professional chefs sometimes take that long to perfect an experiment.

One hundred per cent. I have a cake that’s still on the breakfast menu. We opened somewhere else doing breakfast, then we got robbed and decided it was too difficult. But we were already paying for the restaurant, so why not open for breakfast in the restaurant? On Saturdays and Sundays we do lobster buns and crumpets, and it’s been going very well.

This cake was something I made in one of my first jobs in Italy when I was 15. It’s called torta sabbiosa. The Aussies like to call it sandy cake; sabbiosa means sandy. It’s such a simple, beautiful cake, very similar to a torta paradiso. So light. The recipe is very difficult. It’s so simple, but the recipe is very difficult. Sometimes it doesn’t come out, depending on how long you keep the oven open, whether you regulate the fan perfectly, preheat the oven properly or mix the butter properly. I taught the boys in the kitchen how to do it, and now they do it better than me. I remember so many of those cakes became a crumble or something other than what they were supposed to become.

I feel like you like a challenge, and you won the tapas competition. Was it last year, 2025?

Yes, last year. That’s a big skip in the journey. From when I was young to that, there have been so many things in the middle, but it was a great, unexpected experience. I wasn’t even sure if I should have gone.

Spanish?

Spanish, correct. I love Spain and many things about Spanish culture that have something in common with Italian culture, especially tapas. I love a lot about Spain, but tapas are the thing I love most. If you come to the restaurant, an Italian assaggino snack is a copy and paste of a Spanish tapa. Something I always say is that in Melbourne, the tapas culture is so widespread without people even knowing what it is. You go to a restaurant and see ten snacks on the menu. You get a little bite of anchovy, Cantabrian anchovy: that’s a tapa. All those snacks come originally from Spanish culture, then spread around Europe, and Australia took them in too. It’s a worldwide way of eating.

So I decided to participate. I wasn’t sure, but I had nothing to lose. When I’m not sure about things, I’m like, “I should do it.” I’d never been to New Zealand at the time, and the semifinals were there. I went and did the competition and came second out of 44 chefs. I thought, “I didn’t do very well here. I’m not going to go through,” because one person goes to Spain. Honestly, I wasn’t ready.

Who was number one?

Someone from New Zealand, a very good and strong chef. I can’t remember her name right now, but she did very well. Her dish was beautiful, following her heritage. It’s a dish she does in her restaurant too. They had to bring two people that year because there were multiple countries. I was from Australia, she was from New Zealand, and I was second overall, which made me first from Australia. I didn’t know that would happen, but they picked me too. I went to Spain. They paid for my flight and hotel. The experience was beautiful. There’s a city called Valladolid, the capital city of tapas, where tapas were invented. There’s a red carpet around the city for the competitors. Every competitor is placed in a restaurant and followed by one of the chefs. You do your dish with them. They find all the ingredients for you, you cook in their kitchen, and if you win, your restaurant reproduces your dish for the whole year.

The kangaroo, though. Did you have to take that with you?

Yes. The story’s crazy. I had this crazy idea to do kangaroo because it couldn’t just be normal. I contacted an Australian company. Maybe it’s better if I don’t say the name. We get beautiful kangaroo here, very good kangaroo. It’s a lean fillet and very hard to cook. It’s easy to make it tough. Without much fat, if you don’t cook it properly, you end up with a very dry piece of meat. We started tasting it raw and got it tested by Melbourne Council because we weren’t sure if you could serve raw kangaroo. But you can serve raw beef. After the testing, everything was okay. We started serving it in the restaurant and the dish was a big success. I thought maybe Spanish people would love this.

The competition dish wasn’t the same. We did a complicated tapa. If I explain: tapa means lid. Originally, a lid was put on top of a glass to keep flies out. In Spain, people were drinking and drinking, and one of the kings said, “You can’t serve drinks if you don’t serve food with them.” They already had the lid, so they put a little snack on top. That’s how the story says tapa came from lid. We don’t have flies to keep out of the glass, so I decided to trap smoke inside with the lid. I made a kangaroo consommé, French style, Italian style. On top of the lid was a tartlet with raw kangaroo with berries, fermented apple and other ingredients. The dish was beautiful. I really enjoyed it myself, and somehow I won.

Congratulations. I love that there’s so much thought in it, all the back story. And so much to look at with the smoke and the different textures.

The kangaroo didn’t arrive in time. That’s why I didn’t say the company’s name.

What did you do?

My wife and I looked at each other. It felt like something out of a movie. I was travelling, visiting the production of Parmigiano Reggiano and Prosciutto di Carpegna. I was on that whole journey, then had to go to Spain for the competition. The Australian company was supposed to send the kangaroo to me through France, into Spain, but they stopped replying. Somehow it was stopped at the French border. They understood it wasn’t going to arrive in time and stopped replying. We’d had emails back and forth, and I’d said, “This is very important.” I think they felt so sorry that they stopped replying. I thought, “Am I going to do venison? What am I going to do?” The whole point of the kangaroo was that I’m Italian coming from Australia, bringing something Australian with Italian techniques.

In Rome one day, I had a dream of eating kangaroo in Italy. I looked at my wife and said, “But I really ate kangaroo in Italy as a kid. There’s a place close to where I grew up called Kangaroo.” Italian Australians had made a business serving kangaroo in Italy. If they had it near Milan, someone would have it here in Rome. There were three days before the competition. I started calling the world and found a place. I took a taxi 50 minutes from the centre of Rome, got the kangaroo, an ice bag and all of that, took it to the airport, put it on the plane and flew to Spain. I found the exact same type of kangaroo I use at the restaurant here. You wouldn’t believe it. It was like a movie. I got it.

Are awards, competitions and good reviews important to you?

All those things were very important to me until my thirties. Too important. Can I say bad words on this podcast? Now I don’t give a fuck. They actually started coming more when I stopped giving a fuck. I can’t depend on anyone else. Someone told me something that has stayed with me: work on what you can fix internally instead of focusing on what other people think of us. Since we did that, the restaurant has got busier and busier. More people call me for things and more events. October and November are already scheduled. Good things.

I don’t know how you do all the things you do. You obviously don’t sleep. I see what you’re doing online. You’re here in the restaurant, and you’re doing marketing for other people, for other events, and creating content.

Correct. It’s not my main business. Taige Media: the founder, Taige Alhadweh is my business partner there. He runs most of the company, but we collaborate a lot. We started doing the marketing for the restaurant because the company we had before wasn’t working very well.

Marketing is important. Taige and I met when he came to do filming for the Delicious 100. I think the filming never got published; they only did a very small part of it. This was four or five years ago. I always knew marketing was important for a business. In the first years it was difficult for me to run social media and do those things because I was always in the kitchen. Setting up a system in the first years is one of the most important things. I told him I wasn’t happy with the marketing company we had. It wasn’t really doing anything in particular. We had all these things to say. I don’t like to say “teach”, because I’m no one to teach; I prefer “share our perspective”, what we’ve learned. But nothing was happening. We were putting pictures up. Why would people watch them?

We started making videos together. I like entertainment and think it’s very important. We had a mix of instructional entertainment and recipe videos. We didn’t stop. We kept posting. A lot of people come to the restaurant just because they see a video.

Is it aimed at getting people into the restaurant, or at the community that’s already there? They’re very infectious. You can’t just watch one video; you get drawn in. They’re really entertaining.

How do you let people know what you’re doing if you don’t share it? Back in the day, in Italy, the way to share was to go into a piazza and shout. Today, unfortunately, you need to share where people are. People’s attention is on their phones. It’s sad to say it that way, but that’s the reality. I love going to places too. We have the Italian Festa coming soon. I organised a festa, and not long ago a prosciutto fest inside a supermarket. I was going around shouting with a megaphone. I love those things. That’s the best marketing you can do. But videos are important too.

Now we have become a company, and Taige Media does the same videos I was doing for Al Dente for many other companies, not even restaurants. We’ve done real estate, hairdressers, gardeners and tradies. Wine companies too; a lot of things are still around hospitality.

What’s next?

After what the doctor said today, a big, long rest. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. There are a few exciting things we’re planning. I’ve been travelling a lot because I like doing those things we mentioned: the videos, opening a parmigiana wheel or slicing the best prosciutto in the world, around the world as well as Melbourne. I’ve done it in Bali, and not long ago I was in Spain on a cruise, slicing jamón ibérico and opening Parmigiano Reggiano. We plan to extend breakfast. There’s a big plan for that. We have many corporate dinners coming and things we’re organising, plus multiple plans that I can’t speak about.

We’ll watch this space.

I’m really superstitious. If I say it before it happens, I think it’s bad luck.

I respect that. Just to finish, Andrea, I usually ask this question. You’ve had a fascinating path and lived a very full life so far. What would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

Passion is number one. Find your passion, but allow yourself to find it. People always tell me, “You’re lucky because you have a passion.” It’s not that an angel is going to come down from the sky and tell you what you’re passionate about. You have to go and try things. Try things while you’re young. Understand what you actually enjoy doing, pick it and don’t change your mind. You’ll find things you don’t like about that passion you’ve found, but being constant, being consistent and never giving up will allow you to get results.

Al Dente Enoteca, 161 Nicholson Street, Carlton