Anthony has worked all over the city and in various suburbs over the course of his career and he thinks it’s important to understand your diners. While restaurants in the city can have a different crowd through the door every night and are after that one-off experience, neighbourhood restaurants have to cultivate their community and offer consistently good food at reasonable prices. If it’s not right, they’ll go elsewhere. Clearly Osteria are getting it right. Anthony points out a couple and their toddler who eat at Osteria 20 four to five times a week. Talking to Anthony, I can hear his love of the Italian tradition of sharing food and creating community. It’s important to him that this little family get that and that his wish for everyone dining here.
Where did it all start for you, Anthony?
I’ve been cooking for almost 25 years. I’m a local boy, born and raised and I’ve worked predominantly around Melbourne, I’ve done a few CBD things and worked in the suburbs as well. I’m used to more of a family environment, more casual and not so high end, so cooking for kids and so on as well.
Did you always want to be a chef?
Ever since I was a little boy. Even before all these television shows were on, there used to be one cooking shows on SBS in the mornings and I used to watch that back when it was Channel 28 or something like that.
Yes, I always wanted to be a chef.
Coming from an Italian family, food is really important to us. Sitting down at the table and eating together. That’s what we are trying to do at Osteria 20, bringing people together at the table. We are encouraging sharing from plates on the table rather than plating up individual dishes. We cook the food and send it out as it comes up and people eat and have conversation rather than get their meal, eat it, it’s done and they ask for the bill. We want people to take time over eating. That’s what I try and so with my family as well. We never just cook one meal. There are always three or four things on the table and we try and keep the kids at the table as long as possible.
It’s a very European thing. In France and Italy, people sit around the table for hours and have all those wonderful conversations about politics and religion and all sorts of things that we, in Anglo Saxon countries have been told to avoid at the table. I love that.
The main room in our house is the kitchen. Everything revolves around the kitchen for us. Whether we are at my parents or at my in-laws house or at our house, everyone converges on the kitchen. That’s always our meeting point.
When I started, people didn’t know what eggplant or artichokes were. They were pretty unusual. Now you can do specials with them.
Is Osteria serving general Italian food, or food specific to a region?
It’s general Italian. We will look to regions for inspiration and pull one dish out. But we’re not specifically targeting northern or southern.
What are some of your favourite dishes on the menu?
I really enjoy cooking using a lot of vegetables and not always doing everything based around meat or fish. Again, growing up, we always had heaps of vegetables on the table, whether it was from the garden or from another family member. Someone always has a lemon tree or bits and pieces going on in the back garden in our family. I really like the polenta dish we have on. It’s completely vegetarian; soft polenta with mushrooms and slow-cooked onions. It’s one of my favourites.
Where do you get your ideas? Do they come from your 25 years of cooking?
Yes and no. Sometimes you forget about things and then you’re reminded. I might be in the supermarket or walk past a book and see an ingredient I haven’t used for ages and I’ll go and do something with it that week. It can be a forgetting then remembering thing. Food has become very mainstream now. There is a lot of media attention around food. Things come and go all the time. When I started, people didn’t know what eggplant or artichokes were. They were pretty unusual. Now you can do specials with them. Once upon a time if you used those kinds of vegetables, it was 50-50 whether people would order them. Now people understand a lot more. So the media is good in a way, because it educates the general public which then pushes us to do better or be more creative because they want it, they’ve seen it somewhere and they want to see more. It’s good for us.
818 Genferrie Road, Hawthorn