Anthony Dispensa

Hi Jo, how are you? We are going to put together some food for you to try and then I'll sit down and talk to you.

Amazing. Thank you.

We have a couple of cool things here; we have a fermented potato focaccia, and then we have a lovely mozzarella that we warm, so it is pre-warmed in a bath, we have a Stracciatella and compressed cucumber salad to which we add aged balsamic, olive oil and tons of fresh herbs like mint and dill and lastly, we have one of my favourites which is slow cooked octopus with cannellini beans and we finish it off with a little fresh dried oregano that we do in house with olive oil and smoked pimenton, which is paprika.

I saw your octopus dish on Instagram and I thought it looked pretty good so I am excited about that. You've been in Melbourne for four months? How did coming to Melbourne happen?

Matt Butcher, who I met in Los Angeles with Gordon Ramsay, back in 2011or something, he and I worked together, we were kind of on set with Gordon at the beginning because he was doing some TV shows before we were going to go into the restaurant, which is cool because I saw Gordon Ramsay literally every day and it was fun to be able to work hands on with Gordon daily. Yeah, I don't think many people get to have that experience of working hands on with him. Especially today. We worked three months together every day.

I have lots of questions about that but keep going.

He kept filming and then Matthew and I opened up The Fat Cow and that is where Matt and I basically started our relationship really well and as we went along, Matt went his way and I went mine, but we have always remained great friends and he came to London to see me in London when I was there at Dinner by Heston. He has been a good friend and follower, I guess. Just before Covid had hit, he asked me to come out and I was like, I don't know man, because there was so much going on. I had been pre-hired at Carbone but Covid happened so it got pushed back so I did some consulting in New Hampshire and then Carbone opened up and I went there. Then when Matt found out I was at Carbone, he said, you have to come here. He kept begging and he came to New York to sit down with me and that was it.

It's good to be so wanted.

Exactly.

Had you been to Melbourne before?

I had never been here. But I gambled on, or doubled down, as I put it, because I trusted in Matt that this was the place to be and I made my way out here.

I imagine as a chef coming to a new city, I mean we think we are pretty big in Melbourne, but it is not New York, do you have to change the way you do things to suit your audience or does the audience have to change for you?

I think the one thing I was trying to do, and I think it is going to be a slow process, is to teach people what New York is about. I think Melbourne should have that understanding or the fun part of it. I want them to come in here and feel as though they are eating in New York rather than being someone from Australia eating in an Australian restaurant. I want them to get that experience of being in New York rather than in an Italian restaurant that wants to be. I don't want it to be anything, it IS a New York restaurant. And there are things that we will do as we grow and develop and we will add more and more bits to it to be more involved with the customer, but right now it's about getting them the food and the experience and get them to understand of where we are trying to go.

You have changed the menu too. Was it a big change?

It is about 90% changed right now. There is still some stuff on here that is Matt's.

I wanted to ask about working alongside Gordon Ramsay and working in Michelin starred restaurants, how did you get there?

How did I get into those restaurants?

Well maybe, what made you become a chef in the first place?

Well that's an easy one. I think at four years old I was on the ground at my grandmother and grandfathers house and I was always fiddling with their pots and pans so I think it was inevitable that I become a chef. Not to mention that my last name, Dispensa means speciality ingredients, and my family has always been part of the hospitality industry. My dad's side of the family used to own the Balinese Room, which is a casino in Dallas, in Texas, and I was always around food growing up. Two of my dad's best friends were in big restaurants and I was always around that family. My first cookbook was from Tony Vallone and then when we moved to Connecticut I was in the area on the East coast of America where there are a lot of the best culinary schools in America and I went to one of them, Johnson and Wales. At that point I don't know that I ever thought my destination would be what it is today but if there is one thing I know, God just puts you in a path where you are supposed to go and hopefully you can follow on his path and get to the point you need to be.

That's right and the work you put in along the way and the connections you make, the people you meet and the exchanges you have.

Yeah, like I said, I met Matt and look where we are today.

What is it about hospitality that keeps you there?

Food changes, doesn't it? It is continually evolving and when food evolves there are challenges in there. If you look at food 15 years ago, it was around the time Heston was getting a Michelin star and he totally changed the food in London. If you look at London, itself, and at Marco Pierre White who Gordon trained under, and then Gordon opened up all his great establishments and developed a lot of great chefs and then at the same time you had this guy, Heston who no one really knew and he developed all his food and he evolved and then you look at the scene now in London, the food is just so incredible. It is better than New York city. I don't think people understand that; there is better food in London than in the United States by far. They are lucky enough to have the produce and the quality of ingredients you can get throughout Europe you can't get anywhere else. To be able to bring that into London is mindboggling. To be able to bring in Iberico pork from Spain into London is incredible. To be able to get the chickens and pigeons from France and bring them into London is really incredible. And that's the cool thing about being here; to be able to see the culture that is going on here in Australia and what they do and how they do the same thing with their ingredients, always evolving, especially when you are surrounded by ocean. You can get great produce and New Zealand has some of the best fish in the world. America would love to have that style of fish. Here I am in Australia and it is right in the back yard.

Absolutely and then there is all the great dairy here and Gippsland is so rich with its produce.

And there are lots of Italians here, which is cool.

And you know, we hear things about some of those big restaurants and some of the old school places in London and Gordon Ramsay's name is probably synonymous with the shouty chef model, but things are changing these days. Are things changing in London and New York, do you think, in terms of wellbeing in the kitchen?

I think the one thing about Europe is that it does stand by the model of the brigade and you are still working long hours and you are still working hard. Is there yelling going on? That I don't know. It definitely wasn't going on at Heston, that was an incredibly professional kitchen. Just to strive to be your best is in itself a challenge and keeping people up to par and standards is its own challenge, but also I think Covid has had a drastic impact around the world on the culinary world because a lot of people have left the industry and here a lot of people left the country, so you have lost a lot of hospitality. Hopefully they will start to come back in which would be really cool.

I recently spoke to an owner and the chef at a place called Oko in Fitzroy that has a specific wellbeing policy around no one working more than 45 hours a week, and they have two consecutive days off and limit knock off drinks and the chef was saying she has been in the industry for 27 years and she thinks that Melbourne hospitality was about to fold in on itself before Covid and that it needed something to shake it up and I think it has given everyone pause to reflect on what hospitality actually means. Doesn't it mean caring and nurturing?

It does mean all that and I think the one thing we have to hope and pray is that everyone out there understands that you go to a restaurant for an experience, and I hope that isn't lost because we are short on those great hospitality people. They are definitely still out there and as time goes on people will start to come back to this country and we will be able to get that lovely hospitality. I think that when you sit down and have a great experience between the food and the front and you come together as one, I think, man, there is nothing greater than having that experience. That's the one thing, being an old school kind of person, that I don't want to see lost. I think when you sit down in a restaurant there are so many levels of things that play into someone's experience. It's the people who are there to take the food order, to the music, to the food, to the engagement with the customer because then you walk away, and obviously you have the ambiance as well, and when you have all those lovely things together then as a guest you can walk away having really enjoyed it. That's my main goal here, to give people those lovely experiences.

What about your experience in the kitchen? You are working with heat and sharp knives and deadlines of getting things out. Is it stressful or is it thrilling? What is it?

I think what is most important if you are putting out food that you really love and are passionate about, I find that is the reward out of it. At the end of the day when you are happy with what you have put on the plate and it goes out and the customer is able to get something you put time into and worked really hard on, I think that is my main goal.

As a head chef, there is a lot of teaching and nurturing a team that goes on. What style of leadership do you think you have? I guess most chefs are showing rather than telling, is that what you do to get people to understand your vision?

I think showing them is imperative. And I think guiding them and showing them the way you have been taught. Me personally as a learner, I don't learn just by looking at something, I need to be shown. I want to show people because I'm a visual learner and I think that when people can see the visuals they can learn from that.

You have worked in some really top restaurants, and have done molecular and classic cuisine, are you still able to be surprised by food?

Of course I think that reading up on brining beans was a pretty cool thing and seeing the ways of doing it and why you do it and then actually taking what you have read and experimenting on it, that's a reward in itself, isn't it? Read and continually look up things and inspire ourselves through other chefs and through other people and thats what I live by.

Nice.

What would your advice be to young people who want to become chefs or get into hospitality?

I would say the best thing to do would be to read the book by Daniel Boulud. It's called Letters to a Young Chef. It's a brilliant book. I remember reading it a long time ago. It talks about Daniel Bouloud's process of how he became a chef and understanding the sense and things like that. I think when you learn all those things, they are the steps to becoming a really good chef. A lot of people think you can come into the kitchen and boom, you will learn like that. It doesn't work that way, there are just too many things to learn. You've got to make mistakes and fail to learn. And if you can't fail, you will never learn. I guess its like what Denzel Washington said, "Fail big." If you can fail big, then you can learn. I think that is probably the best way of looking at it.

Perfect. That's awesome. Thank you! Don't let me hold you up.

I am here for you.

Oh I love that! How great. And Friday night service tonight, will it be busy?

It should be. Fridays and Saturdays are busy.

Eddy was saying you all had to get used to lunchtimes here because a lot of the workers are still not back from working at home.

Yes, that's the sad thing. I think it is time and I pray that businesses will say ok, come back to work because it is hurting other businesses. It is time to get back into the community. It's time to open up so that we can enjoy life and people can be back to working with another and be back to being a full community. When you do that, life is great, isn't it?

Exactly right. It's as you say, it's about that ripple effect of the other businesses.

I think also too there is nothing worse than losing that and I am an old-school kind of guy when you lose the ability to talk to people, it hurts us as humans. We need interaction with one another and when you lose that it hurts everyone I think it is time for us to come back as a community and as a world. We need to be rejoined and rejuvenated and believe in life.

What was it like in New York?

Very similar. People are still very scared. People are very much about protecting one another which of course is very natural, but I think sometimes we have to take the gloves off and be humans so we can enjoy life. I hope with the new food and the new things we are doing here that it will bring people together and make people feel as though they are all in a family and have a family experience and that was the whole intention here; to have really good food and feel like you are at your grandmothers table or something and you're having a good time.

For a private dining room, this feels quite homely.

It is very special. It helps to have the Chianti bottles there, right?

Classic. I'll let you get back to the kitchen. Thank you so much.

It was a real pleasure and I'm glad we got the chance to meet.

Thank you for feeding me so beautifully, and also, you're a bit of a celebrity, so it was wonderful to meet you and have this time.

I'm definitely not a celebrity. See you again.

Ronnie's

The Rialto Piazza 525 Collins St, Melbourne