Billy Crombie

Conversation with a chef: It’s so great having the fire outside. Tell me about the coffee we are drinking.

Billy Crombie: This is a South Indian coffee. This is called a Davara. It’s hot, that’s intentional. What happens is Indians will pour this directly into this to get it to the temperature they want and to aerate it. The beans are grown in South India. It’s roasted here in Melbourne by Kaapi, a little South Indian roaster in Coburg, and we brew it. Underneath it, that taste, it’s chicory. I think it’s a hang-up from wartime, when they needed to subsidise coffee, and the South Indians kept that. It’s quite nice. And Parle‑G is their childhood biscuit. It’s like a taste of home. A simple thing, but it’s their childhood, the equivalent of, if you’re English a Penguin biscuit or when you’re travelling through the middle of Africa, and someone gives you a Timtam. It’s a taste of home. It’s just a simple thing and it’s their childhood.

Leaning into nostalgia; whether that’s a Parle‑G, serving the coffee traditionally, or the 1971 Hindustani Ambassador sitting here, it takes South Indians straight back to their childhood. They love it. They really do. They are intentionally driving here from Geelong, Bendigo, Sale, Albury. I’ll say, “Are you visiting the Redwoods?” and they’ll say, “No, we’re coming for lunch.” I smile, but I’m thinking, are you crazy? I wouldn’t drive two and a half hours for a humble plate of curries. Some stay overnight, but many just come and go home. We’ve become a destination restaurant.

Are there other South Indian restaurants in Melbourne?

It’s pretty unusual in Melbourne. There are South Indian restaurants, not a lot, and they tend to bring in North Indian dishes as well because it’s actually hard to stand authentically by what you do and where you’re from.  A lot of places might say they’re South Indian, but 50% of the menu is North Indian or Aussie‑Indian dishes. It’s hard to sell food Australians don’t know. We do have butter chicken and palak paneer now; we didn’t for years. That’s purely to open doors, especially where we are. Ninety-five per cent of our menu is from Kerala.

What does that look like?

It’s not just Kerala. It’s from Trivandrum, the capital in the south, and influenced by my husband’s background from a Muslim fishing community. South Indian food has more lentils, coconut, mustard seeds, curry leaves. That’s where dosa comes from: fermented lentils and rice. Idli is steamed rice cakes, uttapam, I tell Aussies it’s a bit like a bit like a pizza. It’s not. But it looks like a bit like a pizza. It’s made out of the same as dosa, and you’d have cheese, red pepper, red onion through it, and you dip it into your dahl and your coconut chutney. North Indian food is more tomato, cream, butter, and most of the curry bases are similar. South Indian food has more diversity:  stir fries, yoghurt dishes like beetroot pachadi. There is more variation in textures and flavours. I’m not an expert. I know a bit. It’s not just “South Indian”, it’s not just “Kerala” , it’s Trivandrum, and specifically Muslim fisherman food. People will say, “This isn’t Kerala food.” It is. It’s just not your Kerala. Every region has different dishes. Even biryani is different depending on where you’re from. Ours is very meat‑driven: goat, beef, fish and influenced by that coastal Muslim culture. It’s hard to help Australians understand, and, to add on another layer to us, it’s hard to do that in a regional town that is not used to Indian food at all. There are four pizza restaurants up here. There’s a reason for that. It’s hard to stick to what you do. When you need to look after your staff. But it’s a long game.

Why Warburton?

I’ll go back to my husband’s cuisine. He’s from the bottom of Kerala. Kerala is on the Western side of India at the bottom, towards Europe. It’s very tropical. It’s not crazy India. It’s very reliant on nature. Nature is very important to them. It’s very abundant with mountains and rivers. They describe Kerala as God’s own country. It is stunning. When they come up here, it feels like Kerala. A bit colder. Although if you go out to the mountains of Mona, in Kerala, up in the Western Ghat, there are mountains and rivers, it snows up there. Warburton feels like Kerala. It’s like a hill station. In colonial times, the masters and the madams in Kerala would travel because it was too hot on the coast. They would go up to the mountains.

This building as well is a 1936 cabaret building. It’s got quite a bit of history and it’s very special to a lot of people in Warby. It’s got that 30s vibe. Warburton has gone through so many changes and is currently going through a change. Back in the day, it was a honeymoon venue. In the early 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, the steam train would come up from Lilydale. It was a tourist destination, and people would stay at some of the beautiful guest houses that are up here or The Alpine. Then they would come and dance here. They built it in 1936, and it’s gone through many reiterations. It hasn’t been an Indian restaurant before.

Two and a half years ago, what made you think, oh, we need a second restaurant in Warburton.

Going right back, we started at the Belgrave Market, and at the Upper Ferntree Galley Market, with one Tawa, an Indian hot plate, and a Bunnings marquee. and about $100. No idea what we were doing. Max came out to Australia. I lived in India with him for some time. I met him in India. Even though he’d run a restaurant in Kerala, and it’s the classic immigrant story, his skills weren’t valued here. His English was pretty average. His skills weren’t valued. He’s totally self taught. Here he worked in restaurants, cafes around the southeast and wasn’t paid correctly. I think from going from leading a team in India, and then coming here to a game of snakes and ladders, right back down, it was pretty tough to do that. He wasn’t okay. I realised that, whatever the future looked like, he needed to be cooking, working for himself. And so we started cooking Dosa at the two local markets. He’d never cooked a dosa in his life, which is quite funny. They are very hard to make. Then try and cook a dosa when it’s, like 60 knot winds outside and raining. We had no idea what we were doing. It’s quite funny. I still remember that day. Max was in foetal position at the back of the marquee because he couldn’t do it, he had never made one before. It was like 60 knot winds and it was an extreme fire day. We shouldn’t have even been cooking, but we didn’t know that at the time. Gradually after phone calls to his mum, he learnt, and then we started cooking at bigger places like the Queen Vic Market Night markets, we were cooking there and then Aussie music festivals.

How do you get to do that?

Back then, it was like applying for MasterChef. We were this tiny little street stall. I applied, and they interviewed us, and you have to cook for them. We had to bring food in because we were coming from quite far in Belgrave, but it wasn’t that easy to do that. They said sure, bring some food in. And they said, oh, okay, you can heat it up in the microwave. I gave it to Max to do. Max had never used a microwave in his life. I dealt with it. And as I said to the guys interviewing us, well, you want authentic, don’t you? At that point, he had never used a microwave, never used a rice cooker. Everything had to be cooked, cut by hand, which I still fight with him about that. because now obviously, we’re pretty busy. He’s very much a village cook. We did the night market, we got in. We lost so much money every week, because it costs a lot of money. But that’s okay because we learnt so much. The Sri Lankans there, Drums, beautiful people, taught us everything we know about cooking outside for large amounts of people. At the market, there’s a lot to be grateful for, watching them. It stopped before COVID. It was very stressful. It was a lesson in how not to lose several $1000 every week. We were literally cooking at home apparently in a council approved kitchen. We might have been cooking outside like we were in the village on our veranda and burning my brother’s veranda down. We might have been doing that. Or we might not have. Even that was quite funny because Westfield came to us at that time and said to us, we’d really like you to open a Babaji’s in every Westfield in Victoria. It would have killed all the passion

Did you have other jobs at that time as well?

I did for a little bit. Human rights education is my world and community. At that time, I was managing the education team at the Electoral Commission. Awesome job, looking after asylum seekers, prisoners, indigenous communities. I had a team that worked for me, it was a really great job. But, whilst the electoral commission has its strengths, it’s still bureaucratic. One day I just had a bit too much of that. I thought cooking dosa om the street was a path. I probably jumped too soon, to be honest, but there you go. I did. Then we started cooking at music festivals, like Golden Plains, and various others.

We opened our first takeaway shop in Belgrave. We still hadn’t told people we were South Indian. I’ll explain for this, our name is not South Indian and it’s confusing. The name Babaji’s is actually more aligned to North India. There’s a lesson in branding here. At the time, it was just a cute name that hippies like me would like, it was catchy. We were Babaji’s Kitchen. Then when we opened Babaji’s Belgrave, it was a takeaway shop at first. North Indians would come in expecting North Indian flavours, and not get that then leave us one star reviews everywhere. The South Indians didn’t trust us because of the name. We just weren’t hitting the mark where we needed to. Then we started leaning into South India and made it Babaji’s Kitchen, South Indian street food. Then one day we realised that we really needed Kerala to strongly feature in there. It was too late to change the name. We are too well known amongst the Aussie community, especially in The Dandenong Ranges and the music festival world. So we became Babaji’s Kerala kitchen. That’s when we started finding our people, when people started understanding us. It’s just a lesson. I’m a school teacher. My background is education and secondary school teaching. I think I have a good understanding of people and culture, and I’ve lived in lots of countries, so that all helps. But I could have made my life a lot easier, if we had thought it through at the start. But maybe not. When Max first came out to Australia, I thought he might want to go and live over in Footscray, somewhere a lot more culturally diverse. He spent some time in the hills and was desperately unhappy for at least five years. I asked him whether he’d prefer to live somewhere like Footscray but he said, why? There’s no life. Nature is so important to people from Kerala. He is from the coast. He is from a place called Varkala. It’s on the Arabian Ocean, there’s a beautiful cliff top that runs across the Arabian Ocean. It runs alongside the ocean. It’s absolutely beautiful. He used to have a restaurant that was on a cliff top overlooking the ocean. He’d just sit there all day and just watch dolphins jump.

There are two times in my life when I’ve felt a really strong sense of destiny. It was the time when I met Max. I remember being in the ocean and telling my friend, he’s my future. I knew that. And it was this restaurant that we’re here at in Warburton. When I understood that this space was available, I wanted to be sick because I knew that this was here, and I wasn’t looking. It was put in front of me.

Billy Crombie, Babaji’s Kerala Kitchen

How did you and Max meet?

I was teaching in the UK at the time. I grew up in hills, but I am from the UK. I came out here when I was a kid. I lived in lots of countries. I had lived in South Africa for some time. In 1992, when apartheid was dismantling. I went on a rotary exchange. I didn’t want to go in Sweden or America. I wanted to go to South Africa. So I went to South Africa in a time when the country felt like on the brink of civil war. It was really fascinating time to be there. It was the first year that African students were allowed to go to what were white schools. I lived in South Africa for about three years. It was very influential on me as a person. Then I lived in Papua New Guinea for a few years working at one of the universities up there doing work around HIV AIDS education. Then I went to the UK and I got very involved in a subject called citizenship and started working on the national curriculum around that. In the UK, teachers have a half term holiday. Every six weeks is a half term. My mate from here was in Tamil Nadu at the time and said, why don’t you come and visit me? I went over and we travelled around Kerala and we went to Varkala. Back then it was pretty rustic. Now it’s all over Instagram. The customer base has really changed as well  because of the rise of middle class in India. It’s gone from hippies like me who sat there on a cup of chai for 10c all day to the Indians discovering their own country, which is fascinating. Max had his restaurant there. It was New Year’s Eve. He was behind his fish table. At the time, he was deciding how much you were going to pay for fish, based on where you were from,. You would choose from the catch of a day and it would get cooked right then and there for you on the tawa, on the hot plates. You want mussels? Max would send his cousins down to the cliff below the restaurant and they’d get mussels. As long as it’s not monsoon because that’s unsafe. I met him then and he was a playboy. I didn’t realise that because I must have been so naive. Anyway I went back to the UK teaching again, and then next half term came and the next half term came. Then his cousins said, You’ve got a problem. But I knew that it was going to happen. His English was not actually that great. I didn’t actually understand quite as much until he came to Australia, to be honest. There are two times in my life when I’ve felt a really strong sense of destiny. It was that time when I met Max. I remember being in the ocean the next day and telling my friend, he’s my future. I knew that. And it was this restaurant that we’re here at in Warburton. When I understood that this space was available, I wanted to be sick because I knew that this was here, and I wasn’t looking. It was put in front of me. We opened our restaurant in Belgrave, it started leaning into Kerala much more, but we’re not there by any means. COVID hit with Dan’s five kilometre rule. It’s all Mountain Ash around us. Five kilometres is National Park. We’re not in the suburbs where you just have all these people who have nothing to do but eat. Also our staff at that stage were all international students at that stage. We’re a small team. Still a small team of 52. There really weren’t any subsidies. All those staff stayed in jobs. We started delivering out this way; to Warburton, Healesville, King Lake. Everybody would put their orders in and then we would do these little road trips. It started making me realise, that there was a bit of an opportunity in Warburton. After COVID, I knew that the Indians who are new to Australia, explore their new country, they head up to the Dandenong Ranges, they go on Puffing Billy, they go up to Mount D, they go up to the tulip festival, the Yarra Valley. They love the Redwood Forest. I knew that because we were getting remnants of them at Belgrave. I knew there was no Indian restaurant that can accommodate them. And apart from anything else, we need a space that is big enough to accommodate Indians. Because the Indian community, when they come, they don’t come in tables of two, three, they come in tables at 10, 15, 20, no bookings. Belgrave used to struggle with that. It is challenging for business, but that’s our that’s our territory. A friend told me about the building. And I sat on the table in Belgrave and I knew that that it was going to happen and the previous tenants were still here. The property was for sale. It’s still for sale. I understood that these old people were vacating. I spoke to the agent and said, do you think you can talk to him about renting this place out to me? She said he doesn’t want tenants in there, just wants to sell. I wrote him a letter, and I used to come up here several times a week without telling Max. I’d walk the dogs up here and I’d go and sit at Silva coffee and just watch the people; see what kind of people came to Warburton, not just Indians, because Indians are not at Silva coffee. I was trying to understand whether this was viable. I did that for several months until the landlord actually agreed. I got everything finalised and then I said, sweetheart, we need to have a chat. Can I show you something?

What was the reaction?

Not great, but he’s about food. I understand the Dandenong Ranges. That is my place: the Hills, Warburton here. And I think, until even six months ago, I have that classic female trait of Imposter syndrome. I have had my moments when it’s been pretty rough, or when the latest stuff around the Iran War and increased costs happen, and I’ve sat down with Max and I’ve said, I’m so sorry that I put us in this situation, because everything is at stake. Our house is at stake. I employ 52 staff, six of them are sponsored chefs with children in this country. I take that responsibility. I probably hold that a bit too much. We’ve always worked from a place of challenge, whether that is starting at the market with $100, COVID happening, storms in the hills, power outages, the cost of living. We’ve always operated in that space. My husband comes from that space. He comes from poverty. I come from a very dysfunctional family background. Even now I’ll sit at this restaurant and watch the road, and we’re at the gate of Warburton and there’s nobody coming through. Max is a very positive thinker. So when I say I’m so sorry I brought us here, he says: Look at what we’ve created. Look at what we are doing. What are you doing? Stop it.

Tell me about ‘pay it forward’.

I’ve always believed, because of my challenging family, that community is my family. Babaji’s is very community centred and I always think the answer is in community when you’ve got a problem. How can you work with them? Where’s the answer within them? I’ve always lent into that. We do things like community days where we give 10% of our sales to a local community group. No questions asked, no tax deduction and all that bullshit, none of that. In most cases they’ll bring their people. It’ll turn a $2,000 day into a $5,000 day. Those community days, last week we had one here at Warby for the Yarra Ranges Film Society. That was great. We’ve got one coming up for Benwerren Women’s retreat, which is a refuge for women who need time out. Then there are things like the storms in the hills, which Melbourne had no idea how serious they were. People still haven’t had their houses rebuilt as a result of that. I was in Monbulk, so I didn’t have power for that time either. It was just after COVID. We decided to go up the mountain and cook 500 serves of butter chicken for everybody, because that’s what they want, comfort food. Or vegan dahl. We’re going to do that every week until the power comes it back. I put that out there in my universe and then I was like, shit, what have you done? You have no money. You’ve just survived COVID. I put it out on social media to say, this is what we’re doing. And before I knew it, the whole thing was donated. People were just ringing in donations. It was probably for about four or five weeks and we kept our commitment. We did it every week. That is community. The answer is always in community.

I’d like to say that about some of the challenges we experience here in Warburton. There are only 2000 people that live in this town. We still pull people who will come for dinner from Doncaster, Glen Waverley, Cranbourne. They come for dinner on a weeknight, but if the price of fuel goes as it is, they’re not necessarily going to drive to Warburton. Who knows what is coming? I think just continue to be authentically you. We’re looking at opportunities for winter. We’re starting something new here tomorrow: Pollichattu which is fresh fish, cooked in shallots, red onion and then it’s wrapped in banana leaf and it’s steamed. Over summer we did a live fish cart every Sunday where we literally would go to the market that day and get the fish. We don’t use frozen fish. We don’t cut corners. We use shallots and red onions instead of white onions. We don’t use ginger paste and garlic paste and all those things. We use the vegetables that you would use in Kerala when we can: wintermelon, taro, snake beans. Max would go to the market. He’s like a kid in a candy shop. I’d like him to be about half an hour. He takes about 2 hours. He would marinate all that in different Kerala spices and then the diners would come and they’d be able to choose the fish they wanted from the fish cart, and we serve it with kalu, or toddy, not of the Scottish kind, in a beautiful clay pot. Toddy is a fermented coconut drink, and it’s actually tapped in a coconut palm. To an Aussie, it would taste like alcoholic kombucha. Toddy and fresh fish, cooked in front of them. That is life. That is why they drive three hours to come up here and get. We’ve had to stop that now for the moment because it’s too cold up in Warby and we literally cook it in a restaurant and leave the doors open. But from tomorrow, we’re going to be doing this Polichattu.

To go back to Travandrum food. Historically Max is from a Muslim fishermen community. They are known for their biryanis. Our biryani here is nothing like a Hyderabad biryani, which is India’s most well-known biryani. They are all different, depending on where you’re from. Our menu is very meat reliant. Our goat curry, our beef curry, are very Muslim dishes as well as fresh fish. If you’re going up to places like where chef Jithun’s from, they are influenced by a lot of stews. More like the English. I actually didn’t understand that India had as many Christians until I went to Kerala. 35% of Kerala’s community is Christian. If you have an Indian over here whose name is something like Matthew John, I can guarantee you that person is from Kerala. They have plum pudding for Christmas. But if you ask someone from there bout it, they don’t understand how fascinating that is. Max is the same, he doesn’t necessarily understand how his food is different. I have done some research. I’ve really started to understand that our food is not just South Indian, it’s not just Kerala, it is not just Trevandrum, it is very influenced by the Muslim fishermen.

We’re a very close team. That just fills my cup. The boys do what they do and they do it really, really well. They don’t cut corners and they cook from memory. We have only just got, well, they’re not recipes, but there’s some sort of documentation of what we’re doing, and it has taken me all these years. Max absolutely refused to do it. So now I know the costings and I can use that to educate people on the socials who question the cost. I can break it down for them, including the fact that we pay our staff well. If you are paying a cheaper price, somebody’s being exploited. I literally say that. Now, it’s your decision where you spend your money. It’s challenging. Our Indian community is challenging. It is both beautiful and challenging. Our Aussie community, as well, their expectations and understanding are challenging. But we’re positive. Somehow. And we have more plans.

Babaji’s Kerala Kitchen, 3305 Warburton Highway