Bryan Nelson & Kate Dickens

Conversation with a chef: It’s lovely to be here again in this beautiful setting in the courthouse. I was just reminiscing with you that I was here early on in 2018, which feels like a long time ago. Do you think it feels like even longer because of Covid and lockdown? It feels like another era.

Kate: Actually, no. It’s the opposite. I feel like we haven’t really had a chance to really get started. What is that? Seven years? It feels it was so full on at the start that from the period of opening up until Covid, it was just go go go. It was so busy. Right from when we launched in autumn. As you know, when you open a new place, you get that three months of absolute, everybody wants to try it out. And then we rolled straight into summer and this venue’s super unique in the fact that we’ve got these huge garden spaces. We’re right near the beach. We always knew summer was going to be peak for us, just because of the size of the outdoor area. We strategically launched a lot earlier, so we would have a flow. We got through that first summer and yeah, not long after it was the next summer, we pretty much had Covid. It was a rude awakening. I think we’d only just really started to kind of get comfortable with the restaurant at that point. We were in a rhythm. We had a really good team. We were really happy with the way things were operating. And then just to be shut down like that. It was like starting a whole new business again.

Did you do things over that time?

Kate: We didn’t close at all. We pivoted literally the next day. We were really fortunate that we took a break, we travelled just before Covid happened. We had seen Covid starting to close other places down in, um, Southeast Asia. We were really aware that this could be a big problem. We’d never done takeaway before or anything like that. But we had talked about that. We didnt wait. We just basically installed the Uber and went straight away. We had another cocktail bar too, our old venue, that we had turned into a Speakeasy. That had just won Time Out, Best New Bar, 2019. We were running these two venues that were both pumping, and we’re like, oh my god, we’ve got so many visa workers, two venues, what are we going to do with the staff? A lot of our chefs were from Italy and South America and all over, and we’d worked so hard to get this team together. We had to stay operating. It was that was good that we didn’t shut down. But, again, as far as the Ciao Cielo concept of where we wanted to drive it when we opened in 2018 to where we were left at the end of Covid, we couldn’t keep driving towards the same goal that we had pre-Covid. There was just no way that our business would have survived post Covid if we had had those same aspirations. I think that was probably the hardest thing because Bryan’s an amazing chef. He was doing some stunning dishes. And we just knew after Covid, if we kept going down that path of striving towards a hat or trying to do fine dining in the main old building and then doing more casual outside with all the restrictions on space and people’s wallets, we would go broke. I think that was probably one of the hardest things for us as two chefs to look at this business after building it up for so long in our old restaurant. It was an emotional roller coaster.

Bryan: The way the way people dined after Covid shifted quite a lot. Kate talked about budget. Also, a lot of people got used to the idea of having fancy takeaway at home, and we catered to that market. And whilst we still do some pretty amazing food, inflation has taken its toll as well.Price point is definitely somewhere where you have your business going in the right direction for it.

Kate: I think the main thing for you pre Covid was that there will never be a pizza in the restaurant. It’ll always be outside. That was his dream. It was two different things. Post Covid, it was really disheartening

Bryan: No. I don’t think it’s disheartening.

Kate: We were happy to see people back,

Bryan: But when we first started, we were trying to make a distinct difference between both sides of the venue. One was more of a casual outside area where you bring your friends, family, kids, pets. We’ve had rabbits and cats as well. We had a parrot once. And then inside, we were aiming for something more formal. But I think overall now, it has blended and it’s working out well for the best.

Is it still Tuscan leaning?

Bryan: I’m getting into more provincial Italian food. In August and September last year, we went and did a lot of the South Of Italy. So I spent time in Sardinia, Sicily, Puglia. We just hired a car, drove around, ate amazing food. It really inspired my summer menu quite a bit. That’s the thing I love about Italian cuisine is the vast broadness between the North and the South, and they both really suit both seasons in Melbourne quite well, I find. The southern food in summer is amazing to have in Melbourne. And then when it gets really cold in the winter, northern food definitely has its place as well.

Kate: If only we could get red prawns here though. They are so good.

How do they cook those?

Bryan: You don’t.

Kate: They come from 200 metres down.

Bryan: Very deep sea.

Kate: The same path that the red tuna takes as well. They’re super sweet. They just do them crudo style on pasta. We have a dish at the moment that Bryan’s doing which is a pistachio cream rigatoni with burrata. The only difference is it’s missing the red prawns. So we’ve done a vegetarian version of it. Super creative, light, amazing. And we came back right in time to suddenly realise Melbourne has a pisctachio trend.

Bryan: I’ve been using pistachio quite a bit. I love using pistachio. It’s one of my favourites.

And you make all the pasta in house?

Bryan: Yes. We do extruded pasta. We do hand rolled pasta. We make a lot of gnocchi.

Kate: The gnocchi is the coolest though.

Potato gnocchi?

Kate: We’re using Spud Sisters, so organic potatoes. The girls have been working with Bryan for quite a few years now. So, they actually pick the right potatoes, the moisture content to waxiness at different times of the year, specifically for him. We make a lot of gnocchi. It’s probably one of our most popular dishes in the pasta section. How much are you making?

Bryan: We’d probably do about 50 to 60 kilo potatoes a week just for gnocchi.

Kate: Everyday making gnocchi by hand. You don’t have like one of those cool machines.

It’s a workout. And I guess different sauces with it. Do you have a favourite gnocchi sauce?

Bryan: We do we do a couple of things. At the moment, we’re currently doing a slow braised oxtail with some salsa verde. We also just do a very simple one out for the outside area, tomato and basil. We do some specials, and things change from time to time. I’m about to start dabbling into doing some ricotta gnocchias well. Hope it might be nice for autumn.

It’s interesting you were saying that it’s such a great summer venue, which it is. I feel like it’s a lovely autumnal or wintery venue as well.

Kate: We fell in love with this place because our old restaurant is only like thirty, forty metres away. So we fell in love with this place in winter, just because the fireplaces. It’s a three way working fireplace. I’m a bit obsessed with fireplaces. This is like Tuscany. We always travelled in their winter because we could only close our old place at Christmas time, because it was so small. That was the only time of year that we could go to Italy for an extended period and people would understand that the restaurant was shut. Some of the places we travelled like Sienna have the same feel as this place. This is actually renaissance gothic period. So it does have some similar architectural features.

What was it before you had it?

Kate: It had been a nursery for twenty years and then very briefly some guys who had bespoke tiles were the first ones to make it a hospitality venue. They got a liquor license and then they served some wine and sold some tiles. Got some music. That kicked it off. That was super popular. But, Jurgen and his partner really hated the idea of making tiles by day and then actually dealing with customers at night. So about a year after that happened, they sold it. Some people from Hobart who had a pub there decided to turn it into an Argentinian style bar with some food. The fabric of this building at that time though had no facilities. There was no kitchen, no toilets. It was just the old buildings. They tried to cook inside and have a spit outside. It was not the greatest set up. They didn’t last too long, but they did have big hopes of developing it themselves. They just found the process of dealing with heritage quite hard. They put it on the market maybe eighteen months later. We jumped at the opportunity to try and get in here because we’ve always loved it and saw the potential.We decided to try and buy the building. Because we could see how much needed to be done, development wise to actually operate as a venue. We pulled in some investors who are actually long standing customers of ours that also live in the area who thought it would be an amazing themed project to do for Port Melbourne as well, because it is fairly lacking as far as theres not too many places. We all got together and spent two and a half years doing the development. Now it’s fully amazing. There’s nothing else to do.

Thewrought ironwork over the bar is stunning.

Kate: I do a fair bit of interior design. All that was custom made. The reason we did that was to hang it off the old beams to draw your eye to that. But what it does is it actually shows you the height. It’s not actually a big floor plan. But the ceilings are so high, so when your eye’s drawn to that, it makes the space seem a lot bigger. It’s really only about 45 seats, the way it’s laid out regularly. When we do a sit down event, we can do 54. It’s not a big dining room, but it feels huge.

I can smell basil. That’s a really delicious smell.

Bryan: You can smell basil. Correct. I’m even curious what they’re making out there. They might be just finishing off some caponata or something. I don’t know. They might even be just picking it. Beautiful at this time of year. Sweet and pungent.

Apart from the pasta on the menu, what other things can people expect when they come here?

Bryan: We do some beautiful grass fed beef. Most of my beef I get is minimum marble score four, so really good quality, high grade meat, beautiful marbling. We also do a fair bit of seafood as well. Currently, we get amazing oysters in. We have a beautiful tuna tartare with some stracciatella and pistachio on the menu. I’m also just about to launch a dish coming into the Easter period, which I like to call it fregola di frutti al mer, but also known as algherese paella. It’s a dish that comes from Alghero in Sardinia. It’s quite similar to paella in some ways, minus the chorizo and chicken. So it’s basically fregula cooked with some saffron and tomato stock, and then we’re going to put some beautiful scampi on the top, calamari, mussels, and then a little bit of other bits of bobs of seafood that are in season and available at that time of year. I’ll bake it in the oven so you still get that beautiful crust with the fregola. At the and all the beautiful seafood juices will soak into that base as well.

Kate: We spent a bit of time there.

I was just going to say, where do you get your inspiration, but I think that you get it from travel, don’t you?

Kate: We were there last August. We spent two weeks in Sardinia. And the amazing thing about Sardinia, its like its own country, it’s nothing like the rest of Italy. They have their own dialect and everything. It’s quite vast. Every major town, especially Alghero has a different cuisine. But, especially that town, because it was invaded by the wars.You’ve got this Arabic influence there. It’s a fortified town with big walls where you can imagine they were fighting off people coming on ships. The food there has a very Catalan style to it. It doesn’t even feel Italian. We were pretty blown away by it. And it’s not one of the top picks that everyone goes to, but I really highly recommend it.

Lucky us that you’ve brought some of those things back.

Kate: We just bring back the stuff we like to eat and Bryan puts his touch on them or in this case, you haven’t really messed around with this one.

Bryan: I think we’re going to be a bit more generous with the seafood than they were.

And Kate, you’ve got some Italian heritage. Was it your grandmother?

Kate: Yes. My grandmother’s from Vincenzo in the North.

Do you speak Italian?

Kate: No. I’m duolingo-ing a lot more these days after the extensive travel though. I find that you have a lot more fun if you can speak the lingo. You get invited to some more interesting places, food, entertainment. It’s a good language to learn if you’re going to spend some time there.

And you got into Italian cooking prior to Ciao Cielo, Bryan?

Bryan: Prior to having Ciao Cielo, Kate and I travelled Europe extensively for about a year. We both really did fall in love with Italy then. So when I came back, I started a little stint at a little place in Seddon with a couple of ladies who used to work for Guy Grossi called Delizio Cucina. It was a beautiful restaurant, amazing food. Also around that time when we arrived back, Black Saturday bushfires had come through, and both of Kate’s grandparents had passed away during that period. Kate’s auntie had an epiphany to open a gelati bar in Bay Street, Port Melbourne here.

Kate: Beautiful. Milani style. A stunning room.

Bryan: Maybe a little over the top for just gelati. She got a bit crazy in how much went into it.

Kate: I think it was just really a project to get her through a really hard time. She was really leaning into the presentation of the venue. So it was all about bringing my grandmother’s style and Northern Italian glamour into play. It was a very glamorous gelati bar. It had beautiful wallpapers and there were beautiful black and white photos of them on the wall. Grandpa smoking a cigarette. I’m like, this is a gelati bar. Do you know what you are doing? It looked like a cocktail bar. It was a hit. Bryan was amazing.

Bryan: We did a little bit more than just gelati as well. She obviously realized that we needed to do a bit than just gelati could provide to pay the rent. So we started to do some Italian style food. Some pastas, arancini.

Kate: This was before the Messinas and thePpiccalinas. And the gelati phase. This was back in 2010.

Where was it?

Kate: It was 50 metres down the road. So, the worst location you could ever think of but it was where she lives. It was convenient. Great in summer but again, because it looked so fancy, nobody was rolling off the beach to step foot in there. It was really hard for them to tell it was a gelateria. Bryan graciously started making some pasta and some Italian breakfast. Just like if you were in Italy and you’d have a panini or you’d have a bowl of pasta. We decided to take it off her hands a year later. We bought it off her when she realised hospitality wasn’t her thing and we converted it into our first restaurant. So that’s how Ciao Cielo started. We got rid of the ice cream, stopped doing breakfast and just went straight into what we do.

You have a background as a chef as well, Kate.

Kate: Yes, I was a chef for twelve years. I wasn’t chefing with Brian though. I wanted to, that was the plan. We would both be in the kitchen. But being Port Melbourne circa 2010, where there was only really The Graham around the corner that was doing good food, we couldn’t get a manager. We were too small, unknown. We just couldn’t find anyone at our level that we were happy to leave front of house. So, initially, time’s money. So I jumped front of house to kind of do that in the interim. And I realised that it was actually really important to stay there. Because we’re in a community. It’s a small venue, we werent known and people just love that dynamic of connecting with who is producing what they were eating. Because I was seeing what Bryan was doing and we were collaborating at the time. I was super passionate about the food, so it was really easy to talk to people and that’s how we built it. It was a lot of fun. We look at those days now and ask why did we stop doing that? It was so good. So easy. A lot more focused, food driven. It was a real chef’s place. But we were pretty naive from other aspects of restaurants at that point. The game obviously changes very quickly. I would say restaurants are more now about an experience. Whereas, we were of that old school mentality that a restaurant will be successful built on the merit of food.

Bryan: And good service.

Kate:Obviously, good service. But number one was consistency, doing something that people really loved and putting a lot of effort into that. We delivered a great experience. I think we did. We learned a lot in that place. I would say, in the eight years that we were in the old venue, we definitely grew. And it was a small space to grow in. It really prepared us for this, I think in many ways. I think if we’d ever tried to conquer something like this off the bat, we would have absolutely looked like idiots.

I think it’s really important for front of house people to have that connection to food and to know what you’re talking about. So I feel likeit would be really helpful to have that chef background actually.

Kate: It was a lot of fun for me, because people would say, how can you remember what goes in all those specials in such detail? Id say, I can make it. It was super fun just being able to guide people. We talk about chef’s tables or tasting menus and things like that, I’m really passionate about the food that Bryan does. So, I like to steer people in a particular direction because ultimately people don’t always know what they want. They’re looking for that guidance. I don’t think that happens so much anymore.It used to a lot more. Obviously in some of the best restaurants it happens. One of our favourite restaurants would be Tedesca because it still gives you that connection. And you put the faith in them to guide you. I wish we could do that. That would be amazing. But there is only so much room in hospitality for those kinds of places. It has been a real privilege to translate what Bryan does front of house. I get to see how much people enjoy it, which he doesn’t. So that’s a bit of a bummer.

Bryan: I get to hear about it. It’s amazing. You can be in all sorts of places, like in the airport or on a flight or at your gym or wherever it is. Sometimes people just be randomly start talking about the restaurant without even knowing who I am.

Kate: He gets out and about a bit more now. The first year, we’d be here seven days a week. It was ninety, a hundred hours a week. So now hes on a holiday, pretty much. No. Just a regular working week. That’s the other thing Covid brought around was a lot of changes to work-life balance and what the expectations were of hospitality workers and people not looking at being a chef as such a horrible life destroying occupation anymore. We’re all in a learning phase of how to recalibrate from all of these changes. It’s not just wages, but inflation and interest rates and all the rest of it.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there about hospitality, how do you counter that? How do you stop yourselves from being sucked into that?

Kate: I think as chefs, we’ve always been in survival mode. Right from when we were apprentices. We’re fight or flight kind of mentality. We’ve always had to think worst case scenario with everything we do. That’s pretty much what going into busy services are. You have to account for everything that can go wrong. I think the people that survive well in this business are not just business minded, they just fix shit. They’re not afraid to deal with a catastrophe and move on from it.I think our industry has always been like that. It is always going through something. We opened in the GFC in 2010. Then we went through a period where we just realised there was never going to be an apprentice we could hire. The pool of them had just shrunk because of the way that the apprenticeship system changed. Skilled labour was going to be an issue with the one year go to school become a chef certificates that were being handed out. Things that we couldn’t even imagine would happen. We’ve always had to deal with something that’s made it super hard. I think, you’re just used to that. That’s how you were trained in a kitchen anyway. You’ve always got somebody telling you, work harder, faster, do it better. The good places anyway. We started with nothing. So we’re used to having nothing. I don’t want to lose anything. There’s a lot to lose. But you have to still keep that fearless mentality. Otherwise, you just don’t adapt and change with all the problems. You just become scared of making decisions.

You seem like a really great team. How did you meet?

Kate: We started at the River in Southbank in ’98. That was a beautiful seafood restaurant above Blakes, back in the day. We were second year apprentices, and we became good friends. It was a pretty hard kitchen to work in. Everybody was a very good team. Bryan went and worked at all these amazing restaurants. So did I. I went overseas, and then he came to visit for a holiday when I was working in Malaysia. And I was like, wow, you look different now. He got all grown up. And I thought he was hot.

Bryan: I spent three years working down at A la Grecque as the head chef down there in Aireys Inlet. So I was able to surf every day before work and hang outat the beach and do a lot. It was kind of pretty rewarding. It was nice being down there. Youd go for a swim in the ocean on your break.

Kate: He went from skinny and pale to being fit and tanned. We hadn’t seen eachother for five years or something. So we hooked up. That’s what happened and we went from there.

I heard that, you are making limoncello now as well?

Kate: Yes. We started that a while ago. We like limoncello, but why did we start doing it? What was the reason?

Bryan: We thought we could make it better ourselves.

Kate: Traditional limoncello has a really pithy, bitter taste. And what you buy in Australia is very different to what you get made for you in Italy. It’s quite commercial. I like the limoncello in Italy. I don’t really like what we buy here. Bryan did some research, and I can’t tell you how we make it. It’s top secret. We make the best limoncello. It’s super, super smooth, very intense, boozy. So it’s perfect.

Bryan: I think I think this year when the blood orange comes into season, Im going to try it with blood orange.

Kate: The limoncello has grown. We were probably doing the limoncello spritz before it came cool. Because we discovered the Amalfi lemon infused gin. I love a gin spritz. So we were throwing our limoncello in with that and fresh lemon juice. We make our limoncello spritz a bit differently to everywhere else. We don’t put prosecco in it. We just highlight the lemon. Then that spun off into limoncello martinis and now Bryan is doing a limoncello pavlova.

Kate: We just make it all the time. We’re probably making about six, eight litres a week.

You’d have a loyal following, I imagine, here. This is one of those places you’d have quite a few regulars, do you?

Bryan: We’ve been blessed in Port Melbourne with that.

Kate: Being eight years in the small venue, we got to really become part of thecommunity and people got to really personally know us. And this building had never really been taken care of. It is basically the town square of Port Melbourne. It’s the epicentre. It’s the main intersection. It’s iconic, the building. It had just been left to wither away prior to us. So when people got wind of what we were doing and that we were actually going to restore, rejuvenate, and do it properly instead of chipping away at it, they really got behind it. We’ve always had regulars. It’s fifteen years now from the old restaurant to this one under the same name. We’ve seen first dates, marriages, babies happen. We’ve actually seen people grow up. And it has evolved. We have tried to keep it moving, keep people interested as much as we can. Not just by changing the food, but DJs, we’ve done events, we do wine dinners. We try to keep it fresh with what we give people because our regulars are the lifeline. When everything goes wrong as we’ve seen with times like Covid, if you don’t have that loyalty from somewhere, it doesn’t matter. A lot of restaurants went broke, out of business, in the CBD, because they just don’t have that. We were very lucky. One of the things that we did was pretty much put straight away on our website exactly how much takeaway we needed to sell per week to keep all our staff. Half of them in hospitality were not given any assistance. One of our sous chefs is from the Philippines. Bryan had this idea of, okay, yes, we sell our food, but let’s do a chef’s dish that they would want to eat at home. Because we were having all these fantastic staff meals all the time, Brazilian moqueca, chicken adobo, Japanese ramen, all these things that our chefs were cooking us. So Bryan came up with the idea of them having their own once a week. It gives locals another option. I think it’s just also part of that connection. People understand who we are as a whole. It’s important.

Ciao Cielo, 115 Bay Street, Port Melbourne