Usually I prefer to talk in person to chefs, but today I had a chat on the phone to Chris Bonello out at MPD Steak Kitchen in Berwick. Chris has such a wonderful energy and enthusiasm that it almost felt as though it was in person. He painted such a vivid picture for me of his childhood and early teens in Malta, that I had the impression I was watching a wonderful film playing out in front of me. This is exactly the kind of person I want cooking for me and I will certainly be heading out to Berwick in the very near future.
Chris, I’m so excited to talk to you because I read that you grew up in Malta and my grandparents lived there for five years in the fifties and by all accounts it was the best five years of their lives.
Malta will always have a place in my heart. I go there every couple of years, especially now I have my little one, she is two and a half. My parents, my sisters, everyone is back in Malta.
And you grew up in a farming family which must have cemented your relationship with food in some ways.
It did. It was always part of our life. It was not a farm like in Australia, but we always had fresh vegetables growing. We used to export potatoes to Holland. From a young age, I worked with my parents; we used to do it all together. It wasn’t like a big company, though, it’s an island, so we grew enough to give to maybe five or six restaurants.
Back then it was hard work, everybody used to hate the potato picking season. Planting was fun. As a kid, my father had a hand-held motor tool and he would make the little dent and then one of my uncles would put the seed potato in and the kids would have to press it down with our feet. The worst part was picking time. We all hated it because, again, it was the old school way. There was a motor with a V-shaped thing that goes under the soil which pushed the potato out to the side so you were bending all the time to put those into the bucket. We did everything by hand, so we had a love and respect for the vegetables and for the seasons. We knew when the tomatoes were coming or the fruit. It becomes part of your culture. We looked forward t strawberries in summer. We never had a strawberry in winter. In Malta you couldn’t afford to import them. Knowing the seasons and appreciating what was in season was almost a part of our religion. I try and teach that to all my apprentices. They want to use tomatoes all year round. It’s amazing how behind we are on taste and seasonality.
That is the challenge for us in Australia and New Zealand because we can get everything all year round and then there is a pressure from consumers to have want they want on the menu.
I am very strict on seasonality. We have so many signature dishes and sides and people come in for them, for instance, the Brussel sprouts; people love them. They say, of bring the Brussel sprouts back, and we don’t. We explain to them why. If it’s not in season, I’m not going to do it. Jerusalem artichokes too, we have these beautiful dishes in March, April, depending on how nature is. Berries, once summer is over, we don’t put them in our desserts. Coming into March and April, it’s mandarin season, so mandarins will be on, and all the brassica; cauliflower, broccoli, cabbages, all that stuff will be on. It’s all about what is in season. We won’t put tomatoes on our menu once summer goes. In winter, you will not see a single tomato on our menu, because it’s not in season and it’s not organic. They’re not real them, they don’t have any flavour. If you get things out of season, that’s what you’re going to get…no flavour. That’s my belief and working with Shannon (Bennett), that’s one thing I always fell in love with, that he is so into seasonality. When I came to Melbourne, he was one of the only ones doing that.
You’ve worked in some impressive places in different countries around the world. You’ve been in Scotland, you cooked in Malta, you’re overseeing a restaurant in Vanuatu as well as Australia. When did it all start for you? When did you know you wanted to be a chef?
I was pretty young. Again, cooking was part of life for me. I remember when I was 11 or 12 years old in Malta, you know on Saturdays you want to play with your friends. But I remember I couldn’t go out and play until I had cooked a whole tray of lasagne for the family. I got up at 7 o’clock to go and but all the stuff to make the Bolognese and the béchamel. Thank god I was allowed to buy the pasta sheets ready-made. I used to make the pasta when I was little but then I was allowed to buy the sheets ready to go. I love eating lasagne, but I hate thinking about that time, those three or four years where I couldn’t play with my friends until I had made the lasagne.
The Sundays were always the traditional family day. My father was the better cook out of my mum and dad, he was the creative one. My mum was a great cook, don’t get me wrong but my dad was the one who experimented, and he inspired me. He never worked in a kitchen himself, but he loved cooking and he gave me that passion.
On Sundays, for example, one of the dishes might have been rabbit. What we used to do, we would get up at five or six in the morning and go with my uncle who had a four-wheel drive. I was in charge of the floodlight and either my uncle or dad would drive and the other person who wasn’t driving was on the gun. I had to focus with the flashlight, the rabbits would freeze, they would shoot it and we would pick up three or four rabbits, take them home and skin them, start the stew, marinate them. So even eating Sunday lunch was all about starting early in the morning and doing the whole process.
That’s amazing. We really have lost that connection with the food we eat. Very few of us would have any idea of the back story of the meat we use.
I tell my guys about how we would wait for the first rain, because after the first rain we wold go and pick snails because that’s when they haven’t been eating grass and they are good to eat. It was a tradition, when the first rain came, I’m not kidding, Jo, you would see everyone out in the street picking up snails. It’s crazy. The whole country would do it. You just get connected to it.
That’s such a great image. I can imagine that.
I tried accounting and computing, but I think you can tell from my voice that I have a lot of energy and I could not sit on a chair for five or six hours. Since I was 14 I always worked. I was a pool boy in a hotel, but the pool boy’s job involved getting there at six o’clock in the morning. The deck chairs would all be up, so you’d wash the whole area around the pool. and put out the chairs again. Then you’d go into the kitchen and start prepping for the chef, cutting up the vegies, preparing the pasta and the risotto base, then he would come in and you would help him some more then the bar man would get you to top up his bar. At night I would put all the deck chairs up again. So even as a pool boy, I had that connection to food.
I loved the creation side of things. I loved doing the risottos with the chef and the chefs loved it, they would let me work with them from a young age. So then I thought, I’m going to give this a crack and I joined the ITS, which is the Institution of Tourism Studies in Malta, like a TAFE. From the first day, I fell in love with it and decided that was what I was going to do.
So you had some time cooking in Malta and then you went to Scotland?
Yes. After three years in Malta, and part of the deal of doing the studies was that they would help you to find a job overseas and that’s when I chose to go to Scotland and I worked at the Hilton there. I was 17 years old. I had to get a work permit too because it wasn’t part of the EU.
It must have been a real culture shock. Scotland would have been so different to Malta.
It was. Especially when you are young. The kitchens were different too. Much stricter. And I didn’t like the produce. Everything looked fake to me.
After that I went back to Malta and after not long after, I had the opportunity at a young age to be the Executive chef at the Hotel Riu Seabank which was part of a big Spanish hotel chain.
That’s a big jump to be an Executive chef at that age.
Yes, I was 21 years old.
What do you think that you had then and obviously still have now, that enabled you to move so quickly through the ranks?
Energy is one of the things. I’m a worker. And one of my strengths is getting the team on side and getting the energy happening. I have always done a lot of research since day one. I remember from a young age when I was getting into it, buying books and reading and wanting to try things. One big thing that I took from the year and a bit in Scotland that made a big difference in the way I did things was the systems they had in place for checking everything. Quality control, cleaning processes. Australia is so far behind even where they were 10 years ago. I have that now in all my venues 20 sheets, three times a day, all the fridges and so on. That will always be part of how I am. That really changed how I did things.
So I think that strictness and my creativity and energy got me ahead and is still with me today.
Are you still hands on now?
No. Every now and then I go and run the pass. For instance, I have been here all week and I have been in the kitchen. I had an event yesterday. I am the ambassador for the New Zealand salmon brand, Ora King, in the Marlborough Sounds. It is my favourite salmon. A couple of years ago I entered a competition in Japan and ended up winning it and then last year they asked me to cook for their awards night and they made me their ambassador for the brand. Yesterday we were so lucky to have one of the salmon delivered to us and we created a dinner around it. One big fish; 14.2 kilos, and out of that fish we made a five courses tasting menu for 25 people, including dessert as well, made from the salmon, which was a highlight for everyone, believe it or not. Not using the fish, but using the bones and everything else. So I was in the kitchen preparing that all day. We also do off-site events and I have one of those today and one tomorrow and I am training people to do that. There is so much demand for it and working five years for Shannon, the last three years I pretty much stepped away from the daily running of Vue de Monde and the Bistro. I was the Executive chef for the group and was mostly PR, media and off-site events. We cooked on boats, cruises, anywhere. So I can do any kind of dining in anyone’s house. So I have been showing the team how to do that.
What a varied career. You’ve had so many different experiences. It does make for an exciting job.
I love to travel and do research trips. Up until last year I had been to all the continents except North America, but I went to the US last year. I went to San Fran, Chicago and LA, which was mind-blowing. I went to some really good restaurants to see what everyone is doing. Traveling is definitely one of my passions and I try to go for one or two weeks once a year.
You must have such a repertoire in your head and palate for flavours, but when you are creating a new dish, do you ever get so surprised by a flavour or combination of flavours that you want to pat yourself on the back with how delicious it is?
I always try to do that, and I like to listen to the team and hear their ideas and work with them so that we are all on the same page. For example, yesterday we made the challenge to ourselves with the Ora King dinner to make a dessert. My head chef and I worked on it together. We started thinking crazy ideas and we ended up with a beautiful dessert where we used the bones, roasted it all off, got all the fat off it, smoked it with manuka and made a milk-based ice-cream instead of eggs and replaced the eggs with the fat. It’s got this beautiful flavour, you can tell there is salmon in there, but it isn’t in your face. We made the sable biscuits, and thought how could we get the salmon into them? So we got the skin and we dehydrated it, mixed it with salt and replaced the salt and vanilla bean in the recipe with some of our mix. Then we did some blind-tasting with a whole lot of fruit. We blind-folded ourselves and tried it with banana, rockmelon, mandarin, berries. We had to ick two fruit that went the best with it and made sense with the ice cream. We all picked banana and two of us picked rockmelon. Then we thought about what we could do with those two items and we compressed the rockmelon with some lemon zest so that it changed texture and had more flavour. With the bananas we freeze-dried them and made them into meringues and then we had some cherry gel and before we knew it, the flavours came together, and I said, wow guys, I think we have actually done this. We had that moment big time. And everyone at the dinner said the dessert was a highlight because they did not expect that and it blew them away. It is rewarding to put so much effort into it and people are happy. That was one of those days, Jo, where you pat yourself on the back.
288 Clyde Street, Berwick