Daniel Salcedo

I opened the first Peruvian restaurant in Carlton when it used to be Piqueos. I opened it with the boys from Rockpool and MoVida and I was running the kitchen with Blair Williams. Then I ran Harley House first as Chinese Mexican food which after six months we had to change and it became Peruvian. They are still using my menu now but it is more of a pisco bar. But this one is the first one that feels as though it has been specially designed to be a Peruvian or South American restaurant.

I’ve been cooking for the last 24 years. I am 44. I left the country first because there wasn’t any chance for me to be a chef in Lima, when I was 16, 17. It was seen as a bad thing to be a chef back then and my parents wouldn’t support me on that. As soon as I turned 18, I managed to get a Visa, which was really hard for a Peruvian then. Terrorism was at its peak, there was corruption. Peru was a country nobody wanted. But I managed with the help of my father to go and study English in the UK. I went there with a plan to live there, become a chef, study and work. But then after three months a good friend called me from Australia and told me to come over. As soon as I arrived, I loved it. I never went back to the UK. When I arrived I was in Sydney and working in Italian, French, Japanese restaurants, a bit of everything. If you had asked me then in my twenties what sort of restaurant I’d own in the future, it straightaway would have been French. And my second option would have been Italian. Then I worked in massive groups and in good restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne. The last one I did was Rockpool for eight years. We opened in 2006 and I finished in 2013 when the opportunity came to open Piqueos.

During the last couple of years at Rockpool I was thinking about what I would like to do with the rest of my cooking life. I started recollecting the happiest time of my life. I love hospitality. It is the only thing I know and it is the only thing I will do until my hands don’t allow me to cook ,but it’s a hard thing to do. The new generation complains a lot and it made me think about how I would like to approach the next 20 or so years of my career. Another restaurant? Another group? There was an option to move to another group. There were always options, I could have moved to Sydney. But I started thinking about what it was that made me happy about food and it was the years when I was 6, 7, 8 and food meant happiness. I come from a broken family. My mum and dad, all my family weren’t united but when it came to food a transformation happened. Everyone would sit at a big table, my grandmother would cook and food allowed people to be happy. We would talk about food for two hours; at Christmas, at Easter, birthdays. All that started coming back to me. It was the pure clean remembering of food, touching people’s emotions and putting aside all the negativity. I loved that and I wanted to cook that, get back to that. That meant cooking south American food that I had been disconnected from for 20 years.

How did you go about reconnecting?

It was hard. When I said to Rockpool after eight years that I was leaving, they asked if I was crazy. I was on a high salary, I was running the Waiting Room as the head chef and had won best bar menu and then they sold that one to Crown because they were opening Rosetta. I jumped into Rosetta and then I decided to leave and they told me I was crazy because I had started from the bottom and I had worked my way up. But I knew it was the right thing to do. It was hard in the beginning to leave a big salary and the latest equipment and being supported by a massive group to only a team of five people, but I was doing what I loved to do.

Introducing the first beef hearts, anticuchos, to Melbourne was unbelievable. It was funny because the first time we ordered it, they gave us the beef hearts for free, a five kilo bag. We started cooking it and everyone loved it. We marinated it with spices. There is an African connection with Peru. In the old days the Spanish used to just eat the prime cuts and left the insides so the people who had come from Africa and were doing hard labour grabbed those pieces and they marinated them with vinegar and spices. Then they would cook them over charcoal. We started selling a lot and people loved them. So the second time we ordered ten kilos, they charged us.

Then I stared introducing ceviche, sashimi Japanese style, the beef hearts, then corn cakes which are a breakfast staple in South America. We also sold a lot of steaks. I was there for a year and it was amazing. Finally, something that had been in my head for years, was happening. During busy services at Rockpool I would be thinking, I just want a ceviche. It’s a hard thing to explain, but opening the first Peruvian restaurant in Melbourne is something that no one can take away from me.

How does that fit with Pastuso, which is a pretty well-known Peruvian restaurant?

I am a big fan of Alejandro. I did a lot of research before opening Piqueos. Chefs who make it in this city do a lot of research, study and travel. So in those years I was doing a lot of research on where the best Peruvian restaurants were and I discovered Morena. Alejandro’s restaurant in Surrey Hills. It was a beautiful restaurant. and I thought it was great that it was already happening, but in Sydney, not here. We opened Piqueos and Alejandro came to Melbourne six months later. He came to Piqueos and introduced himself and we became friends. I was so happy that there was going to be a second Peruvian restaurant. For me, that’s my mission. The more people know about this food, the greater it is. He came to visit me before he opened Pastuso and by then I was at Harley House which we changed from Mexican Chinese to Peruvian. I told him it was all good because I was doing home cooking and Pastuso was fine dining. About a year ago we lost touch because I stopped doing South American food and I was working a little bit at Rockpool, a little bit at Sand Hill Road and with the Cumulus group and then this thing came out of the blue. It’s a miracle.

How did you meet Nan and Julio , the owners of Citrico?

I suffer from depression, big time. Every year is harder. It hits me three weeks in a row, sometimes four weeks and it hits me hard. Sometimes it happens after summer. I don’t know why. It happened to me six months ago. In the old days I used to balance it by drinking a lot, as lots of chefs do, but I don’t drink any more. I was dealing with the situation myself. At the same time, my daughter was also having some difficulties. It was a horrible time. I hit rock bottom. I couldn’t work at Cumulus any more, I had to leave to deal with my depression and to help my ex-wife with my daughter. I stopped working for nearly four months. But I started cooking for my daughter and for myself and with my family, everything came alive and we had happy times again.

Then when I said to a couple of friends that I was ready to work again. The last thing on my mind was the possibility of a South American restaurant, but one of the suppliers gave me a number to call and didn’t explain the job or anything. I called and Nan told me they were opening a South American restaurant and she was looking for a head chef. When I hung up, I went upstairs and looked to heaven and said, you want me to keep cooking South American food? There aren’t many opportunities to do what I originally wanted to do. So I have been here for the last six or seven weeks and this is our third week being open.

It has been in every publication, so people were obviously waiting for something like this.

I started researching more about South American food, especially Peruvian. When the Spanish came they transformed it by bringing their ingredients. Then they took a lot of ingredients back to Europe but the mixture of the food they got here and the produce from the Andes create new dishes and there was also African input. When all these different cultures arrived in Peru they contributed to making it even better. After the Africans, there were Asian Chinese and then the Japanese came in massive numbers. Then came the Italians. There is a real mixture. Peru is the only country that has Nikkei food, which is Japanese Peruvian. It’s huge. When the Japanese came to Peru, they changed their cuisine to create something new with Peruvian products. They are the ones who showed us how to eat fish properly; how to clean it and how to make ceviche. We used to marinate it for 10 hours but it has to be cooked on the spot. Now a little kid of seven years old, if the ceviche isn’t raw, they would say it’s wrong. But when I grew up, traditional ceviche sat for five to ten hours. The lemon juice actually cooked through the fish. The fusion was actually incredible. That’s one more point why I want to tell people this.

Does the menu here represent all that?

Yes. It has been four years since I started cooking Peruvian in Melbourne and it’s a little more balanced now. I know what people like and what people might not be ready for. It was also built for this neighbourhood. It has all the elements of South America; potatoes, corn, chilli, seafood, ceviche. We’ve got a charcoal grill, which is Argentinian. We represent Chile with the sauces, bananas. It is a concentrated but not confusing menu. It represents Peru, Argentina and Chile. For me it was never to compete, but to contribute. That is probably why I haven’t ended up working for the big guys. I’ve done it before. I know what it is to work hard and be a money-making machine. I didn’t want to do that for the next 20 years. I’m more Australian than Peruvian. I’ve lived more years in Australia than in Peru, but my heart is Peruvian. I think those are very important things that are expressed through the food.

I am friends with some great chefs. We get together and support each other. A lot of chefs suffer from depression. In the old days, no one talked about it because it minimised you as a person, but now the more you share, you allow young people to express themselves too. You create a mechanism or conversation to help others.

It has been highlighted a lot over the last year. As you say, it’s an ongoing thing. It’s another world that you live in. You work late nights, pressured work and when you get to the level you’ve been at, all eyes are on your food. There’s a lot of criticism and opinions. I think it must be very hard to be a chef.

When you’ve been doing it for many years you find a sweetness. It’s hard to get good people in the kitchen. Out of twenty, you might have three or four who really get it.

I really believe your life is represented in your food. Whatever happens to you, you’re in a bad mood, it goes into your food. I always say to my team, I know you have issues but when you’re in the kitchen, you have to put those aside. Then when you’ve worked together for. a month, you can start to share a little bit more, talk about your family, and go out together and so on. I just do things I wish people had done that with me when I was younger.

It’s an amazing industry. I say to my kids, to do a job that connects you to the earth is unique. It is hard but there are not many opportunities to do something that connects you from the sun to the growing to looking after it as a chef, cooking it properly and putting it on a plate. All those steps mean that when you eat it, it’s amazing. If you break one of the steps, or don't take care, the love isn’t there and it won’t be right.

I like teaching and talking to young people. Not just recipes and how to cook, but why we do things and how to live a nice life.

Citrico Cocina

376 Queens Parade, Fitzroy North