Dario D’Agostino

Dario, you’ve been a chef for about 20 years now?

Yes, I started when I was 15 or 16. I grew up in it. When I was very young, I was always after money and I went to work in a restaurant, or pizza shop, near my house and my auntie and uncles were involved in this game. My grandmother was a cook in a hotel. So that was how I got involved, but it was mainly to get some pocket money.

Where was that?

In Central Italy.

I’ve spoken to a few Italian pizza chefs who are very passionate about their particular style of pizza. Do you have that same passion?

For me it’s different because I’m not a pizza chef. I started my career as a chef and I developed the skills. Obviously over the years I went from being a cook to being a chef, so from being in the kitchen and doing my job, then I also got involved with running the business.

I started watching trends and getting more involved in them. I think it’s hard to find a good restaurant and a good pizzeria together. Usually the pizzeria is a standalone and the good restaurant is standalone. Having said that, I do own a restaurant where we serve pizza, Pizza e Birra. We only have pizza and pasta. We don’t serve meat or fish because I don’t think you can get everything right. That way, we specialise in good pasta and good pizza.

Over the years I always cooked, but I never made pizza. Then I bought Pizza e Birra and I started to get more involved in pizza. There’s a little story behind that. About six years ago, I saw the explosion of pizza and I started a side business called Pizza Revolution because I expected that pizza would explode, that’s why it’s called Pizza Revolution. So I created a pizza club where all the pizzerias from all over Australia participated in a competition to select the best Australians who would then compete in Italy, America and so forth.

During that exercise, I learned a lot about pizza. I learned about the dough mainly and applied my chef skills to the toppings. That’s where the name Stretched comes from because of the stretching of the pizza dough. We have a pretty cool Italian pizza dough that you would expect from an Italian shop but we are very quirky with the flavours because I think I can match them very well and I know and follow what is happening in cuisine.

Melbourne is the best platform to launch cuisine that is very multicultural. I am an Italian man and I married a Vietnamese girl (Ly Nguyen), so we made the Un-pho-gettable pizza and you can actually taste Pho. That’s what makes us a little bit different but spot on with the flavour part because of the skill involved. Everything gets cooked as a chef would do it and applied to the toppings of the pizza.

I really love the menu. It’s so much fun with the plays on words. I love every aspect of it, nothing has been overlooked. It is very clever.

That’s my wife’s work. She is a perfectionist. I bring the flair and she brings the perfectionism. Then we have the numbers man, Joe Codespoti who is from a financial background in the bank. I think those three elements are very important to run a business. If you apply those three elements to a pizza shop, we can make something good.

You only recently opened?

Three weeks ago.

What are the big sellers so far?

I think everything is selling about the same. Monday night they go for a meat pizza, Tuesday night is vegetarian, Saturday night is for family, so it’s very hard to detect the popular ones, but the wow pizzas would be the Un-pho-gettable, the Hangover and some of the vegan options. The vegan options are really good.

Vegan food is a trend, it’s very big, even though they are very noisy about it, there is only a small percentage of the population who are truly vegan.

You are in a suburb where it’s a big thing.

We have researched the good stuff for it and I think our vegan pizzas are very good. We have a very good vegan cheese, which I think is important for pizza.

You were saying that you follow trends and have your finger on the pulse with different things, is social media a really important tool for that?

I’m lucky because I come from the old school generation of restaurateur/customer, but also the new generation because I haven’t turned 40 yet, so I am still in that younger bracket. That’s very important because my wife is always saying that I’m 40, but I’m not, I’m 39.

The good thing is that the old days were all about word of mouth and customers who would come to you or connoisseurs would write reviews. I have had some pretty interesting reviews in my restaurants. They were constructive reviews because at the end of the day, they were connoisseurs who I respected and who told me the things to improve. It was really good. Today it is totally the other way.

Social media is really good and really important but also really dangerous, because I can’t please everybody. Everybody is different. When we receive an order, we receive a piece of paper that lists the pizzas. I don’t know who has ordered that; their age, gender or anything. So maybe an Italian person is ordering the Un-pho-gettable which has totally different flavours for a pizza and they may complain because they don’t expect the combination. My own mother or brother wouldn’t understand that pizza because they’ve never tasted that combination before. It has a lot to do with education.

As I said before, Australia is the best platform. We have the opportunity to try so many different kinds of food and people are very sophisticated, which is great, but I don’t agree that the customer is always right. I think this is just a story that someone made up. The reason why I think that is because if you’re not happy with something, you have to tell me and I will do my best to fix it, but on a common ground of understanding. If you don’t like tomato but you order the tomato pizza, I can’t do anything. It’s like if you tell me you are going to Rome to see the Eiffel Tower. It’s impossible. People give a lot of opinions on social media. There are pros and cons, but we embrace it. We are very strong supporters of social media and we use it ourselves.

You have other venues in different parts of Melbourne, what made you open Stretched in Coburg?

We have this kind of uniqueness in us. We don’t follow real estate gurus or newspapers who tell us what to do, we follow what we believe is right because we do our own research. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I have been very lucky because every location I’ve chosen has worked very well.

We try to create an experience because again I think you have to offer good food and good service and also give people an experience because these days there are so many things on offer and they can have good pizza anywhere in Melbourne. When I choose a location, I want to create a destination and an experience, which is very dangerous because it can backfire. We chose our other venues in some very crazy spots and everyone told us we wouldn’t last but we are still here. It can be hard to make it work but we are professionals and that is what we do for a living and we learn from our mistakes. We are always learning something different and we do value people’s feedback. I only value feedback from people who have also put their job on the line, which is what we do. It is very easy to judge and tell people what they should and shouldn’t do. People wonder about the foot traffic here and the council, and competition on the street.

Competition is great and I think the more restaurants along here, the better, because you want to eat something different every day and if you can have a street full of different options, so it’s good.

You touched on this before when you said you wanted to create a destination, but the flip side of the coin in terms of Melbourne is that people can be fickle in that there is a lot of hype around new places opening and then they are on to the next thing. You have to be really good to grow a loyal following and keep up with what people want.

You need to know your customers. There are lots of factors involved in them choosing to give us their business; travel time, cost of living. You can’t easily come to Coburg if you are living in Port Melbourne. You might come once or twice, and you might think it’s close by going on the motorway, but you’ll be paying a lot in tolls. So you have to have good food and service but if you give them a good experience, people tend to come back. If it’s fun, you’ll go back. You might go to a once a year place that has a wow factor and you want to impress your partner, but how many times can you go there? If you go somewhere where you can have fun, you will go back there more often.

You need to know your customers and you need to know not to put all your eggs in one basket. You need to be able to capture a customer, make him happy 85-95%, make sure he talks about it because he had a good time. Sometimes you can have bad food but good service and you can get away with it and vice versa, you can have bad service and good food and you might not get away with it. But if the experience is there, people tend to remember the experience.

Melbourne is the food capital of the world for a reason. You can try anything. A couple of years ago I cooked Sudanese food with an Italian twist with a Sudanese lady. It was amazing. Now we are doing a project with an Aboriginal chef cooking Italian food. You are always growing in this industry. You learn from other people.

That sounds great. Tell me more about it.

I don’t know a lot about it yet but I got approached by a company asking me if I wanted to be part of it because they know me and know I do crazy stuff. They thought I’d be the best person to work with this indigenous chef. I think it’s a great idea because Indigenous people are the founders of this country. I think there is a good line of work in that because I think it could work extremely well. The Sudanese project worked very well because we have the same ingredients; tomato, flour and so on and then it’s how you execute it.

How do you manage all these projects and venues?

In my experience in this industry, and I went from the bottom to the top, it’s a hard industry. A couple of years ago, Ly and I had just got engaged and we wondered how could we always have this life where we are working 19 hours a day, day after day. My family is in Italy and I like to see them quite often because that’s life. So we have developed this concept for a place that is easy to run, and easy for people to get involved. We are teaching the new generation.

I work a lot in innovation as well and I believe that, at the moment, the hospitality industry in Australia is struggling because there aren’t any cooks or chefs. Everyone talks about the fact that there is no pay. I don’t believe that, there is no passion. If you are not passionate, you won’t succeed in this job. I am very happy because we have a very good crew and people come and ask to work for us because we teach them. If you educate people, you will always have staff and there will be no shortage.

So that is our whole concept; good experience, good food, we can offer jobs to people and most importantly we can show someone who wants to get involved in a business how to do it. I think everyone has a dream to open their own restaurant or pizza shop but they don’t realise the difficulties and we can help with that.

It is also about creating a good life for us too. Joe has two kids, and Ly and I plan to have a family and we can’t work all those hours. Our concept works for everyone. We are hoping to multiply these shops. Our plan is to open more, spread around the country. We’ll start with Victoria and expand from there. We welcome people to come and see what we do and embrace it.

Stretched

53 Moreland Road, Coburg

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