David Lakhi

It’s so nice to be here, David. I’ve been wanting to come here for a long time. Colleagues have asked if I have eaten at Little Black Pig and Sons, and I hadn’t. I felt embarrassed about that, because I hear such great things. I’ve been following your Instagram for a while, so it’s nice to finally be here. 

I’m glad you’re here. Being in a Heidelberg is a blessing, and can also be curse at times. Because people have this preconceived idea of what Heidelberg used to be. But in the last nine years of owning this restaurant, I’ve seen this area change so much. People always ask me, oh, why do you have this restaurant in Heidelberg? Why don’t you open this in Kew or in the city? I’m happy with where I am. I want to serve the community on this side of the river. If the opportunity arises one day to open a second place somewhere, yes, we will, but at the moment, I’m happy serving the community here. Everybody drives nowadays. We have diners travel from all around Victoria. 

You were saying there were people from Point Cook in last night. 

Point Cook, we have regulars from Glen Iris, Toorak, Middle Park, South Yarra, Prahran, and all those areas. But only a very small amount of people from within the kilometre radius of this area, which is strange. A table told me last night that they only started noticing six months ago that we were here. 

Well, even I was surprised when I was walking along, and you’re on a strip of shops, next to Aussie Mortgage Brokers and it’s just a small front. I guess you could be easily overlooked. 

 It is painful at times, ‘because we get overlooked by a lot of people. 

I’m always intrigued about what spaces were before, and I know this was a deli before it became a restaurant, but before that, it was a lawnmower shop. 

You know the intro you read in the wine list? That was only printed yesterday. It’s new. Normally I go out and people want to ask me my journey, I tell them freely about the whole thing. My wife suggested that when people have a couple of minutes on their hands when they sit down, they could read about my journey as a cook. Since then, a lot of people have been reading about it, which is great. 

Let’s talk about it. I know that your journey started quite early for you when your dad gave you a solar oven?

A solar cooker is almost like a suitcase. It opens up and the top part has a mirror opens up has a mirror and then there’s a little glass panel in between. I found this sitting in storage back home and I was always intrigued by these kinds of things. I was 10, 11, maybe 12 years old. I perfected how to bake a cake in that oven. 

How does it work then? 

There is the mirror part. Then there’s another panel, which is glass, and then underneath that, the bottom where you put your clothes and everything, that’s where you have your blackout compartment. Obviously black attracts the heat. The sunlight hits the mirror, hits the glass, heats up everything in between. So that’s what I used to do. 

What part of India was that? 

Punjab.

Okay, yeah. I don’t think they would work in Melbourne. 

It would work great in Australia during summer. 

Were you always interested in food, then? 

The way I grew up, food was a very important part of the day. My mum was a housewife, so she never worked. Her job was just to feed us. And it brought us together. Unknowingly, I fell in love with that part of the concept, which was bringing the family together over a meal. My first successful thing was I ever made was a caramel, and I was running up and down the street, getting everybody to taste it. At the age of 10. I was always helping my grandmother. We do this sweet noodle dish back home where I’m from, and the way they roll it, we got these terracotta water storage pots. My grandmother would flip it upside down, and she would roll the noodles on it. We dried those noodles and then cooked it in a sugar syrup. I always saw and was always keen to know what they were doing with the food. But then, at the age of 17, when I really started to click with the food, I decided to move to Australia by myself. When I was on the plane to Australia, I turned 19 on the plane. That was 21 years ago. 

Why Australia? 

I had few friends here already, and also it was one of the easy places to go to as an international immigrant. There was no other reason. When I first arrived in this country, from the get go, it felt like home. People were kind enough. Some people weren’t. But I was accepted into a restaurant, like their own, and their mum told me how to cook. 

Was that your plan when you came, to be a chef? 

My plan was to be a cook. That was my childhood dream. I had no other desire to be something else. I started religiously when I was at the TAFE. One of the teachers was so happy with the way I was progressing, he gave me a knife kit. Wow. He was a Scottish guy, Daniel. That was always the dream. It was very hard to get into this industry to get a job because there was a lot of racism back then, in this industry, especially. As an immigrant, you can’t get into a kitchen. You have to work your way from a kitchen hand, and you have to do your hard yards. I started as a kitchenhand in a kitchen when I first arrived in North Melbourne and I ended up leaving that job because I was told, you Indians are only good to wash dishes. You use that as a moment to push yourself forward, not drag yourself down. I said, no worries. I left. Then I was applying for jobs in a kitchen, in any capacity. I was finally able to find a job where they accepted me, trained me, showed me the ways, not just the cooking side of it, also the financial side of business. I was always keen to learn about business, because I come from a family business. So I was very intrigued by the numbers. Once they start teaching me those things, it started to make sense. 

Was this the Italian place? 

Yes. They had a few restaurants. One of them was in Burwood, called Michelangelo. Then they had another one called Paesano. Then they had a few in other southeastern suburbs. It was hard, because I was working with some proper hard knocks. back then because the culture was different back then. It wasn’t like what it is today. But that’s what made me more resilient. 

Obviously, you found something, you said that it felt like you were at home in Australia, but it feels like Italian food, and cooking feels like home to you as well. What was it about Italian food that drew you in? 

It’s exactly what we do back home. We eat from the land. And that’s what Italian food is about. As a child, I was barely home. I was always playing outside. I only went home just to eat quickly and then I’d be out on the streets again. I grew up stealing from other people’s gardens. That’s one of my fondest memories of food growing up. If I close my eyes, I can still seeing myself plucking a radish or a tomato from somebody’s garden. Or climbing a tree to get a fruit. Italian food and where I come from, we both eat off the land, and we respect what the land has to offer. And the simplicity of the cuisine. Indian food is not what it’s been portrayed in this country. Indian food is different to what you eat in this country. So is Italian. That’s what drew me the most towards this cuisine is the simplicity of it, and there’s no room to hide. You can’t serve tomato as something else. Tomato has to be served as a tomato during a certain time of the year with three ingredients: buffalo mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes. Plus a good olive oil. So, four ingredients. Your perfect meal for lunch. How many cuisines can offer that kind of simplicity?

Eating off the land and doing very minimum technique as a cook is very important. I have seen a lot of people turning tomatoes into something they never will be. And as I said, tomatoes taste better from January, February and by March, they’re gone. For me, we stick with the ethos of cucina povera. We try to tweak a little bit, but not in a way the tomato forgets itself.

David Lakhi, Little Black Pig and Sons

Then from there, it sounds as though you branched out a little bit and worked in a few different places. When did you realise that you wanted your own place? 

I realised that after eight years of working in this industry from the start. We were looking at a lot of places. I eat out a lot, and we try to educate our kids a lot about eating out, because not many people know how to behave in restaurants when they go out. So as a parent, and people from hospitality, it’s our job to educate them. When you work somewhere, you start to get frustrated about small things, and as a cook, you also get frustrated if you don’t have the creative control. That’s the biggest curse you can put on a cook, by taking the creative control away from them. I was at the stage where I was struggling to find that balance. There’s no point in getting upset, because if you can’t afford to do your own thing, you should shut up and just do what the place has to offer. 2014 moves the time when we started looking, and we looked at a lot of places. My wife said, the way you’re going about these places, where this isn’t right, that isn’t right, you’ll never have your place. Then we stumbled upon this place in 2017. You know when you walk in somewhere and think, this is it. But 2014 was the first time I realised it was time to go solo. When I say solo, it’s me and Emilia who own this place together. 

But you kept the name? 

We kept the name. It was a deli, then it became a restaurant for a year before we took it over. We’ve had it for nine years now. 

I guess the name makes you think of a butcher, or deli, a village, and neighbourhood. It’s a good name to have, isn’t it? 

People ask me the question, why is this the name? We never asked the question from the previous people. So I can’t really answer. The way I redesigned this whole dining room was, okay, you might not know what this place is. So when you walk in, it’s another surprise. We let the food and service do the talking.

I’ve read about the Cucina Povera philosophy, and then when I came here, and I saw the menu, it’s a very impressive and sophisticated menu. Can you tell me what, then, does cucina povera mean to you? 

It’s what I mentioned to you before. Eating off the land and doing very minimum technique as a cook is very important. I have seen a lot of people turning tomatoes into something they never will be. And as I said, tomatoes taste better from January, February and by March, they’re gone. For me, we stick with the ethos of cucina povera. We try to tweak a little bit, but not in a way the tomato forgets itself. We only serve tomatoes in this restaurant for two months. And during those two months, it will only make it on a menu maybe twice. Summer is one of my favourite months to cook. You’ve got figs, you’ve got the stone fruit. You had the anchovies. That’s my take on egg sandwich. I play cricket. There’s a dish in Venice called Uovo Acciughe, which is a hard-boiled egg with anchovies on top. I did that dish in 2018. I did it three times in one year, and we never sold it. In 2021, it was during lunch at cricket seasons. You get sandwiches as a tea. I was eating this bloody thing and it had had no taste in it. I thought anchovies would taste really good in here. So it’s exactly the same dish, which is hard boiled egg. But what we did is, just add another component to it. It’s playful. But it’s exactly the same dish. If I put a hard boiled egg with anchovy in front of you versus that dish, what’s more appealing? So you still have to give people something they eat with their eyes first. But the dish has to have the simplicity and the ethos this restaurant holds, which is the cucina povera. 

Also, this changing the menu fortnightly is wild. That menu has got so much in it. Each section, so each course, has got three or four different choices in it, and within each of those, there’s a lot of elements. How do you have all this in your head?  Where do you start? How are you doing that every fortnight? 

To be honest, I am very blessed to come from the culture I do. Driving, or riding a bicycle, there’s a food stall cooking. I cook with smell. That’s how I visualise the food. There’s a very small amount of time that I taste food when I’m cooking. It’s all by the smell. I’m very fond of eating things raw, like fruit. The menu is very vegetable heavy. You might be eating a fish carpaccio, but it’s with fruit. We get a lot of market reports from our suppliers. That decides the menu in the first place. Then you just have to tweak the technique a little bit. I like to cook the way I like to eat, I like to eat the way I like to cook. That’s my philosophy in life. I don’t like to overcomplicate things. All the pasta is handmade. No machines are used. I see a lot of videos on Instagram and they say it’s handmade pasta and then they’re cutting the pasta on an extruder. Even though we make all the pasta by hand, most of the regular customers who know me, most of the staff members over the last nine years who have worked here, if you ask them what pasta I eat? They will always say pasta aglio e olio, nothing else, which is garlic, olive oil, and parsley. That’s the only pasta I eat. Because I like to keep my food simple. Yes, you got a lot of pops happening in your mouth, but they’re not overpowering or they’re not taking away from the actual dish. If it’s a beef tartar, the focus is the beef. Everything there is to complement the beef. We start with good beef. Let me do things to it, but beef is still the hero. 

You must have a huge repertoire of different pasta in your head as well. I saw that you had a chocolate pasta.

That’s right, with duck ragu. Last week, we did a pasta with coffee. Coffee and a beef short rib. 

Are they things you’ve seen before, or are they things you’re coming up with yourself? 

When you talk to your guests, as a cook or as wait staff. They are your teachers. That’s how I see life. We had a diner here. We had the chocolate pasta five weeks ago. I’d never done that pasta. It was for wine dinner. We had a winemaker from Verona in Italy. I thought chocolate and duck sounded really good. I’d never tasted that pasta. I never tried. Everybody was in love with the pasta. So that’s where this journey of chocolate pasta started. It was agnolotti filled with duck and some fresh truffles shaved on top. We had a customer, he’s a regular from Hong Kong. He said, this is a very interesting combo. What’s next? Melbourne is a coffee town. So, I said, thank you very much. So we did a coffee pasta. I always listen to our customers. 

Do you write all these ideas down? Have you got notebooks? 

We do not write recipes in this restaurant. It’s all here. Because that’s how I was trained. If you ever see a very old Italian lady cooking, they don’t have recipes. They have lids of different jars they use as a measuring tool. They don’t have proper cups. If you ask me, oh, what did you put in the tiramisu I had today, I cannot tell you. Because I do not measure. 

I liked seeing on the menu where all the products are from. You obviously select really carefully your suppliers. 

Our suppliers, they brought in their produce. So for us to display their hard work is a compliment. The two things we don’t serve in this restaurant are salmon and chicken. Maybe I’ll eat my words one day, but we have not served those two things in this restaurant. Because you can find them everywhere. And some things are sustainable; some things are not. We are the custodians of food on this planet as cooks. We have a job to use a product that’s produced within the ethos of sustainability. That word gets thrown around a lot, but when I put something on a menu, that means I’ve had a good chat with the people who represent that company. It makes life easy to sell it to the customers, because when you go out to a restaurant, you don’t want to eat what you can cook at home. 

Have you been to Italy now? 

We were going to go in 2020. I was planning on going this year. The world is a very fragile place at the moment. You don’t know what’s happening. I can’t be going to Italy and be stuck there. We’ll see what happens in next couple of weeks, a couple of months, and it will decide if I will be able to go to Italy this year. 

When/if you get to Italy, what are you looking for when you’re there? 

I will go to villages. Eat the way peasants eat. Because that’s the proper way to eat food. It’s totally different to being in this country. Where I grew up, we invited people over, and my mum cooked, or my grandmother cooked. You wouldn’t go out to a restaurant every week. Going out to a restaurant was a luxury. But I don’t know how things are back home now because I’ve been here for 21 years, but that’s how I want to eat. Food has that capability of transporting you back in time. Talking to you, I’m thinking about, this family, they would throw the potatoes at the end of the night in the embers and the next day, they were the best potatoes you’ll ever eat in your life. One of my grandmothers from my mum’s side, she used to make mango chutney. where she would throw the green mangos in the embers overnight. Next day, she’d peel them and make a mango chutney out of it. Totally amazing flavour. Oh, we can talk about food all day. You don’t feel sick after eating that food and you feel connected. This is where the memories are made. This table…I don’t know how many people sat on it over the years. If we have to put a price on the memories that were made on these tables, people cried, people hugged each other, people proposed, this is where we leave it all on the table. 

Just to finish off, with all your experience, and your well thought out philosophy, what would your advice be to young people starting out in hospitality? 

My advice for young chefs? Just be a sponge. Listen to people. The hardest thing to do nowadays is listen because there’s so much information and misinformation out there. Don’t cook for Instagram. Cook for people who matter, who pay the bills. Instagram will fade away and will not pay your bills. It might bring you an overnight success. But if you don’t cook from your heart, that fame will disappear like that. That’s my only advice, I would say. Just work hard, listen to people who have done the yards. And be on time. Be punctual. Respect the craft. Because this is becoming a dying art. There are many jobs that will be overtaken by AI, but this is where it becomes crucial. This is where this industry becomes even more important than before. Because people will seek that personal touch. The robots can’t give you that personal touch. Somebody said it once, consistency is death. You can keep on cooking consistent food every day. Sooner or later, you will be tired of that consistent food because there’s no emotion behind it. 

Little Black Pig and Sons, 48 Burgundy Street, Heidelberg