Joe Grbac was my first Conversation with a Chef four or five years ago when he was at Saint Crispin and had the idea that talking to chefs would be a great thing to do. Today I went in to the city to have a chat with him about his solo venture, Saxe, which has been running for two years and newly launched Saxe Kitchen, the more casual downstairs sharing-plate type iteration. We really got straight to the meaty stuff, discussing the state of the industry and the ways a chef can keep growing and evolving. Fabulous.
Hi Joe. Nice to see you again. You were actually my very first Conversation with a chef when I was writing for The Northsider back in 2014 or 2015.
Oh no, I feel old.
Well, we’ve all walked down that track. I had the idea to do Conversation with a chef because my friend Nicola McDermott in Christchurch was a head chef and had worked in London and various places and I loved talking to her about food and being a chef. When I moved to Melbourne and started doing a bit of food writing for The Northsider, I thought, now’s my chance to do Conversation with a chef. I was at Saint Crispin one night and I asked you whether you’d like to be part of Conversation with a chef and you luckily said yes. Now I’ve taken the whole thing out on my own onto my own website and then I thought it’d be nice to revisit and see where you’re at now.
How cool.
And this place is great. Well done.
We’re now coming up to two years. It was October 2017 when we opened.
That’s a milestone for restaurants. A lot of places open and don’t make it to two years.
You’re never guaranteed though. A good friend of mine, Hayden, from Woodland House closed last week or the week before and they had been open for five years. There’s no rhyme or reason.
So you can’t really read the market and know how things might go?
There was a food awards night last night or the night before and Con Christopoulos won an award for his time with the group of seven or eight restaurants he runs. He came on stage and in his speech said that what we are experiencing now in the industry, he has never seen before in that it is phenomenally quiet and a lot of places are struggling.
Is that because of Uber Eats?
I think it’s everything. The economy is a massive part of it. I think everyone is nervous about being in a recession and restaurants are always the first thing to go, the social part of life. Uber Eats has been a massive thing for our industry. It has changed the way people see food. I’m not talking about our generation, it’s more the younger ones. I read something the other day which said that the current generation don’t even know how to cook.
I think that’s true. When I spoke to Annie Smithers she talked about giving her cooking classes and discovering how many people are almost fearful of food, well fearful in the sense of not knowing how to cook it and doing the wrong thing. We grew up baking and cooking more I think.
It’s strange. It’s interesting. But we love what we’re doing and we just keep doing it.
I was reading what other people have written about you and it is always glowing. People often use words like ‘idiosyncratic’ or ‘a unique style’. How would you describe what you do with food?
I’ve never really thought about it. I’d somewhat say the opposite. I’m classical modern. I’m not Philippe Mouchel, he’s from an older school. How would I describe it? It’s always, always, always seasonal. The biggest thig for me is what’s in right now, what’s local, what’s available. Especially with what is going on in the environment. It needs to be sustainable. I like using small farmers and small producers. The same goes for food and wine. Look, at heart I was French-trained and I’m always towards that side of it, but I think it’s a little bit interesting, a little bit, but not too quirky or too left of centre. Good, seasonal, yummy, tasty. For me the most important thing is flavour. There are some places in Melbourne who have a really good following but I don’t believe they pack a punch on the plate.
I think the pendulum is swinging back to more traditional, delicious, cosy…and it’s not that I’m describing your food as cosy, but food that makes us happy rather than complicated food.
Someone said that to me only a couple of days ago. It has all come full circle again. The worst question you ever get asked it what’s the next food trend? Yes we always try and move with the times and make sure that we change dishes and evolve with the seasons. Like from last spring to this spring, I might bring a dish back. It might come back as a complete replica, or sometimes I might give it a tweak here and there. It’s about constant improvement.
How would I describe my food? It’s always, always, always seasonal. The biggest thig for me is what’s in right now, what’s local, what’s available. Especially with what is going on in the environment. It needs to be sustainable.
How do you keep learning as a chef so that you know when evolution and tweaking are needed when you’re working long hours and so on? Do you read books? How are you coming up with these different things?
A little bit of everything. You only have to pick up your phone and scroll through Instagram. At the same time too I think you have to be careful not to change what you believe in. Sometimes chefs replicate exactly something they’ve seen and you have to be careful about that.
I’m a green thumb and I have a vege patch at home and sometimes that reminds you about stuff, as in you might forget about certain vegetables or something. Talking to other people in the industry who might talk about using an amazing product or this great supplier for a certain thing. Books slightly. You know, I think a new cookbook gets released every week, you can’t keep up with them.
I’ve been invited to two launches in the next couple of weeks, Scott Pickett’s and Coskun Uysal’s from Tulum.
There you go.
Yes. I have lots of cookbooks and I do love cooking, but often when I want a specific recipe, I’ll just google it.
I sometimes find myself going back to old favourites that have been on the shelf for ages, so it’s not really about an idea or concept, but it can be about an ingredient you’ve forgotten about. Stephanie’s Kitchen Companion is one I always go back to. My one looks like the dog has bitten it, it’s so well used.
Her recipes never fail. And I like that it’s alphabetized by ingredient.
It’s amazing. She was so ahead of her time. So sometime the older books, sometimes the internet, sometimes not, other chefs. Sometimes inspiration comes from the wine team. They tell me about a small boutique producer who has given us this wine, what do you think about a dish to go with it? Then you mess around with certain things and throw ideas around. I’ll do a concept dish and go from there.
MOMO
Has running a business solo changed the way you approach things? Do you feel more vulnerable?
In a way yes and no. There are two sides to the coin. You’ve got that other half there next to you and you always have someone you can bounce ideas of and run things by, but at the same time, when you want to change things you have to go through other people. I pretty much had free reign at Saint Crispin really. It was more the business side of it that Scott and I would discuss. There are times I think, shit, I wish I had someone here with me. But it changes too. I use my wife a lot as a sounding board as well as other people in the industry, I know the chefs down at Tipo and Osteria really well and I’ll go down for a coffee. Catarina has been down the road for 20 years, so there’s no one that knows people and restaurants better than them. I was only there yesterday asking her opinion about something. It’s a really small industry and you rely on others.
I do like the idea that there is a community that helps each other.
We’re all in it together. It doesn’t matter whether we are in competition or not really. I’m a big believer in the more the merrier. I think in a certain area, there’s room for a few places. To give you an idea, I’m a stand alone at night. Next door don’t open, Catarina’s don’t open. Even though Palermo is just straight down there and I ca see it, we are a stand alone. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of silly people in the industry, but on the whole we are a really small and tight community.
That’s interesting. Now Saxe Kitchen, you were already serving downstairs as well, what has changed with this rebranding?
In terms of the original concept when we first launched Saxe, I had a really clear vision of what we did there. We started a bar down here at the start and I don’t think it was the right thing. Post that we started doing the à la carte menu upstairs and downstairs. Again thinking about, dare I say it, the difference between age demographic, how younger people eat…when I go out, do you know what? I don’t like to share my food. I order this, I want it and it’s mine. Within reason. I find the sharing thing a little bit strange whereas the younger generation love it. So rather than have a more constructed dish, they would rather have five or six or seven or eight different things and they can have a little bit of each. That’s what we are doing at Saxe Kitchen.
Maybe that speaks to a lack of commitment and a need for entertainment…?
I never thought of that. My two kids are ten years old now and it’s hard enough to get them to eat a whole plate. Their attention span is so short. So anyway, we wanted to cater for the two different audiences. We apply the same thing to both of course; the best ingredients we can get, seasonal, evolving slowly.
Are there two kitchens?
No just one that covers both. The stairs are a really good stairmaster. But they’re not as bad as the stairs at Saint Crispin. Did you go up those?
Yes. But it was more the coming down the stairs at Saint Crispin that worried me…when you had the little bar up there, I do remember having a cocktail and then concentrating really hard on the way down.
Yes we had to be pretty careful of the RSA there. These stairs are more forgiving.
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