Joe Vargetto has turned his restaurant into a truffle wonderland. Step inside Mr Bianco right now and you’ll find moss, fairy lights, oak leaves, and, if you’re lucky, a truffle-hunting spaniel on duty. Some chefs talk about truffles as a luxury. Joe talks about them as if they’re alive, creatures that seduce trees, steal nutrients and transform the soil they grow in. He’ll tell you they work just as well on a toasted cheese sandwich as they do on a tasting menu. There are plenty of restaurants in Melbourne celebrating truffle season, but only Joe thought to bring the farm indoors. I always love catching up with Joe. He’s so generous with what he shares, and he really wants to share everything. We roamed the restaurant, taking in the enchanted forest in Bianchetto, which means white truffle in Italian, the Staub range of ‘white truffle’ crockery Joe is working with for this venture and upstairs to see the photo from 2001 when he took part in the Bocuse d’Or, encouraged by his friend and mentor, Philippe Mouchel, and of which one of the sponsors was Staub. Long story short, it is all very serendipitous and absolutely charming.
This is the truffle farm, a little kind of foresty thing. There’s some soil here and we put the truffle in there and people can have a look at how the dogs sniff, smell. The dog is done by Robert from Buxton Truffles. His farm, they say it’s not the most beautiful looking, but the truffles that come from there are the best. His son studies plants and soil and he’s just a nut. He gets asked by other farms to go and see the soil, salinities and bits and pieces; it’s all about the soil and how you inoculate and so on. They created this little farm and it would have been lovely to have taken you there. We do it every year. They’ve got their little homestead, and then you go up the hill and it’s behind, you go, “Where is this thing, Robert? I’ve been there maybe 10 times. But other people that go, you go up a hill, you go behind some kind of shrubbery and there’s trees and then you start walking and then you start seeing around the trees where the inoculation where the vegetation is dying and they call it the brûlé because the truffle sucks the nutrients from the soil’s top. It’s a bit like a parasite; it hooks onto the veins of the roots of the trees, and uses the roots of the trees to produce. I’ve got an oak tree in front of my house. It’s huge. So, I just dumped all these leaves. I brought them all in.
Then what happened was I had a friendship and association with Staub and the guy that delivers products. His name’s Robert, and he also looks after things like microplanes and some other ranges that they have. One day, we were talking and he said, I’ve got the world manager of Staub coming in. Would you like to meet him? They came by, they wanted to see the restaurant and we sat over there. Robert was sitting on the end chair, and he and I were just talking and he’s from Belgium. He looks at the sign over there, Bianchetto, and he can speak Italian, and he can speak French. He knew that Bianchetto means white truffle in Italian and Staub have a new range dishes and plates and things called white truffle. He said, I know it’s a French brand, but I said, that doesn’t really matter because I did the Bocuse d’Or. So know you understand why and Italian restaurant is using French products. I like to give you the whole story. I worked with Philippe Mouchel for a very long time. We’re very, very close friends still. It’s over a relationship of 25 years in the sense of cooking. He was a big mentor of mine, I worked for him as his second in charge and I did the Bocuse d’Or and Staub were one of the major sponsors. And Paul Bocuse himself uses the Staub cocottes and things like that in the restaurant. That was in 2001 and that’s when I started to appreciate all little dishes.
The next part of the story is that many moons ago, I did this truffle farm at the back of Mr. Bianco in 2018. It was a great success. People loved it and I had this back area where Robert came with a big truck full of plants and things like that, but it only ran for four days. Because by the time you cut the tree, we put it in a pot you know the branches, after about four or five days, everything was dying. So we did it for four days. Anyway, people loved it. This gentleman from Belgium liked the idea. We got some quotes from a company called Green Space to set all this up. They’re all in pot still, and they come twice a week to water the plants and it’s all moss and all the stuff. It took about two and a half days to set this up. At night, it looks even better because obviously we’ve got the little lights, things. Robert doesn’t come in every day because he’s obviously running the farm and he’s here maybe three times a week with the dog.
It’s a big project, but I think it’s exciting and something that I wanted to do. We formed an association with Staub. and their range arrived literally a week before anything. We opened on the 10th of August. We had a full dining room last night in here. People absolutely loved it. I had a little doggy kind of walking around, and we have a truffle menu. On the 27th, we’ve got a truffle dinner, which is a ticket at event. With the normal menu, you can either, have the menu as it is, like a dégustation style, smaller portions, or they can have individual plated ones.
It looks delicious: truffle infused risotto, caramelised pear. You are using Buxton black truffles. Do we do white truffles in Australia?
No, we don’t. But I heard that possibly, I haven’t seen it or tasted possibly there is one gentleman that has cracked a code in Myrtleford and maybe we have could have a white truffle that he’s produced. But that’s still to be confirmed, I think only this year he has produced a white truffle. It’s the first time in Australia, in Myrtleford. Growing truffles is very, very hard because I think it’s all about luck, right? So for example, if you bought a property and you’ve got the sun that shines in the right spot and the terroir or the ground or the soil has the right specifics. You just need to add a few little bits and pieces. You have to have the right trees, the right inoculation. People don’t understand the same process can be done in the same kind of climate and so on, and it doesn’t work out. That’s why a lot of investors, they spend millions on things like truffle farms and sometimes it’s not until the third or fourth time that they get them. It’s a bit like digging for oil as well. You don’t know what you have until you find it. And every year Robert says the same thing; I don’t know what I’ve got until the dog starts to scratch on the surface of the soil during winter. Then we we’ve got something. Something could have happened throughout that time, and it doesn’t work. There’s just so many elements that it’s not like switching the stove on and putting a pot of water on and making it boil. During the year, theirs all the trimmings. There’s making sure that the pests or the rodents and weevils and things like that don’t become too much, but the thing is, you can’t use too many sprays and things like that because it’ll ruin the elements of things. So it’s technical.
One of the elements with the truffle, is that it is very romantic and it just captures your mind. When you smell a truffle, you lose words. And whether you’re a chef or you’re a home cook or you’re someone that enjoys cooking, it is an aroma which is, I don’t know, there’s not really many words that you can describe it, but they are just beautiful. In my mind or a chef’s mind there’s not much you need to do to make something beautiful from a truffle.
Joe Vargetto, Mister Bianco
Chefs always go crazy around truffle season. What do you like about them?
One of the elements with the truffle, is that it is very romantic and it just captures your mind. When you smell a truffle, you lose words. And whether you’re a chef or you’re a home cook or you’re someone that enjoys cooking, it is an aroma which is, I don’t know, there’s not really many words that you can describe it, but they are just beautiful. In my mind or a chef’s mind there’s not much you need to do to make something beautiful from a truffle, but also, there’s a lot of things that you can do to just ruin it: different acidities, for example. Chillies don’t really work with truffles. Too salty, doesn’t work. When I was in Europe working and we had the truffle season there, we had this rule that anything that grows below the ankle goes with truffles. So any kind of vegetation, pigeons, quails, ducks. the thing is, obviously, braised pork trotters go beautifully with it. Venison doesn’t grow below the ankle, but venison does go well with them. I think Australian cuisine, kangaroo done in a beautiful, slightly peppered, slightly kind of dark chocolate works with truffles. We are always romanticising what the truffle can add to the dish, but also how it can accentuate the dish as well. Garlic and truffle work really well until you put too much in and then it’s no good. Beautiful mashed potatoes, a little bit of garlic, beautiful cultured butter and some nice shaved truffle on top. It’s delicious.
What about seafood?
I think a lot of, let’s say, bloodfish, things like, we don’t have it here but sea bass or Barramundi can go very well. Depending on how you cook octopus, if it’s going to be char grilled or slightly wood fired, I think would go really, really well. Then maybe seaweed or a puree of seaweed, that kind of grassiness that goes well with the earthiness of the truffle as well. When you’ve got good truffles, it doesn’t matter. You could put it on a toasted cheese sandwich. That would work even as well.
Do you have to be careful with desserts? I’ve seen truffle and chocolate things. You’ve got it with a baked truffle cheesecake and blueberries and truffled honey. Do you infuse the truffle with the ingredients or do they go on afterwards?
The baked cheesecake is a bit like a Basque cheesecake. It’s very rich. We just fold in some grated truffle. Obviously, once you cook truffles for that long, you can taste that there’s truffle in it, but it’s lost its aroma. We grate a little bit of truffle just so you can see that there’s kind of flecks of truffles through the baked cheesecake. And the truffle honey, we ferment some really, really finely chopped truffle, a little bit of olive oil and honey, and then we just leave it in the corner for days on end. That infuses through. We make a blueberry marmalade. It’s sugary, slightly sweet, slightly sour, and then the blueberry and honey go on top of the cheesecake, and then we grate more truffle on top. It goes on top as pieces rather than shavings.
If people were really keen to see the dog in action, is there a better night to go?
Obviously, Robert has a lot of on his plate at the moment. For example, he’ll ring me up and say, I’m on the way in to Melbourne, I’ll be there Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. He’s farming then he comes down to Melbourne, he sells truffles to Toscanos andso on. Yhen he’ll come in for an hour and bring the little doggie and people, seriously, go crazy. You could literally take their wallet. It doesn’t matter what you fed them after that. Just as long as the dog’s there, it doesn’t matter. You could give them a McDonald’s burger. I don’t need to be here anymore, after that.
That will be me, for sure. I love it.
It’s reward for effort. You try your hardest or you try your best to do something new and people acknowledge that, I think. I think at the moment, whether it be in Melbourne or Sydney, although, I think Sydney is really pushing some boundaries and then doing some different things. But I think Melbourne is a bit stuck in a rut. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this as well, maybe it is something different, maybe it’s something stupid. But everyone that’s come in here really enjoyed themselves.
Mister Bianco, 26-28 Cotham Road, Kew