Justin North

Hi Justin, it’s really nice to be here in the Angel.

It’s lovely to be here with you. I’m very proud of this place. It has been an amazing journey so far.

It’s been closed for 3 years. I drove past here, and to be honest, I thought it was just an abandoned place that was going to remain some kind of ghost pub.

It’s been quite an amazing transformation, as you can see.

When did renovations start?

It was part of a broader precinct and development, which started probably three or four years ago? And then we really started getting stuck in probably about nine months ago. We really wanted to restore a beautiful local pub back to the neighbourhood in the community. I think we’ve managed to achieve that and just beautify it, but also keep the original bones and that beautiful architecture that’s here, and, of course, deliver some amazing food along the way.

It is stunning, and for a Wednesday afternoon, there’s quite a few people and they look pretty settled in.

That’s the beautiful thing with the day, because you get people trickling in over the afternoon, and then as the day progresses and the real tempo and the vibe really lifts, and dinners are really pumping, which is exciting.

Tell me about the three zones.

Three levels. We’re on the ground floor, which is a public bar. We’ve been open and this is about our third or fourth week now. Then hopefully by the end of this month around the 28th of May, we should get hand over from the builders for level one and two. We’re going to have a wine bar and casual eatery, which is Mediterranean inspired on level one. It’s about a 100-seat restaurant and a 50 to 60 seat wine bar. Level two gets really exciting as well. That’s a cocktail club and music lounge and a private event space for up to 60 people.

I wish it was my local. Will the food offering be different on this floor as opposed to upstairs?

Very much so. I guess with the public bar, we didn’t really want to overcomplicate it. We did a lot of research into what a good pub is, and what it means to the community. We looked at your traditional, good pub counter meals that people want to come back for time and time again. We didn’t want to lose that. We really focussed on getting those pub classics right and doing them really well, which we can talk a little bit about. Whereas, level one, Flores, is still very casual, very approachable, but it’s a little bit more refined in its offer, and we’ll have more of a contemporary Mediterranean offer. Mediterranean through an Australian lens.

What’s on in the menu here in the public bar?

If you look at the classics, we’ve got an amazing schnitty, a beautiful Parma, great burgers, really good fish and chips. Our unique selling benefit on that is rather than just getting boxes of frozen schnitties in and chucking them in a deep fryer, we’re getting beautiful free range chicken breast, taking the tenders off them, and we’re using them for fried chicken, and then we’re batting out the chicken breast, and we’re brining it, and then we’re crumbing it with our little aromats and panko crumbs, and then deep frying it from there. The brine really helps to lock in the moist juiciness of a chicken, and you get that wonderful crust and the exterior. But it’s not overcomplicating things. It’s really going back to giving people what they want, meeting the market where the market is, and giving them a really good quality product. And obviously great drinks as well: beer, wine, cocktails and then live music, DJs, it’s got the whole package.

What is on tap?

We wanted to give people what they want to drink. So, Carlton Draught’s the biggest seller. We’ve got Guinness by the pint and by the schooner, which is selling really, really well. We’ve got Angel lager, Bailter, Stone and Wood. We’ve also got a few cocktails on tap as well. We’ve got a limoncello spritz, Aperol spritz, they are flying out the door, and then a beautiful yuzu margarita.

What about snacks?

We have fried chicken, we’ve got beautiful Australian calamari as well, which is a bit more Mediterranean, not the big, heavy batter. It’s a really light dusting of aromats and then just quickly flash fried. We’ve got housemade sausage rolls as well and then we make our own focaccia bread, too. There’s a real nice selection of shared snacks and small plates. We have a grill section, too with some beautiful O’Connor grain fed beef, a rump cap on there, eye fillet and Scotch fillet as well.

The door to the kitchen looks quite small, but I’m imagining, well, I’m hoping, for everyone’s sake, that is it a big kitchen?

It’s fit for purpose, let’s say. I wouldn’t say it’s massive, but it’s certainly not small. a really good size. On the busy nights, we’ll probably have about five or six chefs in there working the line. It gets pumping.

Does that serve upstairs as well?

No, we’ve got three levels, three kitchens. The main kitchen will be on level one. where we do Flores.

When I saw that beautiful, artistic, creative side to the kitchen, it really resonated with me. The rest was history. I did my apprenticeship in Wellington, New Zealand, and then travelled. I had about a year or so in Australia, in Sydney and then I went to the UK for quite a few years and then came back and settled in Sydney and it’s been a really amazing journey.

Justin North, The Angel of Malvern

Flores is Mediterranean. How great. There are so many options. How do you narrow that down? Does that mean that the menu is going to be ever evolving?

Definitely. It will evolve, not necessarily with the hard seasons, but with more of a seasonal ingredient change. It will be inspired by great produce, taking a lot of inspiration from that beautiful coastline of Spain, southern France, Provence, southern Italian coast where it’s a little bit lighter and fresher. And then some nice Portuguese and Spanish flavours in a subtle way, with some beautiful spice and smoked paprika and a bit of saffron, and just some really lovely sort of aromats for the food. It’ll be a lot more seafood leaning. It’s going to be quite theatrical, because we’ve got a beautiful live charcuterie station, where we’re going to be shaving meats on the flywheel, crushed ice that we will be shaving to put under freshly shucked oysters, a lovely crudo. It’s the sort of food you just want to eat every lunch and dinner.

It sounds like feasting. Is it shared?

We’ll have banquet menus and chef’s sharing menus, and there’ll be a lot of snacks in the wine bar too, so you can have share plates, you can design your own journey really, or have entrée, main, dessert if you want that more traditional structure.

I love the sound of that. That southern coast is my favourite part of the world. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

I think it really suits our Australian climate, and particular Australian ingredients as well, and it’s just a lovely way to eat. It’s quite light, fresh. It’s not overcomplicated. Everything’s served in such a natural, beautiful way.

In terms of wine bar, what are the wines going to look like?

It’ll be a real mix. We don’t want to overcomplicate things. We’ll definitely have some natural wine, some small producers on there, but we’ll have a lot of crowd pleasers there as well. The key, I believe, with hospitality these days, is not overcomplicating what you deliver, and just really meeting the market, and giving them what they want, and just doing a little bit better than anywhere else, and really having a good quality product, and making it accessible. So it’s easy just to come and sit at the bar, have a beautiful wine, nice cold beer, well-made cocktail, and some beautiful shared plates.

What is your role here?

I’m part of The Refinery Group. This is our first venue. We’ve got many more planned. Josh Rudd is the head chef for the venue, so he takes care of the day-to-day operations of everything, and Josh and I work really closely on the menus together. He does all the hard work. I do all the fun stuff. I’m based in Sydney, so I travel between there and here. It’s a great collaboration and an amazing team.

Do you still get on the tools?

From time to time. I love it. It’s a really nice creative balance at the moment; working on the menu, talking to suppliers, trialling different dishes, doing a lot of development, together with Josh, and then doing service from time to time as well. I think the key to those wonderful partnerships is also getting out of his way, a little bit, letting him do his job, which he does incredibly well.

It’s a sustainable path for a chef to move into that.

It has a mentoring side as well, which I really love. It’s interesting, and we didn’t necessarily think of it like this, but a byproduct of introducing more skill into a pub kitchen, where quite often it’s sort of deskilled by everything being brought in. In a roundabout way, by creating a really good quality product, we’ve ended up being able to educate and train a lot of chefs, as well, through the process of doing things from scratch, and making all our own stocks and sauces from scratch, instead of packet powdered gravy that a lot of pubs use.

I think people are calling out for, cozy and, as you say, accessible dining, and I think that that’s what pubs are. Pubs are such a cornerstone for Australian neighbourhoods and communities. I know there have been pubs around forever. But I feel like a lot of them closed down, and apartment buildings were going up instead, so it’s great to know there is an apartment building adjacent, not instead of The Angel.

I know I’ve used the word a lot, but I think the thing with the pub is its accessibility to the community; coming in and using it however you like. The range in the demographic that we get here is just quite phenomenal. It’s catering to every single corner of the community. Which is as a pub should be. I think, stripping it back, and keeping it raw, at its essence, and not trying to overcomplicate that offer, is really important. It also needs to be reflected in price point too. Operating costs for hospitality businesses these days is astronomical and it just keeps rising. It is a balance, but we’re quite proud of being able to source really good product, keep the prices nice and approachable for the community too.

What are you most looking forward to once The Angel is completed, and it’s all up and running?

I just love the evolution and the training and tweaking and refining things, and that’s a really interesting part of the journey. There are three stages: the setup, the recruitment, then there’s a deep training and the excitement and the energy of opening. Beyond that, you’re really listening to the feedback from people, and you don’t always get it right, or things don’t always turn out exactly how you planned, so to keep evolving, and to keep the community happy, you keep listening to what they want to eat, and what they want to drink, and you respond to that. That is really important.

You’re originally from New Zealand. Did you always know that you wanted to be a chef?

Probably not always. I left school when I was about 15, and I did a Polytech, TAFE course in hotel management for about six months, and I spent a month in the kitchen. I used to do a lot of art at school and was quite creative there. When I saw that beautiful, artistic, creative side to the kitchen, it really resonated with me. The rest was history. I did my apprenticeship in Wellington, New Zealand, and then travelled. I had about a year or so in Australia, in Sydney and then I went to the UK for quite a few years and then came back and settled in Sydney and it’s been a really amazing journey.

You’ve worked in some really incredible places. I feel like I’ve spoken to a few people who have worked at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. You were there for three years? Is there a lot of coming and going of staff? Is it somewhere people go for that next level of training?

I think what was quite interesting at the time, which would have been about 1996 to 2000, back then, and I had the intention of doing this too, people wanted to get a really good resume, and you don’t really get those references until you’ve worked for a year with someone. You’d see a lot of people come to a Michelin star place for pretty much a year to the day and then move on to another one. But with that, you get a lovely collection of recipes and learn a little bit, but until you really spend a good amount of time with this chef, you don’t quite get to fully understand their philosophy. I was fortunate that after a year, to a year and a half, I had quite a close relationship with Raymond Blanc, and that still carries on to this day. We’re still in touch 20, 30 years later. My point there is to really get inside the head of a great chef, you need to work alongside them for as long as you can to not just have access to their recipes, but have access to the thinking that goes on behind it. Then you stop replicating other people’s dishes and really start to develop your own philosophy and set of principles through that process.

That sounds like a really intentional path, and I know a lot of young people from New Zealand do have a pathway that goes often through Australia and to the UK. When you were starting off your apprenticeship, what did you like about it? What made you think I’m going to continue with this?

It would probably come down to the creativity and the energy and the constant learning. It’s really weird. I think when I was young, studying at 15, it wasn’t probably until I was about 20 or so, that I really started to understand what it was all about, because you’re learning as much as you can each day, but you don’t quite understand the full concept of everything. My thinking at the time, when I was in my apprenticeship, is that I just wanted to go and work for the best in the world, to see how far I could actually take this as a profession and then work back from that. That’s what my journey was about. It is a very physical and quite mentally draining job. But the adrenaline and heat of service and all the camaraderie as well. I think this is really beautiful camaraderie in kitchens; great teamwork and, in good kitchens, a really good culture. That’s another thing that we really want to implement here. And we’ve got the beauty of doing that with Refinery group: we establish what our set of principles are and what we want our culture to be. Hospitality is all about people and you need to make happy people in a happy environment so that people can work and really excel and express themselves.

When you had that idea of wanting to work for a top chef, did you ever hope, aim to be a world class top chef yourself?

I think you always have dreams of doing that, but also, I think the beautiful thing about our industry is it’s all knowledge based. I think the more knowledge you have, the more freedom you have to be able to create. I was fortunate enough to have my own restaurant at such a young age when I got back from the UK. I was about 24 when I opened it and I knew nothing about business. I just knew how to cook. It was an incredible journey and I think that’s what I love about cooking and the kitchen and hospitality in general is you could use that skill set in so many different ways. I love what I’m doing now in the capacity of a culinary advisor, whether it’s Refinery Group, or amazing hotels, and seeing a lot of luxury lifestyle hotels coming on the market now, it takes me back to my roots, doing my apprenticeship in a hotel. It’s such a diverse and interesting career; the world literally is your oyster.

That’s right. I’m a French teacher as well as a writer. You’ve written a couple of books and one of them is about demystifying French cuisine. What do you really love about French food?

Oh, there’s so much. I’ve been fortunate enough to write three books. Each one was a real snapshot of where I was at the time. For French cuisine, when you do your training, it’s all embedded in the French hierarchy and French basics. That was something I was quite fascinated in. I worked for a French chef Raymond Blanc for a long time, and also Liam Tomlin at Banc back in the day. He was Irish, but very well versed in French cuisine. I didn’t necessarily seek out that path. It was just a path that I fell into, and absolutely love, and the first book I did was all about the producers, but it was very unashamedly a snapshot of what we’d do in the kitchen. It was very much fine dining recipes, and some of the recipes went for full pages, and it was boning out pigs trotters, and pigs’ heads, and all these very technical things, but I didn’t want to simplify that. I wanted to really showcase that in a book of how to do those things, and knowing that that’s not targeted to a household cook, but a lot of our customers and domestic cooks, although they probably wouldn’t try the recipes, were quite fascinated in what went on behind the scenes. With French Lessons, then, it was really going back to look at the basics: what is a daub, and what is a confit of duck, and how to prepare beautiful stocks and beautiful sauces. It was going back to the basics in an uncompromising way, and really learning the techniques and trying to educate those techniques. I always feel a responsibility. I was lucky to work for so many good chefs who were very open and shared so much knowledge with me, and I am the custodian of that, and I want to give back through literature or through mentoring other chefs. It is a real honour. The last book I did was about family cooking, so the sort of food that you cook every night at home. I had young kids at the time, and I have much older kids now.

I can see from the way that you talk about your staff here at the Angel and the books and so on, you do really love mentoring and passing things on and sharing your knowledge, which is really amazing. Just to finish the, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

If I’m having conversations with young chefs, I always try and understand what they want from it and where they see themselves in five or ten years time, and work back from there. It’s really hard to give advice if you don’t know what they want to do. When I was training, there was really only one path, and that was fine dining, and you work for it. It’s not necessarily always the way. The thing I would emphasise the most is to find a kitchen where you are first of all happy, you feel comfortable, and you’re learning, and there’s a really nice energy. If you’re in that environment, then you’ll just learn so much more and it’s so exciting to come to work when you’re feeling like that. Also, seek out really good chefs and really good mentors along the way. Knowledge is everything. If you’ve got your basics, you can really propel yourself from there. Because if you’ve got lots of ideas, but you fall short on your basics, it’s really hard to implement them. I think for a lot of young chefs, and I was very much like this at the time, it’s about you, whereas I think once you mature a little bit, you realise it’s not about you, it’s about the consumer, and the customer, and what they want. It’s less about impressing other chefs, and more about impressing the customers, and meeting the market where it is. I think you’ll have a lot more success that way. The

The Angel of Malvern, 641 Dandenong Road, Malvern