Mario Manabe

What made you become a chef?

I was always interested in food and surrounded by it growing up. My family is quite into cooking and my grandmother is an amazing cook. I think that’s what got the food bug to bite me at first. In terms of professionally, it really happened by accident. I had moved back to Hawaii and I was really interested in culinary school and culinary arts and all these food shows had just started coming out at the time…it’s a while back…Great Chefs of the World and Food Network had just started getting popular. That was back in the late nineties. By some sort of fluke I got hired by Alan Wong to go and work as a prep cook in one of his restaurants in Hawaii. That was the start of it. It was a really rude awakening. I didn’t realise how hard it was going to be, but for some reason it still appealed to me. After that I went back to Uni and then culinary school and then started working and that was it.

I read that you enjoyed learning French techniques.

A lot of the kitchens I worked in were predominantly French cuisine, most of them are, I guess. I was lucky with the people I got to work with. There were some really great people who were fun and easy to work for. The kitchens were doing fun food. Some of it was quite high end fine dining and some of them were fine dining with a little bit of comfort food thrown in. I got to work everywhere from Arizona to California. I was in Washington DC for a couple of years, Hawaii. That was my restaurant time.

I had met another chef called Curtis through a mutual friend, he’s an Aussie; Curtis Stone. That was when I was working in California. We were just acquaintances as chefs. At the time he was working for Discovery networks doing Take Home Chef. I had been hired to run a restaurant in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard and he rang me one day and said he’d heard I was looking for new opportunities and his house was right down the street so could I go and have a chat. That turned into me going and doing a few dinners and lunches with him because he needed an extra hand. Then a couple of months later I had a full time job with him and I left the restaurant and from there it was a whirlwind of travel and seeing different forms of his business, which at the time was quite small. There were only three of us when I first came on board. It was really cool.

A lot of people see the cooking shows and perceive a certain amount of glamour in food and cooking but not everyone can cope with the demanding nature of the job. What do you think it is that you need to have to keep going?

I think any job is hard if you care about it. Probably the thing that makes it harder is that you do care and you want it to be right. The conditions can be brutal sometimes when you’re working in a hot kitchen and everyone else is out having fun and you’re working. I think when you’re really super young and then when you’re a little bit later in your career, they are probably the hardest times. As a youngster you want to go out and party with your friends and then when you get older, you get married and have kids and you want to be there for those things. The years in between you’re a little more carefree and it’s your time to focus on your career and you don’t mind doing the long hours. But you’re right, some of those food shows do give people the wrong idea and a false sense of reality of what a kitchen is like. They think it’s glamorous and you’re cooking in these exotic spots. A lot of times it’s not; you’re in a dungeon kitchen with no windows.

I guess too if you’re a perfectionist, it’s a very exacting job. There’s now a public who can say yay or nay with a click of their phones. You really put yourself out there.

Absolutely and I think with social media, mostly the comments are good but sometimes someone will say something and you think, maybe the dish isn’t quite right, or they’ve had a bad experience or we’ve done something wrong. You have to have thick skin about it. Not everyone is going to like what you do. That’s the nature of the beast. I think the tough thing is that everything we do is real time. You’re not making a product that will launch in five weeks time, we’re not meeting print publication dates, our deadline is now. Someone is sitting in the restaurant and we have 10 minutes to get the first course out and you have one to two hours to try and make them happy.

That’s the really great thing about hospitality; you’re providing something that makes people happy.

Hopefully.

People are out for a good time and you’re creating that with the atmosphere and the food. When you eat something that’s eye-closingly good, it’s an amazing experience. That must feel good.

I definitely agree. A smell or a taste triggers something and hopefully you get that sweet spot where you do trigger a memory for someone or accentuate an anniversary or a birthday or whatever special occasion it is. I think that’s why we do it; to help people have a good time. We’ve been pretty fortunate here as well because a lot of the reservations we get are for birthdays or date nights.

I really like the fit out. It’s fun and exotic.

It’s small so it’s pretty easy for us to manage. We’re just waiting for summer to hit. Our menu is geared towards warmer weather. It’s quite light.

What exactly defines Hawaiian food? We’ve had a big surge of the poke bowl here, but what else should we know about?

Hawaii is such a melting pot. You’ve got a lot of Asian and Mexican influence and stuff from the mainland US, there’s also a Portuguese influence. It’s pretty hard to say, ‘this is traditional Hawaiian.' Poke has been around for hundreds of years. You get a lot of flavours predominantly influenced by Japan, so soy sauce, a lot of sesame. Rice is definitely a staple there. You’ve got taro root and then different takes on things. Haupia is a traditional Hawaiian dessert made with coconut milk. It looks like a slice and is a thickened coconut custard. You’d see it at luaus. Seafood is probably at the forefront of what we eat in Hawaii because it’s so readily available and beautiful quality.

And that’s the focus at Hana? Light dishes, seafood, poke?

Yes, we’re doing a lot of seafood. If you were to go to Hawaii and have a poke, the way we eat it there is quite simple. It’s in a bowl and that’s it. You might have some rice or some nori sheets with it . What people are doing here in terms of a poke bowl is their take on it. It’s quite different to what I’m used to, but I think that’s kinda cool too; seeing the different versions. Our few of our dishes could be classes as traditional poke with our twist on them, but a lot of them are more composed seafood dishes served raw with flavours we think go well with it.

Can you find the ingredients you need in Melbourne?

Oh yeah. We’re pretty spoiled here. Melbourne, actually Australia in general, is a foodie place. Seafood is good, and in terms of tropical fruit, despite have a few things that aren’t as readily available, Queensland has great stuff coming out of it and we’re coming into the warmer months so we’ll definitely be able to start playing with a few things.

I read that you were using a few indigenous ingredients too.

We’re using things like saltbush and sandfire, finger limes. We’re trying to use things we can find here and there. We definitely use a lot of sea succulents which have stared to go out of season now. But now we’re coming into Spring and Summer we are definitely going to start incorporating things like tomatoes. We’ll focus on lightness. We do have a couple of heavier dishes on the menu now, like the pork shank which just looks like a club or a tomahawk of meat. We have a brisket we get from Rangers Valley which is nice. We slow cook that and then do it with a carrot puree accented with cardamom and ginger. It’s quite a winter warmer style dish. We’ll start tweaking that stuff to be either a new dish or go lighter altogether. We’ll incorporate more seafood too. That was really the goal; to be raw seafood focussed.

Where do you get your ideas?

Inspiration comes from everywhere. I think one of the coolest things I’m constantly on Instagram. You get to see other ingredients and what people are doing around the world. Obviously you never want to rip off anybody but you see a ingredient they use on the dish and you wonder what it is and then it stirs the creative juices to find out and try and use it. That’s why I use things like finger lime and saltbush; I’d never used them before.

I’m not going out to many other restaurants now because I’m usually here but when I was talking to Matteo about the project, I had an idea about the dishes I’d like to try and they’ve obviously evolved from when we opened. I was playing with ideas in my head and there were a few failures with some of the dishes but we got there in the end. I’m always trying to think about what I could use if I was still in Hawaii. We use coconut in quite a few different forms; toasted, desiccated, coconut cream. We were trying to test out things using coconut flesh we were using ourselves and then using the water for the pina coladas. There are definitely ingredients that would be familiar to people in Hawaii, like pineapple and coconut and macadamia which are three of my favourite ingredients.

Have you had Hawaiians in?

Yes, we’ve had a few and they’ve given the tick of approval. We have been clear from the start that we’re not traditional. We are what we are and doing our version of it.

When you do get to go out, are you able to enjoy it, not as a chef?

Absolutely. I remember when I was younger just out of culinary school and going out with other chefs and trying to be cool but you learn straightaway that’s not the way to go out. It’s not enjoyable.

I’m not a hard guy to please when it comes to food, I usually like everything. When I go out now, it’s just to enjoy the experience. Melbourne has some really good restaurants. Embla is just across the street.

Isn’t it amazing?

I have always been a big fan of Dave Verheul. He’s a really talented guy and a really nice guy as well. My wife is pregnant so we don’t go out that much any more but we used to go there quite a bit; good wine list and really amazing food. There are so many good places you can just pop in and have a good time.

So can you still be surprised by flavours?

Absolutely. There are so many dishes people haven’t invented yet and so many combinations. There are ground-breaking people like Ben Shewry or the team at Brae and you think, how do they do this? I definitely go out now more as a happy foodie than as a chef.

Hana

212 Little Collins Street, Melbourne