McKay Wilday

Good morning. It's quite nice being out and about early when everyone is setting up. How are you? You have been getting such great reviews.

Yeah, it's been, it's been pretty good. I cannot complain.

How long have you been open now?

End of February we opened, and it has been pretty consistent ever since.

Do you open for lunch as well?

We are open for lunch Saturdays and Sundays and then dinners every other day.

Seven days. That's a lot. And are you in seven days?

No, I just work Tuesday to Saturday.

Nice. So that means that you have to have trained your staff and trust them to hand over the restaurant for the days that you're not there. But that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Exactly. I trust Dane a lot. We worked together at Grossi, so I know that his pasta work and breadmaking's good. So my main role in the kitchen when I'm in there prepping is to do pasta and the bread. No one else really can do that. Apart from Dane. I'm very specific on it.

How did you get that skill? Where did that come from?

Well, I guess when I started working at Grossi's, I started there in 2012 as a little apprentice. I was young and I just got put on the pasta section, well first larder and then eventually the pasta section. And I just got slammed every day. Every day, huge amounts of pasta. And if you know Grossi, then you know, there's just one big pasta machine for all three restaurants.My section was that. I saw lots of different types of pasta being made and I got a real passion for it. I guess my passion for Italian food grew while I was working at Grossi.

You a particular kind of Italian food here Piedmontese, but what is Grossi? Is it a bit more regionally wide?

It is a bit more wide, but, Guy's father is from the south of Italy and his mother's from the Veneto, so I guess upstairs is a bit of everything, probably mainly a bit more focused on the north part of Italy. I'm not sure how it is these days, but when I was working there, it was a bit of everything. The grill is Tuscan grill, so lots of good meats, very Tuscan influence.When they did the massive renovations down there, I helped them restart that, which was good.

The two specialty pastas that you're doing here from the Piemont region, tell me again about that, because I really loved the way you described it for Broadsheet.

The tajarin is a very, very thin, usually it's super paper thin tagliolini and it's just served with butter or butter and sage, or a type of ragu. If you go to a trattoria in Piedmonte, there are four pastas with four different types of ragu or sauces that you can choose from. You get tajarin with tomato, tajarin with ragu, tajarin with butter or butter and sage. That shape is very classic to Piedmonte. It's a lot thinner than your normal tagliatelle. It's very, very thin.It's very simple. Its made with semolina and egg yolks. And that's how you can get it so thin. Because of the semolina, you can roll it out super thin and egg yolks are a good binding agent.

And then you've got the Ravioli del Plin. So agnolotti, ravioli, it doesn't bother me what you call it, if you want to get specific, agnolotti has to be a certain recipe, in my opinion. Maybe with agnello, or lamb. That comes from a very specific region in Piedmonte, in the Cuneo region, if you're going to call it agnolotti. That's in my opinion, ravioli del plin, I call it that because that's how I learned. I learned from a Ligurian lady who was from Piedmonte. And so anywhere that's outside the Cuneo region, you call it ravioli del plin. And so obviously plin is when you pinch the two sides of the pasta around the mix and then you fold it over and that's how you get it. Plin is dialect for to pinch in piedmontese.

And what's inside at the moment?

We've got braised brisket from The Wanderers. I think The Wanderers is some of the best meat in Melbourne. I love it. When I was working at Victoria by Farmer's daughters, we had a couple of their steaks and it was amazing. I just fell in love with it. I think it's a perfect cut of meat for what we use. It's little bit more fattier, bit more nuttier in flavour and not too much sinew, which is really good. And then that is just braised with heaps of mushrooms, seasoned with Mascarpone and Parmesan. And then I make a broth, from all the braising juices and then the pasta gets cooked in that just before we serve it.

Oh, so delicious.

Well, you know, that's, that's how I like to cook the pasta. I like to cook it for only about 15 to 20 seconds in the pasta water and then the rest in the pan. Because for me the pasta actually has to take on the flavour of the sauce instead of boiled pasta with sauce on top. That doesn't doesn't appeal to me really. You need the pasta to absorb the flavour of the sauce. And so you just put it in the water just to get rid of all the semolina and extra starch and get it cooking and then the rest in the pan.

And the Ligurian lady that you learned from, was that here or over there?

No, that was when I was living in Liguria. I was at a restaurant Balzi Rossi, it's been around, for 50 years or so. It used to be two Michelin stars back in the day, in the 1980s. And Senora Vina, she was the head of it. She was 86 years old. She passed away just before we opened this place, unfortunately. But she really taught me how to cook Italian food. And then I also had a Piedmonte head chef who was trained at Alma, who showed me the very technical sides of Italian cooking. So I had the best of both worlds. Also my partner is Ligurian, so I learned lots of little Ligurian dishes from her mother and Nonna, which was amazing. So I learned a lot. I learned a lot of that kind of Ligurian style of things while I was there.

But the majority of my knowledge for Italian food was down in the south of Italy when I worked at Bros'. That was hectic. I worked there for just about a year and a half and that was probably the hardest thing I've done in my life. I would not suggest anyone to go there ever to work. It was brutal. It's what a kitchen should never be. But I just take the positives from the negatives and that's all I can do. Few have lasted there.

So it sounds like a year and a half was pretty good going then.

I was probably one of his longest employees. I was his righthand man.

And what led you there? How did you end up in Italy?

When I was working at Grossi, me and my partner planned a trip to Italy because obviously she's Italian and she wanted to show me her country. And I thought, let's go. I was young, I was 22 I think when we went. I just fell in love with it. We travelled on the trains all around from the north of Italy down to the south and back up. We just ate so much food. She showed me all these beautiful places. We started in Ventimiglia, then we went all the way down to Pisa, Florence, Panzano and Chianti, where I did a stage with Dario Cecchini, who was the Master of the Florentina. I stayed with him for a couple of weeks and then after that went down to Rome and then on to Sicily. Then we flew into Verona and then got to Modena, or that regin. I ate at Osteria Francescana. That was my dream as a little apprentice, being able to eat at Osteria Francescana. It was amazing. It was still probably one of the best dining experiences I have ever had.

What did you eat?

I can tell you a few things. There were the five types of Parmesan, The Crunchy Part of the Lasagna, The Big Apple, a really cool risotto that they spray in a citrus spray, which I thought was really cool. I've never seen that before. I know it was 25 courses. This was the year that they got voted number one. It was very intense and I didn't know what to expect because it was my first fine dining restaurant. It was really good. And then after that we came back to Australia and I wanted to open up a restaurant in Italy and said to everyone, guys I'm off to Italy. And then I realized you can't open up a restaurant in Italy. There's too much bureaucracy.

Would the locals accept an Australian doing that anyway? Is that a thing?

No, they probably wouldn't accept it. That's why our Osteria Francescana was so cool because it modernized Italian cooking and it took a while to get up and going, but they did it. But if an Australian went over there, I don't know, I don't think it would work. It'd take a long time to get it up. Especially when I didn't speak the language. I had my partner, she was translating everything for me. It was very frustrating. So I just had to learn it.

So you speak it now?

Yeah. But I speak with a southern accent because I learned the majority of my Italian down the south. So then I had to really learn how to speak when I was up the north. They speak very differently. I had to learn Italian otherwise I wouldn't have survived.

But I also think, and I say this as a French teacher, but I think when you learn a language, it does give you a much better insight into the psyche of the people. I think you can understand a lot more by knowing the language because as you were saying, some of the words, even in cooking, the direct translation doesn't always work or it's got a story behind it.

Exactly. And Italians speak with their hands a lot. I watched a lot of MasterChef, Italy and you just put two and two together and watched their hand movements and everything and you can figure out what they're saying after some time.

I lived in the south of France for a year, and I feel like it's similar down there.

Whereabouts?

Just out of Avignon.

So it's near Italy. Ventimiglia, where I was living is right on the border of France. And so Balzi Rossi is the last restaurant just before the border.

Right. I went through there on the train from Nice to the San Remo leather market.

San Remo is beautiful.

So where did it all start for you as a chef?

I started cooking when I was 15. I was actually wanting to be a concert pianist. I played piano for nine years beforehand. I wanted to be a concert pianist. And my mum said, well, just in case it all backfires, you need to get yourself a trade, something to fall back on. In my little town of Tasmania, they pushed having a trade, you have to be a tradie, a plumber. And I didn't want to be any of that. I was working at McDonald's at the time, and I was like, yeah, cool. I might as well just try being a chef. I've always cooked with my mother. My first job was when I was 14 in a little takeaway store just down the road from where I lived. There was a local restaurant that was famous in our town called, Pedro's. Its a little seafood bistro that is over the river. It hangs over the river, so when the tide comes in, you kind of lay over the water. It had a little fish and chip shop on the side. I started as an apprentice in there. I remember the first day I started, I cut myself really badly. I've still got the scar on my finger. It went straight through because I'd never had a sharp knife before. That was my first day, and I lasted half an hour. And then I went back the next day. I had all the shitty jobs, like shucking oysters. I used to do a hundred dozen a day. I used to have to cook hundreds of kilos of prawns because we used to wholesale them, catch the lobsters out of the lobster tanks. I had to get in there. And they used to wrap around my legs, and you can't touch them because they're expensive. You have to put some fresh water on them.

You were actually in the tank?

Yeah. There's a massive swimming pool full of lobsters that we used to sell. And so that's how I started, in chaos.

That's a fun start though.

Yeah, that was working with a lot of seafood. Then I moved to another restaurant in Penguin called Wild Cafe, which really was one of the best restaurants on the northwest coast at the time. It was like a French Asian fusion restaurant, a 40-seater and packed every day. I was so naive. I like really didn't understand what cheffing was. It broke me. So I thought, fuck it, I'm not going to be a chef anymore. I quit for two months, went back to school to continue studying to be a concert pianist. I told my mum I was moving out of home. And moved out down to Hobart with a few of my mates. That lasted about six months.

How old were you then?

18. I worked there for a nice little pub. And then I ate out at a restaurant called Garagiste, which blew my mind. And I think at that point in my life I thought, oh, why can't I do this? I'm just cooking schnitties and deep-frying fish, why can't I do this? I sat down and ate a beautiful meal. I said to my mum, I'm moving to the mainland. I want to work in these high level restaurants because Garagiste were closing down I think, it was like one of the last few months they were open. I said, I want to do something like that. I'm going to have a restaurant like this by the time I'm 30. She's like, are you serious? I told her, you watch me. And so then I moved to Melbourne and started working at Grossi and I was at Grossi for five years from 2012 to 2017. That's how it all happened.

And tell me about Geranium.

Geranium. That was awesome. I had never wanted to work in a three Michelin star. So when I was working down leche in Puglia. My boss, he was good friends with the general manager of Geranium because he was also he was also Pugliese. He saw me work and he always tried to get me to work at Geranium. But I didnt want to be tweezer chef. I don't want to pick herbs. He kept begging me and begging me and begging me. But I eventually ended up moving to Denmark, but I worked at 108, for the Noma group. I did a little bit of time in Noma, at 108 and then he covid hit and 108 went under. They fired everyone, got rid of everyone. And I got out just before he started getting rid of everyone, which was good. And I said, look, I'll come to Geranium. I was there for a year and a half I think. But that was intense.

So they were still open during Covid?

No, I got there just as we reopened. I was at 108 for the whole time during Covid. Then started at Geranium. Then we went into a second lockdown, which was okay. The second lockdown was only a month, six weeks I think. But the first one was three months. I ended up deciding to go to Geranium because I thought, why not? I'm here. I can learn how to work in a massive group of people. Because I've only ever worked by myself. I've never worked in a big restaurant. I've always been in a section by myself.

How big is the staff?

We had 40 chefs. And then after the second lockdown we had 15. So we were in the shit.

Doing the same amount of covers?

Even more because we started opening up lunches on a vegan restaurant inside the same building with Angelica. So one of your chefs had to go to Angelica and the other one stayed in the section and did mise en place and you just sunk. You start at six o'clock in the morning because by 11 o'clock you had be ready for service. Service finishes at 4.30, and at 5 o'clock there's another full dining room. You had to be like three or four days ahead of your mise en place with your sauces and then just every day just punching and picking herbs.

Do they have the same hierarchy in the kitchens?

Even more. I think it's probably the most amount of labelling that I've seen in the kitchen. Youve Rasmus, who's the executive chef/owner. Then there are two head chefs, two senior sous chefs, six sous chefs. One fridge section and then under that, there's five or six other chefs underneath them. It was insane. And everyone plays a hierarchy card pretty hard.

What were you?

I was just a CdP. But I was the only one allowed to cook during service. Rasmus said that I was Australian. I should know how to use a barbecue. All the little veg was grilled and all the meat was grilled. It was the only cooking ever done in that restaurant. But I was just a senior Chef de parti. I was going to be a sous chef, but I turned it down because I was leaving. I didnt want to take the job of sous chef for two months.

So now you've realised your dream of having your own place.

Yeah. By the time I was 30.

Congratulations.

I stuck to my dream.

And does it feel different when it's your own place?

My own. A lot different. I'm just more relaxed. This place has its stressful times, but I've got no one to impress apart from myself, which is good. I don't have to prove myself to anyone apart from myself, which is good. I spent 15 years of working for someone else and constantly being on edge, constantly making sure that I was doing everything the way they wanted it. Its a relief to be able to do something the way I want it. And I think I'm finding my style. I'm not the most creative person and I don't really have a cooking style yet. I'm still trying to figure that out. But I feel that I cook very simple. I only use very few ingredients in each dish, but I execute it very well. take the ragu, completely destruct everything and then put it back together. I cook the vege separate to the meat and then I put it together. Then I process the vege separate to the meat again. Put it together again. Its flavour structuring. Instead of just all in a pot and then let it go. I just pull it all apart and cook everything perfectly, then bring it together. That's how I like to cook.

It sounds like you really like to know the background and the history of the dishes and so on as well. And that's another layer.

Of course. Especially when it's Italian. Theres so much Italian food out there and we just specialize. Our main focus is Piedmonte, but there are so many dishes in Piedmonte. We could never put them all on. It'd be impossible.

That's exciting though. You're never going to run out.

No, no. The stories behind each dish are cool, how they came to pass, why they are done a certain way? Why is it called a certain way? That's really cool. You just can keep learning. You'll never be bored.

Do you still play the piano?

No. I do sometimes when I go back home to Tassie, for 10 minutes and then I'm done. But I eventually I'll start again. Once I have my own house that I can have a piano in there. I don't want a keyboard. It's not the same. I'm very picky when it comes to them.

Do you want a grand piano?

Just a normal nice upright. Not Yamaha, I don't like the sound.

Okay. So quite picky with pianos too.

Yeah.

And you've had lots of different experiences, not really over a long period. I mean, you're still young. But what would your advice be to a young person who was thinking about becoming a chef?

It's always a tough one because this feels like you're throwing them into the deep end. But, I don't know. Just really, don't go to a restaurant just because of its accolades. I've learned that. Just because they're the best in the world doesn't mean that you learn to be the best. I think, do your research. Find a chef that you like, find a chef that will teach you and who is willing to teach you. I think that makes a difference, because if you have a chef that doesn't want to teach you, you're going to go nowhere. You'll get very frustrated if they're always yelling at you, then, just go. But do your research. Don't follow the crowd. Find a restaurant that really speaks to you, that you know you can get the most out of. And then when you stop learning, move on. You're allowed to leave restaurants. It's hard to do, but you can do it.

Alta Trattoria, 274 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy