Mirco Speri

Hi Mirco, it’s lovely to sit down with you. We’re in Sincero, which is on Glenferrie Road in Malvern. The suburbs change so often along Glenferrie Road. You’re almost right on the corner. 

On the corner of High Street, yes. We’ve been here for just over a year and a half now. 

How’s it been going? 

Oh, it’s been a rollercoaster. At the beginning we were quite busy, but we have found it hard to find a a structure and system, but in the past six months, it’s been very inconsistent in the way that you get a really good week, a really okay week, some bad weeks, but I think probably got to do with the economy, the area, and the way people go out dining has changed as well. That’s right. It’s okay, but it’s been a bit difficult, it keeps us on our your toes. 

How does that compare to the first restaurant? 

Oh, the first restaurant, Buono, has been open five years, that one is a completely different area. It’s down bay side, Parkdale. We opened that one just after COVID. It was pretty good in the beginning because the three owners and me were working and so the wages were quite low. We did a bit of takeaway, but then when we reopened, all the people living in that area came and we were busy, pumping. That one is doing well, but it has been five years and a different area.

You’re surrounded by other places here, so I guess there’s always.

Well, there is a little bit of competition, from Glenferrie Road to High Street, if you go down the block here, there’s a lot of boutiques, a lot of really expensive shops whereas this part is a bit more casual. But there’s a market for the restaurant, it just takes time. With restaurants, you have to give them a couple of years to actually see some results.

I read that Sincero is based around traditional authentic Italian food, but with a forward focus, what does that mean? 

I call it: Italian my way. The classic flavours are there, but we just twist the way that we present them and create them. For example, one of our signature dishes is a seaweed spaghetti. We dehydrate seaweed and there’s actually seaweed in the pasta. And then it’s served with roast fennel and Moreton Bay bugs, a crustacean from Australia, quite popular, and we put blood orange jelly. Fennel and orange is a classic combination in salad or in Sicily, especially, but we just twist it a little. We use Australian seaweed, Australian seafood. It’s a pasta dish, it’s got the Italian flavours, but it’s different. 

So that’s not something you’d see in Italy? 

Oh, I’ve never seen it around, to be honest. It just came to me. We were just talking, trying and we decided to run it as a special in the other restaurant and then when we opened this one, we twisted it and put it on the menu and it’s been on the menu since we opened.

Do you describe Sincero as fine dining? You do have white tablecloths. 

Fine dining is an interesting word because I think it depends on the way you look at it. In Melbourne, in my opinion, and I have worked overseas as well, fine dining restaurants you can count on one hand. There’s not many. Because they might look fine dining with the linen and all dressed up nicely and the service is fantastic, but it’s quite casual compared to places overseas that are more up-market. The other restaurant is more casual. It doesn’t have linen, for example, but I don’t think linen on the table makes it fine dining. Because if you look at Entrecôte, for example, the one we just talked about before, the food they do is pretty casual. It’s like a bistro. It’s not fine dining. When you’ve got steak and chips., it’s not fine dining. Even France Soir in South Yarra; they’ve got linen. They are all dressed up in nicely and it’s beautiful. The food is really good. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s bistro food. 

Right. I see. This is an old building you’re in here. 

It’s pretty old here, and it has been renovated. We renovated the whole thing. The kitchen was already there because there was a restaurant before here. 

It feels old school Italian. 

It does have that little bit of a feeling. They did a really good job with the interior designer. We’ve got a little room upstairs for like eight to ten people, for private dining, and there’s a preparation kitchen as well upstairs. 

The beauty of this job is exactly that: you can come up with recipes. You don’t need to follow recipes all the time. Apart from pastry, obviously, that is different, because there’s chemistry, you can’t just put them all together and put them in the oven there. It has to the correct dosage, but in certain recipes that you’re doing, you can always twist them along the way. And if it doesn’t work, you start again. I like to give it a go.

Mirco Speri, Sincero

We were talking before about the events coming up celebrating regional food, but in general is the menu across all of Italy, rather than regional?

The à la carte menu, yes, there are the classics, twisted a little bit. We have a  Bolognese, for example, on the menu now. We put it on because everyone was asking for it. Everything’s classic from all over. There are 20 regions in Italy, there’s a lot of different food. We’re using a lot of fresh egg pasta that is from Emilia Romagna, but sometimes we do specials with semolina pasta that is more from south of Italy. We have a lot of fish dishes on the menu, but we’ve got a lot of long stew and braises as well, so it’s north and south. There’s a bit of everything. As you mentioned before, we’re doing a regional night: we’re doing four dishes from that region, with four wine matches. It’s quite interesting because we started in the other restaurant doing it, and from the second one, we had to start to do two nights in a row, because we were booked out straight away. They go really well. Tomorrow and the day after, we are doing a Spumante night.

Is the menu a secret?

No. The regional nights are classic. There’s no twisting. It’s just the classic dishes from the region for you to actually experience what the food is from their region. We have Vitello Tonnato to start with, we have agnolotto di magro. Di magro means skinny, but they call it that because it has a vegetarian filling, no meat, no protein. There’s a brasato al barolo with soft polenta. And dessert is a bonet, a custard cooked the bain marie with amaretti biscuit and caramel. It’s very rich, but very, very tasty. 

It’s so great, isn’t it? I think people do love that idea of really discovering a region and going into it in depth and having those cosy, traditional dishes. 

It’s interesting because we have actually discovered a lot of new little things, that we didn’t know, the chefs and the front of house sommelier. For example, two weeks ago, the other restaurant, we did a Valle d’Aosta night. That’s a little region up north, near France, in Italy. And it was a fascinating when we started to actually come up with the menu, we discovered dishes we didn’t even know about. We tried and tested them, and then they worked and we got the wine too. We try to do this every couple of months. We alternate between the restaurants. 

It sounds fun for you as well. How do you find out about those things? Do you look at books or online? 

Books and online and obviously a lot of the food that we use comes from certain regions that we know already. But others, we just need to research, because obviously there are some famous regions in Italy for food, like Tuscany, Sicily, Sardinia, Emilia Romagna. But when you start to go elsewhere, for example, Basilicata, or Abruzzo, Valle d’Aosta, there’s a little bit more research to be done because you don’t get to know the food unless you come from that region. As Italians, we obviously research and we’re doing as much research as possible to find out what comes from their region as well in the wine as well. It’s quite interesting. 

I find that really fascinating because when I spoke to Giorgio from That’s Amore cheese and he’s become famous for his burrata, but he said when he first moved to Australia, that he had never even heard of Burrata because it’s not from his region. I was surprised about that, but it’s good to hear you say that as well. 

I’ve known Giorgio for many, many years, pretty much since he came here. Mozzarella started from Campania, but Burrata is from Puglia. 

That’s right, and he’s from further south, I think. So then when you’re having these kinds of twists in ideas, obviously you talked about fennel and orange going together and then you started thinking about what you could do with that. Are you someone that has lots of notebooks when you’re having your ideas? 

Oh, I write everything down because my brain is like a sieve. There’s a lot of things going on in it, but certain things, when they cross my mind, I have to write them down or I forget. It could be maybe when we do preparation or could be when I read a book or could be if I watch something on YouTube or a food channel, they might doing something and I think about something else and I got a little notebook then bring with me. I put notes in my phone too. And then later on, we try them, or we twist them. Because the beauty of this job is exactly that: you can come up with recipes. You don’t need to follow recipes all the time. Apart from pastry, obviously, that is different, because there’s chemistry, you can’t just put them all together and put them in the oven there. It has to be the correct dosage, but in certain recipes that you’re doing, you can always twist them along the way. And if it doesn’t work, you start again. I like to give it a go. But yeah, notes everywhere for me, on my phone, in my little book or even in the car. Because I can’t remember my ideas. They come up to me like that and then, you know, boom, gone. 

That’s right. I often have ideas as I’m drifting off to sleep and I always think, oh, I’ll definitely remember this tomorrow and then I definitely do not remember it. I need to have notebooks too. How often do you change the menu? 

We change the special a la carte menu is every season. So four times a year. There’s certain dishes that we keep on all the time. We always have a fish on, we always have steaks on, but we might change the garnish. Now we have a linguini on the menu. We were in The Age on Sunday with it and then that one is something that I don’t think we’re never going to change again, because we just sell too many. But yes, every three months, depending on the season. Then the specials, we run separate from à la carte, we change them every couple of weeks. We only operate five days a week. We close Sunday, Monday. So we do a meat special, we do a fish special, we do a pasta special, we do an oyster special. Then it’s on the menu, but they change every couple of weeks when the à la carte is every three months: spring, summer, all, and winter. 

For me, Italian food is not about getting white asparagus from Bassano del grappa, in Italy, and flying it over here in 24 hours to use them. It’s about using good produce where you are. So I’m using Moreton Bay bugs because they are from here, I’m using asparagus in the season because they’re from Victoria. I’m using the Spud Sisters potatoes because they are only from up the road. It’s about using local produce and treating it simply, and that’s Italian food for me. It’s not using Italian produce from Italy. It’s about using good produce. Then you go from there.

Mirco Speri, Sincero

I saw you’ve got an express lunch is that popular. 

That s a real draw card, that one. Because for a lot of people, it’s good value. The really tricky part of it is, when customers sit down and have the $50 menu with a glass of wine, they always want a second glass of wine and they may have desserts after it. So they always end up spending a little bit more than the $50. But it’s good value because you get two courses and a glass of wine. 

That’s right. And that’s their choice too. Obviously they’re having a good time. 

There’s a fixed entrée. Normally we always have a bruschetta for lunch, and we just change the topping. We sell a lot of bruschetta because people know what to expect. You can put whatever on it. It’s like a pizza. They like it. It can either be tomato, pumpkin, whatever. Then you have a choice of pasta, fish and meat and you have a glass of wine. If you go to a bar and have a glass of wine, it’s $17 just for the wine and then you get an entrée with it for 50 bucks, it’s pretty good. We sell a lot. Only Friday, Saturday, we do lunches. 

Nice. How do you find the produce here? I spoke to another Italian chef who I won’t name, and he said that he laments the produce here, that you have to do a lot to it to bring out the flavours and that Italian produce is much better. 

You can’t compare it. Because you’re in a different country. They have not been growing vegetables and fruit in Australia as long as it’s been growing in Europe. I’m not just saying Italy. And obviously, the way that they grow and the land, the nutrition and the vegetable from the land, you can’t compare it. It’s completely different. There’s a different atmosphere, the microclimate in Italy is the Mediterranean Sea. There’s nowhere else like it in the world. You can’t compare the vegetables, but there are awesome vegetables here as well, that you can’t find in Italy. There’s a lot of beautiful produce when it comes to seafood, especially that we can’t get over there. For me, Italian food is not about getting white asparagus from Bassano del grappa, in Italy, and flying it over here in 24 hours to use them. It’s about using good produce where you are. So I’m using Moreton Bay bugs because they are from here, I’m using asparagus in the season because they’re from Victoria. I’m using the Spud Sisters potatoes because they are only from up the road. It’s about using local produce and treating it simply, and that’s Italian food for me. It’s not using Italian produce from Italy. It’s about using good produce. Then you go from there. And yes, answering your question, are the vegetables different? Of course they are, because obviously it’s a different climate, different land. Everything is different. So it obviously tastes different. 

That’s right. I think tomatoes are such a prime example. I feel like when I eat tomatoes in restaurants, they’re really delicious, but tomatoes you buy from the supermarket don’t really have any flavour. Someone was saying to me the other day that tomatoes really need many hours of sunshine, and we don’t have many hours of sunshine consistently. It is a much smaller window for that in Victoria. 

Also there is such a demand for vegetables and transportation as well so vegetables are picked before they’re actually ready to eat for shelf life as well. So that’s why, as you say, when you buy it from the supermarket or you grow the tomato in the garden, then you pick it, then it’s ripe and you eat it, it’s always going to taste different. Because the vegetable, it can be a piece of fruit or a vegetable grows and ripens on the tree, naturally. Obviously it’s going to taste better than picking it when it’s almost still green a little bit to ripen in the coolroom because with transportation, it takes days to move them pack them and all that. 

The joy that you get, as you say, when you have picked a tomato off your own vine or an apricot in season, those kinds of things, that’s the real joy of eating food, I think, but it’s tricky when you’re in a city. 

It’s tricky because obviously you can’t do that. You can do it in a small version. You can grow your little herbs. You can still have a plant or tomato on the balcony of the apartment, it can be done, but you’re limited. I remember when I was little, my nonna had a garden, not very big, but everything we ate, we picked it out of the garden. There were only three or four of us eating, because she had a house completely separated from my mum and dad. And when I was tiny, when I was five, six, I was going up there to help doing things, she had cauliflower, eggplant, tomato, salad, lettuce. Beautiful. 

Delicious. Now, speaking of you as a child, I read somewhere that you are one of those chefs that always knew from a young age that you wanted to be a chef. Is that correct? 

True story. To cut a long story short, my mum is an awesome cook, very basic, not very experimental, but she is very good. Now she is older, so she doesn’t cook as much anymore. My dad used to have a panel beating shop and his best friend was the head of the vegetable and fruit market in Verona. So towards the weekend, when stuff didn’t sell, he would bring trays of peaches, I remember it like it was yesterday. Sometimes came home with two or three trays of peaches, two or three trays of strawberries, a box of cherries, whatever was in season and my mum preserved them or we’d get pumpkin and we’d be doing ravioli, or we’d put fruit in booze or in grappa, my brother still does that. Or peaches, we cleaned them, washed them and put them in syrup. That’s where I think the passion started for me for food. When I hit 14 and I finished school, I chose to go to cooking school. It was completely different to school. I did three years of cooking theoretical and practical, and I did two years extra. It was more technical about what’s behind the restaurant, behind the hotel, how to run it and all that kind of stuff. I finished school in 1996 and then I started to do chefing full time and I never turned back. Over 30 years now. 

Wow, that’s amazing. And you’ve worked in Michelin Star restaurants? 

Yes, when I finished school, I did a few seasons on the lake because where I come from in Italy is a little town in the Valpolicella area not far away from Garda Lake, a big lake in the north of Italy. When I finished school in the late nineties, it was a very busy lake, with tourists, it still is now, but much more back then. I did a few seasons there and then luckily through a friend, I got a chance to go and work on a cruise ship for seven months around Central America, North America and South America. When I came back from there, I took a little bit of a break and through a friend of mine that I met on the cruise ship. I went to London for two years to work in Stefano Cavallini restaurant. It was so cool, it’s not there anymore. The Halkin Hotel. He is the first Italian chef to have a Michelin star restaurant in London. After that, through him, I went in France, to the South of France, Cannes, for another two years. There was a Richard neat, an English chef, very good. He used to be the right hand man of Joël Robuchon, and I worked there about 20 months. An English chef with a Michelin star in France was very unique. Then when I was in the South of France, I met a lot of Kiwis and a lot of Aussies. A lot of them, because most of them worked on private boats back then. Unfortunately, the restaurant closed because the couple divorced. So then I thought, let’s go and try Australia. I was 23, 24 years of age, quite young. I just got a tourist visa, came down here. I’m still here 23 years later. 

Was there a culture shock when you first got here? 

23 years ago, you would hardly hear Italian spoken in the streets. Then after when there was the economic crash in Europe, there were a lot of Italians coming over. But back then it was it was very different from Europe, very different from England and France, and London, the food culture. They were years behind compared to the food they used to do in Italy back then, or in France in London. I couldn’t find anywhere where you could eat woodfire pizza, when I came here in 2002. And mozzarella, they didn’t even know what that was. You couldn’t find prosciutto. But not just that, just the way people ate or the perception of Italian food to Australians. Obviously that has to do with knowledge. For example, the chicken parmigiana, you know, it’s not an Italian thing. I never heard of that before. And don’t get me wrong, I love them because they’re great, but it’s not an Italian thing. 

No. I lived in the south of France for a year in the nineties. I’m originally from Christchurch in New Zealand and I thought all the food was so amazing, we didn’t have anything like it. The food scene in New Zealand was not great in the 80s and 90s and now, like here it’s really taken off. Thank goodness. Especially, as you say, you, living in the south of France, the produce there was amazing. I was in a small town called Châteaurenard and they had a Marché d’Interêt National, so they were shipping all these beautiful tomatoes and things off to other parts of the country and the rest of Europe. So different. It’s come a long way.

Oh, it has come a long way and in a very good way as well. As much as people complain about people immigrating here, they bring a lot of their culture and food and actually the proper food from where they come from. It’s not just butter chicken and rice in India. There’s so much more in any country. South America has so many countries and the food is completely different, not just from country to country, but from region to region. It’s fascinating because you never stop learning. There’s the beautiful thing of this job as well.  As you said before, you’ve got this Indian guy who has opened up a restaurant and he wanted to do South American food. There’s nothing wrong with that if he’s passionate about it. 

Apart from the fact that you’re learning all the time, what else do you love about being a chef? Is it the thrill of service? Is it the creativity? 

I think at the early stage, it gave me the chance to travel a lot. And I did. Then when I landed here, I became a father and then of course, that has slowed down a little bit. I can’t travel and go around as I used to be when I was 25 or 26. That I think is probably one of the main things in the early stages. The most important, I think is that you never stop learning. There is always a new ingredient you can find, there is always a new recipe that you can try or something that you can twist or something that you can combine with another culture in your culture and it works, or a different technique to cook something. And then you get to meet so many people. People from different cultures, different languages, different ideas, different ways of seeing things. There’s always something new. It can be a person that you meet, an idea, a new vegetable, a new fish, a new way, a new technique. Your day is never boring. You’re not sitting in front of the computer; there’s always something exciting around the corner. I guess those are probably the three main reasons: travelling, meeting people, and learning and getting to see different and new things all the time. 

I’ve read that you really enjoy mentoring young people coming up through the ranks. What would your advice be to a young person starting out in the industry? 

My advice to any young person is to pull your sleeves up and be prepared to work hard, and have a great attitude. Because attitude is a very important key factor of front of house, back of house, kitchen and it can be in any job as well, not just hospitality. If you go in with the ride attitude and are prepared to learn, you’re already 50% in it, in any job, I think. I spend more time with my sous chef than my son. I prefer to open a book that is empty and I can write in what I want than get a book that is already written – metaphorically – and if it’s already written, but it’s not written properly, it’s very hard to fix that. In Italy, we’ve got a saying, you put a stick next to the plant when it’s little, so it grows straight. When it has already grown, you can’t put the stick in because the plant is bent, you can’t get it back up the same. In general, with someone starting work in any industry, if you get to train them and they’re happy to learn your great attitude, then there you’re already over halfway done. In both ways, me when I’m training you and you as the one who is learning. 

Sincero, Glenferrie Road, Malvern