Not only did Nacho regale me with stories of the history of Spanish cuisine, his competitive nature and the technique for perfect paella, he also fed me. Nacho is right, you can't really understand a chef until you've eaten his food. Having devoured Nacho's croqueta de Jamon Serrano and his Salmon Curado of marinated salmon, roasted and pickled beets, and goats cheese, what I understand of this passionate chef is his absolute love of discovering and sharing flavours, textures and excellent produce.
It’s beautiful in here. I’ve driven past so many times and thought that it looked great but I haven’t been in.
It looks so cosy and warm and stylish, doesn’t it?
Walking in, it smells so delicious as well.
We are about comfort food. Our aim is to cook as freshly as possible, to cook traditional food, of course with a modern twist. We look for roots and tradition here. If you ask for a croqueta, you’ll eat a croqueta. If you ask for a tortilla, the eggs will be free-range, the potato is slowly cooked in olive oil, the garlic is good. We do the basics but they are well executed with good produce.
How long have you been cooking?
About 10 years. I started in Barcelona in a hospitality college. I did the degree there and when I finished, in the meanwhile I was working in a Michelin star restaurant to pay for my studies. As you can imagine it’s hard when you first start out in Barcelona. I was working for guys who push upwards and there were so many things I didn’t understand yet; the cleanliness, the commitment, the rush. At the beginning it all seems hard but once you understand those things you can make a career and move on.
I think the industry self-selects from the beginning. If you love it, you can manage all those things; you can get through working weekends and not seeing your family, traveling and being alone. All those things at the beginning are hard but then they become part of your experience and it’s not hard for me now.
Did you always want to be a chef?
No. I wanted to be a biologist. I went to university but the chemistry and maths at that level were really hard for me. They seemed abstract to me and I didn’t do well. I went to the UK for a year to learn English and to have a break in my life. I started to cook for myself and discovered that I liked it. I went back to Spain and started the process of college and stages and apprenticeships.
Did you learn about Spanish cooking, or French techniques in Barcelona?
I worked with both during my studies. One was a Catalan Michelin starred chef called Nandu Jubany who has a lot of influence in the Catalonia region and he has always had three Michelin stars and is the group of the good chefs. He has a knowledge of the Catalan base that is very strong. He is also a very demanding chef so you learn a lot from him. You learn Catalan cuisine, how to move fast, how to organise big events, like a wedding in the restaurant for 300 serving top level food. The other chef was French, Neichel, who was the father of El Bulli before Ferran Adrià. He was asked by the owners of El Bulli to come from France. At the time he was with Alain Chapel, a great chef. He was at El Bulli and from there he went to Barcelona. He had two Michelin stars in Barcelona for 40 years and eventually he was getting old and he lost one. When I was with him he had already lost the star. But he was like the teacher of all the teachers. He is like Paul Bocuse in France. Every well-known chef knows of him or has worked or learned with him. He is a master of masters. He taught me classic French cuisine; how to work with mushrooms, how to stuff a chicken. But he had olive oil in his kitchen, so it wasn’t too buttery for me in my first contact with French cuisine. It was my first experience working with French food but already there was olive oil, which was good.
I lived in the South of France for a year and they said there was a line under Lyon and once you crossed it, you swapped butter and cream for olive oil.
Yes, it’s a little part of history actually because half of the south of France was Catalan territory and that’s why you see olive oil and those things so much down there. Also in France they eat snails and mushrooms and it’s the same in Spain, in the Pyrenees, the mountains. They both have a culture of weird food. You wouldn’t see those things ten years ago in some places. If I brought a snail to Australia, people will not eat it. Mushrooms are in fashion now. You brought pine trees over for wind protection and now you have mushrooms. When I was in the UK they didn’t eat mushrooms it’s not in their culture.
Even offal isn’t appreciated so much by Australians and New Zealanders although it is starting to be more popular. In France, there was a lot of offal.
Oh yes, in Spain and France we eat the tongue, tripe, and the cheeks, which are amazing and actually we do them here. Cheeks are less confronting maybe.
Cheeks are ok, but kidneys and liver and brain.
If I say liver, no, but if I say foie gras, maybe. Sometimes because of the name, we have this idea about food. There was a good chef who was an enemy of Ferran Adrià, who was doing modern cuisine with chemicals and Santi Santamaria who lived in the mountains and had three Michelin stars but without the chemicals. He was very against molecular cuisine and he said that we need to get used to eating everything naturally and tasting all the ingredients we can find in the world in nature and then we can know a lot of different flavours and know about everything. He never said No to anything.
That’s one of the philosophies I have; I never say No to anything. I might cook something and fail but I will find a way to cook it. If it’s too acid, maybe I can cook it in milk, if it’s too strong, I can put it in wine maybe. It’s like game, you don’t put game directly into the pan. There needs to be a process; some celeriac, some herbs, some wine and some cognac and leave it two or three days and then it’s ok to eat. I think it’s the same with other parts of the body. You need to know how to work with them otherwise they can be too strong in flavour. Then you have a bad memory of that food being strong and you won’t eat it again.
That’s one of the philosophies I have; I never say No to anything. I might cook something and fail but I will find a way to cook it.
Are you using local ingredients but cooking them in a traditionally Spanish way?
Yes. We have two Spanish suppliers and we get our ham from them, and our wines and cheeses. Certain products come from Spain but the rest is from here. We use Gamekeepers. They have really good products. We use their wagyu and their pork cheeks; they are beautiful, so fatty inside. They are not from animals who have been confined. Those animals, I can tell because the fat goes to the outside corers. When the animals have been treated properly, the skin is different, the meat is a different colour and the fat has a different concentration. It’s a really nice piece of meat, but you have to cook it for a long time. We cook here by law over 65°. I would go a few degrees lower in Spain because it makes the meat so tender. Low for long temperatures isn’t science; it’s the classic style. We cook it for one to two days at that low heat. We serve that with a cauliflower puree, a wild mushroom sauce with cinnamon. And we finish the dish with a chorizo crumble. We do dishes like that. It’s simplicity because we have five or six ingredients and we don’t want to go crazy, because we don’t have the time and the staff. We have a high volume of guests coming through each day.
Who is coming here? Is it locals?
Most of them are locals. The people who live in Hawthorn and Kew have lived here for a long time. They’re established suburbs. They don’t just come here once by mistake. Then we have people from other neighbourhoods from Elwood, Brighton. We are not on the list of cheap restaurants because we are not cheap but we have good products. We start from scratch every day. That’s why I can only do one service. It takes me several hours in the day to get ready for the evening service. If we were open for lunch too, it would be a rush and it would be shit, because we are only a small team. You need to have time to deliver a proper service.
Also wherever I have been, I treat it as thought is my own. I check the lights and the toilet paper, the glasses and the cleanliness of the floor. You can see we are a very clean team, thank god. The kitchen is the same; all the corners and under things. We are all in the same boat here and it is really great to work with my team.
Tell me about the Paella competition you were in recently.
It was crazy because I don’t do paella. It’s not from Catalonia. They are made in Valencia. There are a lot of rules for making paella, not only the texture of the rice, but the colour and how you roast the meat. There are 20 small things you need to do perfectly to make a good paella.
What made you take part in the competition?
I’m really competitive myself. Even knowing I wasn’t going to win, because those guys live from paella. That’s what they make in Melbourne and on top of that they are from Valencia, from the country who invented this dish, so they have a certain advantage. My training was two weeks here, starting at four or five o’clock in the morning. The first paella I made, I thought, whoa, it’s not that easy to get all those things right.
When you make a paella just for one or two people in a small pan, like we have here, it’s quite easy but when you have a huge paella, everything changes. There are different points of heat underneath. You have more rice and more water. You need the proper amount of water to rice.
I’ll tell you how it works because there is a technique to the dish. Basically you put in a lot of olive oil and brown the meat. Then you put in the vegetables, then you put in the garlic but be careful because it can burn, then you put the paprika in and then add the water. Now you have to reduce the water. This is your stock and you have to know when you have the right amount of stock to add the rice. By theory, it’s 80 grams of rice per person. So there are a lot of things you need to take into consideration when you make paella.
Actually we did well, the jury told me that the rice was cooked well, the meat was tender, the spices were all good, but for the training weeks we had just used saffron and for the competition, a guy gave us a colorant to use and I used too much. So it was too bright. It was a mistake to use that colorant. But next year I’m going to win, for sure. We learned a lot and we were happy.
555 Burwood Road, Hawthorn