Nic Phillips

Conversation with a chef: Hi Nic, it’s lovely to meet you. We’re in this beautiful, vaulted room in the basement of Lucia.

Nic Phillips: We are. It’s very hidden away down here, very private.

It’s a private dining room, and it can open up into one big, long one, but then it also has this beautiful door that shuts.

Exactly. So we can make it into two separate rooms, small little dining spaces.

The sound is exceptional.

It’s definitely got good acoustics. We actually had some ballerinas dancing down here a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had some very interesting functions down here, but it’s been good.

Do you have to run food down here?

No, we have a separate kitchen purely set up for the vault. We run the meals out of there.

I was just sitting upstairs before, and it’s so beautiful and very calm, even though it’s right on Kings Way. It’s a very busy road out there, but you’d never even know. It’s been built very well, and I assume all those acoustics were thought about when we were building it. And the beautiful windows. The curve is so lovely. So the traffic just becomes kind of like a mesmerising river passing by.

But it’s not something you notice either. And that’s what we try to bring to each individual guest experience. It’s pretty grand when they walk in, the big steel ball out the front, and it’s like a massive hotel foyer. They come in, and we create that experience for the customer. It takes them away from the busy roads and the city centre.

You’re very close to the city, aren’t you? But in South Melbourne. How many does the dining room seat?

Upstairs, if we’re trying to cram people in, which we don’t try to do, we try to make it more relaxed and easygoing so they can feel comfortable up there, it’s about 80 people. Down here I think we’ve pushed it out to about 38 when we’ve opened up the vault completely.

It’s Mediterranean, maybe leaning towards Italian.

All us owners here, partners at Lucia, come from a background of Italian restaurants, and some of them are even Italian background. So our leaning has come from the Italian side of food culture. However, the way it is these days, especially in Australia, you’re getting chefs from every single culture throughout the world. What we try to do is harness those individual personal relationships that the chefs have with food. We try not to confine that to just Italian, and allow them to have the flair to show that on the plate, but obviously we try to harness it and direct it in the same way. We’re not saying that we’re every single food, but we’re Mediterranean with a little bit of flair from here and there throughout the world. That’s the best way we find to do it.

How does that look on the menu? If I’m coming in and I want to have the absolute Lucia experience. What would you recommend?

I’d start off with something, and this goes back to letting each chef have their own individual flair shown on the menu. We do the crudo of the day now, and that gets us chefs inspired. It lets us use the produce that’s in season and the freshest seafood. It doesn’t mean that, when we’re ordering, we order thousands of kilos of fish and have the same fish every day. We get to use what’s in season, what’s fresh. Especially with the crudo, you want that freshness of the seafood to shine on the plate and allow the chefs to put their flair onto that as well.

But again, my approach with the chefs is that we want them to show a whole heap of flair and ambition, but we’ve got to guide them. We tell them all the time it’s got to be approachable. We don’t want to put 3,000 things on a dish. The food has to shine itself. We can play with the flavours and that type of thing.

I would go with the crudo, maybe even share a lobster taco that we do, which is a bit different. It’s not a taco in the sense of your traditional Mexican flatbread. The shell is actually made out of kohlrabi. We shave it on a slicer, really thin, and we dunk it into really ice-cold water, and then it naturally curls up like a taco shell. It’s very fresh, very clean, because we don’t do too much to the kohlrabi. The kohlrabi itself is there, and then we pick lobster meat and mix it with a tequila dressing with citrus. Again, the tequila, it’s a South American sort of thing. We have South American chefs and that’s where it’s come from. It’s light, fresh, a bit of lime caviar on top as well. They’re probably two things I’d start with, very light and fresh. And then we do a lot of house-made pastas here. That would probably come back to that whole Italian thing.

We make all our pastas on site, and the chefs get a lot of enjoyment out of making their own filled pastas and different shapes of pasta, studying from around the world. There are new shapes of pasta turning up all the time. It’s not just your linguines and your pennes and your spaghetti. There are whole new styles that they get to play with.

How often are you changing those?

We change fairly regularly, every couple of months. Again, we want to create that space where the chefs can feel creative. If they’re not able to feel creative, then we can’t change the menu as much. That’s what we try to do. Our seafood pastas are probably the ones we’ve found we really do well with. At the moment we have a Moreton Bay bug and crab linguine on the menu, and that’s something that’s really flying off the shelves, I guess.We’ve also in the past done a prawn caramelle. It was basically like the old Fantale sweet. It was more about the chefs bringing it to us and saying, ‘We want to try this.’ And we said, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ That was another one that flew off the shelves, and it’s really exciting. I don’t want to be one of those chefs who tells every chef what to do and what to cook. I want to be able to help them bring their ideas to the customer.

My approach with the chefs is that we want them to show a whole heap of flair and ambition, but we’ve got to guide them. We tell them all the time it’s got to be approachable. We don’t want to put 3,000 things on a dish. The food has to shine itself. We can play with the flavours and that type of thing.

Nic Phillips, Lucia

The other thing we do, through Gamekeepers, one of our suppliers, they provide us with great meat, and we do a lot of steaks here. A lot of steaks shared in the middle, a lot of large steaks, one-kilo Chateaubriands, rib-eyes. With those we generally don’t do too much. We just cook them well, treat them the best way we know how to.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s always been steak night at the pub, obviously a classic favourite, but I do feel like diners are asking for it. People want steak. They want meat. Maybe people are going more plant-based in their home lives, and then they come out to a restaurant and you guys know how to cook steak. I think I’m a good cook, but I just can’t cook steak at home the way I have it in a restaurant.

I can’t cook it at home the way I would cook it in a restaurant setting either. For me, it’s a lot about the strength of the gas. You don’t get that high sear on the steak. The whole point of a steak is getting that Maillard reaction, that caramelisation of the meat. Unless you put your pan on at home and leave it there for an hour and heat it up really hot, it’s hard to get that because generally the strength of the home gas isn’t there. You can probably get it outside on the barbie a bit more, but it’s very hard on the old-school gas stove at home.

Interesting. Do you decide the cuisson?

We giver diners the choice?

What do people mainly like? Medium rare? Rare?

Generally it’s medium rare, we find. That’s also the way the chefs love to cook their meat. But I’m a bit, maybe I’m going to say old-fashioned, although maybe old-fashioned is the opposite. For me, a good steak is a good steak. A well-done good cut of meat, or a good-quality piece of meat, is better than a poor-quality well-done piece of meat.

Absolutely. So it’s really personal preference. I feel like blue is quite hard to do well.

It is technical, and it actually takes a lot longer than people would think. It’s not just, ‘Oh, you don’t cook them much, they’ll be out in five minutes.’ It’s almost as long as a well-done steak. You really have to get it to room temperature, a deep room temperature, and then really quickly sear it off. It’s almost like a Japanese-style seared tuna. There’s not much to a blue steak, but it’s definitely not as easy and as quick as people might think. ‘We’ll go in for a quick steak, order a blue, it’ll come out quick.’ No.

Good point. And in terms of sauces with the steaks?

We have our classic red wine jus, done all over the world, but that takes time and days to prepare. The effort that gets put into it! Liquid gold is what we call it. You don’t want to stuff it up because it takes another three days to get it ready. You roast the bones off, cook them. We cook the stock overnight and then we’ve got to reduce it down, and probably the next day we flavour it and get the red wine in there. It’s a little bit of a process, but it’s also the difference between a good one and an amazing one. The amount of effort you put into it is what you get out of it. That’s another thing with the young chefs, trying to explain to them and show them: you get what you put in. It’s not always about just getting the job done. It’s about treating the products well, and the end product will be better for it.

And maybe also it’s about educating front of house as well. As you were saying that about making it with the bones and everything, I’ll tell you, a long time ago when I was working as a waitress in Christchurch, we had to go and put all the recycling things out. The stove was right by the outside door, and I went past the stove where there was this big pot. They’d done all the bones the day before, and it was like the second day. My apron caught on the handle and I pulled it over. I was fine. Those chefs were not even concerned about whether I was! Now I understand even more, hearing you say that. It’s all coming back to me, how upset they were. And of course they were!

There’s been plenty of stories, and I’ve had it happen to me a couple of times. I remember one time, and I always say to my guys now, every time something disastrous happens, ‘You’ve killed my Christmas.’ Because there was one year where a head chef of mine had asked someone in the kitchen to strain the stock. He strained the stock, the liquid went away and he kept the bones. And the head chef was, ‘You’ve killed my Christmas.’ I always remember that. Every time someone makes a big mistake, it’s like, ‘You’ve killed my Christmas.’

How many different cuts of meat have you got?

We change all the time. We use Sher Wagyu as well, and that’s on the menu as our tenderloin, our fillet, I guess you’d call it. Apart from that, we also use Southern Ranges meat. Then the biggest steaks we change all the time. Whatever we can get our hands on, whatever’s good at the moment. It’s not always that you can come in and get a T-bone, for instance, or a big one-kilo T-bone, or the Chateaubriands. We change it weekly, basically. At the end of the day, we just try to treat the meat as best as we can and let it speak for itself.

We try to keep that with our food in general. As I said before, not a thousand ingredients to make it look good. Treat every ingredient to its potential and let that work. That ties back to all the chefs’ ambitions, because they can have a lot of ambitions, and they want to do this and that, but it’s also got to be practical. It’s hard sometimes. They’ve got to remember we’ve got a service to do. If one dish takes five minutes to prepare and put up, it might not be practical for us when we’re doing resets of 80 people at night and we’ve got the functions downstairs. It’s not necessarily telling them no, but reminding them it’s not just about what they can do and what they want to produce. It’s also got to be approachable for the guests. There’s no point doing an amazing dish where all the chefs think it’s awesome, but there are no customers who want to order it.

I really love the way you’ve been talking about the team. It feels very much like a team, that everyone’s got this input. How big is this team?

In the kitchen here there’s about 20, so it’s quite large. But we also have to remember that at times we’ve got two kitchens running. We’ve got the downstairs kitchen and the upstairs kitchen, and then we might have a big function upstairs. Tonight you and I are sitting in this beautiful vault! But it’s all about flexibility as well. The old days of chefs working 90 hours, you can’t factor that in anymore. You’ve got to have work-life balance. What I tell my chefs all the time is, ‘Happy chefs means happy food means happy customers.’ You’ve got to factor that in. You can’t just work them to the bone anymore. They’ve got to have a life outside of work.

It’s a real brigade, isn’t it? Twenty! That’s old school. I like it. And when you’re talking about different people having their ideas, talk me through menu creation. Do you all sit down together? Or is it that people have come up with things along the way and you’ve gone, ‘Okay, we’ll get back to you’?

It’s funny, in this new age now everyone’s got their WhatsApp groups and all that. Generally we do try to sit down and all do it, but with such a big brigade it’s hard to do that. There are times when we all get together, probably more on the big menu changes. But a lot of it’s through the WhatsApp groups and messages. It’s not something I’m used to, and I’m starting to learn more about it. It helps too, especially with two kitchens. We can talk from upstairs and downstairs without actually having to come down and check if they’re all right. We tried the walkie-talkies at one point, but that wasn’t as practical as we’d hoped.

Do you have a dedicated pastry chef?

Yes. Downstairs, with the vault kitchen, the other half is where the pastry is set up, and we service the whole restaurant from that area. The poor waiters always have to come down, but we do work as a team, and if it’s busy and we’ve got the time then we do take it up to them. Again, it’s all about that teamwork. We have a dedicated pastry team here. And you’re probably going to ask about that, the Chocolate Coffee and Bourbon?

That viral sensation! Did you know it was going to go viral?

No, not at all.

It literally pops up on my Instagram. It’s my algorithm. It’s amazing!

We’ve even done slightly different versions of it, but even the flavours of the Chocolate Coffee and Bourbon are something the customers love a lot. We’ve done a burnt honey one with a honey parfait sort of flavour inside it, but they’re all like, ‘It’s good, it’s amazing, but when are you bringing back the other one?’ So I think that one’s here to stay.

I don’t think you can get rid of that! And things like that, though, you’ve driven over from Scoresby today. Is that a dessert that would work in Scoresby?

I’d love to bring it over there, but the kitchen’s set up a bit differently there. The funny thing is, the way we actually make that dessert is on an old record player. We’re literally putting each individual one on and turning the record player on and piping the meringue around it as it turns. It’s not a practical one for everywhere, but the fact that we have that space down here to be able to produce it is great.

I guess my question is, does the neighbourhood influence what you put on the menu?

Absolutely. And that’s something we’re still learning here at Lucia. We’ve been open for about two and a half years, but I think only recently we’re starting to learn a bit more about what the neighbourhood in South Melbourne really wants from their restaurant. This is the closest restaurant our group’s had to the city, so it was a bit more of a learning curve for us. We’ve made some mistakes here and there, but I think now we’re starting to find that level of consistency and, again, finding that level of approachable. I keep coming back to that, but that’s something we’re really focused on this year. Whereas beforehand we probably reached for the stars a bit too much, tried to be something that maybe we weren’t at the heart of us. I think we’re getting back now to the heart of us as business owners and pushing that through the business itself. Definitely a learning curve, and we’re starting to get back in touch with us.

And so your role: you’re a co-owner, and would you say executive chef over the two venues?

It’s funny. I spent last year here pretty much on and off, the majority of the time, but I wouldn’t say I’m the one executive chef. In our group there are actually nine owners, and six of them have backgrounds in waiting and service, and there’s three of us who are chefs. We actually all worked together at one restaurant, all nine of us at one point. It was called Sette Bello in Glen Waverley. That’s where the journey began. We all have that general respect for each other. I wouldn’t say that if I wanted to do this, I’m going ahead and doing it. We make the decision as a group. Again, going back to that team, it’s got to be that team environment. I think that’s what works best for us, otherwise, if you can’t work together, it’s never going to work.

Where did it all start for you? Have you got an Italian background as well?

No, I don’t actually. I’m only one of, I think, two of our owners who don’t have an Italian background. One of the other chefs is from Malaysia.

When you were growing up, did food play a role in your family home? What was happening?

I got into food because my mum had MS. Towards the end of every day, she would start to get a bit more tired. She was still walking around and mobile, but she had a slow-moving form of it, and I would start helping her with dinners. I was about ten years old helping her with dinners, and then I found myself enjoying it a lot. I used to watch *Ready Steady Cook* and *Yan Can Cook* on TV, and Rick Stein, all that sort of thing. By the time we got to choosing a career, I knew what I wanted to do.

The way I found myself in that Italian thing was the first job I ever got, at a little Italian restaurant called Giancarlo in Beaumaris. My first job was only me, a first-year apprentice, the head chef and two old Italian guys out the front. That’s how it started. I didn’t know what risotto was. Rice to me, at home with my English mother, was boiled rice. It really did open my eyes to a new world in terms of food.

And hospitality, I guess, with old-school Italians as well.

Yes, 100 per cent. I was a young 17-year-old, a bit arrogant and silly and stupid, and the old-school Italians definitely taught me a few things about life. But I wouldn’t take it back for a second. I’m really happy I started there because it was only a small restaurant. They treated me like family.

Can you remember that 17-year-old? Did you have plans? Did you think, ‘This is what I want to do, I want to be one of those chefs on TV,’ or ‘I want to have my own restaurant,’ or ‘I want to travel the world’? What were you thinking?

At that age I knew I wanted to be a chef, but it wasn’t, ‘One day I want to…’ I guess I thought about it, but it wasn’t a plan, ‘These are my goals.’ It was more about learning about food, the realisation that food could be anything and there was so much to learn about it.

And as a 17-year-old you’d be missing out on parties and nights out and all of that. What did you love about it that kept you in it at that stage?

The creativity. I was always a very hands-on sort of kid. I couldn’t sit in a classroom and focus on things. I always had to do something on my own, whether it was art or building or gardening. I felt that was more my place. In the kitchen there was always something to do, whether it was washing dishes or creating a dish or learning about food. That was something that really opened my mind.

From that little Italian place, you were in London. What was the pathway to London?

I finished my apprenticeship and did about three or four years as a chef. Because my mum’s English, I found myself wanting to travel overseas. I followed chefs like Gordon Ramsay, and I wanted to go over there and work for a while. I was over there for nearly two years. I loved the work over there, definitely worked hard, but the lifestyle wasn’t for me. I found it very grey, and I just wanted to come home and see the gum trees. I loved working over there, but Australia was home.

When was that?

2010. I was over there for a couple of years, and it’s funny because I found myself working for an Australian guy. He was opening up a brand-new restaurant. I didn’t actually work at many restaurants there. It was only the one restaurant. But through that two-year period, luckily or unluckily, depending which way you look at it, I had three head chefs who had all been head chefs at Michelin-star restaurants. I got my different types of learning through them without changing restaurants. It was a great time.

Was it eye-opening? Eye-opening in lots of ways, probably, because I imagine those kitchens are quite different. Maybe then. Do you think a Michelin-star kitchen is different to other kitchens? Is that a stupid question?

I’ve been through a whole range of different kitchens and they’re all different, and you can learn different things from different restaurants. Definitely what I learned over in London was the respect for ingredients. There was a lot of structure and discipline, and we definitely worked hard, but the respect for ingredients was probably my biggest learning. Understanding ingredients, where they came from and how they were brought up, like how the cows were reared. Ingredients were a big thing I took away from there.

In some of the lesser-quality restaurants I worked in early on, I learnt about teamwork in my first-ever restaurant, then I learnt about hard work at my next one. At the one before I went overseas, I learnt a lot about nose to tail, using the whole beast and what you could do with a whole range of ingredients and different techniques. That was really cool as well.

It’s interesting because I spoke to an Italian chef, probably a couple of years ago now, and he was really lamenting the produce here and that’s interesting, because I feel like a lot of chefs I speak to praise Australian produce, things from Gippsland and now the amazing Koo Wee Rup asparagus, all of the seafood. But this chef was like, ‘The tomatoes here are terrible.’ And maybe as an Italian that’s true, because the soil was not made for tomatoes nor hooved feet.

I agree with you. There are definitely things in Australia that we do better than there as well. But I remember walking in Paris past a market stall that had just strawberries, and these strawberries were as big as apples. If we have a strawberry here in Australia as big as an apple, it just tastes like water. But over there it was ridiculously good.

But then Paris is interesting too, isn’t it? There are some pretty bad restaurants in Paris, and you have to know where to go. Honestly, just eat from the market.

If I did travel again, I would definitely… I think I went to all the tourist spots when I did a lot of my travelling. Although there was one time when I went to Lyon, and we went into the backstreets and found this little restaurant that didn’t speak any English. I went in there and said, ‘I want that one,’ and got a tripe sausage and snails. It was an experience, and I would never take it back. But I think that was one time I got it exactly right.

Exactly. You’ve got to go behind, far away from the monuments. And now where do you get your inspiration? Do you still look at cookbooks?

I do all of it. After all these years it’s still something that interests me and inspires me. But one of the other things, tying back to the staff, is all the different nationalities and cultures. I learn off them as much as they can learn off me and what I’ve learned. Trying things is the best way to go about it. What I find with food is that different cultures and nationalities have their different ways of doing things, but it’s all very similar. It’s all about flavour, technique and good-quality produce. It’s just the way it’s presented or done that’s different.

And we were talking as we came down the stairs about hats, which is a controversial subject. But regardless of hats, do you look at reviews? Do you look at customer reviews?

I do.

Does it matter?

In the long run, yes. Does one individual review matter? No, because everyone’s got a personal preference.

And the individual day they’ve come from might influence it.

Exactly. For me reviews are more about patterns, identifying something that’s happened more often. That’s how I take reviews. I have one chef back at Scoresby who loves his reviews and is looking at them all the time, and he gets upset if they make a small little comment. You can’t take it personally. You’ve got to have faith in what you do. If you believe you’re putting your best foot forward, that’s all you can do, really. But definitely listen to the customer. That’s what we do it for. Yes, we want to make good food and interesting food, but at the end of the day we can’t do any of it if we don’t have the customer.

And it’s hospitality. I think this group, or this collection of people, sounds like a little village to me. The common denominator is this love of hospitality. I’m not sure everyone understands what hospitality is, but it sounds like this group does, which is really great.

We’re trying to push that forward onto our staff as well. We greet our customers at the door, look after their individual needs and make their life within our restaurant as easy and as comfortable as we can. And even if they have a preference with their food, if we don’t have mushrooms we can’t make a mushroom risotto, but if we do have mushrooms and they want a mushroom risotto, we’ll make a mushroom risotto. Make sure they enjoy their night, and call them by their name by the end of the night. The waiters call everyone by their name. ‘See you, Steve. See you, Brian.’ We want to make them feel like they’re coming into our house, or a home, and we’re looking after them. They’re not just another number. And we try to push that philosophy through to the staff as well. They’re not just an employee, they’re part of the family. That’s why all nine of us worked at Sette Bello at one point, and now we’re all partners in Lucia. It’s such a big family.

Wine is a really big part of things here too, isn’t it?

Absolutely. Our wine list here is… Well, I’m obviously a food guy, but our wine list here is pretty large and we try to cover a lot of different areas and spaces.

And I think smaller producers and some interesting wines as well. Do you have discussions about how the food goes with the wine, or does it all just work together anyway?

Generally, with such a big wine list, and that outweighs our food, we have a wine to match any type of food. But we do a lot of wine dinners, individual wine dinners, especially down here, little small ones for 30 people. I think even tonight it’s a Henschke one upstairs. We definitely try to bring both together.

Usually my last question is this one, so thank you for your time. What’s your advice to a young person starting out in the industry?

My advice for a young person starting out in the industry is: be prepared to work hard if it’s what you really want. That doesn’t mean your life’s going to be ridiculously hard, but it means you’ll get as much out of this industry as you put in. You’ll take as much learning out of this industry as you’re willing to learn. There’s a lot to learn, and there are a lot of people I’ve learnt off, young, old, younger than me, older than me. Anyone can teach you. So just listen, and take as many experiences away as you can. That’s probably the best thing I would say.

Perfect.

Lucia, 11 Eastern Road, South Melbourne