When I walked through the door of The Hardware Club, Nicola greeted me like an old friend and revealed that he’s a big fan of my podcast and knew that he was the 202nd conversation I’d had. That made me happy and I felt happier still, perched up at the bar and hearing all Nicola’s stories of growing up in Verona, doing a stint in a hotel restaurant in Mykonos and coming to Melbourne. A year ago, he and his friend, Andrea Ceriani bought the restaurant they have called The Hardware Club. Housed in historic Hardware House, they have renovated the space, painted the pillars mustard yellow as a homage to traditional trattoria in Italy, installed a gleaming custom-made pizza oven in the corner of the room, and at the same time made sure the diners who had been coming to the place in its previous incarnation for up to 30 years, are still catered for.
Nicola: Thanks for taking the time.
Jo: Of course. I love doing this.
I saw that you spoke to my friend, Daniele (Colombo) at Tipico. We worked together for a few years. We used to live together in the same house for probably six years. We used to work for the same company; he was running the production facility for the Lucas Group.
When did you come to Melbourne?
In 2010. From Verona. Me, one of the owners from Tipico and Andrea, my business partner here all come from the same town.
Romeo and Juliet!
Yes, that’s right. So that’s us.
What brought you to Melbourne?
I came on a typical working holiday. I needed a bit of a break from the grind of working in Italy. I had a bit of a moment when I got involved in a bit of an accident on the highway and I realised that I had been working like a madman for six years. You know when something happens that makes you think…I was still young, around 24 and I had started working at 15 while I was at school.
Was that something that was in your family or did you always know you wanted to be a chef?
No, that’s a bit of a story too. I was studying to go to university and that’s what my parents obviously wanted. They pushed me that way. I had a moment when I was working at the local pizza shop to earn some pocket money. I was a very picky eater. I got to the age of about 16 and I would only eat pasta with Napoli sauce and sandwiches with ham, but the ham had to be really tucked into the bread. I couldn’t bear the texture of the ham on my tongue. I still remember the feeling of not liking it. Then one day, I went from school straight to work and I was so hungry because I had forgotten my lunch and I didn’t have any money so I went all day without eating then at the end of service, I was so hungry I had a slice of pizza with blue cheese and all sorts of things, and I thought, oh my god, but I was starving and I knew I had to put it in my mouth. I thought I was going to throw up but as soon as I put it in my mouth I realised that it was really tasty and beautiful.
Wow, so it wasn’t even a flavour thing, it was more of a texture aversion.
I don’t know, I can still remember the feeling of looking at almost any sort of food and it was as though I had a plate of eyeballs in front of me, I felt so disgusted by it. But from there, I thought food was amazing.
The school system is different in Italy. You can do professional preparation at high school, so you can study for three of five years and then go into a trade. So I did that. I’d already started on the track of preparing for university and I’d been studying for about a year and met a few people who were working in offices and jobs like that and I didn’t think I would like it. I was always a hyperactive kid, so I thought I wouldn’t want to sit in an office all day. I had a couple of friends who were studying hospitality and I thought I would give it a try. It was a bit shocking for the family.
They would have thought it was hilarious.
I went home and said to my mum, I want to go to study to be a chef. No joke, she got straight on the phone and called my grandmother and said, do you want to hear something funny? Nicola wants to be a chef. I could hear my grandmother laughing on the other end. We drove to her house and that was the running joke in the family. My dad was looking at me, saying, stop this thing about working in a kitchen, but I started working as a chef and I’m still at it.
Do you eat everything now?
Oh yeah. Of course. I think that’s one of the reasons I love food, in a way. I still get moments where I’m reminded for some reason and I look at something and it looks delicious, but in my head, there’s still something that says, you don’t want to eat that.
That’s really interesting. I had a similar thing in that when I was 7 or 8 years old, my family went to Tahiti and I hadn’t heard anyone speaking other languages really, coming from Christchurch, and someone said something to me in French and I was completely traumatised. So I always say that I then spent my life working through that by getting a PhD in French and becoming a French teacher. Sometimes our first encounters can have such an impact on our future selves.
I also think it was the fact that I got to experience freedom almost straight away as a chef. Basically you work over the summer season; you study from September to June and then you have three months straight off from school. Most of the kids who were studying for a trade went to work then, semi-fulltime to gain experience. So I would finish school and then go somewhere and work for two or three months and be away from the family. I was 16 or 17 and people in the hospitality business don’t mind a bit of a party so you find yourself at 17, 18 surrounded by these people…they look like a pirate crew. It was fascinating.
So you worked in a few different places when you were first learning, all in the same region?
Pretty much. The first few were around Verona. I started in a small ice cream parlour on the way to a ski resort, so it was really busy all the time and we were churning lots of ice cream all the time. It was fascinating at 15 getting to work with these massive pieces of machinery. Then from there I went to the local osteria, which is more like the kind of place people go for more traditional food. From there, I remember overhearing a conversation between people sitting at the bar and they were talking about being chefs and working for a consulting company and I had never thought about the possibility of travel and I started thinking that maybe I could do more than what I was doing now. I was probably 18 or 19 at the time. I somehow got their contact details and sent them an email saying that if they wanted a hard working person, that I would be happy to work for them.
I ended up in Greece, in Mykonos. They sent me a message saying they had a position for me as a junior sous chef position in an amazing luxurious hotel in Mykonos. It was pretty fancy. I went from a relatively small town to traveling. I had to go home and tell my parents that I wanted to travel to see what I could learn.
From there, I went back and worked in a couple of really good restaurants in Verona until the last experience before I left Italy to come here, I was working in an amazing two Michelin star restaurant for about eight months.
Was that Italian food as well?
It’s hard to find anything other than Italian food in Italy.
What about in Mykonos? Was that more international?
They worked with these consultants because they wanted to give the hotel and restaurant a Mediterranean feel, so the Executive chef created a menu with some Spanish and French flavours. That was interesting. There were about 15 of us in the kitchen, a big team. It was a bit of a journey from the local trattoria to this massive hotel.
We wanted to land somewhere between a pizza-pasta place and what the amazing people at Tipo 00 and Osteria Ilaria are doing, so almost fine dining…something in between where the quality of the food is amazing but it’s really easy-going. So the branding was initially a lot more laid back. But then we found out about the rich history of the building and that the clientele had been coming here for almost 30 years, so we thought we had to make something that was a little more timeless and classic; something that we can give another 20 years and it will still feel the same.
You would have learned a lot. Then you’d been working really hard and had your accident and you decided to come here. Was it a big culture shock coming to Australia?
The reason I came was that I wanted to stay for around six months. I came with Andrea, who was a long-term friend and now business partner and we thought we would stay for six months and then go back and do something else. I had the chef from the two Michelin star restaurant to reference me for a job I was going to take in Copenhagen. I had everything planned out and then I was going to travel again. Then I came here and I hadn’t thought the hospitality industry would be so complex and so multi-faceted with all the Asian restaurants and Spanish and the occasional really good Mexican restaurant. And the traveling too. At the end of the six months, I did a couple of months traveling around, the usual kind of backpacking and driving through the outback. I thought it was easy to get a job here and earn a living and then travel. Asia is so easy to get to from here. So I did the first six months here and went back to Italy and then thought maybe I’d come back for a few months. We ended up staying.
We came back and Andrea met the woman who is now his wife, so he didn’t want to leave. I got interested in learning more. I was going to leave and I had all my tickets to go and travel to Thailand for about a month and then my brother was getting married, so everything was planned. Then I met Chris Lucas two weeks before I was going to leave and he told me he was going to open an Italian restaurant. I was a massive fan of Chin Chin, so I thought if this guy wants to do Italian, he’s going to have a different angle and I want to see that. He told me to come to the production kitchen and cook lunch and then talk about it.
What did you cook?
I think I did a couple of pastas, then I think we did a few pickles and small easy-going things like that. We did a chicken liver parfait in a jar…pretty straightforward stuff, but like most Italians, thought I knew it all. I had been in the kitchen for nine years, and I was only 24. He ended up offering me the head chef job at Baby because they had everything planned already because they had the production kitchen and all the system and all the amazing kitchens. They didn’t really need anyone to design everything from the ground up, they already had an idea of what would happen. They just needed someone to run the restaurant.
But 24 is pretty young to be doing that.
Oh yes. Definitely. I had about three days when I thought I could do it and that I was going to smash it and do an amazing job. I ended up staying in the same position for almost three years, so they must have been kind and thought, at least he’s keeping it together.
What are some of the things that were the most challenging in that role?
Apart from that experience in Greece, I never really had a position where I was in charge of anyone and when we opened Baby, we had 16 chefs there. It was high volume, we served 500-600 people on a busy day, so going from small…even the highest end Michelin star cooking, we would only cook for 50 people to high volume. That was another interesting thing about Melbourne, when I first saw Chin Chin and saw the numbers they were doing, I thought it must be a joke. It was shocking to say the least.
I spent the following two years basically there every day. It was impossible for me not to be there; the stress of all of that going on.
After Baby, where did you go?
It was almost the three year mark and you cold say I was a little bit burnt out.
That’s not surprising.
Even now I love cooking, touching stuff and working with great produce and in that position it was more like managing 50 people. You don’t have any fuel in the tank at the end of the day to just stay in the kitchen and cook something nice for the special the day after because once you’ve got a special in your mind, you have to instruct seven people to do it and it takes five days.
That takes the joy out of it a bit.
I think, also the fact that I was so young. I was 25. Most people wouldn’t be happy to take orders from a 25 year old. I gave it my best. Nobody really wanted to take orders from a 25 year old and when you get through service and you’re punching out docket after docket, you need someone in that position to be really strong and to have a couple of sous chefs that are there committed to keeping everything under control and I could never really do that.
Did you take a step back then?
What I did was, Benjamin Cooper, who is still Group Executive chef of the Lucas Group and was Executive chef of Chin Chin, he noticed that I was keeping it together but having a hard time and he stepped in to help. He said maybe I could go and have some fun at Chin Chin with him. At first I didn’t really want to do that because I was stubborn, like a little dog holding on to the bone. I was going to break my teeth but I didn’t want to let go. But then somehow he convinced me and they had hired a new Executive chef at Baby, so for me, I thought he would take care of Baby better than I could so then I spent the next two and a half years at Chin Chin doing Thai food. I was blown away by the food. I absolutely loved it and I love it now. I think Asian food is probably my favourite food; all the citrus and the freshness. Half of the ingredients I had never seen.
I was there and I knew I had to work on my people management skills. I had tried to make all these people work together and they couldn’t be bothered listening to me. I knew I had to work on that. The food, yes, whatever I could learn about Asian food was a plus but Chin Chin really taught me how to manage people.
What position did you have at Chin Chin?
I was junior sous chef but at the time they didn’t really have defined positions but there was a team of probably five or six of us for me to run day to day. There’s a bit of a funny story there. I got int here the first day and everyone knew I had been the head chef at baby and everyone was looking at e and I felt really embarrassed and the sous chef at the time and I’m a great friend with him now but he was trying to push me around a little bit and he told me I was cooking that staff meal that day. It was my first day and I didn’t even know where anything was. I asked how many I was cooking for and he said 60. They had 60 people working at any time. I thought, oh my god, what am I going to do now? I remember walking downstairs to the cool room with my heart pounding and saying to myself, everyone is going to think I’m a bloody idiot. They’re going to look at me and think who is this guy, so I thought I had to make a really good staff meal. I opened the cool room and 80% of the ingredients, I wouldn’t even know. I knew little bits and pieces, but all this ginger and coconut cream. I ended up making it happen somehow. Chin Chin was absolutely amazing and I had the best time.
What happened then?
That was three or four years ago and my girlfriend was pregnant with our first baby. Chin Chin was high octane and we were always pushing so hard and working so hard and I wanted to be there if something was wrong and they called me, I wanted to go in to the restaurant and I thought maybe that was too much because I wanted to be around my girlfriend and the baby. Chin Chin had been amazing for me. They had a time when they were renovating so I thought that was the time for me to leave, so when they came back I wasn’t there. So I finished what I was doing and then moved on.
So I helped out Andrea, who is also a co-owner of +39 pizza around the corner. He called me up and said he was opening a second venue and did I know anyone who could help him do that so I thought maybe I’d do it. He was pretty happy too. They had opened it and run it for a few months and then I ended up jumping in and helping. I did that for around a year and then through the people behind +39, they got in touch with the family who owned it and bought it.
I didn’t realise there are all these families who own restaurants in Melbourne.
I think it’s common with groups of people who have other businesses. They get together, they’ve got some money, they like the trade and know the people in the communities. This building here called Ciao Pizza Napoli before we renovated. It was here from 1988 and it was the same family who had a place called Ciao Pizza on Russell Street where Embla is now. They owned the building, upstairs and downstairs before the people came who are doing amazing things there now.
So it’s another shift again for you to be a part owner. Has it changed the way you do things? Are you still on the pans?
Yes. I came on board with the premise that’s what I want to do. I want to run my own place. I’ve got two kids now. I got to the point where I had to push it a little bit. I’ve been doing my thing but now it’s time to give it a bit of a push. So I was on the hunt for the opportunity and the amazing people behind this gave me the opportunity to be here.
I’ve always had a sense of ownership wherever I went. I don’t know if you could call that anxiety driven or professional. I don’t know what it is but I couldn’t do anything but work as if the place was mine.
That’s good though. It’s a level of commitment and engagement in what you’re doing.
I think that probably helped when I jumped in here. I didn’t really feel any pressure because it felt like any other day at work. I didn’t know that. I realised once we re-opened here. I feel lucky I can do this with a group of people who really have control of the numbers and I can call them and they always have an answer. That’s an amazing upside. I could never do it by myself. Not right now.
I like that you’re doing it with your friends and there’s a sense of community…well you’re family now really.
Yes, that’s it.
What kinds of things are going to be on your menu?
I could say that I’ve been working on this menu in my head for a few years now, you always put all the dishes you like into your memory space where you think one day I’ll put that on my menu. I think that’s pretty common. I wanted to do something that felt like a Melbourne restaurant serving Italian food, more than copy and pasting an Italian restaurant from Italy. I think we’re in a different position…I understand if someone from Melbourne goes on a trip to Italy and they see something they really like and get inspired by that. But for us, we moved to Melbourne, so it has to be something that is Melbourne. I don’t want to be nostalgic about the place I come from. I live here now.
It’s 100% Italian driven, but we don’t overuse Italian terms on the menu and we chose an English-sounding name for the place, The Hardware Club. We went through the design and branding for that a couple of times. The designer wasn’t very happy with having to scrap everything and start again, but we thought we’d give it an Italian name, but it didn’t feel right. I live in Melbourne. I’m Italian but I have to do something Australian.
I love the sign. It’s quite old-school, retro looking.
It is. With the fit out, we changed our minds probably a month before we started renovating, mostly because we thought we were going to do something fast casual. We wanted to land somewhere between a pizza-pasta place and what the amazing people at Tipo 00 and Osteria Ilaria are doing, so almost fine dining…something in between where the quality of the food is amazing but it’s really easy-going. So the branding was initially a lot more laid back. But then we found out about the rich history of the building and that the clientele had been coming here for almost 30 years, so we thought we had to make something that was a little more timeless and classic; something that we can give another 20 years and it will still feel the same.
And the clientele who have been coming for 30 years, are they still going to come?
Yes. What we did in the last few days is we opened the doors just for them. The restaurant is currently operating under the radar. We’re going to launch the restaurant on the 28th October. But because they’ve been waiting for the restaurant to re-open and we have a pretty solid group of people who would come here every day for lunch. That was one of the decisions we had to make; to have a separate menu for lunch and dinner, so that the lunch menu was an extract of the dinner menu and the old clientele could still feel at home. We have to slowly, slowly evolve it to where we want it to be. It will take us a while, but it was in the spirit of hospitality. We bought this place twelve months ago and I won’t come in and disrespect people who have been coming here for 25 or 30 or even 5 years. It’s their spot, so we have met them half-way and we still have space on the dinner menu to do whatever we want, because almost none of them come in for dinner. They linger around and stay until 3 or 4 o’clock.
I can see that happening. It feels like that sort of place.
Before we renovated there was a big pizza oven where we are sitting, facing that way with a bar around it. The bar was on the corner over there. We wanted a corner here at the entrance where people could come in and have a glass of wine or a little negroni if they want, to give it that Italian bar feel. So, you don’t have to cross paths with people in the restaurant. Who wants to walk through a restaurant to go to the bar?
We want it to be more on the casual side with a menu designed so that people can come in and order all their favourite dishes and then share it if they want to, that would be our preference, but if you don’t want to share, we can do that too. There will probably be around 30 items, so it is pretty big, but it’s also pretty simple. We didn’t want anyone in the kitchen to have to use tweezers or anything like that.
I think that’s the untold story of Italian food too; you can go to Venice and go to amazing hotels where waiters are dressed up and have white gloves and serve you amazing food but also you can step out of the hotel, take a right and a left and you’re in an alleyway and there’s a little family restaurant and the ambiance is definitely not the same, but you can get an experience that is just as good. The osterias and trattorias are tiny family-run businesses. A lot of people think that Italian has to be all marble counters and fancy and I thought, what can we do that’s different? There is definitely a place for that and we are surrounded by amazing Italian restaurants here, and we don’t want to step on peoples’ toes, so we have to play our own game and make it plentiful and craveable and fun to be shared. That’s the plan. We’ll see if we can pull it off.
4?3 Hardware Lane Upstairs, Melbourne