Orlando Marzo

Conversation with a chef: Hello. How are you? Thanks for coming.

Orlando Marzo: Thanks for having me. Do you want to go through the tastings?

Go on then.

I can't remember what you tried at the event.

I tried a lot.

I wanted to show you what you can actually do with Loro cocktails. I think you liked the martini didn't you?

Yes, I did. Tell me about the olive martini.

We wanted to present a martini that is elegant and opulent and has that beautiful flavour of olives. We always say that as a bartender, when people ask for a dirty martini, it's technically incorrect in the bar world because you are putting on top of the beautiful fragrant aromatic of gin and dry vermouth, you're putting olive brine. Olive brine is delicious, but the olive brine or pickle juice basically masks all the flavour of the gin and the dry vermouth. Bartenders, when we are asked for a dirty martini, we get a bit funny about it. But if you think about it, olive and lemon have always been a great complement of a martini. They always dress the martini glass very beautifully. So I wanted to get the flavour of the olives without having the brine in it. And if you think about it, what is the flavour of the olives? They're beautiful. They're juicy, they're salty. If I put in front of you three different olives, you'll be able to say, oh, this is different, this is different. This is meaty. My family has been olive growers for years; eight generations. We have a thousand years old. The trees have split they are so big. For me, one of the most amazing flavour memories I have is when you take olives to the press, it's called Frantoia in Italian, which now is also a variety of olives. It is freshly pressed, beautiful, green, vegetal, really magnificent. And so we distil it. I'll show you. We use this machine called a rotary evaporator. We put in olive oil and it comes crystal clear. So then to that we add gin, two types of dry vermouth and filter water. And that's it. So it's very clear.

It's amazing. And just that little squeeze of that lemon zest is delicious.

I want to show you something really magical. If you squeeze the zest, that's how much oil goes into a drink. If I squeeze some oil onto your hand, it smells really nice, aromatic. If I rub it onto your skin, it smells bitter.

Oh, you mean when they rub around the glass: don't.

Don't. I know it's very common. Even some great bartenders do. But they don't know why they do it. I was very lucky, Jo, to have had the best academy ever. The best decision I ever made in my career was to work for the Rushmore Group, which had one bar in London called The Player. It was opened by the gentleman who invented the espresso martini. They had a bar, Milk & Honey. These in the nineties were the first bars to have freshly pressed juices. Now it is normal, back in the days it was not.

How did you get to do that?

I applied for a job when I left Italy and went to London, that the real story is that as soon as I got to London, typical me I Googled my top 10 bars and wanted to work there. If you ask anyone in London, there would be a queue of bartenders who started their career at Milk & Honey. I went to Milk & Honey one day at 10.00 in the morning with my CV printed out. I was like, hello, I'm looking for a job. The guys told me, oh yeah, send an email to whoever. And obviously that's not the path to take. That's fine. I found another job in the city of London. I started to learn English better, started to understand how the city works. Every city's different. You're going to get into that circle. I started to go to cocktail bars and ask bartenders, where do you normally drink? I started to hang out to the right with the right people, go to Master classes, events and whatnot. And then I was working in Soho in another place, and this is actually a lovely story. When people say you are lucky, there's always that opportunity. You don't understand how a yes or a no will create your path.

I agree. But I think there's luck, but also, you create your luck. You networked and you put yourself out in those places. You were curious, you wanted to learn.

And for me, if you ask me what was the chain? I remember it was my day off. I was exercising and my bar manager rang me and says, Hey Orlando, Ive got a friend of mine. He runs a Members Club in Knightsbridge. It is really high end. It was a really cool bar.There's a uniform. Can you please help him out? It's two and a half hours in this Member's Bar. Sometimes you get quick information, and you just say yes or no. Look, there's a member's bar, there's another gallery. We just need a bartender for three hours to do cocktails. Cool, no problem. I'll do it. I rock up there. In London, these Members' Bars are not like the Members' Bars here. Prince William was meant to be there. It was really high end. The way they run these Members' Bars is they take bookings, but only for the members. The restaurant is always open there and the bar is always open. But you might be on a night when no one comes. It's very bizarre. So then this night, I remember, they opened, and they needed a bartender upstairs to make a Pomegranate Bellini and I had a room maybe a little bit bigger than this, with this really cool art on the wall, a little bar, a fridge here with a pomegranate juice and a little cordial that the bartenders made, Prosecco and glasses. I made two Bellinis in a three hour shift. Very bizarre. I was going downstairs, and asking if I could help down there? We had a quick chat and he said he really liked my attitude. I thought, oh, I didn't do anything, But he said he would keep my number if more events come up. So I ended up going twice there and he was asking me what I wanted to do. I told him my dream was to work in Milk & Honey. And then he said, oh cool, I got a friend of mine who manages the bar called The Player, which is the sister bar of Milk & Honey. The Player was called the Player because it was opposite one of the most famous record studios in London. But also next door to Agent Provocateur, so you never know why it was called The Player.I ended up working at The Player and then from there, my career started at The Player and Milk & Honey. But you know what, if you go back, if I didn't say yes to that shift, I wouldn't have got to the Members' Bar and met that guy who knew the guy.

But when you were in Italy, did you just always wanted to work with drinks? Where did that come from?

My dad makes wine. That doesn't make him a wine maker. I'm choosing my words. He's been making wine for a while. at home, but a good amount. Still maybe 3000, 4000 litres. He gets a big load of grapes, and he likes the different varieties. And we always had a big tub. Sometimes I'd come back from school, and he would ask me to help him. So I've always been involved in the making. I think that's what it comes from. My mum has a big family, so there is never a dull moment in the family. It's never a dinner for two. There's always an auntie passing by. She has five sisters and six brothers.

What part of Italy is that?

Southeast Puglia. I'm from Salento.Back to the drinks, here I have a Strawberry Cream Negroni. This was a special release that we did with Shane Delia. Five years ago we didn't know each other. We were sitting in the ABC studio doing an interview. A PA, introduced us to each other and said, this is Orlando, this is Shane. He has a lot of bars and restaurants, and Orlando has got a pop-up bar and he is about to launch his bottled cocktail business. And he said, oh yeah, bottled cocktails, blah, blah. And the PA told him to try. He tried and he said, oh my God, this is the best Negroni I've ever had. I've got a few restaurants. If I open a bar, I would love to have this Negroni. So when he was close to opening Bar Jayda on Bond Street near Maha, he called us and said, I want to have that Negroni that I tried a couple of years ago. And then to honour that, we've created Strawberry and Cream Negroni. We use freeze dried yoghurt, which gives a lovely malolactic texture and aroma on the palate without interrupting the flavour of the classic negroni and making it milky.But it gives you that flavour reminiscent of strawberry and cream and rose hip and a little bit of blackberry leaf as well to give that negroni backbone, because when you bring it to your nose and you might feel is a little bit more confected because we use dehydrated strawberries. What happens when you dehydrate citrus or fruit in general, you are basically depleting that ingredient from water, therefore you're concentrating sugar. So it might feel a little bit sweeter, but it's basically a perception of sweetness.

Is Loro mainly for home use, or in restaurants and bars as well?

Loro was mainly created to elevate beverage experiences where you don't have that kind of skill in place, or the volume requires that you do things in a more streamlined way. And you should never compromise quality for volume, I think. What I realised, as a bartender, I remember working at dinner by Heston, the bar program was helped and elaborated by one of my greatest mentors back then. And working with Heston Blumenthal and Ashley Palmer-Watts, the executive chef was amazing. But we would have 180 people in one sitting. We used to make a martini that was representing the journey of the Brits coming to Australia. So the last thing they see is the coast of Devon, which is white, full of chalk. The first thing they see here would be Perth, so sandstone. We used to represent chalk and sandstone together. Distilled precipitated chalk, representing a sandstone aroma, two types of dry vermouth, distilled gin, so seven ingredients in the drink. You could not make that efficiently for 180 people one by one. So we bottled it. We went to the table because, fine dining is a considered dining experience where nothing is left as a second thought. Always everything is thought from tea to pastry, to all the aspects. We used to go to the table with this bottle, that was our Martini and pour it. And people were like, oh my God, you're not making it fresh. But telling the story in 30 seconds and drinking one of the best martinis they ever had was an experience and the guests realised, oh my god, this is amazing. Then people wanted to buy 10 bottles to take home for a party. I'm like, no, it's only here. And this was on repeat: its my wedding, it is my anniversary, it is my friend's 30th, can I buy two bottles? I really want to have it. No, no, no. Then I went to Lume in South Melbourne.

I spoke to Shaun Quade there. It was very creative there.

I worked there from when everyone hated us and when everyone loved us. When I got to Lume, I started to bring this idea of creating a cocktail. I came up with this really cool idea of having a Martini and a Martinez combined. A Martinez is arguably the precursor of the martini. The story says that back in the day, the Martinez was what people were drinking, which is basically sweet vermouth, gin bitters and orange curacao. Then the palate became drier. Normally it was two parts of sweet vermouth, one part of gin.Then our palates became drier. So people started to do it with equal parts of vermouth to equal parts of gin. So now double the gin, less sweet vermouth. And then rather than sweet vermouth, they used to use dry vermouth. That's how the martini came about. But what I did at Lume, I thought it'd be really cool if we created a Martini Martinez, where we distilled sweet vermouth. So it's clear and we make it like a Martini. But when you try, you have the aromatic of the sweet vermouth and the sugar level is brought between a Martini and a Martinez. It went bonkers. People loved it. Again, same story. Can I buy a bottle? Where is available? Then I used to have other drinks. We had a cocktail called Alandalus, like Andalucia in Spain.It was basically a fortified kind of wine with botanicals, almost like a very, very low Negroni. And again, we put it at the table and people loved it. And I had on repeat, can I buy a bottle? So then we looked into the licence, we could sell up to two bottles to guests. One if it was open and the other one corked. So we started to do that. And then we needed to produce more and more. To the point where I thought, this should be a thing. People were asking us to make 120 martinis on arrival for a party at Lume and we couldnt so that because we didnt have 10 bartenders to spare. That is when I developed this concept that if I empower everyone to have a conversation about cocktails, it's not just the head bartender talking about drinks. And then particularly there, I'd noticed that people wanted something amazing beyond just an amazing restaurant and an amazing bar. People wanted to have that cocktail at home to pull it out from the freezer and enjoy.

Pre-mix drinks are a dirty word and obviously what you're doing is not that. But did you have to get over that? Did you have to still convince people?

Totally. We call them Ready to serve.

Ready to serve. Looking at your machine, it looks as though there is science involved. How did you learn about that and then how did you scale up to the bigger quantities?

This wasn't born in a boardroom over a business strategy. This was born literally because I've been working with ingredients and taste and flavours for quite some time. It is the result of my career step by step. So in terms of scaling, I know what can be done in terms of flavours and what techniques Ive used in the past to intensify flavours in one way and things that worked, things that didn't work.

It's one thing to make cocktails, it's another thing to do what you do.

It's progressive. Look, this machine is called a rotary evaporator. It has become quite famous in the last eight years really when a food scientist and bartender aficionado from New York, called Dave Arnold released a book is called Liquid Intelligence and that became a make or break for the modern bartender when back in the days you measure a bartender by the archive or knowledge of classic cocktails they know. Nowadays it's more about their creativity skills and the techniques they can use to empower themself, fortunately or unfortunately and modify cocktails. So then these books started to explain about these machines. Normally these machines are used in laboratory to make CBD oil to make drugs. What this machine does is basically distilling at cold temperatures. That's all it does. And bartenders straight away were making orange juice or whatever that was clear, playing with your mind. But this machine is really expensive and very labour intensive to do clarification. You can clarify with agar agar, it costs $2 from the shop. But it was a rush to use this machine. Distilling in cold temperatures and allows you to use an ingredient without modifying its natural characteristics. For example, if I take this orange and put it in a copper pot still, I will caramelize it. If I give you this orange and you go home and cook it on the stove, you'd be making basically a beautiful like jammy stew with strong orange flavours. If I wanted zest of the orange, just the smell, I can't cook it, I need to leave the orange in its rough stage. To make perfume, they use a machine called a rotary operator. Normally alcohol distils at 78.4. Ethanol comes up to 78.4. Water boils at 100 because of the sea level. If you go up in the mountain, less pressure and therefore quicker boiling points. If you look at this photo of the machine. In this case its olive oil. You see this red tubing is a condenser. The blue here is just a condenser: cold water minus 20 goes through the serpentine there. That's all it does. There is a pump there sucking air and making it basically under vacuum. By reducing the air, they're lowering the pressure and we can use the machine at 40 degrees. So the alcohol is boiling, which technically means going from a liquid state into a gas state; we're not cooking. Now this orange is very fragrant and it smells very close to what you smelled before.

You had a question about how I learned. Firstly at Dinner by Heston, we used to have these type of techniques and cocktails. Then when I went to Lume, I started to work with the machine more and more. But I always say to bartenders when I do seminars and classes, don't fall in love with the techniques, fall in love with the taste. Because sometimes a simple technique, like shaking is fine. You don't have to use a rotary evaporator for everything. It's a bit of a trend. Sometimes people want to rush and tell you, oh, we distil there, we infuse this, we ferment there, oh, the drink is nice. It's just nice. Not because you do all of this. So sometimes you don't need a rotary evaporator.

I've done training with some buyers in Melbourne and the guys didn't know even end up buying it because that machine is like a Formula One car. If you can't spend time to understand how the steering wheel works and when to use it, it's not a car that you go to work in. It's a car. They need to perform to extreme levels. This is a bit of a turning point because I had a bartender doing a guest shift and he goes, Orlando, can you please help me? I know you have a rotary evaporator; I need some clear smoked pear juice. He gave me the recipe. Basically, it was pear: a kilo or pears, two litres of water, blitzed and then you distil it with the rotary evaporator and then we smoke it. I'm like, oh cool. Is that for the aroma? Because if you then use smoke, the aroma of pear will go. The reason for the rotary evaporator is for aroma. Taste is given by maceration and hot distillation. This is my sentence for life. When you smell, the rotary evaporator takes you to the next level. But he said, no, it's purely to discolour.

Oh no, he hadn't understood.

Exactly right. So that means you follow. You're a teacher. But for example, this machine that I just showed you is 20 litres and costs about 45K. And that machine on a full day shift, the way we use it, if you're really on the dot and I wrote a manual, if I say to you, Jo, at 8.30am your shift begins, you turn the chiller on while the chiller gets the temperature, you measure the ingredients, you start distillation about 9.15 and you're really into it, you get to do two distillations in one shift a day. That's all. So you put in 11 1/2 litres, at the end of the shift, it gives you only 20 litres, its not much. Distilling in acopper still on a day can give you a 1000 litres.

Where can people buy your product?

Blackhearts and Sparrows, independent bottle shops.

But do people using these at home, do they need training to know how to use them?

No, that's the thing. You just pour and drink.

But it's nice to know some of those extra things.

So if you want to know more about it, then you can just read the bottle. For years I've been working in venues that can be a little bit, not pretentious, but intimidating for the everyday consumer. When you go to Society or you go to Apollo Inn or Gimlet, at Eau de Vie we used to have 450 whiskies. You want to order whisky, but you don't want to make a mistake. Because these guys know. You have seen how many ingredients we use, you just read it. But is it delicious? That's all that matters when you're at home. You put it in the fridge, you get around the table, you put carrots in a bowl, olives, and you can entertain your guests while you're finishing your parmigiano.

I often ask chefs, do you think about food 24/7? Do you think about alcohol 24/7?

Not 24/7, but very often. This morning I went to Dandenong to pick up something and I was thinking about a release I want to do for Christmas, but also for summer. I was thinking about margarita flavours. I do think about occasions and ingredients. That's what drives me; the creativity. I was thinking I'd like to do a really cool frozen Panettone cocktail. When I was driving I asked a chef friend of mine, can I buy this candied orange and I can have it in the drink and you can drink almost like a smoothie, but it's an alcoholic Loro drink.Sometimes people at home want to see a little bit of action. This is why I have to shake. Do you want to shake some cocktails?

Sure.

What are we doing when we shake?

Shaking puts air in it, right?

Bravo. If you really distil down what a bartender does, we add temperature and dilution to ingredients. A chef is altering temperature in a way and modifying the raw ingredients. As a bartender, we are adding dilution. That's really what we do. I want you to try this amazing drink, Cherry and Cacao Manhattan.

This smells so chocolaty.

It is made in the same machine, but it is a hundred per cent chocolate. Now it gets complicated and if I get too boring, just tell me. Chocolate is a result of cocoa nibs that are crushed, and then fat, like cocoa butter or oil and sugar is added. At that stage it is chocolate. If you and I want to start a chocolate company, we start from getting the cacao. We get the cacao in, we toast it ourselves and if we want to make it really commercial. Let's just get the cacao already dark, already toasted already in chocolate. And then we add oil and sugar to our recipe. In that case, we are hunting, we are shopping for a hundred percent cocoa liquor. We get access to a hundred per cent cocoa. We distil it with a machine and the cacao husk, we macerate into gin. The rotary evaporator gives it that beautiful aroma.

But let's shake the espresso. First of all, let's talk aboutthe head. The head is given by the energetic reaction, the act of shaking. Plus also the coffee itself. When an Italian comes to Melbourne or the UK, normally they say the espressos are not really good. Roasting coffee is like making toast. If you like your toast really toasted, its a little bit more caramelized. If you like it a little bit more white, you get more of the flour, more of the bread taste. Same with coffee. The higher you toast the coffee bean, the more CO2. And when you make the coffee, the heat of the water under pressure, hot water under pressure with the CO2 releases the beautiful crema. We use cold brew. Cold brew gives you an extra layer of fat if you want a texture. We wanted to have more flavour in our coffee. Now, when we shake, let's say you're making this from scratch. You're not because you're making Loro, you would just pour it in. You put 75 mls. Then you put in the ice. We want a lot of ice when we serve a drink on ice or when we shake, we want a lot of ice. I'll give you an example let's say this glass is a gin and tonic. And I just have two ice cubes. In two minutes, these ice cubes will be gone and it will be over diluted. The ices job is to make the drink cold and add as little dilution as possible. So we want the drink full of ice. Same with the cocktail. In this case, we don't need it for the espresso martini, we just need to shake it. Pour the drink in first, then add ice. Why do we do that? Because say you're making this from scratch or even with Loro, if you put in the ice and then the liquid then your friend said, oh, where is the toilet? And you show them. That drink is diluting. Or let's say we're shaking three drinks. Now we've got ice, ice, ice, and liquid, liquid, liquid. By the time we get here, this drink is already diluting. We don't want do that. So we do liquid, liquid, liquid. And then we ice the drink. Later. Then the shaking. You want the action to be as fast as possible.Did I tell your last time about the story of espresso martini?

I've heard the story maybe a few times now, but I really like the story.

The story matches your outfit today. Eighties, nineties. So in the late eighties, early nineties, a top model walked into a bar and asked the bartender to make a drink to wake her up and fuck her up. Pardon my French. He made a black Russian, which is a cocktail made with vodka and coffee liqueur and a little bit of espresso served on ice. But this was the eighties, nineties, the first golden era of the cocktails.

Was it New York or London?

London. It took off really quickly. A lot of people started to drink it and they're like, oh, there is this famous cocktail. Topher a top model, it's got coffee in it, blah, blah, blah. And normally we served it over ice in this glass, but for many people a cocktail glass is a martini glass. It was originally called a vodka espresso, then coffee martini and then espresso martini. But at the venue that I worked, we were not allowed to call it espresso martini. To keep an homage to Dick Bradsell who created the original recipe. That's why I decided to call it a coffee cocktail. You and I like espresso martini but in the world of consumers it has the reputation of being a young crowd drink, overly sweet. That's why I call it coffee martini to be real to the coffee and the knowledge of coffee. I grew up in Italy, of course. In Italy we drink espressos: bold, rich, robust flavours. That is my interpretation of coffees. But then here particularly I learned to enjoy more of the floral element, the delicate element of coffee that can be that way as well. I wanted to merge these two worlds. For that reason we use tonka beans, which gives these beautiful flavours of robust coffee and almost like baked goods, aroma, like pastry almost.And then vanilla and orange gives you a little bit more floral, delicate aroma to the coffee. So those two together. Then we use a cold brew coffee with a Tonka bean and vanilla. We do a vodka. And that's what it is.

It's really good.

It's very straightforward. It's vodka, coffee liqueur and good coffee. But then we add a little bit of orange. I say to people cocktails or flavours in general, its a little bit like art if you wish. You dont always need to be a colourful Dali. You can also be sometimes a black and white or mono colour Pollock. Sometimes when his flavour is there, it's like making a stock. If you taste the onion at the end of your tomato stock, you went too far with the onion. But the flavour of the onion is to make the tomato a little bit sweeter. You shouldn't taste the onion at the end. So same with the orange. It is there to give a little touch of fruitiness. It is there to support the cocktail or aromatic without it being, oh this is orange.

What's your biggest seller?

Bergamot negroni. When you said earlier about people not liking the idea of pre-mixed drinks premixed drinks. We get that all the time. That is why we do these events, Jo. We are new to the category in a way. Not many people put a lot of attention to what a good ready to serve drink can be. We have all of the pieces of the puzzle: you have your gin, you have a good syrups in the market, we have this tonics and you have a tonic world competing with each other. Now we know that more than 70% of people will go to Dan Murphy's then they will go home, put their spirits into something and mix it, more than 70%. So everything is mixed. It's got raspberry and is in a can. But I wanted to be, not too serious, but as serious as talking to a gin distiller or whiskey distiller talking about a cocktail.

How many different flavours do you have in your collection?

Seven. We've done some limited releases like with Mork for example, that are not necessarily all in our collection. We did one with Supernormal. We did a Paradox Bramble using Australian and Southeast Asia flavours. We use like makrut lime to get a beautiful leafy or aromatic lime. It is fascinating when we look at our collection, the negronis and the martinis are there because I knew that consumers are not necessarily my 1% bartender, hospitality friends, you know? And they will say, oh a martini is too strong, negroni is pushing the envelope a little bit too much. But it is very rewarding to see that the Negroni is one of the most selected cocktails in our collection because of the way we've manipulated and showcased the flavours.

What brought you to Australia?

Good question. I feel London is a very fast paced city. In everything. Your career can go pretty fast as well because just the cycle of life is a bit fast paced. I was in London and some of my colleagues where Australians or two of my best mates were French and they came to Australia. And they were telling me, oh man, you'll love it. You'll make a career in Australia. I love to travel. When I was in London, I was there in my mid twenties. I would go to Italy on a day off and then come back the next day. I would go to visit a distillery. We would be closed on Sunday, Monday. So Sunday morning we would go to the airport, spend Sunday, Monday in France and Tuesday back at work. It was insane.Anyway, long story short, back then, thanks to my work opportunities, because brands invite you to trips and competitions so I went to visit distilleries in France, Spain. It was amazing.I went to Switzerland. But I never travelled outside of Europe. I wanted to improve my career. I measured in London. London is a very cosmopolitan city. But I knew there was more. I wanted to experience either Singapore, New York, or Australia. My friends had been in that position, and they told me, The States are amazing, but very hard to get a visa. And in London, I had a really good position. I wanted to maintain that, I didnt want to go backwards. I was the bar manager of The Player and then I would be in a bar in New York just to be in New York. My mates said Melbourne is really upcoming and it is really beautiful. There's a lot of great bars. Some Aussie bartenders were in London. And so I found a lot of connection. And in 2013 I came here. 10 1/2 years. To stay one year. And here I am.

Drinks by Loro

Photography by Kristoffer Paulsen