I first spoke to Paolo at the end of 2017 when he was working at Bar Carolina in South Yarra. It was nice to catch up with him in his new place, Aromi, in Brighton, where he has clearly already made his mark and created a place where people feel at home. People wave out to him as they pass the big windows and when I took his photo at the door after our chat, the guys from Cucina & Co across the road call out good-naturedly in Italian telling him he should have shaved his beard for the photo.
Hi again, Paolo. How long has Aromi been open?
We opened on the 26thMarch.
So a month exactly. How’s it going?
Good. It’s nice. Brighton is a nice area.
It’s different to South Yarra.
Really different.
What made you want to make that step? Most chefs want their own place, I guess.
It’s the natural way a chef will grow. I started a partnership with Joe and Michael at Sarti, I was a shareholder, and then with Salvatore (Montella) we decided to do something on our own, to keep growing, I guess. There’s always a feeling you want to do more.
When you started thinking about where you wanted to do it, did you know you wanted to be southside?
I knew I wanted to be southside. I didn’t know I exactly wanted to be exactly here. It happened because Peter who is across the road used to own a restaurant here and he asked me to help him with the menu. I thought about it and talked about it with Salvatore and thought, maybe we could just take it over. We were thinking around Brighton and so when this opportunity came up, we thought, let’s do it. We liked the space, the big windows, the natural light. You get a lot of bright light in the afternoon.
Did you have an idea of what you wanted it to look like? I love the vertical garden.
We knew we were going to have that. When we came here and looked at the space, we wanted to have a vertical garden and thought we could put all the herbs in there. That’s how we came up with the name. Aromi means aromatics and we use a lot of them. Italian cooking is based on a lot of herbs. The idea was we wanted to have only herbs, but the people who sold us the garden told us we couldn’t have all herbs because it would smell too strong in the restaurant. We have rosemary, marjoram, thyme but we couldn’t have all the herbs because it would be too much. But we still thought the name, Aromi, was perfect. I use a lot of rosemary and sage, they are typical for the north of Italy; oregano, parsley.
Those scents can be so transporting for people too.
It’s very important. Smell can you bring you back to places or bring back memories.
When you were thinking about the menu, did you have to think differently for Brighton than you did for South Yarra?
It is the same style. Through my years of cooking I’ve built a style that has become my own style. But it’s different as far as the restaurant itself is different to Bar Carolina. It’s a smaller restaurant, we don’t double book tables, it’s a different pace in the kitchen. We always work fast in the kitchen, but here we have more time to spend on each dish. A little bit more garnish, a little bit more attention to detail in the plating. I have more time to do all those things and it makes it more rewarding for me.
Give me an example of a dish where you are taking more time.
For example, the tagliatelle I have on the menu has quail sausage and is made from scratch. We get all the quails, bone them, make the sauces…the little quails, yes…it’s hard work.
Do you have to hang poultry sausages?
You can hang them if you want, but we just cryovac them and then cook them as a sausage mix. We put pork fat in there, seasoning and spices, all the aromatics. There are two bases; normally it would be red wine for pork sausages, but we use white wine and marsala for the quail sausage. Then you have that on the plate, the tagliatelle which we make with beetroot, so it is purple, then the beetroot reduction made from golden beetroot, white celery leaves, and parmesan fondu on top. So you can see on one dish, there is a lot happening. There are a lot of different ingredients.
Is that a dish inspired by something in Italy?
It’s just flavours. I work with flavours; the sweetness of the quail sausage goes well with the sweetness of the beetroot. It’s earthy. You imagine how it will taste and then you do taste it and it’s beautiful. The other day we tried a new dish. I got some new mushrooms in; Grey Ghosts, Slippery Jacks and Pines. I know Grey Ghosts are buttery and I tried them with the pork and it was beautiful. We play with flavours and you know if they work together or not. Most likely if we like it, it will be a success. That’s how it works.
How often will you change the menu?
We change it weekly…one dish here and there. This week we have beautiful mushrooms so I’ve put mushrooms on the menu. We print our own menus here so we can decide to do whatever we want. I might one or two dishes a week…something goes out of season and I take it off. Whenever we get a good new product in, we can change the menu and reprint it as many times as we like. It keeps evolving and changing. We can change up to five dishes a week.
Do you think about food all the time?
No I talk about food all the time. I talk about it a lot.
I feel as though you must be constantly having ideas. Do your ideas come through the talking or from elsewhere?
There are days where no matter how hard I try, I wouldn’t be able to create a dish and other days I get inspiration from looking at something or a supplier calls and tells me I should try something, like the pork from the Yarra Valley, which is beautiful and oily and then I think of things.
It’s so important that relationship with the supplier, isn’t it, because you need someone who knows you and come up with the kind of suggestions that will fit your style.
I have built that through working 11 years in Melbourne. I know a lot of suppliers and farmers. They know me and what I’m looking for and what might be interesting for me. It helps a lot. It helps with the creativity. But there are still days when I’m not creative.
Do you ever go out foraging your own stuff?
I used to. Now I have a six year old. Between here and home, I’m busy.
Do you cook at home?
Not much. One night a week I’m at home, I usually go out. It’s not that I don’t like it. If I have friends coming over, I’ll cook. Or if I go to a friend’s house, most likely I’m the one cooking. I like it, but it’s just the time.
It’s also important for you to eat other people’s food.
That’s another side of the inspiration. You go and try another combination of food, it helps a lot as well. You look at a couple of things someone does and you think, I like this, maybe I can change it and turn it into something that is my own way or representing those flavours.
So what you’re doing isn’t fusion, it is Italian, but influenced by living in Australia and working with Australian ingredients?
Yes, it’s still Italian. To me, you don’t have to have Italian products to do Italian food. I get fresh produce and what I do is Italian cooking, Italian recipes, with products I can find here. It doesn’t make me more Italian if I use tomatoes from Italy. I get tomatoes from Geelong, from a greenhouse there and they are beautiful. Even the peppers…I get these small peppers, Piquillo peppers from Geelong. They are beautiful and sweet. I can buy them from Spain because they are originally from there, but they will come in a can. What I do is Italian, based on fresh produce from Australia.
It’s good to be involved in your community. It’s good to get to know the locals. It’s a friendly feeling. People come in and say “ciao bello, I want to have the same as the other night, or make me something different.” I love that. It makes me feel at home.
How often do you get to go back to Italy?
Not often. Not as much as I’d like to.
Do you go back now with different eyes, now that you’re worked here for 11 years. Do you look at food differently in Italy?
When I go to Italy it is normally summer there so there’s a lot of fish and normally there are a lot of people who want me to try a lot of food. Last time I went and it was four week, ten kilos. All my friends want me to try things, their parents made a limoncello I have to try, a salami I have to try. I spend my days eating. My father is the first on the list. He loves eating out, so every time I am there, he has a calendar of all the restaurants we will go to.
When people come to Aromi, would you like people to allow you to feed them with what you think is best, or do you like people choosing for themselves?
A lot of people like us to choose. Salvatore has been with me in the kitchen for five years and he knows how to explain the food and what we do here. The first thing we always tell them is to look at the menu. I can give them a taste of Aromi but there might be something in particular they want to taste. We are very open. Especially in a kitchen like this. People can sit up at the bar and we can ask them what they feel like…fish, meat, scallops. They tell me what they like and I can cook for them, sometimes off the menu. The other day I made a pasta with scallops and artichokes for someone.
Are you using the wood oven for meat and fish?
And vegetables. I run it differently to a pizza oven. Normally a pizza oven is at 400°, I keep mine at 250°. The fore isn’t at the side, it’s at the back. I use Ironbark. Once it burns, it turns red and I open it up and I have grills that go in. It’s like having charcoal and then the grill on top. All the heat is there and you get the heat from the top and beautiful caramelising. It is similar to the Josper that I had at Bar Carolina, but there is a lot of planning with this. You have to think ahead. You can’t just chuck a bit of wood in. It takes half an hour before you get the heat. If you put too much wood on, you can’t bring it down. Lucky enough I had Johnny from 400 Gradi helping me with the oven. He helped me understand how to use it and ten I practised. Every day I tried a little bit of meat, a little bit of fish to see where the hot spot was. After a couple of weeks, I knew what I was doing.
It must be a nice way to cook, I think, it’s the original way.
At the beginning, I wasn’t sure about it. I had got so used to the Josper and thought we should maybe put in one of those and then I thought that this is actually the Italian way. A Josper is from Spain and this rustic, wood-fired oven is the Italian way. A lot of people in Italy use it for all kinds of cooking, not just for pizza and bread. They roast meat, braise meat. So I thought I probably just had to get used to it and I fell in love with it.
I guess it's as you said, that need you have for new challenges and always going that next step forward and the oven was part of it.
It is part of it and there are more things we can do with it. I learn something every day. Bread is something we are working on now, making our own bread using natural bacteria. We don’t use yeast. The proving time is very long. We start at night before we go home. We leave the bread out then we come in the next day and bake it. So, roughly 12 hours proving.
Is that better for our gut?
It is easier to digest. I put some buckwheat flour though as well. There is a big science behind it all. Bread is something we are still working on because every day is different. Temperature of the oven can be different and the outside temperature changes. We are working a lot on the bread.
We are going to be giving some pasta master classes. On a Sunday. The first one will be on the 2ndJune. We are doing a passport…a little book…and every month we will do a master class on a pasta from a different region and we will stamp the passports. Every region will have a filled pasta, a traditional pasta and something with a little twist. You can come to the master class and we will prepare the pasta, then I’ll cook it and then you’ll eat a plate of pasta with a glass of Prosecco.
We are going to start with Piemonte, with tagliolino and a chestnut tagliatelle.
Is the class full already?
No, because we have only told a few people about it so far. Pasta is very important for me. I always use fresh pasta, and I always like trying different things. Now we are doing one with nettle, one with aromatics, so it’s the Aromi pasta. The spaghetti we do with the pulp of the tomato. We blitz the tomatoes and separate the pulp from the liquid. We put the pulp into the pasta dough and the liquid goes into the stock for cooking.
That sounds great. How easy is it to use everything and aim for zero wastage?
I don’t find it too hard. We can easily turn things into something else. You can make a filling or a pasta sauce, you can make a little entrée. We are pretty good at that.
How many seats do you have here?
44, including the bar. Fridays and Saturdays have been our busiest nights so far. Thursdays are quite good. Sunday we only do lunch. We can’t complain. At the moment it’s pretty good. We started without doing any PR. We didn’t tell many people. We wanted to gain trust from all the locals so that they’ll allow me to cook more interesting things for them. A lot of people are trying to move out of the city and open restaurants in suburban areas. A lot of people now leave work in the city and go back to where they live to eat out. A few years ago, people would work in the city and then stay in there for dinner and go home after. Now it seems as though people like to go home and stay local after work.
I like that feeling of being local, part of a village.
It’s good to be involved in your community. It’s good to get to know the locals. It’s a friendly feeling. People come in and say "ciao bello, I want to have the same as the other night, or make me something different." I love that. It makes me feel at home.
312 New Street, Brighton