I sit at a table with Petros in an upstairs room at as the afternoon sun slants through the sash window and lights up the vintage pasta poster framed on the wall. Petros asks if he can peel slippery mushrooms while we talk. Why not? That seems like the epitome of a conversation with a chef, doesn’t it?
Petros, it’s great to talk to you.
You’ve spoken to lots of chefs I know. I’ve always been competitive with Matteo Tine. When we were apprentices, Matteo was at Grossi’s. He was at Grossi’s for 11 or 12 years. I was with George Calombaris, I was an original staff member at Press Club. There was competition back then between Press Club and Grossi’s. There were cook book deals here and cook book deals there; Woolworths here, Coles there; MasterChef here, Iron Chef Australia there. It was constant back and forth. It was all good, it wasn’t aggressive and there wasn’t any animosity but we always find ourselves in competition. He’s doing Sicilian, well he is Sicilian, and I’m doing Sicilian now for the first time in my career. It’s weird how things work out.
Is that competition good?
Competition is always good. I actually ate at Mr. Ottorino last week and I have many times since he’s been open. It’s a place I’ve always enjoyed going and I’m super happy for Matt. It’s every chef’s dream to have their own place and to have carte blanche. You have to have respect for anyone who, for lack of a better word, puts their balls on the line and puts their name on the front door and goes for it.
How long have you been cooking?
13 years now. But it started before that. When I was in high school, my brothers had a pizza shop, in a little place called Diamond Creek. They didn’t know what they were doing; they’d never run businesses like that. They were fitters and turners and doing what my dad was doing. My oldest brother is an aircraft mechanic. He builds Boeing 747s . But for five years they ran a little takeaway pizza shop. It was nothing special, nothing glamorous. Any Italian would see it and they would lose their minds because it didn’t have thin bases. It was pizza for Aussies. Loads of base and loads of ingredients and it worked for that market. They did it and enjoyed it for five years and I grew up in it.
The funny thing was that my older brother told me he wanted me to work there Friday nights, after school, Saturday and Sunday and no social life so that it was drummed into me what it was like to be a labourer so that then I would get a behind the desk job when I finished school. I was 13 or 14 at the time.
So his intention was to put you off that kind of work.
Yes, he was trying to deter me. But within a year or two of doing that, as hard as it was, I really started enjoying it. I really enjoyed the camaraderie, the adrenalin rush, the buzz. I wasn’t doing anything great but it opened up doors and ultimately got me into the RACV club where I got some experience.
The RACV club tried to get me into an apprenticeship straightaway but you try and explain to ethnic minority parents that you’re going to leave high school early. I finished school and from there I started my apprenticeship. A year or so into RACV club, it was a good start, and a really good base, but I met with a guy who was my idol at the time, George Calombaris. He and Shane Delia were prominent in the first 10 years of my career. It was Shane who said to go and work for George because Shane was out in the Yarra Valley doing Chateau Yering and Press Club was just opening and he said I should go and do the Greek thing.
I went to Press Club and within a year of me being there, Shane was coming in more and more and he spent a few months on the stoves at Press Club before he opened Maha. The two guys I had wanted to work for were within arms reach a year into my career. I was at Press Club for seven years, working through the company, going all the way around from Maha to Little Press, to Hellenic Republic, to St Katherine’s, back to Little Press, a couple of stints in Greece at Belvedere in Mykonos when George had that.
So working with George seems to have met your expectations?
It exceeded them. It was a degree of higher learning. I was doing ridiculous hours. But they are the hours you learn from ten fold. I wouldn’t take back those hours for anybody because they shaped who I am now. There were a lot of lessons learned. I wasn’t going out as much as other people my age and traveling, but this life has allowed me to travel as well. I’ve been around the world. When I went to Japan recently it was the first time I had travelled without packing my Birkenstocks and my knives. It was weird to have all this room in my suitcase.
How different was it cooking Greek food in Mykonos to cooking it here?
It wasn’t that different because Mykonos is very tourist driven. You weren’t cooking for locals. I even did some cooking in the villas they have as a private chef.
That’s the thing with cooking. You might start off on the stove in larder but you cold end up cooking for someone on a luxury yacht on a sea and you don’t even know what country you are near. It’s such a diverse trade.
If you surround yourself by the right people and you’re learning the right things and you’re in the right environment, that knowledge will stay with you for a long time and you’ll be able to teach it to someone else.
You seem to lean towards Mediterranean based food. Do you think you’d ever get into something different to that?
Like Sicilian? [laughs] I’ve always stuck to my Mediterranean roots because that’s what I know and that’s why I’m in a good spot now at Mister Bianco. If you look at the history of Sicily, it is very different to Italy. You can’t say that Sicilian is Italian food. You have to say Italian food to get the punters in because you go with what you know. But then we bring in the nuances and there is an educational component when a diner sits and says they were expecting Spaghetti Bolognese, they’re not going to get that. We have beautiful ricotta gnocchi that is predominant in Sicily and some handmade cavatelli. We still use Joe’s mum’s recipe to this day. You have to Australianise your menus to a certain extent and there always has to be that percentage that allows you to be creative and modern.
The Sicilian island has been influenced by so many nations from the Romans to the Greeks to the Phoenecians and the Jews. I spent five years working at Maha so I have a strong understanding of Middle Eastern food from there. The Phoenecian Spice Route through Malta, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, South of Spain, that’s the Moorish Spice Route. That’s where the mish mash of flavours comes into it.
How do you know where to start with all that? What boundaries are there around what is Sicilian and how far you can go?
You find out by what the punters order. I know I can’t take fried calamari off the menu but I can change a garnish. Beef cheeks can’t go either because Joe has been doing it for years. Who am I to come in and say we’re not doing beef cheeks any more. That’s cooking with your ego. You want to work with your client base and within the season and style of what you’re doing.
Mister Bianco has been going for eight years and Massi for two years. They are quite different businesses. Massi is in the city, so it’s more suits and so on.
Do you go between the two?
Yes but we have a head chef at Massi and we have a messenger chat we all discuss things in. I umbrella both but I don’t have to spend all my time there. I was there at lunch yesterday to take the pressure off the head chef too.
You’ve got a third thing…a catering company?
That’s my own on the side. That’s how I got here last year. I was waiting for a café to open and I started a pre-made meal company called Adonis Catering about two years ago. The cafe was taking a while to open and Joe and I got talking. Joe and I have known each other for the best part of a decade. I’d never worked for him before. So a year ago he needed a hand and I needed a place to keep doing my orders on a Sunday. He gave me the key and three months later, after I got sick of the delays on the other place and I pulled the pin. That was a Friday night. Saturday morning I walked in here and Joe said he needed one of two things to happen. His head chef had just left after four and a half years and Joe asked whether I wanted to screen the next guy for him or be the next guy.
I think that things happen for a reason. I’d enjoyed the previous three months of working with a team again and being creative. Sicilian fits with the flavours I know and then throw in the fact that Joe and I think very similarly about things. It felt good here and it is great to work with professionals on both sides of the pass.
I read a stat the other day that the average adult changes their job 13 times over their career. If you don’t know what you want to do, yeah, try everything or study a course. But if you know what you want to do, what’s wrong with staying there? There’s always room to grow. It’s easy to get complacent and just stay in larder, for example, but you have to want to hunt down other sections and do pasta or be the meat chef or the fish chef. I’m obsessed with progression and keeping on learning. Even when I was an apprentice and a section would get repetitive I’d challenge myself by doing it with my opposite hand or with my eyes shut. I’d set myself up so that I could do it after 90 hours of work and I couldn’t feel my feet.
Do you think it’s a different world now in terms of how many hours chefs can be expected to work?
Since the tv shows have started, that’s been the case. I’ve seen that negative side to the industry. But it’s the reality of the industry. I’m not saying that it’s acceptable, but you can’t tell me that Richard Branson got where he has by working a 36-hour week. It’s not for everyone. The higher level you want to achieve, the more you have to do yourself. You can’t open packets of pasta. I’ll challenge anybody now that I’ve done a year of pasta making, 12 hours a week, to find me a packet of pasta that is better than handmade pasta.
I understand within business models why it happens. I understand why McDonalds and Subway work. We make handmade pasta because it’s better. If I didn’t want to spend 12 hours a week rolling pasta, why am I in a Sicilian restaurant?
Filleting fish is another good example. A lot of restaurants are buying filleted fish. It’s not a bad thing but you’re cutting your staff’s legs out from under them. The staff can come in at 1 pm so they can do their 40-hour week but they’re not going to know how to fillet a fish. In five or ten years when they are looking for a new job or wanting to work overseas and the future boss looks at your resume and sees they are at sous chef status and gives them a king fish, they’ll freeze and then butcher the king fish. Then what happens?
It’s a battle. There’s no answer at this stage. But if you surround yourself by the right people and you’re learning the right things and you’re in the right environment, that knowledge will stay with you for a long time and you’ll be able to teach it to someone else.
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