Stefan Armentano

Bonjour, Stefan. How has your morning been?

So far, so good. We have a Raclette night tonight so I have less mise en place will be a little bit easier than usual.

How long have you been here in Footscray with Small French Bar?

Eight years. I came to Australia in 2000. I came to Melbourne with my Australian girlfriend, we got married, children, we moved to Western Australia in 2006 and I opened a restaurant, a tapas bar there for ten years and then we divorced, and she came to Footscray. I followed to be with my children. I was in here for about a month and I put an offer on this place. I built it from scratch.

It's amazing. I love this live edge wood. It's beautiful.

It was a very lucky find. I found it after I designed my plan with all my material and I had to change the planning because I wanted that piece in there.

So that wood actually curves? So you had to curve the bricks?

Yes. My dad came for the renovations. He built the bar and varnished the timber and he made the iron snail cut out. We have had a few identities over the year but mostly wine and cheese and charcuterie and restaurant. At one stage we had the shop next door and the shop across the road, growing, extending, shrinking and then this year we are down to one venue. We had a team of 15 at one stage. We had a wine bar across the road, a deli through this wall. I was mostly in the office working and a little bit of cooking. But then with life and Covid, I'm not going to blame Covid, but we reduced everything, the team. I work by myself on Thursday, cooking, serving, everything. On Friday and Saturday there are two of us.

What is on the menu apart from Raclette tonight?

Again, that is very new. The last few months of this year and the first semester of this year we were doing a four-course prix fixe menu that changed every month. You booked and paid online and only Friday and Saturday nights, two sittings 6pm and 8pm, 24 in the room and 6 at the bar so 60 people a night and we were sold out every week. That was out of survival because customers through Covid were using that word and that excuse to cancel at the last minute and the majority of them were true, but I couldn't run a business. I wasn't in the right place emotionally to be able to do that and out of survival and resourcefulness we came up with that prix fixe so that people paid for their food beforehand.

A lot of people are doing that.

People understood, but I lost touch with my customers. It was 6pm sit down, four courses then out, then next sitting. Our waitstaff did a great job but same problem, people got sick and sometimes we couldn't get someone to fill in and it wasnt sustainable. We are still experiencing people who are struggling with stuff and the workforce is still not rebuilt. So we have gone back to what we did eight years ago. In a nutshell and to answer your question, our menu here is mainly charcuterie and cheese boards and we work on specials. three, four, five specials every night. There was a steak last night, a choucroute, a duck confit and a snail. That has pleased people over the last eight years, those dishes are the most popular. We will bring in a tartare when the weather is warmer. We make our own parfait. I came up with a recipe and I have a few flavours and I want to go into wholesale with that, so our charcuterie aspect is great, I want to emphasize that. And I mean, the place, you tell me, it is so special with candles.

I bet.

So over the years we have had two identities; restaurant and wine bar and we are somewhere in between. And its hard through social media, even verbally to make a stand where we sit because it is a bit blurry. We are a wine bar, but we do hot food. Mostly we have been known as a restaurant rather than a wine bar and people want to book so I decided to stop the booking for a while. In June we closed for six weeks, I had to have surgery, I wasn't feeling too well. We came back with no reservations. It was dramatic. We were dead for the last couple of weeks of June when we reopened. I was confused, my customers were confused. So we re-opened the booking without the set menu and it is going really well. Events is something I want to have fun with. Once a month we do a Sunday degustation lunch 12 3 and 3 -6pm and that is between five and eight courses. I just put one on social media this morning and I already have a couple of bookings. It is a Festival de Fruits de Mer, so a Seafood extravaganza, six-course, purely seafood. French style mostly, but mostly Provencal, because I am from Nice. It is that end tail of Provence that is nearly meeting Italy. I use a lot of butter and cream, but I am mostly olive oil and basil, myself. Ratatouille is how we came to meet.

That's right. I lived for a year near Avignon in Chateaurenard in 1993-94 and I worked as an assistante danglais in a college and so I loved discovering food there and the markets. The Wednesday market at Saint-Remy de Provence was out of this world for me. I dream about it still. Everyone had a different way of doing ratatouille that they absolute stood by, so whether they roast their vegetables separately and bring it together with tomato sauce afterwards. What is your way?

My approach comes from my working-class origins. My grandparents worked on the land. They were growing flowers at one stage and picking grapes at another stage. Mine is more rustic and peasant style. I like to use those words humble and generous. That is how I like to cook and present the food from my childhood. Ratatouille for me, has no tomato sauce. It is just vegetables. My mum used to make one and it is everything chopped then olive oil, garlic, and everything put in there. Obviously, the vegetables cook differently so she would always start with the eggplant because it is the one that absorbs the most oil and cooks a bit longer, then the zucchini, peppers and the tomato at the end. Sometimes there would be some olive tapenade in the fridge and she would whack that in for some extra flavour and to make sure it didnt go to waste. When I went to cookery school, we learned a way that was a little more elevated; finely sliced, looking like a beautifuleventail(fan). Actually we call it a Tian Provencal and it is all those vegetables chopped on a 45angle but I do it very rustically, so olive oil, salt, it has to be seasoned. Often, my first boss in Australia, Frank, calls those guys a delicate genius. A delicate genius is someone who does things for the camera, but the flavour is not there. But maybe from what you saw in the video and from talking to me or from what you learned when you were there, you have to season and get your hands in there and use olive oil, and its not just a nice looking bottle, it has to be bam, boom, big splashes of it. Of course we have to clean here but it has to be messy when you cook, when you chop. Theres music, someone from your family with you. You cook for people you love. I love most of my customers.

Coming from New Zealand, and spending the year there, I was so lucky to meet the people I met and they are still my friends. I would watch them cook and I seemed to know people who went foraging and when they had people round for a meal, thered be 20 people and lots of amazing food. Christmas lunch! We ate all day. Someone had brought goose and there was civet de sanglier that they had been macerating in blood for three days, there was pissaldiere and fruits de mer. It was out of control.

Pissaladiere. Wow. I did one a couple of weeks ago for Bastille Day. It is everywhere in Nice. We take it for granted but it is nowhere else in France. It is only in the South but it is not everywhere in the South.

Delicious. And what is the big thing they do in the pans?

Socca. It is very Nice.

I have seen Panisse in a few places here, is that similar?

No. Socca is chickpea flour and it is very thin and it is cooked in this metal tray under the fire. Panisse is semolina with a little bit of milk and parmesan often.

I was completely wrong.

We used to buy them with my grandmother. I used to go with her to the butcher on Wednesday. That was not my Italian grandmother, it was my French grandmother. She would do steak with lots of butter and panisse. You get the panisse from the butcher. It is semolina and you do it like polenta, I guess, and you squeeze it between two cappuccino saucers and you unmould it when it is set, so it is a flying saucer. Then at home you cut it in big slices, like chips and then you fry it.

Yum.

My French grandmother was a child during the Second World War and her way of cooking was basic. I remember being once or twice, not disgusted, but impressed or surprised. She did milk soup and I had no idea what hat was. I was staying with her one night. She has a bowl, milk, she broke and egg in there and olive oil and salt and pepper. Then she got the stale bread from the last couple of days, let it soak and then she would eat that. I thought wow. That is resourcefulness. You know in wartime they had eggs from the chooks, they had milk from the cows and bread. That was a dish of that time. I was so surprised. And now sardines and rabbit have become a delicacy.

Or bouillabaisse.

But you could come up with that in a fancy restaurant, that milk soup.

It would be all over Instagram.

Bouillabaisse, of course, but also Kir Royale. You know the story of Kir, do you?

No I don't know that story.

It was in Dijon and I think it was the Mayor of Dijon. The vendange was bad that year, the wine was acidic, no good and everyone was asking the mayor what they could do because they were broke. He came up with that twist to sweeten the wine with cassis. So Kir, like many of those stories, Tarte Tatin, they were accidents.

Champagne.

Accidental art. I love that. You dont much around with the classics. But I do. Half of me is very traditional and old school but I have this other part of me, and I think they are equal, where I want to be crazy and put that together.

Can you only be successfully crazy if you know the rules first?

Yes, the technique, mostly the technique.

Where did you train?

In Nice. At the Ecole Hoteliere Auguste Escoffier. I worked in a few big places as an apprentice, then I worked one year in France before I went to England. So I didnt work long in France but I worked with a few big names when I was an apprentice in the South of France and when I was in London, there were some big names. There were a lot of French restaurants in London.

Did you always know you were going to be a chef? Is that in your family?

No, it was an accident as well. My Italian grandmother cooked Italian, but I didn't know when I was growing up that it was Italian. Every Sunday lunch we would have Antipasto, and then Primo Piatto, then Contorni, then Dolce. I never realised and just thought it was French food. When I was in England, I saw it one day and thought about what my grandmother would do. Her antipasti was always a little bit of salami, my dad would forage the mushrooms and my grandmother would pickle them and pickle her own olives as well and we would have that. Then she would cook the meat and put the sauce with the pasta. She always made her own pasta, mostly ravioli and gnocchi because she was from the North, so not long pasta house made. Then the meat with the salad, then a bit of cheese and fruit. Desserts were not her forte so my dad would buy a cake or something. So it came to me later as a young adult that I had this Italian heritage and I used that and got into a little bit. I experimented with making pasta. I worked in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne when I first got here, a Sicilian guy in Brighton. I was second chef and became head chef and I had so much fun making pasta. The techniques were al there, the turning of the tortellini, but the stuffing and the sauces were up to us.

Sauces were something I really enjoyed doing at school; basic technique to thicken and then what to do if you are not happy with your sauce. If its a cream sauce, a big splash of brandy or Dijon mustard. It's like in Ratatouille, the movie, you see him cooking and he adds a bit of this and a bit of that, that is not real technique. You try things together, but it is resourcefulness cooking. In French we call it Systme D. D stands for debrouillard, which is resourcefulness. I like that. My chef at school grew up in the war time as well and I guess that's what makes the big difference between the European and the Australian way of learning at school is that we want to use most of the ingredients and I think it transpires in the cooking in that it is layers of flavour. An onion, the skin and the carrot skin go into making the stock, not just water with tinned stock powder. We recycle everything and wastage is at zero and what we create by doing that is layers. You bone a chicken and the bones go in boiling water or lamb bones in the oven instead of using a packet of read made stock. We would never use vegetables for vegetable stock, it was always vege scraps which creates the layers and then when you create a sauce it is something special. Behind the bar, my special ingredient is love, but the techniques are there. I'll give you an example, we slice salamis and the chunks left, I chuck it in the Bourguignon, I cut it small and it becomes my lardon. The texture is similar. It is not traditional, it's not cheating, but the flavour is there, because I make a cepe salami and there is another layer that is how I play around with the classics.

My school of cooking is not so much following recipes apart from deserts so the Bourguignon you eat tonight might taste differently tomorrow. I believe that cooking is so much emotion and a part of any cook goes into it. The way you feel that day when you cook will go into the food, the final result. If you are happy, if you are miserable, you are angry. It's not that if you are angry it won't taste good, but it might be more fiery or more hot or more acidic or sweeter. I really believe that. That's why I dont follow a recipe for savoury food, it is about tasting. I have to like it. It's a small restaurant and the customers trust me and they trust my palate. What I like the most is people just coming for a simple time and having an amazing magical time. No pretention is very important to me. I have fired a waiter once or twice who was a bit too pompous and I had to say, calm down, it is not this kind of place. I had a manager who wanted a white table cloth and I had to say, no, my dad and I varnished those tables together. They are not perfect, but they are not wobbly and thats the most important thing. I like catching people by surprise, coming to an unassuming place, that's why reviews are a bit scary because once you have maintained a certain level you have to keep that. My new concept is that I spend more time on the floor and talk to people.

Well I think it's what you were saying; hospitality is a package deal. It's not just about the food, I think people, especially these days want to feel part of something, part of a community and they want to know that you as the owner chef care that they are there.

Yeah. People here get chatting and the way I talk to people, it's not sir or madame, that's not the kind of service I want to present. I want to present a real me and a real hospitable side. I like to joke with them and break the ice and then people just relax. Sometimes you go to a new place and you want to impress the waiters and you want to impress the chefs. But you have to treat people with respect, but you have to break the ice. Oh is this your first date, guys, that's my favourite. They say oh thank you, we have been married 28 years, then bang, you get under their skin and I love that. For me it is trust, it is being relaxed, it is establishing something. I have never had a complaint about me being rude, which for a French man is quite surprising, but that's the way I like to talk to my customers. It's a really fun and good environment. I like to think, I dont believe it, but that we are very unique in that sense.

The thing that is important to me in the food and in the service is attention to detail. Attention to detail makes you a better operator, it makes you a better business person and it is better for your customers as well. I have these new liqueurs on the shelf and I let people try them and guess the flavour, it's a bit of fun, a game. The only one that is empty at the moment is the raspberry eau de vie because it is my favourite. But it gets them all interacting.

That's lovely. It's like you are welcoming them into your home here.

Exactly, it's like, welcome to my house. You'd better behave.

I love it.

Small French Bar

3/154 Barkly Street, Footscray