With a raft of awards and experience that belie his years, Tony Moss is a passionate and creative chef whose belief is that if you’re going to put your name to something, you should do it well. He certainly lives and breathes this ethos and you can taste it in his new incarnation at Italian restaurant, .
Hi Tony. Let’s start at the beginning. Did you always want to be a chef?
I’ve always worked in some sort of food. I grew up on a farm and we cropped potatoes and ran sheep and we had an orchard, so we had apples, pears and peaches.
This was in New Zealand?
Yes, in the Hawkes Bay. Growing up there, we were always surrounded by food. Our next door neighbours had a vineyard and I used to jump on the three wheel motorcycle and cross the paddocks to wash dishes there at the weekend. I was immersed in it. I learned from them how awesome hospitality is and how much I liked it. I progressed from washing dishes to peeling vegetables, cutting bread. It ignited the passion.
Did you do your apprenticeship in New Zealand?
Yes, I studied London City and Guilds in Hawes Bay and I was lucky enough to win a scholarship from the Restaurant Association of New Zealand when I was 16. So I decided I didn’t need to finish school because I’d got a scholarship and I started studying to be a chef. I ended up passing with double distinction and was one of the youngest people to do that globally on the London City and Guilds course. It was so cool. From a young age it was nice to know that everything I was putting in, I was getting out.
Where did you go from there?
My first job outside my training was in Auckland, but on Waiheke Island, about 35 minutes by boat from the mainland.
On a vineyard?
Yes! New Zealand is very much about wine and food for me. That was Te Whau Vineyard, which has recently sold actually. The owners had a three level gravity fed small winery with an awesome 60 seater restaurant, one of the best in New Zealand.
I was 17. I turned 18 when I was there. It was really full on because the day before I started, the head chef broke his leg, so I was thrown in to running the pass.
How many in the kitchen?
It’s tiny. There were four people in the kitchen and I was running the pass and I thought it must be some kind of joke but it was one of the best things because I got to learn a lot about running a kitchen at that standard early on. It was scary but cool.
Especially at that young age. So, given your age, did you miss all that brigade, yelling style of kitchen?
I left that kitchen because of that. The head chef and the sous chef were husband and wife which made it even worse. That was the last time I experienced that. Modern kitchens are less aggressive and there is less bullying in reputable places anyway.
I saw you having a nice exchange with your team when I came in.
I think if you set yourself up with aggression, you’re going to get that aggression back. For me, training the guys is really important. This is a new menu that we are going to roll out next week and everything is new for them, from the techniques to the produce and the style is a little bit more refined and a little bit more skill intensive than they are used to. I have to keep them on board.
That’s interesting because I would have thought that Sagra was one of those places where locals demand the menu keep all the favourites.
We are reworking a few things and making a few things better that are already on the menu. We are trying to get the produce more local. It’s all Italian so we are still using Italian tomatoes and olives, but if it’s seafood, we try and make it as local and sustainable as possible. And we’re trying to use everything. We have a risotto on that’s using the whole squid; the tentacles are braised down and used in it, the squid ink is used to colour the risotto and the flesh is used in the Josper, cooked and popped on the top. The Italian are a lower waste country. They try and use as much as they produce. We’re trying to get back to that family style. You won’t see the technique on the plate because it’s going to look as rustic and normal as it always has. But you will appreciate the tenderness; we are using processes, like brining that take a few days.
Well I guess you never really want to eat something and think, oh I can tell this was a lot of work to make, you just want to enjoy the end product.
Exactly.
How much Italian cooking had you done before here?
Not a lot.
You really sound as though you know what you’re talking about.
I’ve visited Italy and I have a lot of Italian friends. Also the Mediterranean style was something I was very familiar with growing up. The first vineyard I worked on was Stonyridge Vineyard and is Tuscan style. Being classically trained too, Italian isn’t far from French. It’s just got better products. It’s a nicer style, lighter and more impactful. I think the Italian style is friendly and more vibrant.
I read that you spent some time in China. How did you get to do that?
I got a phone call one day. The person on the other end of the phone was wondering whether I wanted to work fir a family in China who wanted to set up a New Zealand café chain.
Wow.
It never went ahead. I spent a year working on the project in Shanghai. It was crazy. There were billionaire investors with huge amounts of property but what they wanted to do wasn’t commercially viable. They wanted stores next to Louis Vuitton and Prada and the rents were prohibitive to making money. You’d have to sell a lot of coffee.
And you worked as a private chef for a while too. That would be a different style of cooking to cooking in restaurants.
It was really great. The clients often just let me cook whatever I wanted. It was really good for networking and meeting people.
Were you doing that as well as working in a restaurant?
Yes but I’d only do it for fun. I said no a lot. I actually said no more than I said yes.
I have a big belief that if you’re going to put your name to something, you should do it well. If you want your team to be successful, you need to teach them success.
Now you’re at Sagra. Have you had free reign on the new menu?
Ross Chessari is super passionate and really understands the end goal in hospitality. I’ve been here for a month and Ross has been away most of that time and I’ve been working on the menu. Ross’s words were, “whatever you put on has to be better than what was on before.
No pressure. You probably like that challenge though.
A lot of the dishes are dishes I’ve cooked for Ross before coming here. We are changing the crab linguine which is a bestseller here but he tasted my version and said he wanted that on right away so that everyone can have it. You don’t get an owner like that very often. We see eye to eye holistically from the food to the team to the atmosphere. A little bit of free reign, but some will stay the same.
We’re also going to expand the deli section so that people can take things home. We’re going to sell pasta and the slow cooked tomato sauce we’ve started making. The Josper coal oven has residual heat overnight so we cut up a lot of Roma tomatoes with rosemary and thyme and then they dry gently over night and we put some onions in there as well and then puree it and put in some fresh basil it makes a really sweet sauce. That’s going to be served with a naked ravioli or Gnudi. It’s a cured ricotta ball. We cure it in semolina so it firms up and then we poach it so it has no pasta skin. It’s a beautiful dumpling of buffalo ricotta, sage, basil, nutmeg and parmesan. It’s light and just has amazing Italian flavours.
When you’re teaching staff, are you more of a shower or a teller?
I mix the two. Before these guys got to see the menu, they got recipes for every dish. They had 49 pages of recipe guidelines for them to read. They’ve see the process. In my mind it’s pretty simple but it’s how we put it together; the time, the love, the effort that’s important.
Where do you get your ideas?
All sorts of places. Instagram, Facebook, books. I look at competitors’ restaurants and see what they’re doing. I like to think about what’s good, what’s not and what’s just noise on the menu. This is a big menu and we don’t want noise.
Is it tiring taking so much care and thinking so much about everything?
It depends. I have a big belief that if you’re going to put your name to something, you should do it well. If you want your team to be successful, you need to teach them success. It’s such a team effort. The amount of work that goes into one dish, let alone 30; you’re deluded if you think you can do that by yourself, let alone do it well. Teaching care is what I try to pass on.
Sagra
256 Glenferrie Road, Malvern