Conversation With A Chef
Words by Ro Ritty
www.conversationwithachef.com
Listen here on Soundcloud
The word that stands out from my chat with Anthony Power of Pilgrim in Liverpool is fun. Anthony has been involved with a lot of projects and businesses and life adventures and he describes them all as fun. And I believe him. He exudes a palpable appreciation of life and the many opportunities he has been offered and has seized in both hands. He has worked in Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, London and now Liverpool. He was one of the first 30 Mo Bros who launched Movember back in 2003. He has also authored a cookbook and was a founding member of Root+Bone magazine. He is back in his home town of Melbourne for one of those opportunities; a chance to work in with chef Paolo Arlotta from Herbivorous Nights, Orlando Marzo, the 2018 World’s Best Bartender and Liinaa Berry, sommelier. This gun team are, over two weekends at the end of March, curating a pop-up seven-course tasting menu at Young Bloods in Fitzroy, inspired by the ancient pilgrimage through France and Spain called the Camino de Santiago.
Hi Anthony, how are you? We are sitting in Young Bloods at The Rose Street Market in Fitzroy and you’ve got a restaurant in Liverpool in the Duke Street Market. Is that just a coincidence?
Yes, I think it is just a coincidence. This is right next door and connected to the Rose Street Artists’ market which is a bit of an institution here in Melbourne and I went to high school with Adam, the owner. That’s the connection and that’s loosely how I got involved with the pop-up here.
Right. I’ve been reading a bit about you and it’s hard to know where to start. You said you were doing life administration when I came in and I feel as though you would have to because you were involved with Movember, you’re a writer, you’re a chef, you a co-owner of a business in Liverpool…so, let’s start at the beginning. You’re from Melbourne originally…
Yes, I’m from Melbourne. I grew up in the Eastern suburbs out in Doncaster and Park Orchards. I left just after high school and university in the early 90s. I went over to Canada in 1992 and pretty much spent 10 years living in the mountains of Canada and New Zealand snowboarding and trying to pursue a career and my passion for riding a snowboard. Then I realised that I confused ability with ambition and decided I had better move away from that before I hurt myself.
So that’s when you became a chef?
I sort of fell into cheffing. I’d worked in Melbourne when I was at University in a couple of pizza shops and as a dishwasher. Then over the course of those ten years in all the ski towns, there were restaurants where I started as a dishwasher and worked my way up over the years. But working in restaurants allowed me to ski and snowboard all day and then go to work and get fed at night, which was great because living the life as a ski bum, you pretty much have no money. It was a great job and then after years and years I kept going with it. When I moved back to Melbourne in the late 90s, 2000, and got to work with a really talented chef here called Matt Waldron who has a restaurant in Hawthorn.
I’ve spoken to him. He has Lulo
Yes! Lulo. I’d worked with him a few times as a pizza maker in an Italian restaurant in the early 90s and then came back and worked with him and he was the one who really showed me what food and cheffing could be and made me realise it could be more than just a job to support me while I snowboarded. I was very fortunate to work with a very talented guy who I call Obi Wan Kenobi because he is like a Jedi master to me.
I love that. I love it when I hear chefs talking about people I’ve spoken to and they’re important to them. And his flair is for Spanish cooking as well. Is that where you got your passion for it?
Actually no because when I worked for him, it was in an Italian restaurant. I’m actually seeing him after this interview to talk about some Spanish food. His wife is Colombian, and he is one of those chefs that you could drop into a Japanese restaurant and he’d take it and run with it. He’s brilliant. He is one of those life in the blood who has the passion for it and just does not turn it off. He is constantly thinking about food.
You’ve spent time in Mexico as well?
Yes…I had some very colourful times in Mexico. In between the winters, I used to plant pine trees in the forestation industry up in British Columbia, near Alaska to make money. You can make enough money to ski all winter without having to work…sometimes. And then I’d go down to Mexico on the off-season for two or three months in between. I worked at a couple of restaurants there. When I say restaurants, I say it loosely, they were more beach barbecue places. I got to work with some really cool Mexican chefs and had a lot of fun there.
I feel as though we often put Mexican and Spanish together as cuisines and they’re not, but are there any links between them?
This was in the mid-nineties. Mexican food has definitely had its time in the sun now, globally, and it’s not just slinging tacos, there are some fantastic restaurants in Mexico City.
Some of the top restaurants in the world are in Mexico.
Exactly. Obviously the tomatoes and so on influenced the European dishes. I don’t know if I could say there was a link.
Maybe it’s because they all speak Spanish, so we get confused.
They certainly have a love for food and beer, but I think everyone does.
That’s right.
Cheffing, especially, can be a brutal job. But I think every single chef…there’s a reason why they go through it. People put chefs up on pedestals and it has become a bit of a rockstar job in the last twenty years, whereas in the 80s, it really wasn’t, other than Marco Pierre White. Chefs do it because they love it. They sweat and they give up their holidays and their weekends and their life to do this job and they clearly love it. If it’s not fun, you shouldn’t be doing it.
How did you get to Liverpool?
It’s a very, very long story, as most stories are.
I moved to London in 2005. Like a lot of foolish men, I followed a woman to the other side of the world only for that to go terribly wrong a couple of months after we got there. I was cheffing there for a little while, but before I had left a couple of my other highschool mates, Luke and Travis, the two guys who came up with the idea for Movember; we had worked on a couple of campaigns together…2003 was the 30 guys in the pub just up the road here in Brunswick Street. Then 2004 was a little bit bigger; a lot of the surf and skate guys who Trav and Luke both worked for had got behind the cause and then I moved to London in 2005, which is when it really started to pop here. Then over the next couple of years with all the backpackers over ere you couldn’t avoid it and in 2006 and 2007, everyone had a moustache here in Australia; it caught on like wildfire. Then one of the other founders and his family moved over to the UK to set up the UK campaign and I was fortunate enough to step out of cheffing and in to the moustache factory, so to speak, and worked on the UK and Irish campaigns for a couple of years, doing all the events and business and community development and running the campaign. There were about four of us who did it. Then we expanded into Europe and I ended up running the campaigns in the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland and a little bit of Spain.
That’s huge.
I was incredibly fortunate that I got to be part of it and it was an incredible amount of fun and incredibly humbling to watch the world get behind this crazy idea of growing a moustache. It was fantastic. Then I had done everything I could do with Movember.
In 2017, I stepped back into cooking and started a consultancy company and was doing some events. A chef I’d worked with had met another guy who had walked the Camino de Santiago and had an idea for a pop-up in London where the menu follows the distinctive trail of the Camino and produce found along the way. We did a pop-up and then we were trying to find somewhere a little more significant, a bit more of a residency. We couldn’t find anything and then someone told us about a Netflix show called Million Pound Menu so we applied for it and somehow kept getting through each stage of it and ended up going to Manchester and did a two night pop-up which is on Netflix now, I think. We were offered investment to open a place in Liverpool.
What did you have to do for that show?
It was a lot of fun, pretty crazy. We had cameras and microphones all over us. The whole idea of reality shows is hard to get your head around. You had to put together a business plan and a pitch vide and document and there are about fifteen of the UK’s big food entrepreneurs and restaurant groups overseeing it and they liked our concept. There were four investors who were interested in our product so we had to go and cook a dish for them and talk through the business plan. There were three of us in that stage and they chose us, Pilgrim. Then a couple of weeks later we had to go to Manchester and do a 50-seat pop-up lunch where the investors would come along and we sold tickets to the public. They watched us in action and talked to the guests to see what they thought of the food and the concept. And then we would have one on one interviews with the investors to pick apart the business plan. We were lucky enough that there was a guy there, Matt Farrell from the Graffiti Spirits Group which is a very successful bar and restaurant group up in Liverpool. He said they were building a big food market up in Duke Street in Liverpool and they had a flagship up on the mezzanine and it could be ours if we wanted it. So we all packed up and moved to Liverpool. So now I live in Liverpool.
You don’t have the accent though.
I actually have trouble understanding the people in Liverpool. The accent is tough but it reminds me a lot of Australia. They are some of the friendliest people. After being in London for 14 years and it’s such a massive city and really impersonal and then moving to Liverpool…it’s like that here…I’ve been here for five years and everyone says hello. In Liverpool everyone talks to you. It’s a great restaurant.
How many seats does Pilgrim have?
About 50 seats. It’s up on the top of the market. It’s a beautiful market. There are six vendors downstairs; it’s not streetfood, but one step up from that. There’s table service, you get your food on plates, there’s a wine bar and a cocktail bar. It’s doing really well.
We have an amazing open kitchen upstairs. We built a custom hearth, a big live fire hearth and we cook everything over charcoal, which is incredible. We use Spanish Holm oak…they grow the acorns the Iberico pigs eat that are used to make Jamon. And we use a mixture of English applewood and sweet chestnut as well. The flavour profiles you get from different woods and smoke are phenomenal. It’s a lot of fun. It can get very hot in the kitchen in front of the fire. But the feedback we get from the guests is that they haven’t tasted anything like it.
That’s meat and vege?
Yes, everything, fish…it’s huge. We can cook a whole lamb over it. Our whole beast Sundays are cooking whole pig. It’s a lot of fun.
Are you on the pans there?
I am again now. I spent the first four months there in the trenches sweating, I think I lost four kilos the first two weeks we opened because we were still trying to work out the fire and the optimum temperature for the coals. We were busy for the first two weeks so we were over compensating and feeding the fire full of wood. I stepped out of the kitchen then until about a month ago to work on the marketing and social media side of it and other external events and festivals.
I read Grace Dent’s article in The Guardian where she described Pilgrim as having “swagger.” What do you think she meant by that?
I don’t know. It could have something to do with our business partner and founder, Jimmy. Everyone questions whether he has any buttons on his shirt because it is usually open, unbuttoned all the way down, and he has long hair and a bit of swagger to him. I think that could be where it comes from. Either that, or the three of us who started it, and unfortunately Dave has had to leave and go back to London, but I think we are a bit older than a lot of the younger kids downstairs and…we’re not infamous…but we work hard, we play hard. I think that comes across in the restaurant and the way we run it.
So far everything you’ve talked about, you’ve said it is a lot of fun and that seems to be how you approach life, which is amazing because being a chef and working in hospitality is hard work but of you have the approach of it being fun and you’re doing it with mates, that helps.
It does. Look, there’s no doubt about it, it can be a brutal job but there’s something about it. One of my friends, a very well-known chef in London has just started a pilot light campaign, which is a mental health in the hospitality industry campaign. We were talking last week and people often say chefs are crazy nut jobs and some of the bartenders. Does hospitality drag people who are a bit more crazy and energetic and loose or do people become like that after working in hospitality. Cheffing, especially, can be a brutal job. But I think every single chef…there’s a reason why they go through it. People put chefs up on pedestals and it has become a bit of a rockstar job in the last twenty years, whereas in the 80s, it really wasn’t, other than Marco Pierre White. Chefs do it because they love it. They sweat and they give up their holidays and their weekends and their life to do this job and they clearly love it. If it’s not fun, you shouldn’t be doing it.
Exactly. Tell me about what you’re doing here.
I’m working with Paolo, my chef collaborator who is out the back there now. We are going to do a seven course tasting menu based on the Camino de Santiago. Paolo is Italian and an incredibly accomplished chef. We are going to follow the Camino Roma where the first stop is Rome and then it goes north up to Turin and then cuts across France to a little town on the French side of the Pyrenees called Saint John Pied de Port, which is the starting point for the most famous and well travelled part of the Camino, which is the Camino Français and goes over the Pyrenees to Pamplona, famous for the running of the bulls, then Burgos which is very famous for its Morcilla, the blood sausage, then across to Léon and then to Galicia. It will feature some ingredients and styles of food you would find along the way. It all culminates at Santiago de Compostela, which is a town in western Spain, in Galicia where St. James was buried in the 9th century. In Galicia, when you get there, all the bakeries put out their Tarta de Santiago, the Saint James tart, which is like an almond cake they give out to weary travellers as a reward for walking 500 miles. You’d want to have. a lot of cake for that. Our dessert will be a play on that. It starts next Friday and round the following weekend as well. We’re excited. I only met Paolo yesterday and we are working with Orlando Marzo who is a world class bartender and Liinaa Berry, a top sommelier, who have all come together through Adam here at Young Bloods.
It’s very humbling to organise something through emails from the other side of the world. I hope I’m up to the standard of the people I’m working with. We are all really pumped about it.
It’s good to have those injections of something different along the way and for everyone to come together like that. I think the world collaboration is overused these days, but I do see the benefit of collaborations when it bears that kind of fruit.
You’re right, now it’s just called a collab, the shortened, cooler version, but I don’t know what this would have been if it hadn’t have involved these other guys because I would have literally landed now and I’d be putting it together by myself.
I guess you can do this kind of thing when you have networked over the year and you have been involved with lots of things, so you have lots of people to call on. You know people who know people. That’s the beauty of it.
Exactly. I’m very lucky. These guys are absolute guns and it’s going to be awesome.
Pilgrim x Herbivorous Nights 'Camino de Santiago' Tasting Menu
6.30pm, 7.30pm & 8.30pm sittings
Friday 20 - Saturday 21 March
Friday 27 - Saturday 28 March
Young Bloods, 60 Rose Street, Fitzroy VIC 3065
Tickets $90.76 for 7-course dinner + $69.66 for wine pairing (optional) + BF
