Rob Broadfield: Where WA’s trailblazing chefs will take us next

Chef Kenny McHardy can’t quite believe he’s on this list of culinary leaders. He says he pinches himself every day. “It’s a humbling experience being face to face with customers and producing the sort of food which seems to have struck a chord with so many people. I’m very lucky.” Luck has a habit of attaching itself to hard work, so, what is McHardy’s motivation to grind away, day in, day out at his Manuka Woodfire Kitchen in Fremantle? “I’m just s... scared of failure,” McHardy laughs ruefully. McHardy’s 42-seat venue is one of the smallest top-tier restaurants in WA, known for its dedication to good, directly sourced produce, simplicity and a desire to extract as much flavour and delight as possible from as little as possible. “The connection from the farmer to the customer ticks a lot of boxes with customers these days,” the 40-year-old father of three says. “Transparency is a big thing now, connecting the dots when it comes to buying produce and dealing with farmers. Dining has changed. It’s about making you feel good, not just about filling your stomach. It’s an experience.” McHardy says his “food is humble,” and therein lies its greatness. His dishes are a contradiction, simple but with complex layers of flavour and heat-induced punch from arguably his greatest ingredient — an old brick-lined woodfired oven. In Perth, Chase Weber is professional cooking’s renaissance man, a culinary artist with a thorough grasp of technical skills and a brain for hospitality’s drearier bits: cost of goods, margins, staffing. The 34-year-old former Guildford Grammar School boy produces art that people want on their plate, not highfalutin or exotic but exciting and often highly original. It all began, for us at least, with Weber’s chicken grill, which had us swooning when we first put fork to mouth seven years ago at The Standard bar in Northbridge. At its heart, it was grilled chicken with vermicelli rice noodles. No big deal, you say, except that it was: simple, powerful with ferment, spicy with Korean chilli, charred around the edges, sweet as a nut and, most difficult to achieve with flavours this pugnacious, balanced and finessed. Perhaps more than any other chef on our list, Weber has had a profound impact on the outstanding cooking coming from the small-bar sector. His success at bringing next-level cooking to the fun bar scene gave licence to a generation of chefs who refused to accept that bar cooking was the poor cousin to so-called fine dining. WA’s bar scene — unconstrained by convention — is now the crucible for some of the most creative commercial cookery in WA, and with 5000 punters a week coming through the doors at the venues Weber oversees (The Standard and Fleur and Willi’s at The Royal Hotel ), the affable chef says it’s all down to drive. “I’m driven to do what I do because I have a core belief — you have to give people what they want,” Weber says. “To achieve that, you have to look at all your demographics to see how people eat on, say, a Sunday as opposed to a Wednesday, to determine who’s typically in your venues at any given time and make sure they have what they want.” Which he does in spades: his simple dish of butterflied prawns in a butter chilli sauce is unlike any other grilled prawn dish you’ve eaten. “I like to think out of the box,” Weber says. “I’m not afraid of taking a risk. People are much more accepting of bolder flavours and inventiveness these days. And what’s the worst that could happen? If a dish doesn’t work, you take it off, but you have to keep pushing, pushing, pushing.” At 29, Blaze Young is the ingenue in this group of battle-hardened pros, but her cooking is as original and adventurous as that of her peers. Her menu at the cleverly dishevelled, swanky neighbourhood wine bar, Nieuw Ruin, in Fremantle is full of nostalgic references to old-timey family favourites like roast chook and the pie floater, but executed with a preternatural sense of flavour and, one suspects, an urge to see her customers do that silent wow thing when they eat. “All of the women in my family are incredible cooks,” Young says. “My grandma was a chef when she was young and my aunties have always cooked. “A lot of the cooking I do now comes from childhood memories, from cooking with my mum and grandma. This is where the inspiration for these old-world dishes come from.” Her pie floater is one of the finest, humblest, most tasty dishes you’ll eat in WA. It seems Young has nailed the zeitgeist. There is an increasing trend among WA diners for food as a touchstone: simple, well-executed creations that come with a side dish of nostalgia. Her approach marries with the growing trend for grounded luxury in restaurant food with fewer ingredients, better produce and the creative challenges of a no or low-waste kitchen. The idea of low-waste kitchens was pioneered in WA by chefs Melissa Palinkas and Guy Jeffreys, who, incidentally, are both former WA Chef of the Year winners. Many other kitchens adhere to the zero-waste ideal, but these two chefs embraced it wholeheartedly long before it became a “thing”. Jeffreys is, more than any other chef in this elite group, the closest we might get in WA to the archetypal French Michelin-starred rural chef with his own vegetable and herb gardens, personal relationships with growers and producers, and a kitchen which looks first to the land and the vegie patch for inspiration. Jeffreys lives on the Millbrook Winery property in Jarrahdale among the sylvan embrace of rolling hills, birdsong, native forest and steep vineyards. His restaurant is crammed most days with enthusiasts of his natural style of cooking. Most enjoy the adventure of not knowing what’s going to be on the menu, because as Jeffreys puts it, “the garden and the produce dictates everything we do”. When he introduced his “No Waste Mondays” at Millbrook, it took off. Reservations go out weeks and sometimes months in advance. The weekly clean-out of the coolroom provides his team with an opportunity to get together and brainstorm dishes based on leaving nothing in the fridge for the week ahead. It has resulted in some extraordinary cooking. The much-loved and much-imitated Melissa Palinkas is self-taught. For many chefs, a lack of formal training could be an unjumpable hurdle to greatness. Not for Palinkas (or self-taught Heston Blumenthal, for that matter). She has risen from cooking’s backblocks, learning her trade to eventually win a place on professional cooking’s podium. Her Young George bar, and Ethos Deli + Dining Room, in East Fremantle are a go-to for the hospitality set, as sure a sign as any that she has something to say on the plate. And like her fellow auteurs, her cooking just gets better and better. Palinkas’ two kitchens are the working embodiment of zero waste. Nothing (or very little) goes in the bin. It’s a tough row to hoe. The upside is that such an approach demands creative and innovative menu development. Her customers are the winner. “The industry is becoming more simplistic in the way it cooks: simple presentation, simple flavours. More and more vegetable-forward dishes are making their way on to menus. The sustainable movement will get bigger and bigger, mostly driven by customers,” Palinkas says. “At Young George, we’re 90 per cent no waste. All of our produce has a primary use, then a secondary use for trim and scraps. Finally, we might use what’s left in a pickle or a preserve and then whatever’s left over goes to compost or to the chickens. It’s all about minimising waste.” Vasse Felix head chef Brendan Pratt has a similar approach. Nothing exemplifies his no-waste cred like his garum-style sauce made with the ultimate waste product, fish bones. “It brings all the depth and umami to our smoked beef-fat milk sauce,” he says. “Creating and being inspired by produce” — these are the things that get Pratt up in the morning. The former Fraser’s Restaurant apprentice has been the culinary boss at Vasse Felix for four years, taking leadership of the prestigious Margaret River kitchen as a 31-year-old. You could say his food is “out there” given his idiosyncratic flavour and texture combinations and yet, like all these chefs, his simple, subtle approach to cooking just a few dominant ingredients, rescues him from any urges to go the full Heston. “Finding our own way of cooking a protein that may have been cooked a hundred times by a hundred other chefs, is what keeps us ahead and relevant,” Pratt says. “But it’s produce first, always produce first, when it comes to designing a dish.” His short menu descriptions are an adjective-free roll call of ingredients, as is the way these days. Try dishes like emu, quandong, lettuce, yolk or scampi, tomato, cucumber, radish or, our favourite, pork, eel, eggplant, miso. “At the end of the day, we’re just professional salt adders,” Balthazar head chef Luke Wakefield says. “Everyone can cook food, so you have to have confidence, belief and passion in what you do. I love my job.” The 35-year-old father of five says much of his inspiration came from working on luxury private yachts where “you’re face to face with your guests every day”. “It’s a great way to learn how customers tick and what they expect,” he says. “I’m very lucky. Really lucky. I wanted to bring accolades to Balthazar and to get bums on seats, but I’ve learnt that you’re only as good as the team you have. Good staff retention is critical. Only then can you concentrate on making good food. If you’re chasing staff all the time, it distracts from the creative process.” Wakefield’s simple, recherche dishes prove his point. His beef tartare with tuna mayonnaise and house terrine may sound prosaic but they are flavour bombs with sublime subtlety. Also joining this small band of ambitious, clever, game changers are Wildflower’s Matthew Sartori, who has elevated the posh restaurant’s offer to commercial cooking’s top of the pops; Scott Brannigan (Coogee Common, Bread in Common), with his homegrown, house-made, vegetable-driven menu, which has broken new ground for modern cookery; and Seth James, the young chef whose cooking at Wills Domain in Margaret River delights with its inventiveness and razor-sharp technique. Collectively, their food is exciting and original. Together, they are responsible for shaping the very nature of dining in WA. Simpler, honest and rustic, more vegetable based, less on the plate and more seafood. Honest. These are WA’s emerging dining trends for 2021-2022. Most of WA’s top chefs agree that seafood is making a big comeback as a bellicose China and COVID-19 conspire to keep WA seafood out of the restaurants of Asia. Good seafood restaurants have, inexplicably, always been thin on the ground in WA. That will change, this year and next. Simpler and better is the big, emerging trend. “Industry-wise, we’ll be seeing more simplicity. We’re dialling it back from a few years ago where we were putting lots of stuff on the plate. Dishes will become less cheffy, with fewer ingredients and outstanding produce,” Vasse Felix’s Brendan Pratt says. “A lot of chefs are starting to play with fire,” Chase Weber says. “There are a few doing it really well (like Kenny McHardy) but the wider chef community is catching on and you’ll see much more of it this year and next. “Fermenting may have had its day. It will still be a legitimate element of commercial restaurant cooking, but we’re going to see less of the more gimmicky aspects of fermenting.” Blaze Young agrees. She says simpler food, better cooked and with less ingredients is the emerging trend. “Rustic, tasty food is very much the go at the moment. It’s less about how the dish looks and more how it tastes,” she says. All the chefs agree that the skyrocketing price of red meat, even the once reliably cheap secondary cuts like brisket, short ribs and hanger steak, have priced it out of the range for many restaurants. Vegetables, house-made products and seafood will increasingly be on our plates in the next 12 months. The biggest change though, may well be us, WA’s diners and foodies. “People are becoming a lot more adventurous in Perth now,” Young says. “For a long time, people were very conservative in Perth. Sometimes you’d see pictures of dishes in Sydney and Melbourne and you’d think that just wouldn’t sell here, but that’s changing. It’s exciting.”