Standing before a roomful of diners in the Tamar Valley, Massimo Mele is a workmanlike figure. He’s spent the day standing close to a brick oven at Timbre Kitchen, plating up a festival dinner for more than 100. Most of us would look toasted, but while Massimo’s signature black apron is dusted with flour and cheese from the kitchen, not a hair on his head is out of place.
The occasion is a Saturday night during Farmgate Festival in the Tamar Valley, and Mele is the chef bringing cachet to the event. The room glows with bonhomie and goblets swirling with dessert wine, the crowd sated and raucous. Mele has served produce from the region: a slow-cooked pork and mushroom with orecchiette pasta, and a beef crudo (raw) scattered with micro greens. Each dish is deceptively simple, fresh and highly memorable.
As he addresses the room, there are no celebrity anecdotes, although he could tell plenty. Instead he speaks with feeling about the growers who had dropped off their ingredients through the day, about their modesty in the boxes of field-fresh produce.
The evening was in a way both the end and the start of a journey. It was the end of an extended working trip to Tasmania during which Mele had been guest chef at a series of events including a lunch at Stefano Lubiana Wines, the Winter Feast at Dark Mofo and Graze the Region in the cattle farming heartland of the north west. Collectively, it brought about an epiphany – after a long and celebrated career on the mainland, it was time to come home.
Born and bred in Tasmania of Italian heritage, and steeped in the food cultures of both places since childhood, it was perhaps inevitable that Massimo Mele would return to his roots here. Perhaps it’s true to say that the dual food cultures of Italy and Tasmania have an affinity. Although our island’s food scene is a trembling young stem of a thing in comparison to Italy’s flourishing, deeply rooted plant, both cultures are grounded in respect for fresh and seasonal ingredients, and reach deep into our instincts for tradition, conviviality and family.
Mele’s innate knowhow when it comes to food came early from family members and has never left him. Although born in Hobart, he was raised for his first six years in the Vesuvio region near Naples, poor in economic terms but with rich volcanic soils and a food culture thousands of years old. The family lived communally in a house with cousins and kids on bikes everywhere.
Young Massimo’s grandmother worked on the tomato farm opposite. A watermelon would be lowered down the well every morning for coolness, and drawn up and cracked open for lunch. Such are food memories made. “When I eat a watermelon, I remember that,” says Mele.
His mother, grandmother and aunt were “great cooks”, and their gentleness and patience in the kitchen was a lasting legacy. Cooking was never done in a rush at the end of the day, but happened throughout the entire day. “You’d wake up in the morning and they’d already be talking about what they were going to make for dinner.”
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Mele built on these beginnings with hard work and aptitude. On the family’s return to Tasmania, he worked in his parent’s Hobart restaurant from the age of 12, absorbing their work ethic, watching this mother nurture ingredients in her own vegetable garden and plate a repertoire of simple, satisfying, clever dishes from an Italian-Tasmanian melting pot.
Winning a competition as apprentice of the year, Mele travelled and met others in his industry, getting a taste for exploring. Landing a job at Donovans, in Melbourne’s St Kilda, on the strength of “a fight, a suit and an interview”, he was cast into what he calls the “SAS of cooking”, a kitchen with 25 chefs on the roster, where “every one of them knew more than me”.
Mentored by owner Gail Donovan, he was exposed to the likes of Maggie Beer and Damien Pignolet. He found himself cooking alongside Stephanie Alexander. Doors opened to people with a food culture aligned with his own – more about love and nurture and less about macho endurance.
By his late 20s he had managed a thousand covers a day as executive chef with the Hugo’s group, and had launched his own catering company. He catered a wedding for a Prime Minister’s daughter, cooked for Elton John and shared a sofa and a beer on grand final day with Hugh Jackman, catering a private dinner in his apartment.
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Meanwhile, Mele’s partner, Kristy Stewart, had remained in Hobart. Things changed when the couple had their first child.
In his bones, Mele knew that nothing compared to being able to point with your fork to the paddock where your beef had grazed, or buy vegetables direct from the grower at a farmers’ market. Ensconced once more in Hobart, he stepped into the role of food director for the new Grain of the Silos hotel restaurant in Launceston, and set about building a landmark restaurant. Taking the management team on a three-month tour of regional farms, he sought out the produce he wanted to use – locally grown, by people with as much fire in their bellies about growing their foodstuff as he had in cooking with it.
In Blackman Bay, the team watched on the quayside as oysters were shucked fresh from the water. At Cygnet they visited the zero waste mushroom farm, started in an old apple shed and now with a waiting list for its specialised fungi. In the Tamar Valley, Mele got into the pens with the saddleback pigs, and sampled the bacon straight from the smoker.
Those with enough product to supply the restaurant became stalwart supporters, such as Erinvale potato farm, where Wayne and Susan Adams grow 14 varieties, taking Mele’s appreciation of the humble spud to a new level.
Lesser known varieties such as red fantasy, he says, “are just bloody delicious and unreal”.
Within months of returning permanently, Mele inveigled himself into the food community faster than olive oil through vinaigrette, and the Grain of the Silos menu became a tour de force of Tasmanian food, collecting the Gault&Millau Best New Restaurant award six months after opening.
Eighty percent of ingredients used are Tasmanian, their provenance and integrity guaranteed. A sprinkling of suppliers sends product from interstate, like the Fraser Isle spanner crab which Mele teams with clams from Binalong Bay for a best-selling summer pasta dish.
With big menus and diners returning frequently and expecting something different, variety is essential, he says.
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There’s a fine balance between what is viable and what is not. Driving to the Tasman Peninsula weekly for celeriac, or to Glenorchy for white asparagus, was not workable for long. To streamline things, he is working on a 12-month growing calendar with a handful of growers, mixed farms in four locations from Bream Creek to Cradle Mountain and a nursery farm in the north-east. The spread of microclimates means dishes can remain on the menu for longer. What’s more, the farmers ask him what he would like them to grow. Working this closely with producers is a first, a different kettle of fish from placing an order with a distant wholesaler, as Mele’s peers in the kitchens of Sydney and Melbourne do.
Continuing his mother’s tradition of growing food at home, he planted his own vegetable garden at his riverfront home in Hobart, keen to get his hands dirty and work with the seasonal growth cycle. Giving his family snap beans and kohlrabi three nights in a row because that’s what is ripe doesn’t make him popular, he has found, but he at least he’s now a true advocate of seasonal eating.
Not convinced initially that her son knew what he was doing in the garden, Mama Maria now visits to harvest greens for her own kitchen. And wife Kristy takes cryo-vacuumed bags to work containing what is undoubtedly the best packed lunch in Hobart.
It’s not easy continuing to carve a career as a chef on a smaller island where the pace can be escargot-like, and Massimo Mele likes to work hard.
Underpinning all the work is undoubtedly that background in hatted restaurants, but also what he grew up with, the simple pleasure of a great dish made from ingredients bursting with flavour. He’s still the grandson of a Napolitano tomato farmer, with a love of good soil and the food it produces. No wonder the good life in Tasmania drew him home.
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HOBART, October, 2020: It has been announced that Massimo Mele has been appointed culinary director of a new restaurant in the heart of Hobart. The yet-to-be-named restaurant will be in the Parliament Square project, also home to The Tasman, a luxury hotel. “We are proud to be partnering with a Tasmanian chef to bring Hobart’s rich local character to life," Stephen Morahan, general manager for The Tasman, said in a press release. The restaurant will open when The Tasman officially opens in 2021.
For recipes and further information, visit massimomele.com.
Fiona Stocker is a Tamar Valley-based writer, editor and keeper of pigs. She has published the books A Place in the Stockyard (2016) and Apple Island Wife (2018). More of her writing can be seen at fionastocker.com.
