Eco-warrior Joost Bakker puts leftovers on the table
Joost Bakker will use food thrown out by other restaurants
RESTLESS eco-warrior cum celebrity florist and restaurateur (Greenhouse, Perth) Joost Bakker has pulled the pin on his Melbourne joint Silo and reopened with a concept that takes the whole renewable/no-waste ethos one step closer to his planet-saving philosophy.
Brothl is a six-day, 10-10 zero-waste restaurant based on the idea of recycling other restaurants’ bones and waste fruit and vegetable matter. Seriously. Brothl is a broth restaurant. Using rainwater collected at Bakker’s home in the Dandenongs and bones/carcasses collected from other restaurants (notably Rockpool Bar & Grill, Attica and European), the idea is five broths are supplemented with various additions to create your dish. Bakker then turns the leftover beef bones into charcoal, for composting, and recycles everything else in a closed-loop bacterial composter. Ryan Bussey is head chef.
ENGLAND: SO where next for Bakker’s other chef, Matt Stone, currently doing Sydney pop-up Stanley Street Merchant? He’s off to Brighton, England, for a few months to help British chef Douglas McMaster open Britain’s first zero-waste restaurant. McMaster ran Silo Melbourne during a long visit down under, winning many admirers, and will soon have his own slice of British eco history. According to Bakker, McMaster has put the restaurant’s composter in the middle of the dining room. Silo Brighton opens in September.
NATIONAL: A country Victorian restaurant and a big-city dining room at a casino are the two big winners of this year’s Australia’s Wine List of the Year Awards. Lake House in Daylesford and Rockpool Bar & Grill, Perth, share 2014 Wine List of the Year. Their respective sommeliers, Stacey-Lee Edwards and Ian Baverstock, share the Judy Hirst Award for Australia’s best sommelier. Former Lake House sommelier Tom Hogan got the gong for Best Wine Bar List at his Port Melbourne establishment Harry & Frankie. Other notables include FermentAsian, Tanunda, for Best Country Restaurant Wine List; Sepia, Sydney, for Best List by the Glass; Merricote, Victoria, for Best Small Wine List. For full results: winelistoftheyear.com.au
ADELAIDE: Shaw & Smith’s David Le Mire MW has finally opened a wine and food bar in Vardon Avenue that already has a lot of momentum. On the site of the former East End Cellars premises, Mother Vine is one of those “by a wine nut, for wine nuts” kind of places: it’s in partnership with Frank Hannon-Tan from Amalfi and Pablo Theodoros and Michael Andrewartha of East End Cellars. Adelaide chef and caterer Ali Seedsman is providing the food.
MELBOURNE: Was a guest chef appearance at Pei Modern last week a clue to the next move by the restaurant’s godfathers? We can only hope. A two-night season with Turkish chef Coskun Uysal, a frequent visitor to Melbourne, was a sellout; First Bite can assure you the food was a wonderful hint at the possibilities of the cuisine. Given Peter Bartholomew and David Mackintosh are also involved as “godfathers” with Rosa Mitchell and Victor Liong in their various Melbourne restaurants, we wondered if the Pei events might have been some kind of test bed for future business? “You can speculate as much as you like,” said Mackintosh. “We’re always looking for good ideas.”
Source: The Australian - 29th July 2014
