How Neil Perry helped Simon Johnson kickstart his provedore business

Simon Johnson: “Encouraging people to trade up to quality is what I do.”

Since then, he has introduced Australians to imported truffles and caviar, launched the first fromagerie (in 1992) and started the trend for chefs’ cooking demonstrations (the same year). Today, he has eight Simon Johnson stores across four states — NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia — and an undiminished appetite for hunting down the rare, the prized and the fearfully expensive.

You started out as a chef in your home town of ­Auckland. How did you get into the provedore business in Sydney?

It was farmhouse cheese that got me in the door. Back then, at the end of the ’80s, cheeses in Australia were pretty average. I started supplying Neil Perry at Rockpool (at its original site in The Rocks) and Serge Dansereau (then chef at The Regent Hotel) with great cheeses made by Richard Thomas, Gabrielle Kervella and Frank Marchand. Then I started adding dry goods, all wholesale, initially — decent chocolate, quality balsamic ­vinegar, Colonna olive oils.

The food scene in Australia must have looked very different a quarter-century ago.

Everyone was mad about sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. There was balsamic vinegaron everything. You’d go out to dinner and it would be there on your veggies, drizzled over your duck and then they ­started putting it on your strawberries as well! But people were becoming more curious about food, and wanting more good food. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I would take my products to David Jones and they’d complain they were too expensive: “People will never pay that,” they’d say. So to prove them wrong I opened a retail store (in Pyrmont, Sydney, in 1992). We opened our first store in Melbourne in 1996.

And things really started to take off in the mid-90s?

It was really the birth of the celebrity chef era. There wasn’t much (food) TV then, it was all in the glossy mags, Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining. The interest in produce was just starting, so what I was doing was taking the fashionable products and making them much more of a specialty. We’ve always had balsamic (at Simon Johnson), but ours was the real thing, properly barrel-aged, not soaked in a few oak chips. We also offered Forum vinegars, varietal vinegars that deliver so much flavour. Then the regional-produce trend kicked in: everyone was talking about these great Coffin Bay oysters that (seafood marketer) John Susman was bringing in. Chefs started writing the provenance of their produce on menus, and that helped our business, too.

Your all-time best-selling products?

By volume, Cravero Reggiano (parmesan) and Meredith Dairy marinated feta. But we’ve had our fair share of duds. Truffle jelly was one, from Spain. What do you do with truffle jelly, you ask? Exactly! There have been products arrive and Allison (Victorian state manager) has said to me, “Why don’t we just bypass the store altogether with this one and put it straight into the warehouse sale?” Some notable other flops were laverbread; Boyajian sun-dried tomato oil — go figure — Simon Johnson rainwater and Duchy gardening tools. Oh, and the Simon Johnson Bum Bag.

You would have seen off a fair few restaurants in your time. What’s the secret to longevity in the insanely competitive world of food and dining?

Stick to your guns. Don’t deviate. Of course we have had tough times financially — and I’ve certainly taken my fair share of risk — but you just have to hang in there and stick to your core business. And mine has always been quality. Lots of times people have said to me, “Ortiz anchovies are so expensive, can’t you come up with a product that doesn’t cost as much?” Well yes I can, I could find anchovies that are machine-filleted, not hand-filleted; they would be cheaper and they would also not be as good. The simple fact is, we don’t do cheap.

Your friend (cheese importer) Will Studd calls you the “prince of buyers” and says you’re obsessed with the best of everything. Does the best food always have to be expensive?

Hmmm. I would answer that by saying, there’s always a reason for the expense. You look at olive oil. You can buy cheap olive oil at the supermarket for around $4 for 750ml, or you can pay $40 for Joe Grilli’s, for example. But they are two different products, and if you do a flavour assessment, you will see that immediately. Now, without going into a lot of detail … to get the best olive oil, you lose about 30 per cent of your production at harvest; and then, during cold-pressing, you lose another 30-40 per cent. There is a cost involved in that. That’s the price of quality. And encouraging people to trade up to quality is what I do: it’s what I love doing.

What are some of the more unusual places you’ve been to in the cause of sourcing great ingredients?

Recently, I travelled to Argentina to visit garlic farms, and into the rainforests of Ecuador to look at chocolate plantations. I travel overseas three or four times a year: it’s the key to leading, not following, in my line of work.

What are the on-trend products right now?

Anything with pomegranate still walks off the shelves. And truffle oil — don’t ask me why. We sell shitloads of it.

What’s your take on the Australian food scene today? What’s good, what’s bad?

On the bad side, our food safety laws are getting tighter and tighter, driven by people who seem to want everything to be plastic. I don’t have any issue with trying to protect Australia from genuine dangers, but this persecution of products like raw-milk cheese … In the legal battle I fought with Stonnington Council in 2003 (over the storage temperature in his Toorak cheeseroom), I won because I was able to show that traditional farmhouse cheeses contain natural bacteria that will kill off any pathogens. The fact is, the main health issues with cheese globally have been with pasteurised cheeses, not raw milk.

On the good side, we have the best primary produce; amazing fruit and veg; our chefs are amazingly creative. And we’re really starting to value-add: our best olive oils are equal to the best anywhere in the world. The same goes for our truffles, and they’re fresher, too. They can dig up a truffle outside Canberra and deliver it that day; the shortest delivery time from overseas is six days. And that makes such a difference.

Overall, I think we’re focusing more and more on produce-driven simplicity, and that’s a good thing. People care more about what is in their food. Twenty years ago, no one was going down the supermarket aisles and reading the back labels; nutritional panels have done us all a favour. So now when you see tomato sugo, for instance, you look at the back label and if it says 60 per cent tomatoes, you might put it back on the shelf. But if it says 90 per cent … well, you can see what you’re paying for.

Source:  The Australian - 13 September 2014