Sarina Lewis gives the low-down on moveable feasts and secret suppers for an elite epicurean set.
WHEN chef Gary Cooper discreetly hands loyal regulars a cryptic memo alongside their menus at his Yarra Valley restaurant, Bella Vedere, experience has taught them to take note.
It's a teaser for an unconventional epicurean experience.
"It's like that whole knock-three-times-and-strike-a-match-thing to get in," Cooper says of the underground dinners, where curiosity replaces convention and his inner pagan is granted free rein.
At a recent black-tie Tuscan supper for 30 in a neighbouring shearing shed, one of the Yarra Valley's oldest, guests had to "to pass a test", deciphering a riddle leading them to a website. It contained a hidden clue about the dinner. "It's up to them whether or not they pursue me," he says of the evenings, which cost up to $250 a head. "That way we're not prompting them to spend money. That way we are not advertising. That way we all come together organically."
The Hidden Kitchen in Paris, Supper Underground in Texas, Vienna's theDiningRoom and Melbourne's own (and some say mythical) Zingara Cucina: the concept of the moveable feast continues to grow legs both in Australia and overseas. Some consider it little more than a marketing ploy, a subculture pitched towards satisfying the foodie elite excited by the exclusivity of an invitation-only dinner at a secret location.
For others, including Cooper, nights cooking outside the strictures of a commercial kitchen reinvigorate culinary passions for both chef and diner. "We were bored. I mean, it's great and it's exciting here, but I wanted to break the monotony of going out to a restaurant," he explains of the dinners, held sporadically over the past two years. "And it's brilliant. Everything that happens on the night is just spontaneous."
Like the bats that swooped low through the shearing shed's beams as Cooper cooked a raspberry souffle tableside in a lidded barbecue; the conversation among guests - mostly strangers - sharing food during a one-off evening that is neither dinner party nor restaurant meal; or the thrill of joining the elegantly clad diners on a horse-and-cart ride to their rustic destination.
Back in Toorak, a different set of guests are revelling in their own unconventional midweek lunch. Shaded by garden umbrellas, a party of six knock back freshly shucked Pacific oysters and New Zealand sparkling in the courtyard of Julian Ronchi's suburban nursery.
"We thought we'd do something along the concept of 'Here's the best produce for this week, here's what we're going to do, come join a large table and have a dinner party'," explains Carleen Chamberlain, owner of Albert Park's Icoco Cafe.
She teamed up with chef Anna Cornell late last year, and the two began the plan and execution of "underground" lunches and dinners in secret locations in greater Melbourne. Today's garden nursery lunch, she says, could be next month's dinner on Point Lonsdale's sand flats, or elegant cocktails in a private mansion.
"It's not about having a database of people and sending the information out. It's more about being quite subversive. Different," Chamberlain says.
Word has been scattered among her cafe regulars, their curiosity piqued. Certainly, the lucky few chosen to attend this inaugural feast chatter excitedly, a common passion for food fast overcoming the social awkwardness that can come with dining with strangers.
They are also hoping to reinject a communal element into dining out long since lost in conventional restaurant settings where tables sit like islands in the ocean and interaction between diners happens rarely, if ever.
"The more people talk and sit together - I know this is going to sound a bit like Miss World - but people care more," Chamberlain says, between topping up glasses and passing plates of honey and saffron-roasted chicken, or fennel, radish and feta salad. "It's all about community."
"Not to mention how great it is to be at a restaurant where you can have seconds," says one of the party.
Social connections (and seconds) also play a big part in the monthly dinners run by Eugene Shafir and his partner Mary Snee at Manna Cafe, a sweet spot behind Toorak Uniting Church on Toorak Road. The couple are six months into hosting monthly dinners at which aspiring - and accomplished - chefs play kitchen king for an evening while in-the-know regulars reap the culinary rewards.
In February Sergio de Pieri accompanied his soprano partner, Rafaella Benori, on the church organ before putting the finishing touches to an Italian feast for 70. Under the stars diners devoured bruschetta, pasta primavera and a summery dessert of poached pear to reflect the evening's Venetian theme.
Last month it was a Moroccan banquet ($55 a head) prepared by an aspiring Melbourne chef and her Moroccan husband: a banquet of bisteeya, traditional dips (think red pepper, walnut and pomegranate) and sweet cous cous salads of pine nuts, raisins and almonds.
"We want to foster community spirit around here," Shafir says of the evenings, where locals share a meal with previously unacknowledged neighbours. Numbers are growing, he says, as word spreads and people rediscover the joy in mingling, in surprise encounters and unexpected delicacies.
In Sydney, Savva Savas of Plated catering prepares bespoke secret dinners for clients and goes to great lengths to guard their privacy. He has held a dinner in a tunnel. "The client was so insistent on secrecy that all correspondence was hand-delivered and details discussed in person," he says. "Even I wasn't privy to the location until four hours prior."
On another occasion, guests were transported blindfolded in a minibus to a private home. The windows were blacked out and guests had no idea where they were.
This rethinking of the traditional restaurant experience lends these suppers their frisson, says Brook Powell, former Yarra Valley dairy manager and slow food convener turned lecturer in the hospitality department at Swinburne's Lilydale campus.
"If you're putting the experience together in a completely unknown area . . . it tastes different," she says. "The richness is imbued in the meal because of the experience and its context."
Powell's is a voice of experience. As well as organising regular outdoor dining extravaganzas at Swinburne, Powell and her husband, wine buff and former manager of the Yarra Valley Wine Hub, Stephen Powell, spent 2007 dreaming up full-moon dinners that catered for the foodies lucky enough to have made it into the Powells' personal and professional address books.
There was the traditional Croatian spread cooked by their Croatian chef in a Healesville cafe on one-night loan; the Spanish fishing village-themed night held at a Lilydale vineyard. Each evening was designed to excite, to contextualise a dish or cuisine outside a restaurant's four walls. To bring it back to basics.
"We have got so much choice and we are given so many messages . . . that we should eat this and we shouldn't eat that," she says. "(These events) just remove a lot of the stuff that surrounds food and there is something so liberating about that. About feeding and being fed."
And while exhaustion led to the dinners' demise ("carting everything on site - we just about collapsed before we finished doing them!") the dynamic Powell duo are preparing for a 2009 relaunch.
So how to secure a seat? Good question. While all these secret suppers and dinners are in theory open to any of the paying public, the challenge in snaring an invitation looms large. This is, of course, part of the allure. "We hand-pick them," says Gary Cooper of his diners, usually involving a group of no more than 20. "The thing about it is public liability, which is why we go with people that we know quite well and really support the restaurant."
Like the lucky few invited to share in last summer's midnight forest supper beside the creek at Badger Weir. To the soft notes of pipe and strings played by three students from the Warranwood Steiner School, Cooper masterminded open-air preparation of five or six courses in a cleverly concealed "mock kitchen" comprised of portable cooking equipment.
Under the dim light of candelabras and wrapped in angora throws, guests ate forest mushrooms on toast with sparkling rose and tasted the brook trout charred before their eyes. "Guests can't believe they are sitting in a forest at midnight and they are having this feast with three kids playing music," Cooper says.
Of course, for every underground dinner revealed to the wider public there is another whose creator is determined to keep theirs off the radar; at least one restaurateur contacted by Epicure was unwilling to disclose details of past and future feasts. "Well if I told you," said the cheeky chef, "it would hardly be a secret."
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