Durack Terry - Alla Fratelli: How to eat Italian

For my daughters, Nina and Grace.

In memory of Anders Ousback and John Marsden.

CONTENTS

THE STORY
OF FRATELLI FRESH

La storia di Fratelli Fresh

BARRY McDONALD

Im very proud of my Italian heritage. The only trouble is, I dont have one. So I sort of adopted one and grew into it rather than being born into it. Instead of telling everyone that I was a proud son of New Zealand who had travelled the short hop across the Tasman to Australia, I started telling people that I was the son of Italian immigrants.

At one point, I was the only non-Italian on the Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Australia. When they gave me an award, I had to stand up and make a speech. I began by saying: When my family migrated to Sydney all those years ago, I had to drop the o from my name Mick Donaldo in order to assimilate.

My name is McDonald, right? But suddenly everyone started cheering and applauding, and I didnt have the heart to tell them I was joking.

The truth is I feel Italian. I love Italian food. I adore Italian wine. I make Italian hand gestures, and drink my espresso standing up. I love Sophia Loren, Monica Bellucci, Alessandro Del Piero, Francis Ford Coppola, Andrea Bocelli and Dean Martin. Like all Italians, I think coffee is oxygen, the tomato is a gift from heaven and wine makes life bearable and Id give them all up in a flash for my family, because family is everything.

For me, its always been about family; which is a very Italian way of going through life. When I first started as a fruit and vegetable wholesaler with my brother Jamie, we set up our own warehouse at the massive wholesale produce market at Sydneys Flemington. From there, we supplied some of the best chefs in the city, from Neil Perry at Rockpool and Tetsuya Wakuda at Tetsuyas to Matt Moran at Aria and Guillaume Brahimi at the Sydney Opera House. Many of them I count as mates to this day, in spite of all the times theyve rung me to have a good yell about not getting their heirloom tomatoes or baby fennel bulbs. Some chefs take it as a personal insult when the season changes and they have to rewrite their menus.

The market wasnt as multicultural as it is now; it was very, very Italian, and southern Italian at that. After work, at about 5am or 6am, Id naturally gravitate to the great Italian delis there that are the heart and soul of the market, hanging out with all the old guys and just talking about family, about the price of tomatoes, about football; all the important stuff. I learnt a lot from them; not sure what they learned from me. To this day, I love standing al banco, at a bar, with a bit of salsiccie on a panino in one hand and a coffee in the other, doing business.

The Italian way of doing things was so important to us that when we shifted our business into a big two-level warehouse in Waterloo in 2004, it seemed only natural to give it an Italian name. So Fratelli Fresh (the Fresh Brothers) was born. The idea was to open a retail Italian market and run it in pretty much the same way we ran the wholesale side on the same premises no fuss, no mess, no big expensive fit-out; just Here are the best fruit and vegetables we can buy: take it or leave it.

At one stage, we had Australians, Italians, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Thais, Africans, Chinese, Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians on staff. All our packers were Thai, because, like Italians, theyre all about food and family. They just know, when theyre packing an order, whether the papaya is going to be ripe for today or for tomorrow. They got into the swing of the whole Italian thing, too, and started calling each other Roberto, Giuseppe, Enrico and Rinaldo. Thats very Australian. All our delivery drivers were from New Zealand back then, and I only found out later that not one of them had an Australian drivers licence. They were challenging times.

Six weeks after opening, we launched Caf Sopra (literally, the cafe upstairs). Sopra was never going to be a restaurant, it was always going to be a cafe where you could drop in, have a coffee and a freshly made panini, and do a bit of shopping while you were there, just like at the market in the old days. Well that was the idea, but things soon took on their own momentum.

Our founding chef, Andy Bunn, who had worked with me at Fuel in Surry Hills, came on board; my wife Karen did the buying of Italian kitchen and homewares; and my daughter Nina came back from running restaurants in London. My dad, Tom, came in and made jams and sauces from the fruit and veg we had left over.

We had two in the kitchen, two on the floor, and I bought the whole kitchen second-hand at auction a couple of weeks before. The liquor licence hadnt quite come through, so I couldnt sell wine. When people started coming in, wed just give them a glass of wine, no charge. Pretty good value, when you think about it, but it could have sent me broke.

Caf Sopra, it turned out, was the key to the whole business, because it pulled everything and everyone together. The menu was driven by whatever produce was on the shelves, so it changed every day. People came to eat, and then shopped on their way out. Theyd come here for lunch and eat salumi and polenta, then at the end of the meal, theyd eyeball the big blackboard menu and go off to the shelves and buy the ingredients for something theyd seen.

The chefs had a marketplace under their noses, so the food was defined by seasonality right from day one. They just ran downstairs to see what was on the shelves before they worked out what the lunch specials would be that day. If it was parsnip season, theyd do roast parsnip, and parsnip soup, and parsnip side dishes. If our suppliers had found the first of the pine mushrooms under the trees, theyd go straight into the pasta, risotto and soup. Even the cocktails were fruit-based, to use what we had and what was in season. We had no printed menus, but there were these huge boards left around from the previous tenant, so I just painted them with blackboard paint and used them as over-sized menus; the way weve always listed specials at the market. You just cross out whats been sold, so things keep moving. We still do everything on chalkboards; its become our trademark.