Wirth - This could get messy : a guide to eating : to drinking : to doing both at the same time

IN LOVING MEMORY
OF JAMES MILLER.

A MAN OF BIG IDEAS,
AND AN EVEN BIGGER HEART.

MISS YOU BUDDY. X

CONTENTS

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD

This is the loosest, most non-judgy recipe book youll ever own. So crack open a beer, thumb through this little number, then fire up the deep-fryer youre going to need it!

DrinknDine wasnt something we planned. It was very much an accident. I mean for starters, when we began, none of the people in our own weird band of non-hostile pub-takeover mercenaries were chefs or veterans of the hospitality industry. Somehow, though, we found ourselves thrown together finding pubs and venues in Sydney that had done their dash in former lives; redesigning and reimagining them into fresh, new and slightly odd things.

In the space of two years, DrinknDine progressed from a few beers and a handshake in a dive bar, to a hospitality management concept currently responsible for six venues and 200 staff. All nine of our venues, alive or dead The Norfolk, The Carrington, The Abercrombie, The Forresters, Santa Barbara, Queenies, The Oxford Tavern, House of Crabs and Chica Linda have been the proud results of our accidental endeavours. You could say weve stumbled on a way of doing things that, in its own highly unorthodox fashion, works.

Each of our venues embodies a distinct personality, a strong identity something we realised through trial and error that we were good at creating, even though we didnt really know much in the beginning about all the other stuff that comes after The Idea.

So I suppose I should explain who we are, and how we came to own and run this rowdy bunch of pubs and venues.

To start with, the Australian electronic music scene is indirectly responsible for this book. I fell into DJing some time around the early 2000s and, with my crew of extremely loose human beings, the Bang Gang Deejays, we spent a good deal of time travelling around the world, partying and abusing musical genres by throwing them together to form our own style. We played with big acts like Daft Punk, The Prodigy, and even Vanilla Ice (when he attempted his comeback) In short, we generally had a criminally good time being paid to travel around the world and wreak our own special brand of havoc.

In 2011, I met James Miller, who would become one of my partners in crime. Our mutual friend Greggy (Greg Magree), who introduced us, had just bought this pub, The Norfolk, in Sydneys Surry Hills. Greggy and I became friends because hed come to the clubs I was playing at. He can pull serious shapes on the dance floor and likes a drink or two. In short, my kinda guy. Hes also a pretty gifted property developer who can see the potential in a space before anyone else can. Sydney was, at the time, undergoing a slow and sad death when it came to pubs, and naturally he saw the potential in this downturn. Pubs at that time mostly fell into one of three categories:

• working-class pubs that had lost their charm in favour of poker machines, big-beer-companybranded everything, and no soul
• ugly, shiny monstrosities that didnt know if they were a club, a pub or a restaurant
• classic old school the kind nobody hates and that you shouldnt mess with.

Several pub groups had also gone bust, leaving the door open just a crack for people with a little bit of money and zero sense to get into the game. The Norfolk fell into category number one. It was the quintessential stinky old pub with not much by way of charm or character going for it, and Greggy was looking for tenants to take the place over. At the time, my DJ career was winding down and I was attempting to go legit by being a partner in another Sydney pub called The Flinders Hotel. James was running yet another pub called Ruby, having just moved on from the surprising success of a salad chain he started, called Sumo Salad. We were both looking for new projects to fill our time and found ourselves set up on a blind date by Greggy. At The Norfolk over a few beers, ideas began to form.

What came out of those few beers was the beginning of a partnership. James would crunch the numbers, and I would work on the conceptual stuff. We enlisted the help of Michael Delany, the magical unicorn responsible for transforming my half-baked ideas into a physical reality. As a designer responsible for some of the most respected clubbing venues in Melbourne in the 2000s (Honky Tonks, 3rd Class, Sorry Grandma), wed known each other for a debaucherous decade, and I knew hed be able to understand what I was trying to achieve. Tropical Caribbean meets American dive motel? Got it. Los Angeles Latino ghetto street food? Too easy.

As a team, we figured we had the ingredients to make this thing work. It was simple enough: create the kind of pub we wanted to go to. Something that honoured its own pub-ness, with an energetic atmosphere (aka The Vibe), an emphasis on fun, and of course good food and drink. But back to the important bit: The Vibe.

I was in charge of said vibe. Imagine that on a business card: Vibe Master. Okay, maybe not. Coming up with ideas isnt an exact science and some of our best ideas have been the direct result of a bad joke, a late-night drinking session, or a random email rant. However they come, I document them in a Google folder, which is my version of an inspiration board for ideas, then develop them and bounce them off friends for feedback. Sometimes they work, and other times theyre met with stone-cold silence, which means back to the drawing board. From bad Colombian wall murals to Instagram photos, I collect anything that captures a feeling or an atmosphere. Particularly if its a bit crap.

Crap, my friends, is good.

Australians have a good handle on what pub food is about. In most places, its about steaks, schnitzels, burgers, chips. We wanted to honour that. Theres nothing worse than going to a pub and not being able to get a decent burger and fries: why screw with that logic? We decided then and there that any menu we created needed to have those key components that make pub food great; the concept just needed a bit of a shake-up.

In our collective travels, as well as our former (or imagined) lives, wed each spent a bit of time stateside in the US as well as South America and Europe, and we drew on that collection of real or researched experience to form The Idea. From American diner gems to Spanish tapas and Jamaican barbecue, wed use something small (but mighty) as the basis from which to flavour the style, atmosphere, food and drink. The major criteria was that it had to be, above all things, fun. To our surprise, one by one, each venue opportunity sprang to life and people came. Whats more, they left us with clean plates and smiles on their faces.

So somehow along the way, looking for something to do, we found ourselves in the business of food and drink. And while we like to play around a lot with crazy notions, we take food and drink very seriously. As none of us had a culinary background, we needed someone who could, like Mike Delany, understand our crazy ideas and bring them to life.