Ôter: The different French cuisine - Broadsheet

The team behind Coda, Tonka and Pei modern is ready to open a brand new restaurant that challenges perceptions of typical French cooking.

Florent Gerardin; Kate and Mykal Bartholomew and Tom Hunter decided to open a company together in the average manner: "We drank lots first," says Gerardin, companion and head chef at their new restaurant, Ôter.

A mere stagger across Oliver Lane from Kate and Mykal Bartholomew's Coda, where Hunter has also been working, Ôter will serve outré French cuisine within the former home of Yu-u. The companions had been renovating the basement-degree area themselves, stripping lower back the eastern restaurant to bare concrete and timber. "I've completed [restaurants] on big budgets and small budgets earlier than," says Kate. "i was purchasing all these magazines, and it's all Scandinavian wood and whatever thing, and it's boring. So I went back to magazines that have been 5 or 10 years ancient and that was what was extra inspiring. I not ever desire it to date. I don't need it to be of a trend or of an period."

The critical teppanyaki bar continues to be in location, stripped again to its hardwood jarrah. The furnishings is in the main Italian oak. A mural from Hepburn Springs-primarily based artist Bridget Bodenham will tie the room collectively. "We haven't long gone overboard with the fit-out, we've simply done what we essential to do with a true emphasis on performance," says Hunter. "The entire restaurant is centred round a huge kitchen bar, which is sunk in. There's a true intimacy with the chef, with the entrance of condo that we wanted to carry again to Flinders Lane."

Gerardin, who changed into in the past head chef at Mark most efficient's celebrated diner Pei contemporary, has been digging into his culinary history to get a hold of the menu. "the hardest a part of being a chef is that if you've worked so lengthy for a person else you have to find what is true food to yourself," he says. "It's very pleasurable in the meanwhile because what I spend my time doing is opening books and digging into very ancient recipes i can now bring out. It's time to tug all the rabbits out of my hat."

You're now not going to be consuming coq au vin or cuisses de grenouille (frog legs) at Ôter. throughout a recent research travel to France Gerardin become most impressed by a standard dish in Brittany – fisherman would gather each Friday evening to eat a calf's head – mind blanketed.

"it is going to happen! The best issue is finding the veal heads," he says ruefully. "With French cuisine americans predict things from you. I've made it my mission to now not provide them what they are expecting."

He'll additionally draw from his wide experience in japanese kitchens. "there will all the time be a few influences from Japan, because that's me. i like the region," he says. "i take advantage of extra soy sauce than i take advantage of salt."

Hunter believes while there's no shortage of tremendous dining on Flinders Lane the precinct's equipped for whatever more ruthlessly modern. "I've worked in this certain zone in the city for neatly over 10 years, and that i feel what we're trying to find is whatever new and whatever different," he says.

Ôter will open at 137 Flinders Lane, Melbourne in April.