Speaker's Corner: Neil Perry
World famous Sydney chef Neil Perry talks to Myffy Rigby about his newly opened restaurant Spice Temple - and gets a few gripes off his chest while he's about it
Spice Temple - Neil Perry's latest venture
There are no Cantonese dishes on your menu at Spice Temple. Are you over Cantonese or what? I'm not over Cantonese, but it's not my favourite food in China. My mission statement right from the beginning was to bring the provinces that I really enjoyed food from together in one menu. It was important for me to bring out a few dishes that people hadn't seen before or don't get the potential to see everyday in Sydney. And right from the beginning I wanted to give people a unique, multi-layered experience, so I wanted the food to be as exciting as the light and the music. You know, I'm asking people to go down a number of steps and come underground in beautiful Sydney. The specificity about this place is there are no window tables, and to do that, I felt I had to have something really special.
So what sort of flavours can we expect? There's a bit of Yunnan and Sichuan served in little pockets of restaurants around town. You know, you may get one or two in Ashfield or Burwood and so forth. I haven't been to the new Sichuan restaurant in Glebe [Spicy Sichuan], but I hear it's really good. I just want to be able to bring a combination of food that I really loved from some different provinces around China that I felt went really nicely together and to create a restaurant where you could sit and every dish - to my mind - has something really interesting about it. It's driven not just by spice and chilli, but coriander, cumin and fennel seeds, cinnamon and star anise, as well as all the different types of chillies that some of the different provinces use. We ferment our own chillies as well. They're not actually pushing a lot of heat into a dish, they're just adding complex flavours of chilli and sweet and sour and salty and I just found it really interesting.
Sydney fine diners tend to not amp chilli in a big way. Well this isn't a fine dining restaurant, really. This is a modern Chinese restaurant where you're supposed to come and have a lot of fun. It's about light, sound and food.
Is it hot? It's hot, yeah. Well, look: the dishes that are in red [on the menu], they're hot. I don't think anything's mind-numbingly hot, like eating something in Thailand where the only way you can get through it is if you keep eating because if you stop, you've got 15 minutes worth of hurt but it's amazing if you keep going back to it. Chilli is not just about blowing people's minds out. It really is about adding that flavour and mouth-feel and excitement, so we try to do that with a lot of the dishes.
So, can you just go for a drink down there? You'll be able to, yeah. We're getting our licence, but had a bit of a hold up. The Liquor Administration Board is in chaos as they were closed over Christmas. But with the new licensing laws from last July it's caused as many issues as it's solved problems.
Your Melbourne restaurant is a big success - do you see any difference between Melbourne diners and Sydney diners? Melbourne diners certainly, I think, drink a little bit more eclectically than Sydney diners. That could be due to a number of factors. I mean obviously we do more tourists in Sydney because it's been a tourists' city so they're looking for Australian wines, but Melbournites drink a lot of Italian, French and Spanish and are really comfortable running around Europe. Maybe they get a little bit more dressed up for dinner and stuff, but essentially it's two great Australian cities. People love eating and drinking and having fun.
Why do Chinese restaurants in Sydney never have any windows?
Well at the Golden Century you can look at Dixon St through the tanks. They probably go for the cheapest rents. I'm not sure... I've never really thought about it, to be honest.
When you're not flitting between your restaurants where do you like to eat? I really like to go to the Golden Century because one of the favourite things that Sam (my wife) and I do is just go and get an abalone steam boat, a really nice bottle of wine, some noodles and some tofu, just sit there and eat together. It's just a fantastic thing to do, with some amazing produce. The green-lipped abalones from Tasmania are sensational. They truly are one of the greatest ingredients in the world. I love doing that and I really love going to Icebergs and having some oysters and salad and sitting watching the surf roll by. I like Fratelli Fresh for a Sunday lunch with the kids 'cos it's great to do that kind of stuff. I'll eat at Rockpool if I'm not cooking there because I really love the food - we'll bring the kids early and have some fish and chips at the bar - that's my favourite place to sit. I don't eat out a lot in Sydney.
What do you like most about Sydney as a city? I love the quality of the ingredients that come out of the sea here in Australia and I'm very close to that. But I think the thing I like most about Sydney is the natural beauty of the harbour. I often think about it. Lots of people around the world don't touch and feel iconic things everyday. I look at the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House every day and I've pretty much done that my whole life. I probably sometimes take it for granted. I've had a restaurant in the Rocks there for 20 years so I really feel rooted to the history of Sydney.
We're definitely lucky as a city for the ingredients that we get. And at reasonable prices. People just don't get it. The whole restaurant thing is just ridiculous here - it's so cheap for the quality. The high-end restaurants here are discounted at 50, 60 or even 100 per cent on the same quality of eating in other major cities in the world. You've got to take $1,000 or $1,500 to a three-star restaurant in Paris or New York. In Australia, we just expect our restaurants to be the same or a little bit more expensive than a café - it's ridiculous. You've got 20-odd people out in the kitchen, 25 people on the floor when you've got a hundred guests and a café's got two people on the floor and four people in the kitchen and a 100 guests, and people are wondering why there's a price variation.
What's with all the hoopla over no-bookings restaurants at the moment? If you want to make a booking, 90 per cent of the restaurants in Sydney take bookings. I almost feel like it's the disdain with which a lot of people treat restaurants - they just have no idea of the physical endeavour in the food industry. And no industry has competition like this... Restaurateurs aren't greedy. They make it cheap and pass the savings on, and at the end of the day people go there because it represents great value for money, there's an awesome buzz because we're social creatures and we love to go places where it's heaving. It's like pubs. You don't go to pubs because there are two people standing there and go "well, that was a great Friday night". You want to fight for a drink at the bar, that's half the sport. You don't have to stand in the queue at Kylie Kwong's. You go to the Dolphin, have a couple of beers and they ring you. Fuck, it can't be easier than that!
Anything else you want to get off your chest? The other thing that annoys me is just nitpicking all the time. We need really high quality restaurants that define us internationally at every end of the scale, from the $500 a head and the $10 a head. That's what great cities around the world do. You have to be able to go for a really good coffee where they do a brilliant salad or they make good muesli. You've gotta start from there and go all the way up to walking into a place where you get dressed up to the nines, and for the first time in your life you order French Burgundy or a great iconic Australian wine and you eat awesome food, and you go "wow, I don't do that everyday, but fuck, wasn't that amazing?" Every city needs to define itself at both ends of the spectrum, but we seem to always have this attitude of "oh fuck, that's expensive." It's a fucking joke.
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