Gillian Hirst

Moves effortlessly between cooking styles, managing a restaurant and being a mother

Technology can be both the saviour and the destroyer of great cooking. Trusting your own ability to see, smell and taste is what makes a great chef. One Those who lives by machinery alone does so at their own peril. Gillian Hirst's story about the opening lunch at Brisbane's 'Il Centro' is a case of technology at its worst. An elaborate till system had been set up for feeding the waiters' orders into the kitchen through an automatic printout. This meant the chef wouldn't be waiting on waiters taking their time to get to the kitchen, then asking for special treatment for their table; wouldn't have to decipher scribbled, illegible orders but instead would instantly receive a neat printed ticket right on the kitchen bench. Problem was that all the dishes had been keyed into the machine in Italian. Gillian had little clue of what had been ordered.

The dining room was packed with eager customers for the opening lunch and all the orders came at once. No tears, no tantrums. She set the staff to cooking batches of every dish on the menu then tried the old verbal method of sorting out dockets and somehow dispatched the meals. We all know the virtue of trial runs in new kitchens, but it's not often that builders and bank managers allow such luxury.

The job at 'Il Centro' was the big test for this talented, still young, chef and mother. Gillian had trained in Melbourne at several places, notably with Greg Brown (then at Cotswold House). "Working with Greg was brilliant food-wise but a terrible strain physically. We'd start at 8am and finish at 1am...my parents knew nothing about the food industry and didn't believe that I was spending all that time at work. I learnt an enormous amount from Greg, but finally decided that I didn't want to do it so hard."

She came to Brisbane with the promise of something easier and with the lure of the sun and beaches. No such dream eventuated, the job was hard and there was no leisure. "I was just 18, knew no one, really missed my parents who had not wanted me to go. Had no job but was too proud to admit that I had made a mistake." Gillian found a job in which she stayed eight years working with a very good chef. "He was much more modern, and it taught me something about how to cook and combine life at the same time. I didn't take much notice then but I should have because he was running his life quite nicely, what with managing a family and managing a kitchen with really good food."

Next phase for Gillian was as executive chef at 'Il Centro'. This is a successful restaurant in a prominent position on the riverbank. It was long anticipated, there was a lot of pre-publicity and customer numbers were high. Here Gillian had to organise a staff of 15 in the kitchen and was responsible for a weekly turnover "about 6-7 times greater than I'd dealt with before...it was a real learning curve for me in how to cope with volume and how to manage people."

After doing that for several years, she felt ready to open her own place and with her husband David, an architect, planned and developed their own restaurant, Indigo's. "At the time it seemed like a good idea, the more seats the better, and at that time I felt invincible. We opened seven days and we could seat 150; physically that became too much for me". Although she had to serve similar numbers at 'Il Centro' there she did not have worries outside the kitchen. But in her own business with the total management to think about, "it became never ending work, and actually ran me into the ground. We had to get out and in so doing we didn't lose but we didn't come out on top. So that was again a big learning experience."

After that Gillian took a long break, did a lot of travelling, tried to start a family and then decided to go back into the restaurant business. Then " the minute we signed a lease, ooops I am pregnant!" The lease they signed was for an old gun shop in an historic building in Mary Street. During travels to Spain, David came up with the main color scheme (from a series of paintings he bought from a street artist in Madrid) and Gillian liked the idea of cooking tapas style.

'Tapas Mercados' quickly became popular for lunch and Friday evenings for the flamenco show which used to happen upstairs but is now held downstairs in the Tapas Bar. The downstairs room is small with the bar and display kitchen at one end. The food is uncomplicated with, lots of interesting flavours and has the added dimension of often being served by one of the five cooks. Gillian is well liked by her customers and spends at least as much time chatting out front as she does cooking in the kitchen. It suits her personality and that of the place very well. The upstairs room is now called the Dining Room and has a more conventional menu served in entree and main sizes on to clothed tables. The menu here changes weekly.

When David and Gillian first opened Tapas Mercados it was tapas style right through, upstaris and down, lunch and dinner. After a year, they decided to offer the alternative of the upstairs a la carte menu and retain the tapas downstairs.

At one stage she had considered trying to reproduce the Japanese style little family-run teppanyaki bar where the wife hands over the food and the husband the sake, with only enough room to seat 12 people. "I was thinking of finding a hole in the wall and cooking directly for people - a pretty romantic notion." But as the noodle bar phenomenon had already spread all over Brisbane, and much of it not been done well, Gillian decided to steer away from anything Asian in style, though still wanted to do something that was "small and intimate with small amounts of food." Tapas seems to be the ideal answer. It is, she explains "an idea that works and it is an eating style that suits people. It's suited to our climate and a way of me doing lots of little dishes."

She and David have explained it to people as being like a Spanish yum cha and this helps them their guests understand that it's all about sharing. This makes people feel comfortable about it and also makes them feel that they are not committing themselves to a big meal. In their first month they did put main courses on the specials board but "nobody ordered them, they were coming to have the tapas experience."

However, over time, the novelty has worn off and they are finding that some of their business clientele seem to miss having their own large plate of food. It has also meant that the average spend is much less than for a conventional meal. So from mid October they started offering the more formal option of the upstairs dining.

."As aware business people, they have produced thousands of colour brochures to explain the changes to their clientele and to attract new business.

"It's important that people know in advance what to expect because expectation is such an important part of the dining experience."

INFLUENCES

Greg Brown, Robert Gergen, Hotel Okura, Japan,

Gillian Hirst's Recipes

Oysters with seasame akame salad and soy jelly
Warm potato rosti with Gympie Farm goat cheese and poached paradise pear
Mascarpone sponge with summer berries and rum