Looking Back to Look Forward: The Legacy of Chef’s Table (Aka Experimental Tuesdays)

An empty restaurant is a lonely place. And in our early days – 15 or so odd years ago – Attica had its fair share of mid-week evenings spent whiling away the time, trying to will customers into existence.

On the other hand, a quiet restaurant – without the controlled chaos of service in full swing – can be the perfect place to think. We can’t say for sure that one of these slow nights gave rise to an idea that permanently changed Attica – and the food we produce – but it seems pretty likely.

The Attica menu isn’t static. It’s a living thing that pulses with ideas, research and inspiration. Nowadays, we’re lucky enough to have the time and resources to explore ideas and concepts, honing and refining them until they’re ready to be plated for our guests (if they make it that far).

The Chef’s Table nights, unofficially known as Experimental Tuesdays, were born from a need to address two challenges at once – to get people through the door on the slowest night of the week. And, more importantly, to give the team the space to experiment (and take risks) regularly.

Each week, Monday evening was spent developing a menu based on seasonal ingredients, fragments of ideas and loose concepts. On Tuesdays before service, the (small) staff would gather to discuss the ideas and try to give them form (ideally, creating something delicious as well). It was a high-pressure process designed explicitly to veer away from refinement – a chance to resist resolution and celebrate the process.

A kitchen needs a certain level of tension to function at its best – you can’t create anything at a high level without it. Now, Attica has a playful, measured pressure we can harness positively. But back then, it could be intense.

The soundtrack to those days was questions. ‘You want to do what?’ ‘Will this work?’ ‘What does it taste like?’ Our ambition was broad, and we didn’t always stick the landing. Each week, the clock would be ticking down as the kitchen frantically careened towards service.

 It never got easier, either. Every Tuesday was daunting. It’s scary to put yourself out there and risk publicly failing. There were times when guests arrived before we’d even had a chance to taste a dish; we’d be left trying to evolve it mid-service. It wasn’t always the ideal way of doing things.

Luckily for us, Melbourne is a city that responds to creative ambition. Week after week, people would turn up. It was a powerful experience to meet so many people willing to come on a journey – to take a chance with (and on) us.

 It was high risk, but we didn’t have much to lose (except, maybe, alienating people with our wilder ideas). While we’d never try to make a bad meal – we’re always striving to create something both great and interesting – it’s fair to say the results were varied (and in a few cases, that may be putting it kindly).

One Tuesday in 2013, we decided to try to create a hay-based ice cream, served with pea straw. We infused milk and cream with toasted hay on a base of earthy ice cream. As it turns out, creating custard-based ice cream from scratch isn’t really a one-day job – but it was too late to back out. We served the pea straw four ways: fresh, dried, candied and pickled – and the result was about as tasty as it sounds (the fact the entire thing was brown probably didn’t help, either). This particular evening was the only time the dish graced (disgraced?) our menu.

But there were also nights when some intersection of intuition, ambition and luck would meet to make something truly magical. Among the hits was grilled Western Australian octopus, served with sour corn and spicy flowers. We prepped the octopus similarly to Peking duck, before marinating and grilling it. The sour corn was inspired by kānga pirau, a Māori dish, and the spicy flowers came courtesy of some seasonal onion weed – sourced from the Ripponlea train line. Many courses that went on to become favourites started on Chef’s Table menus. Classics like ‘A Simple Dish of Potato Cooked in the Earth in Which It Was Grown’ owe their inception to those Tuesdays.

The Chef’s Table evenings gave us so many opportunities to learn as a team – to develop Attica’s cuisine, expression and vocabulary. They’re a part of what made us, us.

But, at a certain point, we began to feel they were holding the restaurant back. It’s always tough to kill your darlings, but sometimes it’s the only way to move forward – to grow. So, in 2016 (on the first of May, if we’re being specific) we retired them for good.

The spirit – and lessons – of those Tuesdays live on, though. The scope and the scale of our cooking has evolved. Now, we go bigger and deeper with our ideas – refining them over months, not hours (which comes with its own unique set of challenges, but that’s for another story).