Joe Grbac, Head Chef and owner of Saxe in Melbourne’s CBD, is straying from his trademark take on modern Australian cuisine to a classic Croatian menu this Father's Day.
It includes Istrian ham cured by his own father and reflects Joe's upbringing in a large Croatian migrant family, where life revolved around the kitchen table and vegetable garden.
"Food was always at the heart of our home life. We always seemed to be in the kitchen. And both, Dad and Mum were great cooks”, says Grbac, for whom cooking remains very much a family affair as he includes produce grown by his father in the restaurant menu.
Listen to the interview with Joe Grbac and his father Joseph in Croatian here
Grbac was born and raised in Melbourne, in a big family with 10 siblings. His mother is Australian and she learned to cook dishes from her husband's native land, Istria, the largest peninsula in Croatia.
''Joe was always interested in cooking, from an early age. So, it did not come as a surprise when he decided to be a chef," says his father Joseph who migrated to Australia in the 1960s.
Simple and rustic Croatian dishes are on the Father's day menu, from pickled sardines and potato flatbread as starters to donuts as a dessert. It’s the food Joe ate growing up in Melbourne's northern suburbs and each dish tells a story from the past.
Joe Grbac and his father Joseph in the SBS Radio studios Source: SBS
"This food brings back memories for me. One of the dishes, the black ink (Cuttlefish) risotto was usually prepared by my aunty Marija, the other one, Istrian style prosciutto is cured by my father. And no family celebration could pass without my mother's donuts, so I had to include them in this special menu," says Grbac.
But not all the food memories are sweet. Some of the Father's Day menu items, as blitva - silverbeet seasoned with garlic and olive oil - were not Joe's favorites during childhood. But kids in the Grbac family were not allowed to be picky eaters, and there was always plenty of silverbeet and other vegetables at the table, coming straight from their garden.
"When not in school, we were always in our vegetable garden, there was always something to do, to water it or do something else, and our father would be even prepared to sing to the plants to make them grow," recalls the chef who currently serves broccoli grown by his father in his Melbourne restaurant.
Relying on seasonal produce in his restaurant, Grbac believes one should only use what is in season. It’s a lesson he learned in the family garden, which, he believes, some of the younger chefs in Australia have missed.
"In the mix of the Melbourne chefs, I am an older chef, and it seems to me that younger chefs do not know where the produce comes from, where does it grow and what it is supposed to look like. And all that tells you how are you should cook it."
At Saxe Grbac cooks modern Australian cuisine, which he describes as a melting pot of many different influences which gives him creative freedom.
“What is Australian cuisine? It is a little bit of French, Italian, Croatian - a little bit of everything. I do not feel pigeonholed cooking modern Australian. I am a big fan of Japanese cuisine, so when I create a menu, one dish can be quite classic, French-based, the next one can be influenced by Italian or Japanese cuisine."
Joe Grbac was the co-owner of Saint Crispin and Press Club Chef. Saxe is his first solo venture, opening in 2017, it received a Chef's Hat in 2017 and 2018.
