Chef Jock Zonfrillo swaps Australian restaurant kitchen for California one-night challenge in Grand Gelinaz ShuffleChef Jock Zonfrillo swaps Australian restaurant kitchen for California one-night challenge in Grand Gelinaz Shuffle
Top Australian chef Jock Zonfrillo has foraged in forests and on beaches in California to serve up an unusual dining experience for the customers of a Michelin-star restaurant in the United States.
"It was just a couple of days' notice, 'You're going to America'," the Adelaide-based chef said of the swap, part of the Grand Gelinaz Shuffle.
He told 891 ABC Adelaide of the challenges he faced to satisfy the regular customers of a Michelin-rated restaurant, Manresa.
"They're got very high expectations and, as you can imagine; it's a lot of the best customers," he said.
"They've all been piling in the kitchen, one after the other, to give thanks to the whole kitchen team and the front-of-house team before they leave.
"[There is] a great sense of occasion actually, which is what surprised me - everyone, from a customer point of view, has really got involved in the event and got behind it and actually in the spirit of it, I guess. It's been great to be a part of."
Zonfrillo said he got off his flight from Australia, dined at the Californian restaurant the same night, then set about creating a menu which was not allowed to replicate the regular one at Manresa nor the dishes he regularly creates back in Adelaide.
"There was a lot of expectation, I got a lot of people [who] thought they'd be getting insects or mangrove worm or something like that," he said.
"But the whole idea of this was to go to our host restaurants in our host countries and be inspired by the people, the kitchen team and the produce that we found when we got there, not recreate our own food or create that [regular] food of the restaurant we were visiting."
The Australian chef said it was not hard to be inspired by local produce after he arrived in California, but much harder to create an inspiring menu at very short notice.
"To come up with a menu that carries such huge expectation in a couple of days is quite difficult, with a team you've not worked with before, and then you've got the added pressure of obviously you want to do the right thing by the restaurant that you're visiting and make sure the night's an incredible standard," he said.
The actual night brings the usual pressures for a restaurant kitchen, but the added pressure of diners instantly being able to share and critique their experience on social media.
Zonfrillo said Manresa's regular chef, David Kinch, had flown to Japan as his part of the global challenge.
"He would have been sitting in Japan looking at the social media of the dishes coming out of his restaurant [back home] and making a judgment on them probably," the visiting Adelaide chef said.
Zonfrillo served an unusual array of dishes for his one-night performance in California, including a "roast lamb" dish that had "no actual lamb".
"The whole dish tasted incredibly strong of lamb and, as I said to the customers, the most expensive part of that dish was actually the potatoes," he said.
"The mushrooms were foraged from the forest nearby, the sorrel was wild, and the lamb fat and lamb bones were obviously a by-product of the lamb that they were using on their normal menus [at Manresa], so it didn't cost anything."
And the customers' reactions? "A very popular dish that one," Zonfrillo said.
Other courses included clams in a Japanese fermented tea and an abalone dish.
"I made a custard with the abalone juices and we went foraging down the beach and we got seven different types of seaweed and dressed that," he said.
Another course used locally sourced Wagyu beef and the Adelaide chef gave it an Aussie touch.
"I cooked it over eucalypt to give [diners] a little taste of Australia. Funnily enough, they've got Tasmanian blue gum here in California, which is one of the types of eucalypt we use at Orana (his Adelaide restaurant)," he said.
"It was nice to fill the restaurant with that sort of smell and they could taste a little bit of where we come from."
Aussie inspiration also came to the fore for the dessert, which used stone fruits that had been dried and ground into sherbet, then served with marshmallows.
"We toasted the marshmallows and stuck them on some twigs, just to bring a smile to everyone's face," the chef explained.
He said the US customers were full of praise at the end of the night.
"Very contented, very happy and the sommeliers here and I matched some fantastic wines to go with them - a couple of Aussie wines in there as well - so it was fantastic," he said of the night.
Source: ABC News Adelaide, July 13th 2015
