Food
Keeping it cool with Zoe Birch
How Zoe Birch and partner Lachlan took their zero-waste, hyper-local ethos to the leafy outer suburbs with Greasy Zoe's, where no two days are ever the same - and why that's just the way they like it.
The first thing that catches your attention when talking to chef Zoe Birch is her piercing blue eyes. Peering out from beneath her fringe, you'd easily mistake her for the frontperson of some up-and.coming indie band currently headlining at Cherry Bar. It's a mistake you'd be forgiven for: she is, in fact, in a band, with partner Lachlan Gardner and photographer Kristoffer Paulsen of all people, who captured Birch for this article.
"He's music obsessed," she says of Paulsen. "He's got so much equipment!" The band - so new it's as-yet-unnamed - played its first gig at a primary school event which, by all accounts, was warmly received. For those who have followed Birch since the opening of Greasy Zoe's, however, in 2017 - or before, even, through her stints at Middle Brighton Baths and the Courthouse - the main event is her lyrical take on local, sustainable fine dining. A tiny, eight-guests-per-sitting venue housed in a former fruit and veg shop in the outer Melbourne suburb of Hurstbridge, it earned a hat almost straight out of the gate, then two hats, and this year was awarded Time Out's Restaurant of the Year.
"Lachlan and I met in 2010, in a restaurant, obviously. I reckon we've probably worked together in maybe five or six different restaurants," Birch says of the beginnings of her and Lachlan's journey towards Greasy Zoe's.
"Just working for so many years in so many different venues, we formed a very serious frustration - just seeing the food wasted, not just coming back on the plates but, you know, ordering mass amounts of stuff just kind of didn't feel right to me."
BACK TO BASICS
Birch earned her culinary stripes early, learning a great deal at her mother's side during childhood. A country girl from the regional town of Seymour, Victoria, weekends were often spent picking veggies from the garden, making preserves, baking bread, or scones, biscuits, and sponge cakes in preparation for the baking show competition circuit. The home kitchen forged her innate creative fire. For her and those around her, there was never a question about what she would most likely do with her life.
"It was always just cooking," she recalls. "I remember really vividly as a little kid, maybe in grade four or five, being like 'oh yes, obviously.' And all my friends were like 'oh yeah, Zoe will be a chef.'''
While still in school doing her VCE, she apprenticed at a resort in Seymour, first as kitchenhand, moving quickly into meal prep when it was evident she knew her way around a hot plate. She was in her element. The kitchens of Melbourne were the obvious next step.
Years later, when it came to stepping away from the churn of commercial kitchens to found Greasy Zoe's, Birch drew inspiration from Scandinavian restaurant Fäviken and chef Magnus Nilsson. "Everything we're doing with the theatre of service in front of the guests and the small amount of people and cooking over fire - all this very sort of instinctive cooking. My whole career I'd been trying to figure out what my thing was, and it was very much cooking everything, you know, being able to make everything."
Initially, her and Lachlan scouted some potential venues in the city, but pivoted when Lachlan's mother
- a baker herself - spied a small shop in Hurstbridge for sale, that would become Greasy Zoe's. "We just sort of stood in the space and there was that kind of lighting bolt moment where we looked at how small the venue was, and obviously it needed a lot of work, but we went, 'You know what? Yes, it's tiny, but we could just do it with the two of us.''' For both her and Lachlan, who grew up in nearby Warrandyte, it was a return to their semi-rural roots.
Greasy Zoe's outer-suburban location in the shire of Nillumbik, a gateway to the Yarra Valley, also puts it in close proximity to a natural food bowl that Birch dips into for the fresh, seasonal produce that undergirds her daily changing menu.
"We have a lot of organic fruit and veg producers, and there are about four farms within the area that we use for eggs and stuff," Birch says, with the Yarra providing a little extra dairy and occasional proteins. All the butter, all the sourdough, everything that hits the plate is made by hand by Birch, years of skill distilled in each dish.
I'M A CLASSIC OVERTHINKER UNLESS IT'S A REALLY BIG THING LIKE THE RESTAURANT OR HAVING CHILDREN, IN WHICH CASE I DON'T THINK ABOUT IT AT ALL..
Birch likes to share the stories of the producers she works with. "We know them very well. We're part of that story," she says. "We listen to them. And, you know, they tell us how frustrating it is when it hasn't rained and they need to buy water in; they tell us how frustrating it is when they tried this new thing and it didn't work and it cost them a fortune; or, you know, the rats ate all their corn, and how long it takes to grow a cabbage so they can charge two dollars for it." Greasy Zoe's, then, is about providing a context, enabling a re-naturalisation of our relationship with food.
"We try to communicate these things when we serve some of the dishes," says Birch. "You know, you go to the supermarket and pay two bucks for a cabbage and it just sits in your crisper and you throw it in the bin - like, that took five months to grow."
To Birch, it can only benefit people to be reminded as to the where, why and how of food production - what it takes, what it costs. "I'm very obsessed with vegetables, because we're working with these people all the time. I don't think people actually understand what farmers have to give up to grow something they get no money for, and how hard it was for them to grow that - and maybe half of it got eaten by kangaroos," she says. "All this stuff, and the expense, and the back-breaking labour - it would be great to have just a little bit more appreciation, a bit more education about what it takes to grow these things."
As to the challenges of an ever-evolving menu, for Birch that's all part of the fun. It's pumpkin season, so she's presently obsessed with pumpkins, and the menu will no doubt reflect that obsession in novel ways.
"Because I'm in the kitchen on my own, you know, I get bored really easily and I don't need to train anyone, so it works really well for me in all honesty" Birch says. "Lachlan's very used to it. I think when you're in a kitchen on your own you need to constantly challenge yourself."
GOING WITH THE FLOW
Birch reflects on the 'overnight success' of Greasy Zoe's with a sense of gratitude and humble vindication. "Even now it's actually quite an amazing feeling," she says. "Obviously we work really hard so I feel like we do deserve to be in the position we're in, but I could never have guessed we would be where we're at."
Embraced by the community, celebrated by the critics, creatively energised in the kitchen, Birch offers the following insight into her approach. "I think if you're doing it to get awards and accolades and to feel good about yourself, it's probably not great and probably won't work. Whereas for us, we're really creative people. We were stuck at one point in our lives where we felt like we weren't enjoying ourselves."
It forced her and Lachlan to ask themselves: how could they continue to be in hospitality and enjoy it, to remain inspired? Greasy Zoe's provided the answer. "We were doing it just so that we could, you know, be happy. It's working." Birch is content, at least, with living in the moment when it comes to the success her and Lachlan have established. "I'm a classic overthinker unless it's a really big thing like the restaurant or having children, in which case I don't think about it all and I let it just naturally happen," she says.
"Just be very zen and not think about the future at all. Every year the restaurant has changed in some way. Like, maybe we dropped a service because we only wanted to work three days, or whatever it is. So the restaurant naturally changes dependent on what's going on in our lives."
When pressed about what the future might hold for Greasy Zoe's, Birch is happy to let everything unfold organically, seasonally, even. It's perhaps the best way to keep everything fresh, after all.
"We'll just continue to make it work for us and maybe it will come to a natural close in, you know, ten years time - or maybe we'll do it forever, maybe it will get bigger or maybe it will get smaller. It'll just be a very natural thing, and when it's not fun anymore we don't do it."
Spoken like a true artist.