Press Release

As of the 18th of December I will be moving on from my position as Head Chef at Balzari Restaurant. After 3 years at the helm, I feel it is the right time for me to move on and to look for some bigger challenges. I have made no decisions on where I will be heading to next . My replacement at Balzari has not yet been named. I would like to say a big thank you to all who have dined at Balzari during my time here. I hope that you enjoyed eating my food as much as I’ve enjoyed cooking for you.

Turkey (Tacchino)

Turkey is a favourite of mine. It’s unfortunate that it is a meat that is not commonly used in Australia outside of Christmas, where it tends to be given the old ‘Roasted turkey and cranberry sauce’ make-over.

In Northern Italy, turkey lends itself to a variety of dishes. Often it is braised into a pasta sauce or rolled and roasted, perhaps stuffed with cotechino or luganega sausage. Sometimes it is served as a boiled meat, maybe with a fresh horseradish and apple salsa (Salsa di Kren). Here is a recipe that is may be the most simple of them all and hopefully the most pleasing.

Friulano style Pot roasted turkey legs with herbs and white wine
2 Free range turkey drumsticks
200ml Olive oil (depending on the surface area of your pot)
5 whole cloves Australian garlic (skin on)
1 finely diced white onion
2 sticks of finely chopped rosemary
12 leaves of finely chopped sage
Salt
Pepper (as you like)
250ml crisp/ fruity white wine (Pinot grigio, Friulano or Riesling are preferable)
Stock or water as required
A variation on this recipe can also be made using a Passata or Sugo (Italian tomato sauce) which produces a lovely flavoursome red oil. For a richer sauce it is also possible to substitute white wine with a light red wine.

Firstly, you’ll be in need of a pot that’s big enough to lay both of your turkey drumsticks flat. The less room they have, the less oil you’ll need. I like to think that the use of fat in this method of cookery can be likened to the principles behind the French ‘In confit’.

Season the turkey drumsticks with salt and pepper.

Pour your oil into the pot to cover the base well, maybe half a centimetre. Add seasoned drumsticks and whole unpeeled garlic and bring to a medium heat, slowly browning to a rich golden colour before turning to get a similar amount of colour on all sides.

Once you have made your final turn add your herbs, onion and a good splash of white wine. This makes a completely guilt ridden sauce for dipping bread in at the end of your meal. Place a lid ajar on the pot and reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting. Cook until meat is coming away from the bone, being sure to turn the legs regularly to avoid them sticking to the pot. It is also possible (and possibly necessary) to periodically add small amounts of stock or water to help maintain moisture as well as preventing the legs from sticking and burning.

The legs will take between 2-3 hours to become tender.

This sort of dish is traditionally served with either polenta or roasted potatoes, however, it is also beautifully accompanied by a salad of bitter or peppery leaves such as radicchio, dandelions, chicory or rocket. Fresh horseradish is also a perfect accompaniment.

Balzari restaurant review ‘Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant guide 2011′

*1 Star*

On a section of Lygon Street more renowned for look-alike tourist traps, Balzari stands out as a welcome anomaly. The casually elegant dining room, with its terrazzo floor, bentwood chairs and open kitchen, steers clear of gingham tablecloth cliches, as does exacting service and the smart wine list with a strong showing of Italian labels. But it’s the skilfully cooked northern Italian food that really sets Balzari above its neighbours. Snacks including anchovy and lemon fritole and seared scallops with candied pancetta, walnuts and celeriac precede entrees such as a salad of rough-hewn spicy sausage, peas and mint, and a selection of house-made pasta; cannelloni with Berkshire pork and tomato ragu, say. An ever-changing blackboard menu of mains courses could include excellent braised baby goat, while in the sweets department, a woodfired panforte makes for a suitably strong finish.

Balzari review ‘The Age Good Food Guide 2011′

15/20 *1 Hat*

If you’ve forgotten how good pasta can be, head to Balzari for a palate refresher. The pasta here is something special – all house-made, there may be long ribbons of tagliarini with spanner crab; buttery spinach and ricotta ravioli; or pappardelle lush with braised rabbit and sweet with prunes. It’s typical of Balzari’s heart-warming, full-flavoured northern Italian food, cooked in the open kitchen by Joel Valvasori-Pereza. Owner Simon Balzary is often on-hand to welcome guests, backed by a smooth team that delivers smart, attentive service. It matches the old-fashioned pace of this classic little charmer. You might start with an antipasto of spiced pork sausage, wine-braised ox tongue, roast quail and grilled king prawns with a piquant lemon, caper and sardine salsa. A hearty smoked-ham soup brims with fresh borlotti beans, or regularly changing mains could offer slow-cooked veal shanks with roast kipfler potatoes, or baked barramundi with baby artichoke and white anchovy salsa. The dessert plate is a must: you may get a taste of grappa icecream, roast pears, chocolate semifreddo or, in season, watermelon sorbet. Aged Italian cheeses come with muscatels and house-made quince paste.

A pinch of salt.

By Joel Valvasori-Pereza

I was talking with a regular customer of mine the recently when he told me that in his opinion, my staff and I, on occasions, have been guilty of over seasoning. Now I’m not arrogant enough to think that we get it right all the time. Sometimes dishes slip through. Sometimes they are over seasoned and sometimes they are under. Sometimes this is simply a difference of opinion. Every palate is different and has a different tolerance to salt, pepper, spices, bitterness, sweet and sour. People have their tolerances and preferences. I’ve also even been told on one occasion that to a certain person’s palate, my desserts were too sweet. What is this ‘To my palate’ business that keeps rearing its ugly head in review columns and food blogs. Does anyone really believe that chefs are cooking to cater specifically for your palate? The wine producers of the Marlborough region don’t ever seem to take my palate into consideration when they produce their Sauvignon Blanc. To my palate they show too much fruit. Apparently I’m in a minority. The fact is that it is only really possible to cook for your own palate. We cook the food that we love to eat, prepared how we like to eat it, seasoned or sweetened to what we deem is perfect. Let just say that cook ‘to my palate’.

Growing up in a Friulano household, we would frequently eat salads of bitter greens and radicchio. My wife on the other hand, who didn’t grow up eating such flavours, subsequently has less of a tolerance to bitter flavours. A lot of people in our society have no tolerance for bitter whereas I really enjoy them. Does this mean that I should remove bitter ingredients from my menus that are based around the flavours of my childhood simply out of fear that someone may not like it? In Friuli, desserts, which frequently come in the form of sweet pastries and cakes, are more often than not washed down with a glass of dry white wine, which is possibly an uncomfortable contrast of flavours to people in other countries and is a far cry from the sticky dessert wines that are pushed with desserts in other parts. In this case, who is right?

In the restaurant we are under scrutiny every day by every customer and their preferences. We have no yard stick except our own palate. I love salt, I love bitterness and I hate white pepper! Any dish that I can taste white pepper in, I find unpalatable. I might as well be chowing down on a cup of durian gelato, all the while washing its subtle faecal notes down with a glass of a truckies bath water. On the other hand, I find black pepper more tolerable. I enjoy it in good Italian sausages and salumi, I’ll crack a little on my eggs in the morning and don’t mind a sprinkle on a fresh tomato. I use black pepper in most of my dishes; however, I don’t use it as a dominant flavour. I am of the belief that when pepper is over-used it can have a negative impact on the flavour of the dish. So as a customer, am I right? I’m not keen on pepper. How was the chef to know? Perhaps whenever I go out for a meal I should start wearing my ‘Low tolerance to Black pepper and have serious issue with white pepper’ T-shirt. Maybe then I would’ve been served food the way I would have cooked it.

Black pepper is not a flavour that I grew up with in large proportions at home, as a lot of people have grown up in a meat and three veg environment where salt and pepper was more commonly added to the top of food. How much kudos would a restaurant get if it left the job of seasoning to its patrons? People would start asking the question of why they went out in the first place. We live in a culture where it is normal practice to season food before we taste it, whether with salt or pepper. Every day I am still amazed (and aggravated) by how many people do this. They are in a restaurant paying good money to have a professional cook for them and they still feel the need to add seasoning before they taste it. I have witnessed customers seasoning their food before tasting it, only to send it back because they claimed that it was over-seasoned. Italian food should be seasoned as the dish is cooking in order to help build and enhance flavour at from an early stage. With a lot of dishes we aim for a certain richness of flavour. Unfortunately, it is this richness and fullness of flavour that is sometimes confused with saltiness. We want our food to explode with flavour. I believe that richness is experienced when flavour fills the palate whereas saltiness is when the salt itself starts to burn my palette. I find that most people under season their meat at home and rely heavily on sauces and condiments to make them taste good. We use your body’s natural reaction to salt to our advantage. A nice and juicy, well marbled piece of steak just got a lot juicier thanks to the magic of your saliva. One mouthful of well seasoned meat should have you drooling like a Saint Bernard. I prefer to season my meat well, cook it to about medium, and compliment the seasoning with the sharpness of a few drops of an aged Balsamico or even the sweet spiciness of some freshly grated horseradish. If you are going to spend the money to purchase top quality steak it makes more sense to accentuate its natural flavours through seasoning than to drown it in a sauce that masks everything that is good about the product.

So why do most people go out to top restaurants for dinner? The answer is simple. It is in hope to have an experience that they can’t have at home. When people have dinner parties at home, a lot of the wow tends to be associated with the extravagance of the purchase and not necessarily the final cooked product. We don’t go out to eat things that we always cook at home. If we did, a lot of people would be out trying to find the restaurant that is doing the best Lean cuisine, Kantong or Chicken tonight. Stir- fry and Spag Bol would be staples on every menu in the city and may be served in those little plastic microwave containers with a peel back lid. Maybe they could list it as cooked ‘Sous Vide’. There might even be a Dolmio guide to Australia to rival that of Michelin. At a top restaurant you want to walk away saying “Wow! The food was amazing.” It’s not often that you will go out and repeatedly pay top dollar for good service if the flavour of the food was just ‘Ho-hum’. Some trendy restaurants can get away with it for a while, but most restaurants can’t afford not to have you walk away impressed. When it comes to how a dish tastes, that ‘Wow’ factor simply can’t happen if the boundaries of seasoning are not reached. Seasoning can be the difference between a good dish and a great dish.

When dining out, there needs to be an understanding of what purpose the restaurant you’re dining at is serving to the dining public. If it is safe flavour combinations you are after or cheaper prices. If you don’t care a great deal about the quality or if you aren’t really fussed about the fact that the person cooking your meal is sitting in the back alley smoking half a packet of Styvo’s in a stained Bonds t-shirt that you wouldn’t clean your toilet floor with for fear that the floor might end up dead from some horrible disease, all the while you wait an extra 15 minutes for the steak that you ordered rare to come out well done. When a small restaurant is competing with their more heavily backed and PR driven counterparts the big question to ask your self is, ‘Can a restaurant afford to be safe and under season and risk you being underwhelmed with the flavour?’

Balzari, Melbourne restaurant review, By Michael Harden

The fruits of Friuli

Balzari is putting Lygon Street back on the map with authentic regional cooking, a pared-back aesthetic and charming, hospitable service, writes Michael Harden.

Lygon Street may be Australia’s most recognisable and renowned Little Italy, but it’s been a while since it’s had any sort of reputation for producing great Italian food. And while there’s an obvious surfeit of paint-by-number Italian joints cluttering up the footpaths, all apparently offering the same (oversized, laminated) menu, the street still has room for places that fly in the face of the perceived tourist-trap wisdom. Balzari, with its thoroughly attractive combination of authentic, careful cooking, pared-back aesthetic and engaging approach is one of these places. It’s a restaurant that reminds you of a time when Lygon Street was at the centre of Melbourne’s burgeoning food culture.

Part of Balzari’s charm is that from the moment you walk in, it strikes you as an honest, humble kind of place. It helps that owner Simon Balzary is usually there, greeting people and working the floor with his similarly charming and hospitable team, which includes his wife Aviva. It gives the place an immediate hands-on feel that syncs well with the room’s simple lines.

It’s a handsome enough space, but this is certainly no mega-swanky fit-out. In fact, with its terrazzo floor, dark timber and marble bar, bentwood chairs and linen-draped tables, Balzari deliberately aligns itself with old-school Lygon Street restaurants. There are beaded glass light fittings and a couple of oversized round mirrors on the wall, but those small designer flourishes aside, the room is comfortingly familiar. The main kitchen is down one end of the bar, so there’s the added homeyness of having the chef cook in the same room you’re eating in.

Chef Joel Valvasori-Pereza’s family hails from the region of Friuli in Italy and, having made the pilgrimage back there to eat and cook several years ago, he has its flavours front and centre at Balzari.

Friuli is positioned at a sort of crossroads in the north-east of Italy, so its food (and Valvasori-Pereza’s cooking) shows the influences of nearby Austria and Slovenia, as well as its regional Italian neighbour, Veneto. Braised cuttlefish with polenta, for example, is based on a dish that’s fairly common along the Adriatic coast, all black with ink and slippery-salty, with an underlying flavour of onions, celery and garlic. But Valvasori-Pereza enhances the original by adding just a spark of chilli to the cuttlefish. The dark, inky tumble lying across the pale yellow of the soft, creamy polenta looks brilliant and follows through on the palate with hearty flavours.

There’s a similar reinterpretation of rustic, traditional cooking in the salsiccia Friulana, a beauty of a dish that teams a fat house-made, spiced pork sausage with a salad of peas and mint. The sausage is made according to a secret family recipe from flavoursome pork neck. It has a nice chunkiness to it and a subtle showing of cinnamon and nutmeg. There’s also a slightly sweet braised white onion sitting to one side, and tiny pieces of pancetta adding salty notes to the mix. It’s a nicely balanced dish, both refreshing and robust.

The kitchen’s trick of refining what are essentially peasant flavours without losing the essence, or the integrity, of the dish works particularly well with the pasta dishes. All the pasta is handmade, whether it’s the playing-it-straight rich and cheesy cannelloni filled with Berkshire pork and tomato ragù that comes to the table bubbling in its stoneware dish, or a quite gorgeous spinach and ricotta ravioli teamed with a slightly sweet, buttery sauce of figs and walnuts and topped with shavings of Montasio cheese, a sharpish, salty native of Friuli.

There are also a few Friulian natives on the wine list, a reasonably compact but well-directed collection that spends equal time in the Old and New Worlds, with a particular love for northern Italian varietals such as friulano, dolcetto and malvasia. Much of the list seems to have been chosen with one eye on value, so while you won’t see any massively priced Barolos, you’ll find a lot of interesting drinking at a price that perfectly suits the surrounds. There are some good choices by the glass, a small beer list (that, somewhat disappointingly, only runs to one Italian beer – Birra Menabrea) and some pretty terrific snack-sized items on the menu, making Balzari a very attractive proposition for a quick drink/snack scenario too.

The curly fried bread “twigs” served with Mount Zero olives marinated in orange zest, chilli, garlic, rosemary and sage are a fine and potentially addictive snack, but there’s even better fried dough goodness to be had in the savoury fritole, a traditional northern Italian dish of bite-sized doughnuts flavoured with anchovies, lemon and parsley. Scallops, seared and topped with an apple, walnut and candied pancetta salad, add further interest in the small eats department.

Main courses at Balzari change regularly and so appear on a blackboard menu rather than the printed list. If it’s on, it’s an excellent idea to order the goat spezzatino, a sprightly flavoured stew slow-cooked with lots of herbs and white wine. Goat’s cheese is tossed on top, its creaminess working well with the slight fattiness of the goat, and an accompanying cannellini bean and celery salad provides freshness and earthiness.

Roast barramundi is also impressive, cooked simply on its skin, seasoned with fresh rosemary salt and finished with a quick flip in a pan and some butter. It comes with a vibrant salad of beans, chives, cherry tomatoes and basil leaves that has, oddly but successfully, the slightest hint of ginger in the dressing. According to Valvasori-Pereza, ginger is, if not a common ingredient in Friuli, not unheard of, a product perhaps of the region’s “crossroads” status.

At the dolci end of the meal, the menu lists the usual classic suspects – chocolate semifreddo, vanilla bean panna cotta – but adds a few seasonal treats, such as a watermelon salad that combines fresh watermelon with watermelon sorbet and jelly and then dresses it all with aged balsamic vinegar and mint.

Part of Balzari’s immediate charm undoubtedly comes from being a restaurant with cooking integrity, switched-on service and a wine list that is more than halfway decent on Lygon Street’s most touristy stretch. But it’s not just in comparison with its neighbours that Balzari is so appealing. This is a restaurant capable of delivering the goods in any location.

Ruling supreme. Balzari Review by Michael Harden ‘Melbourne weekly’ 2nd March 2010

Lygon Street doesn’t have the finest reputation for food. The plethora of gingham tablecloth/giant laminated menu/touting businesses that have clustered at the famed strip’s southern end make many Melburnians roll their eyes and start muttering about tourists and the good old days.

But despite the presence of so many quality-challenged eateries on Lygon Street, there are still some places committed to bringing good Italian tucker to the people. Up there with (or perhaps even a little ahead of) the best of them is Balzari.
Located where the cookie-cutter pizza and pasta joints are thickest on the ground, Balzari is a little oasis of pared back style and authentic Italian flavour. While not exactly minimalist, the terrazzo-floored dining room with its wooden bar and open kitchen keeps the flourishes to a minimum and the cliches at bay.

There are giant circular mirrors, some beaded lightshades, framed art, linen-covered tables and curly backed bentwood chairs but mostly there is a feeling of space and calm. Noise levels can get a little tricky when the place fills up but even at its loudest, Balzari is more a “speak up” than “shout it out loud” kind of joint.

Service is one of the restaurant’s strong points with a team of friendly and relaxed floor staff well versed with both the menu and the wine list who give the impression of genuinely wanting you to have a good time.

Good times are certainly helped along by a wine list that starts with a good, reasonably priced and mainly Oz-centric list and then moves onto several pages dedicated to Italian varietals. The Italian wines are divided up according to region so, depending on your mood you can choose a gavi from Piedmont or a classic chianti from Tuscany.

The food at Balzari ranges from all over Italy, too, while sticking to the mantra that seems to define the cuisine no matter where in the boot you are – excellent ingredients, simply cooked. There is a good list of appetisers that work very well as bar snacks (particularly the marinated olives with “curly bread” – salty, fried bread dough, $6), a comprehensive list of pasta and risotto and a daily changing menu of main courses that is written on a blackboard behind the bar.

It’s hard to go past the savoury fritole ($8.50), bite-sized doughnuts flavoured with anchovy, lemon and parsley that have the perfect saltiness to team with cold beer. Also good in the small snacks stakes are the seared scallops ($8), served on the shell and topped with a small salad and tiny flecks of intense candied pancetta.

A poster child for rustic simplicity, a sausage salad ($15.50), combined a superb, house-made pork sausage with fresh peas, mint leaves, pancetta and a lovely, whole sweet and sour onion.

For those who like their Italian on the meaty, saucy, cheesy side, the cannelloni with Berkshire pork, tomato ragu and buffalo mozzarella ($27.50) will certainly hit all the right buttons as well as filling you right up.

The spezzatino ($29.50), braised baby goat cooked with white wine and herbs came, casserole-like, with cannelini beans, celery and celery leaves and some goat’s cheese. The slight fattiness of the meat teamed with the creaminess of the cheese was an unexpectedly excellent combination.

Part of the beauty of Balzari is that it’s probably not a restaurant that many Melburnians would expect to find on Lygon Street. Having your expectations pleasantly overturned is always an invigorating thing.