Juggling venues, expectations and aims for their food, Anchovy owners Thi Le and Jia-Yen Lee have put their hatted Vietnamese restaurant on ice, launching a new enterprise at their Bridge Rd premises which offers a return to their pre-pandemic casual dining format - but with a Laotian menu. JENNY DENTON reports.
Out of chaos comes order or, at least in the case of the owners of celebrated Richmond Vietnamese restaurant Anchovy, a new order.
After COVID closures and restrictions led to a change of dining format and a new takeaway business, chef Thi Le and her partner Jia-Yen Lee are taking what many would see as a gamble.
After deciding to relocate their established business to more suitable premises next door, the couple have pivoted to launch a totally new venture, a Laotian diner called Jeow.
It is not that Anchovy was lacking plaudits.
Set up for $100,000 - incredibly cheaply in restaurant terms - Anchovy received an Age Good Food Guide chef's hat in 2016 it has kept ever since and won Thi Gourmet Traveller's Best New Talent award the same year.
It has been judged in The Australian Financial Review's top 20 Australian restaurants and featured consistently in Gourmet Traveller's top 50 in Australia list.
"I think just last year, we were in their top 20," Thi says.
"For a small humble restaurant I think we've punched above our weight in so many different ways."
Anchovy celebrated its fifth anniversary just after Melbourne's first lockdown, and during that period started selling Laotian takeaway and serving banh mis out of the window, motivated in large part by a desire "just to introduce a bit of life into Bridge Rd".
Given the restrictions on patron numbers, it also made sense to take the plunge and introduce a set menu at Anchovy that "allowed Thi to really look into Vietnamese cuisine the way she wants to and sort of control the conversation with guests", JY says.
The move was part of a desire to "take Vietnamese cuisine to the next step, put it on a sort of a platform away from just a cheap eat".
"We wanted to be able to showcase that heritage and create a value equivalent to Japanese cuisine, for example, equivalent to the cuisines that people are willing to pay for."
While the set menu experiment was in many ways successful, the pair concluded it wasn't suited to the 338 Bridge Rd premises. For one thing, it stopped locals from dropping in for a snack and a couple of glasses of wine.
The gourmet Vietnamese sandwiches, meanwhile, had proved to be a hit, and when the property next door became available, the couple decided to rent it and run the bahn mi business there during the day, and operate Anchovy with its set menu there at night.
While the lack of a liquor licence in the new premises has meant they have had to put the Anchovy business on hold, they have gone ahead with plans to launch a Laotian restaurant from Anchovy's original home at 338.
The Laotian venture, Jeow - which means' sauce' - opened 10 days ago. The menu is loaded with big flavours and dishes the pair love to eat.
"Thi's always loved Laotian food," JY says. "I think her first love is Laotian cuisine."
The food is "a bit spicier, a bit more herbaceous and funky than either Vietnamese or Thai, it's brighter in profile. And all of that is sort of balanced by its aromatic nature.
"The biggest hits of Thai food - your papaya salads, or your laabs (larbs on Thai menus) - all have roots in the Northern Thai, or Laotian cuisine."
Thi and JY describe the new restaurant's menu as "inspired by the suburban Laotian eateries of Australia's two major cities".
"I think such an important thing with any cuisine is seeing what you have and using your own lens to do your best to represent what you're trying to cook to move a cuisine forward," Thi says.
Moving a cuisine forward, at times is easier said than done. When Anchovy opened in 2015, customers didn't take to its fresh roasted duck in fermented bean curd - a traditional Vietnamese dish which Thi once used to convince her mother she had a future in cooking.
"People hated it so much. A reviewer came and hated it," says "JY".
Despite another food writer explaining that taro, included in the dish, was a key ingredient in Asian cooking, he disliked the root vegetable's "weird" flavour.
But seven years later the critic returned, ordered the same meal and hailed it as the "dish of the night" pronouncing the taro "perfectly cooked".
"So palates have changed," JY says with a laugh.
The couple believe Australia has "one of the best Asian food scenes in the world" thanks to its multiculturalism and abundant produce.
"It is so diverse in Australia when it comes to Southeast Asian and East Asian," Thi says. "We've moved away from 'Chinese' into regions now. You can you find Guangzhou-style Chinese, Sichuanese, Yunnanese."
Thi's family life always revolved around food but she got a late start in her métier, at 26.
She cites three former employers as significant to her professional development.
The first was Anthony Redondi, whose Italian restaurant, Aqua Dining, under the Sydney Harbour Bridge served "very simple, very produce-focused classic Italian food".
Celebrated chef Christine Mansfield, who she was paired with in a mentoring program, offered Thi a job at two-hatted restaurant Universal - "an ode to different spices around the world" which served a "playful" set menu incorporating Thai, Moroccan and Turkish dishes.
It was Cumulus Inc. chef Andrew McConnell who drew Thi to Melbourne after she was involved in preparing the menu for his book launch in Sydney.
"Minimal ingredients on the plate but he could draw so much out of the produce," she says. "I was blown away."
Intrigued by what Cumulus was doing, she moved to Melbourne for a trial at the restaurant and loved the energy of its open-kitchened warehouse premises and the first-hand dealings with small producers.
"The more I stayed and learned about what Cumulus had to offer, the more I just kind of fell in love with Melbourne," she says.
"And then I met JY and just stayed."
In terms of personal food influences, Thi says hers were those of "a Vietnamese girl growing up in Sydney's western suburbs surrounded by all these Australian suburban elements" who was then influenced by the food of Filipino, Middle Eastern and other migrants in the surrounding suburbs.
For her, authenticity is not in following recipes but in the "ethos" and integrity of fresh, local ingredients and the history and combined elements of a dish.
"That's what we're trying to showcase," she says.
As well as a creative progression, the couple's new Laotian venture reflects a balance they are trying to strike between the more serious and the social aspects of their food, a balance between a desire to "progress the conversation" around Australia's Southeast Asian cuisine and to just bring people together to eat and have fun.
"At the end of the day, we're essentially a small family-owned business with close ties to the community," JY says.
"We want people we see in the street every day to be able to drop in, have a couple of glasses of wine, have a few snacks and dishes, and go home.
"If you don't want to sit through a two-and-a-half hour set-menu meal, you don't need to sit through a two-and-a-half hour meal!"
THI'S TIPS FOR DINING OUT IN RICHMOND
Thanh Ha II, Victoria St (Vietnamese)
I go there for banh xeo, a crispy turmeric rice cake, known colloquially as Vietnamese pancakes. She's been doing it for the last 20 or 30 years and they're outstanding.
Union House, Swan St (gastropub)
Fantastic for pub food. The chicken schnitzel is so clean, the produce is great. It's served with like a shaved fennel salad and just done so well. The menu is a bit Italian-ish and changes all the time. They have a rotating fish dish.
Al Nawab, Bridge Rd (Pakistani)
Go there for the curries and the dahl. Their dahl and goat curry is fantastic. I've never had a dahl better than theirs.
Oriental Impression Grill Restaurant, Victoria St (Chinese)
They do things on skewers and it's always packed. They do a hand-pulled chopped noodle with tomato and Chinese celery soup and it's like eating a hug. It's fantastic.
Laikon Deli, Bridge Rd (Mediterranean)
John's family has been running the deli for over 50 years. They do really simple Mediterranean style sandwiches and charcuterie boards, soup of the day, coffee. They're old school hospitality. You walk in and feel like you're at their house. Everyone's welcome.
