Scott Minervini

Scott Minervini seems very self-sufficient as a chef. It is his own desire to keep refining his dishes which drives him. He is never satisfied, there is always room for improvement. He recalls the words of former restaurateur Gay Bilson
about how cooking is like firing a pot, you keep on trying to centre it, over and over. For Scott, the perfect centre, the ultimate balance has not been realised. And when he does, or when he is tired of trying, then he will stop doing the finest food in Tasmania and become a pizza cook. But, it will, of course be the very best pizza imaginable.

Scott and partner Stephen Byrne live and run their restaurant at Lebrina in Newtown, far from the hustle and bustle of the waterfront of Hobart. Stephen recalls how Newtown was settled years ago when the waterfront was a scurrilous place. "It was settled by people who wanted to lead a peaceful existence and look down on the water." They bought the old house in 1993 and spent a year preparing it for dining. There are three domestic size rooms used for dining, one with two tables, the others with just three. It has been set up as a place for people to go where they could actually talk. "To take time out to enjoy food, Scott wanted to live where he served the food to embrace the whole thing."

The kitchen is designed for two to cook in and is well equipped for the numbers which Lebrina caters for. Even now with The Pavilion, a new structure in the back yard which seats 21 with doors opening out on to the courtyard, their total a la carte capacity will not be increased. They will serve either there or in the inside rooms, because they feel happiest doing a maximum of about 35 covers.

Scott has been cooking all his life, at home with his mother and then in a cafe which they started together in the North of Adelaide after he had finished at university. Here Scott tried out the dishes he had read about in Elizabeth David, whose words he reveres. The other great reference for him is Auguste Escoffier in whose books you can always find a clear method for everything and it always works.

After six years at the cafe with his mother, he decided to try other fields and went to cook in a ski resort – "a terrible mistake" He retreated to Howqua Dale whose owners. Sarah Stegley and Marieke Brugman, he had met at the Gastronomic Symposium (he has just been the main organiser of the 1999 Symposium in Hobart). Then went back to Adelaide to work at Bridgewater Mill with Cath Kerry at a period which was both exciting and extravagant. Scott recalls the luxury of using Beluga caviar, of putting pieces of squab breast at the bottom of soups – he says you could call it "capitalist cuisine", or as Cath referred to it, "refined extravagance". It was also the heady days of ‘fusion food’ and Scott recalls the pantry divided into the Latin quarter and the Asian quarter, which he says is "a very expensive way of doing things."

Scott then decided to come to Tasmania in 1988. He had long held a dream of growing pinot grapes and had bought some land. The wine growing never eventuated but he did settle in Hobart in a climate which suits him and allows him to do the style of cooking he enjoys most. Here he can cook the heavier European dishes, use game, rich and robust flavours and work within the peace of his own world.

The Adelaide cooking scene was a particularly intense one at the time when Scott was at Bridgewater Mill and it seems that he needed to withdraw from that to develop his own style. Interesting to consider just how many of Australia’s leading chefs and culinary ‘thinkers’ and authors come from Adelaide. There is Janet Jeffs (now at Juniperberry, Canberra); Cath Kerry, the Cafe of the Art Gallery of South Australia; Cheong Liew , Chris Manfield(chef owner of the Paramount, Sydney, who did not have time to be in this book); cookery teacher Rosa Matto; Tim Pak Poy author Barbara Santich; Philip Searle ; author Michael Symons; and of course, Don Dunstan, the state Premier who set the scene for all this to happen.

But for Scott, the person who has had most influence on his cooking was from Sydney, Gay Bilson, "she would keep and idea and perfect it. It is something which seems now very unfashionable, though, he says, "if you go to Europe, that notion doesn’t seem very odd at all, or in China and Japan."

And still, for him is the constant pursuit of the perfect synergy of elements in a dish. He says that he is rarely pleased with anything he does. But he quietly admitted during our last visit that he had improved, though not yet perfected, his oxtail consomme. Each year seems to bring new refinements to his dishes and that is the constant focus. Where others in the restaurant business talk of increased profits or bemoan their losses, Scott and Stephen seem happy to just keep ‘quietly ahead’, their aspirations seem to be about lifestyle, not an increased bank balance. All going well, they might be able to close up for a month and go overseas and walk through Provence.

A review of Lebrina.

Scott Minervini's Recipes

Duck pies
Slow cooked meatloaf
Almond tart with burnt honey icecream