Earlier this month, I returned to Australia for the first time in three years to attend the Melbourne Food Festival and also visit a handful of the leading restaurants in Victoria. I will be publishing some articles about this aspect of my trip in the coming weeks.
While I was in Melbourne, I spent some time with my friend Trish O’Donnell, who is now the landlord of Cutler and Co, one of the most pleasurable places I ate at during my stay. Trish is the elder sister of my friend Mietta O’Donnell, the restaurateur and food writer who was killed in a car crash in Tasmania 11 years ago. Her funeral was one of the largest seen in modern Melbourne, with more than a thousand mourners from the culinary world, politics, the arts and a heavy sprinkling of representatives from the more amusing spectrum of the social establishment. At the time, I wrote the following Obit, which appeared in The Independent in January 2001. It was no surprise that one of the first sell out events at the recent Melbourne Food Festival was a dinner in her memory. On the micro-level, Mietta was instrumental in helping me develop my passion for food and wine in the late Sixties. I was an enthusiastic hack (or should that be hick?) who had moved to Melbourne after working on a provincial daily (The Bendigo Advertiser), when we met while reporting on the Melbourne court scene for rival papers. It is true to say that both of us were far more excited by the lunches we planned than the cases we were reporting. Thanks to Mietta, I began eating at the handful of serious restaurants in Melbourne at the time as she had vouchers that allowed us to have two meals for the price of one.
While rummaging around a secondhand bookshop in Brunswick St Fitzroy, I came across a copy of her Eating and Drinking Guide to Melbourne, which she published with Tony Knox, her slightly inscrutable partner. It remains the best ever food and drinks guide published in Australia, though is now merely a period item as no guide is of much use a decade after the fact.
It is interesting to note how ahead of the game Mietta’s last restaurant was. In some ways, The Delaunay, Jeremy King and Chris Corbin’s latest venture in Covent Garden, shows co-incidental signs of following in her footsteps with its Central European vibe and the notion of Austro-Hungarian chic.
The cuisine of Melbourne has evolved quite a lot in the past decade but that is a story for later. There was also a fascinating book published recently in Sydney that deals with this earlier scene – Insatiable by Tony Bilson (A$40 Pier Nine 2011) and it is also worth looking out for the earlier brilliant food memoir of Gay Bilson, his former wife - Plenty (Penguin 2004).
For those who wish to read more on how Australian food evolved, the best single volume is One Continuous Picnic by Michael Symons. Another one on this subject is Stephen Downes's Advanced Australian Fare, though be warned that the headline on the cover baldly states "How Australian Cooking became the World's Best". Fortunately most Australians have grown out of that jingoistic phase when they had to proclaim that there was Champagne in the sprinklers and Perrier in the taps, but there are always a few stalwarts left to beat this especially clapped out drum. Anyway, Mietta was the antithesis of Mr Downes, so it was no surprise that they didn't exactly hit it off personally or in print.
For those who wish to read more on how Australian food evolved, the best single volume is One Continuous Picnic by Michael Symons. Another one on this subject is Stephen Downes's Advanced Australian Fare, though be warned that the headline on the cover baldly states "How Australian Cooking became the World's Best". Fortunately most Australians have grown out of that jingoistic phase when they had to proclaim that there was Champagne in the sprinklers and Perrier in the taps, but there are always a few stalwarts left to beat this especially clapped out drum. Anyway, Mietta was the antithesis of Mr Downes, so it was no surprise that they didn't exactly hit it off personally or in print.
The Independent Obit January 2001
(Bruce Palling)
(Bruce Palling)
It ran in the family. The granddaughter of perhaps the first and most influential Italian chefs in Melbourne, Mario and Teresa Vigano, who arrived from Milan in the late 1920s, she also created, in www. miettas.com.au, the most authoritative website for Australian cuisine. Her impact on the Melbourne scene was immense, due to her huge range of contacts and connections not only in the culinary world but also in the arts and historical conservation.
Just before her sudden death in a car accident in Tasmania, she had fought doggedly to preserve a historic convent on the Yarra River. A decade earlier, she was instrumental in altering Melbourne's archaic liquor laws, so enabling bars to open without being attached to a restaurant.
A quietly spoken, reserved individual, she possessed a steely core that belied her petite, porcelain-skinned appearance. She methodically and convincingly denounced the standards and working methods of Melbourne's most prominent food guide, which led to a vendetta against her among the more provincial elements of the Melbourne press. There was also an undertone of resentment in other circles because of her passionate belief in French cuisine and wine, which by some was considered tantamount to treason.
Although she never made an issue of it, her first restaurant, which opened in the inner Melbourne suburb of North Fitzroy in 1974, was arguably one of the first anywhere to experiment with what is now called "Fusion Cuisine", the mingling of Eastern and Western culinary elements. This was six years before it was officially created in San Francisco by the chefs Jeremiah Tower and Ken Hom.
She and her long-standing partner Tony Knox were attending a food seminar in northern Tasmania when their car was involved in a head-on collision, killing both her and the driver of the other vehicle while leaving Knox seriously injured.
Mietta O'Donnell was born in Glen Iris, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, in 1950 and educated for 12 years at Sacre Coeur, Melbourne's strictest convent. In 1968, while attending the University of Melbourne, she won a press competition, which sent her to Indonesia and landed her a position as a cadet journalist on the Melbourne Herald. It was at this time we first met at the law courts, where I worked as a crime reporter for The Age. If there was an early recess or adjournment, we wasted no time in disappearing to systematically try most of Melbourne's leading restaurants.
She left journalism to work in the office of a Labor opposition politician but left that in 1973 in order to start her first restaurant in the then Bohemian suburb of North Fitzroy along with her mother, her sister Patricia and Tony Knox. Her next venture in 1978 was reviving a rundown seaside pub at Queenscliff near Geelong, which became the first country hotel to attract Melbourne's emerging affluent and chattering classes. It is still run by her sister (who sold it in 2002).
However her major impact began with the creation of Mietta's, off Collins Street in the heart of the city. Formerly the Naval and Military club, it became the cultural and social hub of Melbourne, with its eclectic cocktail bar and cafe on the ground floor and grand restaurant in the former ballroom above. The ground floor became a salon and space where actors would give performances and Opera Australia held regular recitals. Visiting celebrities such as Barry Humphries flocked to it and Anthony Sher made it his home while he was performing in Richard III.
The reason it had this importance is because Mietta, impeccably dressed in black, was there 14 hours a day with the alertness of a hawk, ensuring both that people meet each other and that each and every function was performed perfectly. Both Mietta and Tony Knox, with the help of Philippe Bourguigonne, perhaps France's leading sommelier, also created the most comprehensive list of Grand Cru Burgundies in any restaurant in Australia.
This well-oiled and highly successful machine came to a restrained halt in the mid-Nineties, first because of the gradual move away from haute cuisine and all of its trappings, not just in Australia, but world-wide. There was also a disastrous business venture in New York. Tony and Mietta attempted to recreate the Coconut Club in Harlem: the project went badly wrong from the beginning and lost them a huge amount of money. Mietta's closed in 1995 but not without a six months' round of cooking events laid on by the most influential chefs in Australia, plus the occasional French superstars such as Alain Chapel and Alain Senderens. Apart from this, Mietta and Tony travelled to France constantly and knew personally every single three-star Michelin chef in France and many elsewhere.
The closure of Mietta's meant that there was now more time to devote to her food newsletter, plus several influential books and Australia's first comprehensive restaurant guide. (The latest edition, Mietta's Eating and Drinking in Australia 2001, has just been published.) Her last book, Mietta's Italian Family Recipes, was a history of Italian cuisine in Australia, including her own family's recipes. Her website too gave a voice to a new generation of critics and writers on Australian cuisine.
Although Mietta O'Donnell was totally committed to her various tasks, including a number of charitable foundations, she had expressed a desire to take on a bigger challenge, such as starting a new version of Mietta's in Florence. Instead, because of her unexpected death, she will be remembered as being one of the three people (interestingly, all self-taught women from Melbourne- the others being Gay Bilson and Stephanie Alexander (who worked in Mietta’s first kitchen) most instrumental in directing and refining the food revolution in Australia.
Maria Fernanda O'Donnell, restaurateur and publisher: born Glen Iris, Victoria 6 January 1950; died Burnie, Tasmania 4 January 2001.
The Independent (January 2001)