Welcome to 1PAX..
Take a seat. Have you dined with us before?
It’s probably no surprise that my entire life revolves around food.
“Sure. Same.” I hear you say. “Can’t believe he’s starting all of this off with such a bold claim.”
Yes, I eat. Lord, do I eat – but let me explain.
I grew up in a place that takes immense pride in its local produce, on a property that existed for and contributed to said local produce – a four-hundred-something-acre dairy farm with river-frontage in Victoria’s Kiewa Valley. Kiewa Milk always reigned supreme, and it was hard to ignore (visually or aromatically) arguably the valley’s biggest building – the “Factory”, as you drove down Kiewa East Road.
Just as staunchly protective of their local culinary traditions is my mum’s side of the family, hailing from Veneto in northern Italy, where I currently find myself. Radicchio, tiramisu and prosecco are religion around these parts – and I’m being asked to apologise for the King Valley’s crimes. Just like back home, there’s a river two hundred metres away from houses belonging to extended family that’s connected to dairy – it has a cheese bearing the same name.
My mum was a hospitality careerist – a family friend’s Italian restaurant in Gosford, a chef at a French restaurant in Goulburn, a commercial pastry chef, running a coffee van before coffee vans were things, a steakhouse, and towards the end, bossing around some of my high school friends working front of house on the weekends – nobody realising the web that connected us all. My Dad took an early retirement, and among other things, tended to a bountiful vegetable garden and a few fruit trees with the hills leading to the Bogong High Plains serving as the backdrop.
From a super young age, I could be found in the garden, either “helping” or making use of the enormous zucchini bush as the perfect spot during hide and seek – the nearest neighbour was over a kilometre and at least two cattle grids away, it was simple, and my sisters and I had to be creative.
Mum would run me through her pasta sauce recipes when a stepladder was needed for me to reach the kitchen bench. Eight-year-old me was writing aptly disjointed three-course weekend dinner menus that made little sense, but now explains a lot about present-day me. Dad would take me to the supermarket, then for the afternoon I’d be sous-chef as it was all brought to life, still too young to be handling all the equipment my menus would require.
Flashing forward a bit, and the family farm has moved and downsized – now black Angus cattle on one hundred and fifty acres, thirty-five fig trees alongside a mix of forty-or-so others, and I’ve spent the last decade designing within the hospitality industry in Australia.
My first projects were shortly after arriving in Melbourne in the early 2010s. My first full hospitality branding project was for a cafe in the mid-2010s. That place is still open, and somehow the work still holds up. Since then, through my creative practice, I’ve worked with delis, cafes, bars, restaurants, food brands, wineries, distilleries, catering companies, festivals and organisations. I’ve written menus, cooked lunch services, worked rockstar shifts in friends’ restaurants, done trade shows, designed and brought a pop-up to life in two weeks. Published a cookbook (the last 2 copies in existence can be purchased from my lovely friends at Swensk), co-founded the most successful avant-garde, broth-based creative-slash-cycling collective in the world, and somehow managed to love every moment of it. All because it’s been paired with cooking for and eating with those I love.
At the best of times, the role of the designer is a hapless and hidden one. As someone who typically avoids the spotlight, that’s a safe space. Hours will be spent on minute details. It’s rare to be able to turn your brain off anyway, so it’s (mostly) okay when things come together later at night, or at the last minute. When you have to play the role of designer in a hospitality context, everything you produce sits in this weird contextual void, in that the tone/vibe/aura, et al., gets set by the work you do. Yet at the same time, most of what you worry about the most sits two or three layers deeper in the diner’s subconscious while they sit in the dining room. Their sights are firmly set on the front of house, waiting to see if the service is good or not, or the chefs, waiting to see if the food is good or not, if the portions are just right, and the well-done steak is done well. Despite all this, I’ve spent a lot of time wriggling and wrestling in my Adobe straitjacket in an internal battle, both knowing and ignoring the fact that it’s “not that deep”.
In late March of this year, at a departing morning tea from my last workplace, my boss noted I always seemed to operate at sixty beats per minute, no matter what was going on around me. For the most part, this is true, as even in the middle of a dinner service or the day before opening a restaurant, I’ve been able to swan around almost in slow motion. Menu update and full reprint twenty minutes before service? “Yes, chef”. Call the signage guy to change the hand-written lettering back to what it was five iterations ago? Build a full brand identity for a cafe this week? “Oui”.
However, and it’s a big however – all of this came at a cost. At the turn of the year, I noticed my creative well hadn’t necessarily run dry, but my willingness to pick up the pail had. My bitterness towards capital-H Hospo™ – of which, since 2015, I had played a range of big and small roles in had truly started to runneth over, and was staining everything I loved about hospitality in the first place – a performance in connection, simplicity and intimacy.
Monday to Friday would be spent thinking about restaurants, bouncing between venues, continuing after five for either more work or, and cueing a quartet of the world’s tiniest violins – free dinners (read: also work).
It took special circumstances and exceptional company for me to be able to sit presently at a table in a dining room and not begin over-analysing the wine list paper when it was 100gsm too heavy, or speed-run four courses of lovingly prepared food without the presence to actually acknowledge a lot of what was going on on the plate. If my beloved doctor of the past thirteen years hadn’t retired out of the blue, I would have gone to her, but instead I leaned on self-diagnosis – I’d become restaurant-pilled.
But now? I currently find myself on the other side of the world, not bouncing between three simultaneous jobs for the first time in six years, and with the kind of free time that has (to my own doing) been rarely afforded in the past decade.
Across the last six months, restaurants have been largely avoided. The only menus I’ve looked at are written on the blackboards of rifugios in the Dolomites. Instead, there’s been sunset cicchetti on one of Venice’s rare patches of grass; eating a panino, sending voice notes and falling asleep under the shade of a tree in Milan’s Parco Sempione; drinks and snacks with the guys after futsal every Thursday night; filling my bag with market produce each Friday then spending 4 hours cooking lunch; or time spent sitting in the piazza, sinking Crodino and a collection of books I’ve been meaning to read for ages.
I’ve been able to reshape what my practice (and life) will look like moving forward in a much more holistic sense – something I’ve already started applying to small projects in and out of hospitality. Next week, I’ll be talking to a room of starry-eyed Italian aspiring designers, saying how “this recipe for a green risotto is going to change the way you think about designing things”. I’ve got a solo date booked next week in a tavern tucked beneath a seventeenth-century church, and I have the time, headspace and motivation to announce this: 1PAX.
"1 pax" means "1 person." It's a term commonly used in the tourism and hospitality industry to indicate the number of people in a reservation, room, or group. Therefore, "1 pax" simply refers to one individual.
There’s no specific set schedule of posts, mostly because I am not looking to inundate your inbox, plus this is all part of the New Me™. What I can promise is nothing longer than this introduction, no AI slop, and a deep-seated reason behind everything, even if it doesn’t initially make sense. The sardonic tone of former soup-based feature articles may return here and there, but overall, this will be much more of a wholesome affair as we explore food, creativity, intimacy and connection together.
What this won’t be is a space for restaurant reviews or food photos. It also won’t be a place to grind my axe; I have a journal, a psychologist, and two eyes to read the comments section of Anchovy Toast for that. Nor is this a place where I put forth my best Anthony Bourdain cosplay attempt, to the point where I will make it known that I am essentially a “fake fan”, I’ve never watched a full TV episode of his work (same goes with The Bear), nor have I read Kitchen Confidential.
1PAX will remain comped (free), and for the time being, will only be advertised via Instagram stories or through word of mouth from you, the dear readers. Maybe that makes this DOA, but I’m trying to think of it like a sexy secret supper club that hasn’t been yassified yet. Time will tell, hopefully, I won’t have to eighty-six it.
Settle in, drinks and snacks will be on their way shortly.
love reading this. extremely happy for you, and happy for me in that i get to read this. congratulartions, and looking forward to the next one x