Van Haandel Family and Michael Lambie

This is a family story, an extended family that is: the staff and owners of The Stokehouse and the Prince of Wales Hotel in St Kilda. Great cooking is part of the story, so too is a great wine store, hotel, bars, band room. But overall it is about excellent management and a visionary team. Though they hate to be talked about, the vision comes from the Van Haandel brothers, John and Frank, and the team they have surrounded themselves with in their establishments.

As this is a book about chefs, we have here the recipes of Michael Lambie, their very talented chef and partner in Circa. Michael was born in the UK and trained in classic kitchens before working with Marco Pierre White at Harvey's. His style has broadened from the Anglo-French dishes he was doing in London. Now the menu at Circa includes 'lighter' plates, always a lot of seafood and less use of dairy products. Michael has developed some of these dishes specially to cater for hotel guests staying in the newly renovated rooms of the hotel. It's expected that some of those guests may use the health club planned there, or simply want to follow healthy regimes.

Also for the first time in his cooking career, Michael has designed a breakfast menu for the hotel's cafe, Circ (son of Circa) which caters for hotel guests for breakfast, lunch and conferences. It has tables in the courtyard under the olive trees (in tubs) and inside adjoining its glamorous 'parent' Circa, which is only open in the evenings. But Circa and now Circ are only a part of the story.

The family story goes back to pizza parlours in Warrnambool, then Bendigo and the first venture in Melbourne at Pronto in Chapel Street. "In its day that restaurant was groundbreaking. Chapel Street was dead in the early '80s and look at it now," said John Van Haandel. Interesting to also look at some of the staff who worked with him then - Sarah Harvey, now owner of the very successful Harvey's in South Yarra, and Gail Donovan of Donovans.

Then came The Stokehouse, an extraordinary enterprise, the gradual re-development of the old tearooms on the beach. It's the most successful business in the area and is constantly voted most popular place in Mietta's Industry Awards. The combination of a casual eating place on the beach with one of Melbourne's first wood-fired pizza ovens downstairs, plus a dining area upstairs overlooking the beach palms combined with a reasonably priced, high-standard menu and good quality wine list works extremely well.

The Prince of Wales Hotel is an empire unto itself. Its acquisition in 1996 has sent the family business into another league. On a huge site, some 1.4 hectares, it combines a large car park, a suite of cafe shops on Acland Street, a bakery, three bars, a wine store, band room, restaurant, cafe, and upmarket hotel rooms. It's not just big but very varied in the feeling of the spaces and of the businesses in them. On Fitzroy Street the bars have been renovated but not 'gentrified'. The changes are so subtle that regular drinkers don't feel any difference, they still belong. Even with the super-trendy Mink Bar round the corner in Acland Street, some of the past has been retained with the socialist mural on the wall reflected in the Russian theme of the bar with its multiplicity of vodkas and fishy things to eat.

Upstairs at Circa is Melbourne's most glamorous dining rooms. And, just across a few walls, in the same building, is the Bandroom which serves thousands of stubbies in its state-of-the-art music room, which hosts all the big local and international names. Then on Acland Street, Il Fornaio makes bread for the restaurants and serves a super range of patisserie. It's become one of the St Kilda meeting and conversation places. Hard to imagine that the strip it is part of was once dirty, dark and a haunt of hard drug users. It's all a matter of having the vision to see potential and to work through changes so carefully and subtly that no one objects or feels they've been made to move on.

Within the businesses some of those who keep the cogs in motion include (and these are just a few of a vast staff empire) - operations manager, Roseanne Hyland; Stokehouse manager, Roger Fowler; Stokehouse chef, Paul Dynan; Prince Wine Store partner and manager, Phillip Rich; Circa partner and chef, Michael Lambie.

And the vision behind these places has not come from market research, that is, the sort of research which most restaurateurs do which is to check on their competitors. "I've never really worried about what anybody else does," says John "I've gone ahead on my own...I keep totally to myself and do my own thing". Market research for John is international, main influences: the Mediterranean.

There are more plans for the Prince of Wales, more rooms and possibly another restaurant. As always, the Van Haandels are taking the development slowly, checking their market, keeping existing customers happy, not offending locals and doing much of the streetscape improvements themselves. In order to create the feeling around the hotel and the view from the bedrooms that they wanted they pulled out the electric lights poles and put the cables underground, an exercise costing some tens of thousands of dollars. To make it possible for cars to pull right in to the hotel entrance in Acland Street they re-paved half a block, again at their own expense. St Kilda council must enjoy such ratepayers. Once they decide to do something this family does not take half measures, they do it well and thoroughly. The hotel rooms are filled with hand-crafted furniture and interesting details such as the basket lights made by a Phillip Island cray fisherman.

Despite, or because of the size and diversity of their businesses, the family has no trouble attracting enough staff, there's always something going on in the Van Haandel empire and there are now some 350 staff between The Stokehouse and the Prince of Wales. These include John's two older daughters, one who is front of house for the hotel, and the other who is a supervisor at The Stokehouse downstairs.

Though the Van Haandels are not chefs, their business acumen and their visionary hospitality ideas have generated great restaurants, the platform which great cooking requires.

Micheal Lambie's Recipes

Scallop salad with seed mustard Dressing
Salad nicoise with seared Atlantic salmon
Hazelnut parfait with passionfruit sorbet and citrus salad