Restaurant Radii
Radiating out from the park
May 1999
The whole restaurant 'game' seems to be up for grabs. You can serve food just about any way you like these days.
Provided your product is good quality and the environment is right, you can do things in so many different ways.
Radii Restaurant & Bar at the recently opened Park Hyatt, Parliament Place, is reversing the traditional role of chef as the designer artist of the food. The philosophy here is that it is the product which drives the dish. In fact, at dinner here, there are no individual dishes. Everything is to be served family style -- whole fish, duck, chicken, lamb. There it is in the middle of the table. First in best dressed, certainly best fed.
What is happening?
The hotel fine dining room giving family service? How can this be?
Well it works in Tokyo at the new concept 'New York Grill' which, according to Radii's chef, Paul Wilson, has become the most successful restaurant in Asia.
Paul had recently come back from a week in Tokyo when I spoke to him just before the opening of the restaurant last week.
His role as chef at Radii is both much simpler and more complex than that of a head chef in a traditional restaurant. He is on show all the time and expected to come out from the open kitchen, talk to guests, explain the food, cross over to the cold larder section and pluck one of the many seasonal fruits or flowers on display, prepare and garnish for an audience. And what's more he is expected to allow regular hotel guests into his 'domain' the kitchen to prepare their favourite recipes.
You enter the restaurant, right opposite St Patrick's Cathedral. You come past an elegant service bar, down lighted stairs, pause in the passage between the two open kitchens, quiz the chefs about what is good tonight and then get shown through to one of several areas. There's a confusing number of levels, and even tables on the stairs. On each of the three landings there is one table overlooking the hotel lobby. Wonderful for voyeurs. In fact, this is a restaurant set up for entertainment. Plush New York chairs ($1000 each is the estimated cost), glass topped tables, polished boards in one area, incandescent columns and tiles in another. There is so much to look at, you don't need to worry that you don't have a dish in front of you which has been 'signed off' by a chef. What you will get instead, Paul says, is very good products, cooked simply. Whole roasts will be presented, taken back to be carved if necessary (but the whole fish will not be filleted) and then plonked down in the middle with some side dishes and you help yourself. Ah, but what side dishes! Extraordinary shaped designer silver ware made in Hong Kong. There is a whimsical 'shovel' which will be for vegies, a curly ended big spoon for icecreams which has been nicknamed the tadpole, and so on.
Then there is the array of dishes, crockery from the best French, Italian and German porcelain houses , plates and bowls in so many different shapes and sizes. How will the dish washers cope, especially as they are on two different levels, accessible from the kitchen by lift.
The concept for the food is more than interesting, it tastes very good. A large fish with a herb crust cooked perfectly in just 25 minutes in the intense heat of the wood fired oven (with some gas assistance). Served with baked fennel, lemon and oil, it was really delicious. But such simplicity is deceptive, it needs real expertise to get timing right. No doubt Paul Wilson has this. His experience at Quaglino's in London before coming to head the kitchen at the sadly departed Georges, was a good starting point for the Park Hyatt concept, brainchild of the group Food & Beverage Manager, Andreas Stadeler.
Much of the style which he developed at New York Grill came from the setting at Quaglino's (where Paul first met Andrea) but it is the 'family style' food presentation which has been such a success in Tokyo. I wonder what will happen for individual hotel diners or for a guest in a party who insists on their own portion? Paul admitted that this was a question which had been bothering him, but what will probably happen is that the diner will get their way, be able to enjoy a sizeable half duck or chook or whatever and the rest will be used for lunches when individual dishes will be served.
Another distinction of the lunch menu will be the specially designed porcelain tray called the 'Radii Soup & Sandwich Set'. "For $24 you will get a hot bowl of soup, a sandwich and a dessert, all served together on the one tray. It's guaranteed to come to you within 20 minutes. You get it in one go. So can have a meal in 20 mins."
Paul thinks it will be a good addition to the Melbourne lunch scene, ' a bit like the bento lunch box' or perhaps the airline tray?
Prices at night too will be kept down, currently starters are from $11-14 and mains from $19-26 and it is intended to keep this to a ceiling of $27.
It will be very interesting to see if Radii can live up to its name (the plural of radius) and break the barriers of the restaurant circle, push open the boundaries and set a new style of eating in Melbourne. For Paul it's a challenging career move, "not many chefs want to cook simple food and only want to cook for 80 (Radii seats 180). I feel that I have grown out of that and want the product to speak for itself."
As well as the challenge of the unorthodox kitchen style, the service, in a dining area on five different levels with all the expensive and delicate gear and waiting staff chosen for their personality rather than years of traditional training, is not going to be without its difficulties. Manager Staris Latkas has been with the Grand Hyatt Melbourne for the past decade faces that challenge. Cooperation and team work is the essence of an operation such as this. And it extends to the way in which the kitchens are being run. The Radii kitchen will order and maintain its own supplies quite independently to the rest of the hotel which does not have an executive chef. It is, Paul says, "quite a unique set up, with a senior sous chef reporting to the executive chef at the Grand Hyatt (Collins Street)." And all the kitchens (including Radii) depend on those at the Grand Hyatt for the pastry mise en place. I wondered if there will be some quick tram rides taken to collect chocolates in emergencies?
No one quite knows how it is going to work. But running a new hotel in tandem with a successful older sibling just up the road seems to make sense. Time will tell. And you will certainly have a different dining experience at Radii than elsewhere in Melbourne.
Bookings for Radii at the Park Hyatt 9224 1234
Mietta O'Donnell
First published in the Herald Sun, Food & Drink, 25/5/99
©Mietta's 1999.