Page 30 - foodservice - June 2018

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DINING
GO WEST
AMBITIOUS AND TALENTED, YOUNG CHEFS JOSH MURPHY AND RORY COWCHER DECIDED TO OPEN THEIR FIRST RESTAURANT, HARLEY & ROSE, IN THE BURBS. AND IT SEEMS LIKE IT WAS A GOOD DECISION, WRITES TIM GREY.
Not everybody’s happy about the changing face of Footscray. In January last year, for instance, Rudimentary, a new-school cafe housed in a shipping crate, which serves filter coffee and
produce grown in the kitchen garden, had a bag of rotten meat hurled through their front door. Around the corner, retro burger bar 8bit had 14 of its windows smashed. On the few that remained the message was unambiguous: “Fuck Off Hipster Scum”.
So when Rory Cowcher and Josh Murphy decided to open their first restaurant on Barkly Street, it was a risk in a more literal sense than usual. “I moved out here three or four years ago. I quite liked it, but it was pretty limited in places to go and have a meal,” says Cowcher. “There’s great Indian restaurants and great Asian restaurants, but nothing in between. At the time, there was one pub that offered decent food and wine – but that was about it. The need for something in the area was one reason we decided to open Harley & Rose.”
For those who aren’t familiar with the intricacies of Melbourne property development, Footscray is a textbook case of gentrification. With house prices forcing the in-crowd north from Fitzroy through to Northcote, and from Northcote through to Reservoir, it was inevitable that the hipsters begin to look west. Footscray was the obvious target. With a long history of diverse communities, the suburb didn’t really need any help establishing a vibrant food scene: a fine mesh of pho and bun-cha joints entwine with Chinese barbecue, Bangladeshi curry and Ethiopian and Somali cuisine.
Naturally, the unpretentious cool of Footscray’s restaurants has attracted cosmopolitans from across the city. And, despite what Peter Dutton would have us believe, locals aren’t afraid to go out for dinner at night. Of late, we’ve seen a new generation of restaurateurs open up in the suburb, such as American barbecue bar, Up in Smoke, and an outlet of upscale burger chain, Huxtaburger. That more ambitious chefs like Cowcher and Murphy would join the Footscray gold rush was inevitable.
PHOT