Page 19 - foodservice Magazine July 2019

INDUSTRY
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winemaker Giorgio De Maria, borrowed the space and turned it into a pulsating pizza and wine pop-up.
Butler, the only floor staff that night, says she clocked over 20,000 steps (or 12kms) in the one service.
“[Dark Mofo] just creates this extreme environment of things that are really interesting and quite different to anything else that you’ve ever seen in Hobart. It encourages a community of people who are keen to stay up late,” says Dyson.
This is something the City of Hobart actively encourages by allowing restaurants to apply for later licences, which Federica Andrisani, head chef and co-owner at hatted Italian casual fine-diner Fico, says took just a week to come through.
As a result, Fico was able to run two “Midnight Pasta”
nights on Dark Mofo’s middle weekend. The late-night services brought Chef Andreas Papadakis from Melbourne’s Tipo 00 down to collaborate with Andrisani and co-owner and partner Oskar Rossi to serve “four or five pastas with pumping music and a lot of wine until 4 in the morning.” The couple worked double shifts each night to pump out 360-odd portions of pasta,
“Every year Dark Mofo [breaks] records,” says Dyson. Tourism Research Australia showed international tourism in the 2017/18 financial year was up 21 per cent on the previous year, with
a record 307,000 international visitors touching down and staying an average of 17 nights on the island.
and Andrisani says they slept a total of six hours over the entire weekend.
Andrisani and Rossi met in northern Italy and decided to move to Rossi’s hometown of Hobart four years ago, with the intention of opening their own restaurant. Back then Andrisani says it was far more common for people to eat dinner at 5 than 8, like she was used to in Europe.
“Now it’s completely changed,” she says, citing Dark Mofo as one of the main reasons for the restaurant industry boom. “The biggest weeks for us [are] when there is Dark Mofo.”
The first official day of Dark Mofo 2019 is, therefore, as good
a time as any to open a wine bar. For the first three weeks of
service, Sonny, the second (tiny) venue from Matt Breen and Chris Chapple of Hobart’s hatted 14-seat pasta and wine bar Templo, was completely overrun with customers. Word of the new wine bar spread like wildfire and people packed in shoulder-to-shoulder to eat fresh ravioli at the kitchen bench, while staff popped magnums and Purple Rain shook the speakers. (The crowd could barely dance though as it was such a tight squeeze.)