Page 33 - foodservice - June 2018

DINING
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“Everyone puts all their money into something in the city that’s open for, like, three years. We wanted to open an institution, not a flash-in-the-pan,” Cowcher says. “At the moment, the area is going through a slow but sure gentrification; to get into an area, before that happens, and be part of the fabric of it.”
to hear some Daryl Braithwaite, a dash of Skyhooks, probably Eric Clapton. “There was definitely no irony intended,” says Murphy. “It wasn’t that we set out to make a certain type of playlist. It’s just that’s how we felt the room responds to different music; this is what we’d thought would work. What we were trying to achieve with the place, how we felt the room looked like.”
Likewise, Cowcher and Murphy’s menu skews fun and comfortable. In the place of edible flowers and tweezer-applied micro-herbs are pastas, salads, steaks and pizza. “We’re not really anything like fine-dining. We do pizzas and salad,” says Cowcher. “The menu, the way we present ourselves – most people are working in jeans – it just makes it pretty casual.”
The dishes are familiar in form, but their execution speaks to
the chefs’ high-end heritage. Rustic, wood-roasted carrots come stacked over house-made curd; gorgonzola croquettes are seven with quince ketchup; minute steak is paired with spiced eggplant and lemon couscous. And, while they’ve repeatedly insisted in the local food press that Harley & Rose is “not a pizza restaurant”, Harley
& Rose’s pizza is very, very good. Using a mix of baker’s flour from Wholegrain Milling in NSW and the ancient Khorasan variety (also known as ‘kamut’), Murphy and Cowcher make a 48-sourdough before bunging the stretchy dough in the wood-fired oven.
Cowcher and Murphy gravitated to this smart-casual menu mostly because it’s the way they like to eat – but also because they’ve got good business sense. “The main thing was it’s not just how we like eating ourselves,” says Murphy. “But also the financial viability of a fine-dining restaurant, for us, is almost zero.”
Cowcher agrees that fine-dining didn’t really appeal. “There were a lot of reasons, but I think it was mainly because we don’t prefer to eat like that. We wanted to do something that was a little bit more close to home,” he says. “I think if you opened a fine-dining restaurant on Barkly Street in West Footscray, you’d be a silly person.”
The lure of not being beholden to an executive chef was ultimately what propelled the pair into their own business venture. “I think it was just freedom. We’ve both always worked off each other really well, and were able to talk through things easily. Being able to make the decisions ourselves was one of the main reasons,” says Cowcher. “If there’s anything, if a piece of produce changes and we’re not happy with it, we just change it straight away without having to go through a board of directors.”
The decision to do it in Footscray was at once financial and philosophical.
“As our first venture, we essentially couldn’t afford to open in the city, in terms of a cost and return exercise,” explains Murphy. “The size of the venue we get here for the rent we pay is one reason. We just wanted to do something a little bit out of the city, a bit suburban.”
Cowcher explains that Harley & Rose was to get in on the ground floor – and stay there. “Everyone puts all their money into something in the city that’s open for, like, three years. We wanted to open an institution, not a flash-in-the-pan,” he says. “At the moment, the area is going through a slow but sure gentrification; to get into an area, before that happens, and be part of the fabric of it.”
The building on Barkly Street, cunningly if understatedly re- figured by rockstar design firm, Projects of Imagination, still has room to grow. Upstairs is a whole as-yet unused floor, and out the back, there’s a terrace where they’ve been holding small events with winemakers and food festivals. “There’s a lot of development left to do,” says Murphy. “We just met with the architects half an hour ago on more developments, and then we’ve got upstairs and out the back.”
On Cowcher’s part, he was attracted to the possibilities the site presented down the line. “It was more like a blank canvas than anything. We could essentially do anything we wanted to it, which is the reason why we didn’t buy an expensive existing business in the city,” he says. “We wanted to create our own thing in a shell. This provided us with that opportunity. In terms of growth, we do have
a function room, and potentially a bar in the future. The space just affords us the ability to do things you can’t do when you’re jammed into a small space. We can do all sorts of wild things in the back yard we’d never be able to get away with in the city.”
Ultimately, both Cowcher and Murphy believe that the key
to longevity is giving the locals of West Footscray exactly what
they want. “I think that listening, and being responsive to your customers, not being stubborn and just standing and delivering a product is important,” says Murphy. “It’s about developing the idea of something over a long period of time, not just saying here it is, like it or leave it.”
Obviously, the first-time restaurateurs know their target market. As the clock turned over from 4.59 pm, locals began filtering into the space, filling out the picnic tables under the saloon lights and row of brushy trees. Clearly, Cowcher and Murphy hit on something that the neighbourhood was craving. Maybe hipsters aren’t so bad after all...
Wood oven roasted carrots, smoked pepper, olive oil and curd.