Page 49 - foodservice magazine April 2019
P. 49

PROFILE
13
“The restaurant doesn’t have to be pompous. You don’t want to have someone showing off about their knowledge about wine, you want the wine to be explained in simple words.”
From left: Cristina Flora. Starters. Outside: Wallaby, egg yolk, preserved flowers. Middle: Macadamia cream, native thyme, bush tomato. Navi's group table. Navi front door.
Flora says it was a challenge tasting ingredients like wallaby, strawberry gum and quandong for the first time while entering an unfamiliar wine market, but perhaps that sense of discovery in a new country is what makes Flora’s service so sincere – she’s learning too.
“The restaurant doesn’t have to be pompous. You don’t want to have someone showing off about their knowledge about wine, you want the
wine to be explained in simple words,” she says.
Navi’s five-page wine list
is roughly three-quarters Australian – 49 local bottles
to be exact – with a few international options, including one 2009 Barolo. Of course.
When Flora hit her teens, she stepped up to pouring wine and making drinks behind the bar. “[My mum] has been very helpful for me, she introduced me to food and also to wine.”
When Flora finished high school, she got a job waiting tables at Casa Del Barolo, a restaurant and bar attached to a wine shop that’s been operating in Turin for 45 years. Flora tasted local wines every night from the shop’s 1000-bottle collection, and, before long, had enrolled in a sommelier course. “It’s just something I built up on top of being a waitress,” she says.
In 2013 at the age of 24, she left Europe for Melbourne, where she got a job almost immediately at George
Calombaris’s Press Club. Not as a somm at first, she says; “they trained me slowly to be in the wine section,” before she assumed the title.
After three years there, she travelled to Spain and Belgium to work as a sommelier on short- term contracts before returning to Melbourne in early 2018.
She first heard about Navi through an online job ad.
“I didn’t know anything about [Hills], not even where he worked before,” she says. But it turned out to be a good match.
“He gave me total freedom so I chose all the wines, but
I wanted him to be involved. Most of the time we met suppliers together and I let him taste.”


































































































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