From GQ Australia
How does a heritage-listed synagogue become one of Melbourne’s hottest new restaurant-bar venues? Ed Charles finds out from Trunk’s Nick Kutcher.
It was the irresistibly enticing site that drew Nick Kutcher into the restaurant business, a block big enough to build a skyscraper on, half of it open land. But the site on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Exhibition streets – with a heritage listed 1859 synagogue – was bought for its charm rather than its potential for development.
“It’s one of the few single story buildings left in the city,” says Kutcher. It has an illustrious history. It was built by the same people who built Parliament House. It’s the oldest synagogue in Victoria.”
It is this rich cultural history he has cleverly incorporated into Trunk Town, named after the 150 year-old heritage listed coral tree in the courtyard. A rustic Italian restaurant, a sophisticated bar and bistro, a cafe and huge outdoor area. Trunk is a different place for different people.
A little over a year ago Kutcher’s plan was to sell his café Mamma’s Boy, located on Little Collins St. He’d bought it in 2004 after tiring of the late nights and long hours of running his own bar Babou, opposite the MCG, which he sold in 2003.
“The plan was to sell and to sit back and research what the next move would be.” But a real estate agent persuaded him to visit the site of the former Italian restaurant Silitto. It was for sale as its owners had failed to get a highly sought-after 3am license for a planned nightclub.
Kutcher instantly saw the potential. He was on the phone to Trent Alexander, managing director of Liquid Lines which has the enviable reputation as the best restaurant builder and fitter in Melbourne. Alexander, on the back of the local restaurant building boom, was moneyed enough to back his own project. Meanwhile, Kutcher brought in his friend Nick Cox together with business partner Dion Hall at design firm Projects of the Imagination.
Such is the restaurant building boom in Melbourne, partly fueled by the demand for outdoor smoking areas, that most projects are dogged by months – even years – with planning and construction delays. The Trunk triumvirate. though, navigated the planning red tape to have phase one of the the restaurant and bar trading on 10 December 2007 just five months after first visiting the site.
The food came the first. Kutcher’s roots are in Italian food having spent seven years at Cosi, an Italian South Yarra institution. He recruited Nicky Riemer, a former head chef at the Richmond Hill Larder & Café and the now defunct Langtons, to run the kitchens. Smoked eel, a spike of chilli and garlic with pangrattato (breadcrumbs) give a contemporary spin to pasta. While Italian flavours are brought to classic local cuts of Rutherglen Lamb and Western Plains Pork.
“It’s rustic Italian with big flavours. That’s the essence of Italian cooking. It’s simple but it’s produce driven,” he says.
Ben Jager, launch manager at Nobu Melbourne, joined the team and added to the wine list of about 150 fashionable Spanish, Italian and local wines priced from a budget conscious $35 up to $415 for a 1999 Dom Pérignon.
Inside the structure of the building remains, enhanced with lamps over the bar which came from a New York wharf.
Patrons sit at the marble-veneer bar, faced with tiles hand-made by local ceramic artist Shane Kent, sipping the ice-cold German Pilsner Bittburger while picking at salt cod chilli fritters and calamari fritti.
A feature wall mural of the Trunk Town site by the Tokyo based artist and Illustrator Nobumasa Tukahashi faces the room. Installations by artist-cum-florist Joost Bakker surround the courtyard. Magnolia trees are hemmed in by hundreds of terracotta pots jumbled within a rusty steel lattice, a Bakker trademark.
To the rear is the function space Rintel’s Room, named after Moses Rintel who ran the synagogue and Hebrew School.
For the moment, the licensed outdoor smoking area is the site for Ma Dalley’s, named after an early philanthropic Melbournian. Opening in 2009 it will be a simple, elegant glass box of an Italian cafe.
It’s a lot of work, Kutcher admits. “I got married and then five months later came home and told my wife that I just bought a bar/restaurant,” Kutcher says.
275 Exhibition St (cnr Little Lonsdale Street), Melbourne (03 96637994)