No one could deny that Shannon Martinez – alchemist, maximalist, style icon – makes vegan food deliriously exciting. Her flagship Melbourne restaurant Smith & Daughters has achieved cult status in the decade since its opening. But it takes more than respect to survive the industry in 2024.

Thankfully, Martinez has always had the smarts to read the room. Actually, she doesn’t so much read the room as tell the room what it’s been dying to read.

An inverted cross bearing the words “EAT VEGAN” on the cover of the first Smith & Daughters cookbook inspired a thousand tattoos and guaranteed the book ornamental status in homes across the world. The book launched Martinez’s TV profile – including a guest spot setting Masterchef’s first vegan challenge – and was followed by Smith & DELIcious: Food From Our Deli (That Happens to be Vegan) and Vegan With Bite.

Martinez’s fourth book, Vegan Italian Food, has the gothic-kitsch aesthetic of a Dario Argento film. There’s a defiance to its girl-gang energy and unapologetically hectic presentation: food slopped over the edge of vintage saucepans, overturned glasses, gelato spillages, generous portions grabbed by the fistful. It’s like the afterparty to Martinez’s hellish last few years.

After being railroaded by serious illness three times, she’s throwing her focus into the book and the newly pivoted Smith & Daughters Social Club in Collingwood. In her own words, “I’m back and I’m like a fucking freight train to make up for lost time.”

People talk about food porn, but Vegan Italian Food is like a movie scene where the couple sweep everything off a table and get messy.
I wanted to really accentuate that kind of ’70s porno filter. There’s one shot in particular, the Calabrian chilli paste, which reminds me of that [1985] Women’s Weekly Microwave Cookbook aesthetic that I just love so much. We shot it at the house of Emma Abrahams, who does Heart of Bone jewellery [also featured on the cover, adorning Martinez’s scarlet-taloned hands]. Her house is a very Saltburn-esque trashed mansion, filled to the brim with cool shit. I was just so sick of flat lay cookbooks. Cookbooks are keeping the book industry alive, but they’re starting to look homogenous.

As a Spanish Australian, did you have to do much research to make an Italian cookbook?
A little bit, but Smith & Daughters went fully Italian for five years, so it was a no-brainer. In Spain, [supposedly] vegetarian dishes almost always contain meat, so when I make Spanish dishes I have to veganise them quite heavily. Italian food is a little bit more varied, and naturally vegetarian- and vegan-friendly. It traces back to those peasant areas where they use pangrattato [seasoned breadcrumbs] instead of parmesan and little things like that.

One of your tattoos states NPFP – Never Pay Full Price. With your section on jarred condimenti, and preservable basics such as dried mushrooms and thick tomato passata, are you trying to coach us into a thrifty nonna mindset?
Whenever my mates and I are joking about a zombie apocalypse I realise there are a lot of people who are not going to be around because they’ve lost that art of preservation of food, or cooking from scratch. When you buy food, your first stop shouldn't be the supermarket. I only go there for the most mundane shit, like toilet paper or bleach. If you’re struggling with money, go to a market at the end of the week, towards the end of the day, and you’ll get a car full of stuff for 20 bucks … But it’s essential to know how to treat a lot of these things, because sometimes it’s towards the end of its life.

You were diagnosed with aggressive triple-negative breast cancer in 2020, coinciding with lockdowns. How did you cope?
My first cancer lined up with my first contract [as culinary director] for Ovolo Hotel South Yarra, and my second one for the Ovolo Hotel Sydney. Both times I had to create recipes and menus for those restaurants, I couldn’t taste anything and my mouth was bleeding, so I had to rely on my staff and muscle memory. It was really depressing, especially wondering if my taste was going to come back.

I started gardening at a nursery a five-minute walk from my house, and it saved my sanity. The first thing I did when I woke up was make my coffee and then babysit my garden. You’re not thinking about all the other shit in the world, and I wasn’t thinking about my cancer, I was just in the moment. To be honest with you, I’ve lost that since getting back to real life. Now I’m talking to you about it, I think, “Fuck, I should really try and do that,” because it was the most peaceful time I’ve ever had.

You’re not vegan, though your diet is largely so. Do you think we’re seeing more people who are vegan-curious these days?
I think they’re more health-curious. It’s pretty safe to say that the vegan bubble has burst, and what’s come after that is people putting more thought into what they’re putting into their bodies. But god forbid that Tafe will teach you anything about vegan food. I think it’s still just a couple of hours in an entire apprenticeship, and then it’s all tied in with allergies rather than seen as a serious component. Actually, the last I heard, they were using my books to teach it, which is wild.

What I cook isn’t necessarily healthier. I’m just going to put it out there – my food tastes the way it tastes because I still use a shitload of olive oil and a whole lot of salt, because they’re the building blocks that chefs use to make things delicious. I don’t have the luxury of using butters and cream and dairy cheeses, so I get it in other ways.

We might also be seeing a new wave of post-Pete Evans paleo, thanks to the endurance-style masculinity of figures like The Liver King.
I think the whole carnivore diet and that extreme Liver King shit probably puts a lot of people off meat, because it’s fucking gross. I mean, I doubt anyone’s ever looked at a plate of vegetables and thought that was disgusting. I have seen those [Tiktok] videos where people think that vegetables are bad for you, but I mean, no one in their right mind actually thinks that kale and broccoli are actually toxic.

There’s long been a crossover between punk and veganism. Was that your route in?
Actually, punk was the start of Smith & Daughters. I was head chef at the East Brunswick Club [in 2006], and we had a lot of punk shows. I started getting asked more and more for vegan food. That year I also played on the [US] Vans Warped tour. I had a goth-industrial band called Voltera – I played bass and backing vocals. With bands like AFI and NOFX, there were plenty of vegans on the tour, so I just jumped in with the catering team and started cooking.

Why do you think we have such a cultural obsession with chefs? Sure, there’s a parallel with rock stars in the sense of big personalities, little sleep, high stakes and making art, but have you ever bought into the cult of it yourself?
We are absolutely creatives, and, you know, my life has always been split between music and food, which are similar in a way: they’re quite performative and they’re very artistic, and can be sometimes problematic in terms of our lifestyle. But I tend to not read the memoirs. I’ve read Anthony Bourdain’s, obviously, because I love him and I would classify him as a bit of a rock star, but the glorification of chefs can be really gross.

Do you watch shows like The Bear and Boiling Point, where the chef is a tortured genius?
Yep. I have mixed feelings about it, because it obviously rings true, but it’s also the kind of kitchens we’re all trying to get away from. It’s still glorifying that aggressive male chef. It’s funny, because we get slammed by the media if we step a foot wrong, then a show like The Bear comes along and people fucking love it. It confuses me. What do you want? Do you want us to be that guy? Some chefs are still like that, for sure, and some younger chefs will still work for those people, because there’s still that ingrained mentality that you have to be punished in order to come out the other end, and only the strong will survive.

How do you run your kitchen by comparison?
It’s funny, because I’m the generation of chef that was taught in the old school, but we are the first ones to have to implement the new-school way of running kitchens. I’m so happy to be that person, because I grew up in some pretty fucked kitchens, and I always told myself that if I ever had my own, especially for women in my kitchens, that they would never, ever feel what I felt.

That must be difficult, in a high-pressure environment.
It’s gonna be interesting to see where the whole industry goes with that, because while our entire industry needed a complete overhaul, at the end of the day, it is a very fast-paced environment. You have to be tough to be able to do it, because you don’t get paid a lot, you work your absolute arse off, you have no social life. If you are overly sensitive it becomes really hard to manage a kitchen, because during service you don’t have time to coddle people. You can’t be like, “Sorry, darling. If you have a second, would you mind redoing that for me, even though I’ve told you 5000 fucking times?”

You started the Smith & Daughters Social Club in August, which has a snackier menu and more of a focus on good times than settling in for the evening.
My head chef [at the time, Josh Bosen], was amazing during my cancer treatment in taking hold of the restaurant for me while I couldn’t. He was from a fine-dining background, so the restaurant went more highbrow, which also coincided with this financial bullshit that everyone’s going through. It’s just not the time to be making people commit to a $95 set menu when people aren’t able to pay their fucking rent, you know? We saw a massive decline in our customers. We were going from fully booked weeks in advance to 30 people on Friday, so something had to be done about it.

The Social Club is stripping it back, getting rid of that mandatory set menu and allowing people to use us as a place to come and have a couple of drinks and some snacks before they head out for the night. We still need to socialise. We still need to have that connection with our friends to make life a little bit easier. So we’ve gone back [to being] more playful, cheeky, much more affordable, and you can now just sit up at the bar and have a drink – you don’t even have to eat. That’s proven to work really well, so I feel the vibe of Smith & Daughters is coming back. I’ve got the music cranked too high for some people, but whatever. There’s life back in there.

Now Sean Mears, your former sous chef, is head chef.
He actually started his apprenticeship with me, so he’s never worked anywhere else. And the Social Club, too, is opening up more to allow me to have friends come and do takeovers. We’ve got ramen nights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, because my new sous chef used to run a vegan ramen joint in Sydney.

It’s actually purely the way that Smith & Daughters is surviving. You think about restaurants around the world, and how bad it is for us at the moment, then multiply that by 100 for vegan restaurants, because we’re already catering for the minority. Vegans talk a lot about a vegan tax, and honestly, the labour is so high. At the deli we’ve had to put up our prices recently, because it’s that or close. We make everything from scratch. The hams in the sandwiches take three days to make, because an animal didn’t do all the hard work – we did. And labour is higher than it’s ever been. This is why I have all my other jobs.

I must admit, when I saw your culinary director roles at Amphora and Friends of Fire at Marvel Stadium, and the Ovolo Hotel gigs, I thought you must be rolling in it.
I only just made my home rent last month. I do make a good amount of money with all my gigs, because I work my arse off, but I don’t keep any of it. Every cent goes to keeping my doors open. I don’t have a business partner, and I always put my staff first. During Covid, I kept all 52 of them employed – all my savings went on that.

That’s when you were sick, as well.
Yeah, yeah. So at least I know that if something happens over the next few months and I do have to shut the doors, I can say with a clear conscience that I did every single thing I possibly could to make it work.

It’s hard to imagine when you get to rest. Have you mastered the art of the siesta?
Unfortunately, I’ve gone back to my usual manic, 1000-mile-an-hour self. Isn’t it funny how during Covid, it showed us that we were all doing too much, and then the minute Covid was over, everyone was back to it. Last December, I got really sick again with a fungal infection and actually almost died. I’d really built up a whole lot of momentum in my career, and then I just got fucking floored. I was so worried that people would forget about me, or someone was going to take my place – all these things going through my head.

To an outsider, it doesn’t seem like you ever took your foot off the gas.
I was going to work with tubes hanging out of my chest. My doctors were really not happy about it. I’ve worked really hard to keep this, and I’m scared of losing it, so I think that’s why I’m not stopping. I found it really unfair that everything I worked for was stripped away from me and I had no choice. I was really pissed off about it. I’m trying to take my power back. I’m still gonna fucking do what I was trying to do.

Vegan Italian Food is out now via Hardie Grant.

This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.