New Hire: John Paul Twomey, One of Melbourne’s Most Revered Chefs, Joins the Bistra Team

John Paul Twomey – one of the city’s most respected chefs – has returned to Carlton. In April, the top chef took over the kitchen at Hot Listed Bistra, further elevating the already exceptional modern Australian bistro. It’s his third time in a head chef role in the suburb – having worked in the role at Andrew McConnell’s Three, One, Two in the 2000s, and at Carlton Wine Room from 2018 to 2021.

“There’s a lot of good things happening around [Carlton] at the moment,” says the chef, whose impressive career has also seen him work as development chef at Baker Bleu, and, most recently, at McConnell’s group Trader House (Gimlet, Cutler, Supernormal). “Hector’s has opened. The new King & Godfree has opened – there’s a new lease on life here.”

We caught up with Twomey to find out more about what he has planned for Bistra.

With your resume, you could probably have your pick of restaurants. What was it about Bistra that made you want to join the team?
There are not a lot of places in Melbourne [where] I would work. Trader House is one, Carlton Wine Room was one. It’s very important for me to have a good front-of-house team – service means a lot to me. It’s just not the kitchen. You can’t have one without the other. If you’re good in the kitchen and you have a bad front of house, it’s a bad experience. What [owners] Joe [Ho], Alexei [Taheny-Macfarlane] and Henry [Crawford] have made here I think is very special. There’s a small-family-like aspect of running a restaurant, which is really important to me. And I’ve always liked the style and the aesthetic [of Bistra].

How has it been going from somewhere like Trader House where you have all these different moving parts, to focusing on one venue?
It’s good. It’s definitely probably a little bit less stress. At Trader House I was development chef, still in the kitchen every day cooking, always – I don’t really sit in the office. I did Gertrude Street: Marion, Cutler and Builder’s [Arms]. It’s been a nice change of pace from having a million things going on in your head.

How is what you’re doing at Bistra different and how is it similar to what the restaurant was known for before you joined?
We’ve changed a few things on the menu. They originally had spinach and ricotta dumplings on the menu. We’ve tweaked that recipe, refined it. We’re doing nettle and ricotta dumplings now, which are really nice, and we’re rolling them into balls, rolling them in semolina, just like the classic Italian style. I think we’ll change the dumplings seasonally. So we’ll do nettle and ricotta now. We’ll do peas and broad beans in the summer, maybe tomato with the ricotta – it’s an evolving dish.

The cheeseburger will probably always stay, but we have refined that. We’ve changed the burger bun recipe, and we’re making our own patties in-house now.

Are there certain dishes you’ve always had in your mind that haven’t worked for other venues that you’ve been able to put on the menu here?
Yeah, certain venues that are high-volume, certain dishes don’t work there. It’s different here. We’ve got a beautiful pork chop on at the moment which has gone really well. [The pork is] from Western Plains, we serve it with some Ramarro Farm puntarelle and the sauce is a Chinese-style mala sauce, but we tweaked it to make it more like a Sicilian agrodolce sauce. So we’ve taken some of the chilli out, taken some of the Sichuan [peppers] out – it’s delicious. It’s still made with soy sauce, red wine vinegar, it’s got a bit of Lao Gan Ma chilli in there, lots of crushed black peppercorns in there instead of Sichuan, lots of fennel seeds and we’ve thickened it with lots of fried shallots. So it’s got the Chinese base, but we’ve taken it and made it more Italian – less spicy – and it works delicious with the pork.

Is nostalgia something you draw from in your cooking?
What the guys want here is that Australian-style bistro. They look at places like Clichy, which they [brought back] for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. We’re aiming for that classic bistro-style food.

Calling on the desserts [from pastry chef Simone Jude]. At the moment, we’re doing a Saint-Emilion au chocolat, which is a chocolate dessert which Elizabeth David kind of made famous. It’s just chocolate, eggs, butter, amaretti biscuits – we take the amaretti out – and a bit of rum, and we just set that mould, slice it and serve it with some marinated prunes and cream, so it’s like a really traditional, simple dessert.

Are there other chefs that you’re referencing or drawing inspiration from?
Alice Waters at Chez Panisse is really good. And Lulu’s Provençal Table by Richard Olney. Lots of the old French chefs. I like the new style as well, but I like more the old-school style. I really like Riviera provincial style cuisine – the cuisine of the sun.

How would you describe your cooking style?
I know everyone hates the term modern Australian, but I’m inspired by the country that I live in.