What Fires Up Tedesca Osteria’s Brigitte Hafner?

Brigitte Hafner’s Tedesca Osteria is set in a gorgeous early 20th century weatherboard house in Red Hill. There’s an open kitchen with a woodfired oven, large windows overlooking the lush 27-acre property, beautiful wooden floorboards and a dark wood ceiling contrasting against slick white walls.

When I visit on an uncharacteristically sunny (but still chilly) Saturday at the tail end of autumn, the garden is full of produce including bitter greens and carrots. And the fires, both next to our table and in the kitchen – where Hafner and her small team use the hearth to prepare leisurely five-course lunches for 30 diners – are roaring.

But what most grabs the attention of my dining companion and I are the grey tailor-made pants everyone on the front-of-house team wears.

“I didn’t want my team to be in an apron,” Hafner tells Broadsheet. “Somehow I feel like putting them in an apron diminishes them in a little way. I wanted them to feel like they were at lunch with us and that we’re hosting lunch, not serving. So I made a point of putting them in beautiful handmade trousers.

“Also, we’re in theatre. You have to cross the threshold when you’re on the floor and leave whoever you are and all of your daily problems, and you step into the character. And these trousers are how they transport into that role.”

If dining at Tedesca is like watching a performance take place, then Hafner is at once the composer and conductor. The menu changes daily and development is “quite a complex process”, she says.

There’s a format: lunch at the Peninsula spot always starts with meze, small share plates that set the tone for the meal. “There’s always something crunchy, something fried, maybe there’s some pastry, there’s some cheese, there’s a vegetable, there’s something on the grill – all of those things harmoniously,” Hafner says. The meze is followed by pasta, then a dish from the woodfired oven, another from the grill and, finally, dessert. It’s often a collaborative process driven by the garden produce.

While nourishing, unfussy food has been where Hafner’s heart lies, it’s not what the powerhouse chef has always cooked professionally. Before opening Tedesca and her now-shuttered (and highly revered) Gertrude Street wine bar Enoteca, Hafner worked under chefs including Kylie Kwong, Neil Perry and Jacques Reymond in her formative years. And though she knew what she loved, Hafner says it took a while for her to find her voice in the kitchen.

Starting out, the chef felt it was important to work in “serious restaurant kitchens” and learn the skills of the trade. “You need the knowledge before you go out on your own and do your own thing. And I think it gave me the confidence to do something very simple.”

The kind of dishes found in fine-dining restaurants didn’t move Hafner. But when she started working for Stefano De Pieri of Mildura’s Italian institution Stefano’s, her outlook changed. “It was a more natural approach to cooking. It wasn’t sort of restaurant cooking, it was more how a home cook would approach it.

“This was probably a bit of a turning point when I realised I didn’t want to be a chef and chop up 10 bunches of parsley, put it on the tray in the coolroom, pull it out that night and sprinkle it all over whatever was coming in the order. The magic of just roasting a duck and eating it then and there was a revelation.”

Hafner is invested in the industry’s next generation. She has fostered talented chefs including Audrey Shaw of Carnation Canteen and, along with chefs Rosheen Kaul, Josh Niland, Jake Kellie and Brent Savage, will judge the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy competition for the Pacific region this year.

Since her early days cooking professionally at the age of 23, Hafner has come to be highly regarded for her homey, woodfired cuisine. Her advice for those starting out today? “I would encourage people to grow outside of the kitchen,” she says. “Try to engage with the world and bring some poetry into your life, because that’s really where the pleasure is.”

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