Vue de Monde’s Hugh Allen To Open His Own Restaurant, Yiaga

“I think in five years’ time I’ll be known for Yiaga, not Vue de Monde,” Hugh Allen tells Broadsheet. The executive chef of the Hot-Listed fine diner on the 55th floor of the Rialto Towers, is standing in the middle of a construction site. The building, beside the model Tudor village in the Fitzroy Gardens, is currently just a concrete slab with the steel bones of a pyramidal roof overhead, but over the next few months it will transform into the lauded chef’s first restaurant.

Allen is a wunderkind of sorts who began his career at 16 as an apprentice at Rockpool, moved to Vue de Monde two years later and, after a stint in Europe that saw him work at Noma for three years, returned to Melbourne in October 2018. He’s had dreams of opening his own restaurant since he was 12 and planned to do it when he first got back from Europe until, in 2019, he took on the Vue de Monde executive chef role. Now, six years later, and just over a week before his 30th birthday, the chef is ready to talk about Yiaga – the place he hopes will become his legacy.

“There’re no rules,” says the ambitious chef. “Having a place where no one’s got any preconception of what it should be or what it is because they’ve never been, it’s never been here before and it’s a totally new thing – that’s really exciting.

“Vue de Monde was my first job as a head chef, per se, but obviously that was a legacy restaurant. I’ve always felt like a custodian of it. We have got guests that have come for 25 years that like more classical style things and, if you came out with some wacky, wild thing, would be like, ‘Get that away from me’.

“I’ve still had freedom, but there’re preconceptions of Vue de Monde. It’s all self-imposed, and [comes from a] loyalty to guests who have been dining at the restaurant for the past 25 years. They love it for what it is … so you can never go too crazy with it.”

Inspired by places he worked and staged at overseas – including Noma, Le Pré Catelan and Le Cinq – Allen always wanted his restaurant to be a destination in and of itself. “The location, the building, the architecture – it’s not just they’ve got amazing food or amazing service, it’s also the venue in the location.”

While living with his parents in North Melbourne during lockdown, he came across a “derelict” and “rundown” pavilion, first built in 1908 and rebuilt in the 1960s after a fire destroyed the original structure.

He called the City of Melbourne and put together a proposal for the tender on his own. It wasn’t until he won it two years later that he sought investors and found an architect. “Getting an investment for a restaurant in the middle of Covid, it was honestly the worst time for that.” (Allen has a financial stake in the business, as does the family that owns the Vue Group.)

He’s working with architect John Wardle to build a restaurant out of materials that are almost all Victorian. Diners will enter the 38-seat restaurant through a doorway made from handmade, hand-pressed, hand-sanded Victorian bricks laid vertically – “but almost badly, so the mortar gets pushed out” – to resemble bark on an old, split elm tree.

“I love the idea of being transported when you come into a space. You have to wander through the park to find the place, and then you come to this chamber,” says Allen.

A team of 12 chefs (compared to the 28 he oversees across Vue de Monde and adjoining Lui Bar) will work out of an open kitchen, and glass panels will form the dining room’s walls. “You can still see out into that wildness, but you’re sort of hidden,” he says “It’s almost like Jurassic Park [looking out to] all the 100-year-old trees.”

Allen wants everything at Yiaga – from the knives, uniforms, tableware and furniture – to be completely unique to the restaurant. “I didn’t want to use anything that any other restaurant’s using.” He flipped through ceramic magazines and scrolled Instagram to find makers that haven’t worked with hospitality businesses before.

For now, Allen has no plans of stepping away from Vue de Monde and insists the day-to-day restaurant operations will stay the same. “Alain Ducasse has Michelin-starred restaurants across the world – this is two ends of Collins Street,” he says.

But it’s definitely Yiaga – which means “to seek and find” in Woi-wurrung, the language of the Wurundjeri people – that he’s most connected to. At Vue de Monde guests still ask for founding chef Shannon Bennett, who is no longer involved in the business. Allen says it doesn’t bother him but he does feel less ownership. “Vue de Monde, I love it and it’s still part of me – I did my apprenticeship there. A key thing was always, someone else started it and it’s someone else’s legacy.”

While the restaurant won’t open until the second half of the year, Allen is already thinking about its future. He knows Yiaga won’t be his forever and wants both the name and the structure to outlast him. “In 50 years’ time, that will still be here,” he says. Before then, he hopes it will evolve into a “vibrant campus of gastronomy”. But for now, he’s focused on bringing the first iteration to life.

@yiaga.au
yiaga.au

Yiaga will open in the Fitzroy Gardens this spring.