I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Parcs’s Umami e Pepe

I was just thinking about torta Barozzi, a dense, flourless chocolate-and-coffee cake from Modena in Italy’s north. Legend has it the cake was invented in 1886 at Pasticceria Gollini – which is still open – and the recipe of the original remains a secret. Does anyone know if it’s ever going to make it back onto the menu at Trattoria Emilia, the CBD diner named for the Emilia-Romagna region that Modena is part of? Or perhaps you’ve spied it at Scopri, a Carlton restaurant enamoured with all things Piedmontese; the Lombardian-minded Oster in Richmond; or one of the handful of Melbourne restaurants drawing influence from northern Italy?

Now that the Italian food purists are distracted with thoughts of a historic regional cake, we turn our attention to the umami e pepe served at Parcs: a plateful of yellow egg noodles slicked with brown sauce and nothing else.

If the name didn’t give it away, the dish riffs on the classic Roman pasta cacio e pepe – tonnarelli or spaghetti showered with the sharp and pungent sheep’s cheese known as pecorino romano, plus a not insignificant amount of pepper. And that’s where the comparisons between Parcs’s version and the original stop.

Melbourne, of course, is no stranger to cacio e pepe remakes. Over the past few years, the dish has shape-shifted into various forms including pizza, a croissant and gnoccho fritto. While the Parcs remix looks a lot like the noodles-plus-sauce original, it has one key ingredient that separates it from the rest of the pack: resourcefulness.

Then again, if you’re across the Parcs story, you’ll already know that minimising waste is the restaurant’s raison d’etre. And that chef Denis Yong is all about giving leftovers a second (or even third) chance. And that, since Parcs opened in the CBD in April, this plate of noodles – sparse in presentation, yet full-throttle in flavour – has become one of the city’s “it” dishes.

While there’s a toothsome quality to the house-made egg noodles, the dish’s MVP is the brown sauce that said noodles are cloaked in. Yong calls it a kind of bread miso – a condiment made by slowly fermenting leftover bread salvaged from Hotel Windsor till it’s earthy and deeply savoury. To serve, the sauce is warmed, the noodles are stir-fried in a wok till they develop that all-important wok hei (“breath of the wok”, a reference to the smoky char a screamingly hot wok imparts on food) and the two components are quickly cooked together so that the noodles can soak up the sauce’s bready deliciousness.

It’s a knockout dish and the latest in a string of imaginative ways thoughtful folks around Australia are repurposing surplus bread: see the “yesterday’s bread crackers” developed during the Barrett-Stone era at Oakridge in the Yarra Valley, or West Australian kitchen-garden restaurant Coogee Common’s gin made from unsold bread supplied by sister restaurant Bread in Common.

Deliciousness aside, Parcs’s umami e pepe is a(nother) reminder that tackling food wastage is a team sport, and all of us can play a part. Fermenting miso might not be something all of us can do, but we can all set aside a shelf in the fridge for leftovers and make it the first place we look when cooking. Bringing your own takeaway containers to restaurants is another strong move; a friend of mine stashes zip-lock bags in her purse for emergency leftover use. I have a container in the freezer that I stash vegetable off-cuts in, to be turned into a stock once the container is full. (The cooked, spent veg then goes into compost.) These are just a few ideas: expert Googlers and web sleuths will no doubt be able to uncover a few more. But if you do get stuck, I know a little restaurant in Melbourne you should be able to glean some inspiration from.

parcs.com.au

“I Can’t Stop Thinking About” is a series about dishes Broadsheet’s editors are obsessed with. Max Veenhuyzen is the Perth editor-at-large.