When Antara opened in 2023, it was pitched as a bakery and all-day restaurant. But new head chef Juan Lantadilla Tapia has been charged with rethinking what the Halim Group (Aru, Kudo, The Hotel Windsor) space can be.
“They gave me blank paper and said, ‘Draw whatever you want’,” Lantadilla Tapia tells Broadsheet.
The chef began his culinary career in his native Chile and has since worked in fine-dining restaurants in Mexico, New York, Denmark and Finland. He moved to Melbourne eight years ago and has worked at The Press Club, Gaea, Gimlet and, most recently, Cutler & Co where he was head chef.
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SIGN UPAt Antara, he oversees 12 chefs, including two bakers and two pastry chefs. His main goal right now is to reframe how people view the concept, and ensure the restaurant and bakery work together. “I tell everyone, ‘We’re a restaurant with a bakery, so we need to use that’,” he says. “We have good chefs who can make me a beautiful duck curry, so we can get the filling done in the restaurant and then give it to the bakery to do the rest.”
We sat down with Lantadilla Tapia to hear more about the changes he’s made at the Exhibition Street venue.
What have you added to the bakery section?
At the moment every pastry changes every second week. On the week that rotation starts, we have a special of six to 10 pastries – whatever the bakery can produce. If it works, we tweak it and it stays on the menu; if it doesn’t work, we scrub it.
I love using people’s backgrounds and histories. One of the bakers is from Thailand and the other is from India, so we made a duck curry pie. The first day we did it as a special, and it ran out in one hour. So it’s not just about me, it’s the team we have. That’s what, for me, Melbourne cuisine is. At the moment everyone is trying to [work out], “What is Melbourne cuisine?” But for me, it’s very clear. There are so many migrants here, everyone brings something and we put all that together to create something special with fresh products.
How do the bakery and restaurant interact with each other?
The bakery makes a couple of pastries and breads for me at the restaurant, and then we can make a curry, a sauce, I can make a jam to use in the bakery instead of us buying too many things. It’s more organic and using everything. We’re using tomatoes now in the restaurant, and with all the overripe tomatoes, the bakery is making a tomato galette. The bakery and restaurant were quite separate before.
And the empanadas, obviously. The bakery makes the dough for me, using my recipe from home. We’re going to be changing the empanadas with different flavours. The next one is going to be a baked empanada – like we have in Chile and all of South America.
How does the Chilean influence come through in the menu?
Everywhere. Little things, but it’s everywhere.
What do you enjoy cooking?
I love doing desserts. I love doing vegan dishes – I love working with vegetables. I think you find more creativity when you work with vegetables. Since I was a young chef, whenever I do a vegan dish or a vegetarian dish, I put [in] a lot of effort because I want the guest [to think], “Wow, I didn’t know a carrot could taste like that.”
What kind of desserts have you been making?
One (which can be vegan if I take the meringue off) is the melon. We have compressed cantaloupe with melon granita, fennel meringue and pine nut ice-cream. The pine nut ice-cream is vegan, not to make it vegan, but because I wanted to have a lot of pine nut flavour. It’s a lot of nuts and then blended with water.
Do you miss working in fine dining?
Yes, because it’s obviously my passion. But the reason why I moved out is because I have two kids, so my family changed everything. Being South American, family is everything, that’s the reason I became a chef. My grandma’s house was like cooking for functions, my mum has seven siblings and each one of them has two or three kids. It was teams like: The ones who cook, the ones who don’t cook and wash dishes. For me, as a kid, I was like, “I don’t want to wash dishes … I want to cook.”