Davelona - What Melbourne Markets Taught Us About Menu

We stopped printing a fixed menu around 2017, mostly by accident. A week of wild weather wiped out the tomato supply we had planned around, and the chef walked into the dining room and told everyone the menu would be different that night. Nobody complained. A few people asked why we did not do that every week, so we started to. The working method is simple. The chef drives to the market early, looks at what actually came in overnight, and buys around that. If the snapper looks better than the barramundi, we cook snapper. If the broad beans are past their best, they do not get forced onto a plate just because they appeared on a spreadsheet three weeks ago. The written menu for the evening gets texted to confirmed bookings the morning of service, which sounds chaotic but runs smoother than the old system ever did. The part most people do not see is the discipline behind it. Cooking to the market means the kitchen has to know maybe forty techniques well enough to pivot at seven in the morning, and it means the costing has to be done on the fly rather than once a quarter. Every chef at Davelona spends two years learning that flexibility before they can run a section alone. It is slower to train for, and it is the reason the food tastes like it came from somewhere instead of from a supplier. If you are booking the chef's table, you can tell us the direction you want and we will write the menu around it when the delivery lands. Seafood-led, vegetable-heavy, built around red meat, whatever suits. The only thing we ask is that allergies come through at least four days out, because sourcing around a shellfish allergy is not something you can improvise at six in the morning with a phone in one hand.

What Melbourne Markets Taught Us About Menu Planning

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