Overview
Captain Sustainability and brains behind Silo Joost Bakker has relaunched his cafe as a soup kitchen. Of course, it's no ordinary cooking-with-groceries soup kitchen; the stocks for the soups are made from bones that go unused by high-end eateries such as Rockpool, Attica and the European. It's called Brothl, the kind of pun that might have been best made and forgotten but is now the legitimate name of a place we'll be spending plenty of time in.
Bakker, originally a florist and a designer, had been doing the flowers at Rockpool for years when he finally asked Neil Perry if he could take the discarded bones for soup stock. Perry did not hesitate to give them away. The result is four nutritious broths packed full of flavor: A Cape Grim beef stock simmered for 48 hours, a 24-hour chicken stock, 12-hour seafood stock made from marron and crab, and a vegetarian stock made using kelp foraged from the Bellarine Peninsula. On top of that, all of the broths are made with rainwater from Monbulk. If that’s not some thrifty practice, we’re not sure what is.
For those who are both sustainability- and health-conscious, the menu includes details of which nutrients, vitamins and minerals each broth will bring you. Getting involved with this Brothl is going to be good for you in more ways than one, it seems.
It will cost you a tenner for a hearty bowl of broth, and once you’ve got the base down you can add extras, such as sea bounty muscles, poached chicken, house-made soba or spelt noodles and seasonal vegetables. They even have chicken feet if you’re craving it.
If you want to know more on this no-waste venture, just make sure you type Brothl exactly like that into your Google search; it will save you from seeing all the things you can’t unsee.