The Best Advice Ever: Alejandro Saravia on Redefining Australian Cuisine, Opening Morena Melbourne and Always Having a Plan

Peru-born Alejandro Saravia, the Owner and Executive Chef of Renascence Group (Farmer's Daughters, Victoria by Farmer's Daughters and Morena Sydney), has become a hugely successful chef in Australia. But Saravia didn't start his professional career in hospitality.

He did always want to be a chef, yet he made a deal with his father when he was younger: to get a marketing and business degree, and eventually work in that space — leaving cooking as a hobby. This lasted for a while, as Saravia spent years at the likes of L'Oréal and Johnson & Johnson. Nonetheless, the call of the kitchen was too strong, and he eventually quit marketing to pursue the ambitious goal of running his own restaurants

To achieve this, Saravia tells Concrete Playground, he made incredibly detailed plans from the outset — something he picked up in his brand management days — which included working at some of the world's best restaurants (learning from top chefs and owners), developing clear business strategies early on and putting in countless hours of hard work.

During our long chat with Saravia, we learned that he does nothing on a whim. Everything is planned out (painstakingly so) and executed with the help of many other experts.

This, he notes, is key to running successful restaurants. However, he believes many Australian hospo owners aren't running their businesses in this way, which is strongly contributing to the industry's failings.

We sat down with Saravia to discuss what restaurants, cafes and bars need to do to survive these trying times — plus he shared more details on his new Morena Melbourne venues and the best advice he ever received.

On the Melbourne Hospitality Industry's Collaborative Spirit

"Melbourne is the epicentre of collaborations in Australia.

The way the Melbourne hospitality industry works is based on collaborations. I think everybody's very open to receiving other people in their kitchens, in their cellars and in their restaurants.

We want to show each other what we do because we're very proud of what we represent.

I love collaborations and I will go out of my way to do them. I feel it's a really great way to exchange knowledge and experiences, and it works really well when you're trying to do new things."

On Defining Contemporary Australian Cusine

"I think that the narrative of tagging Australian cuisine has to change dramatically. Instead of focusing on the dishes, I think we should be focusing on the providence of the food.

I'm not going to say 'sadly' because it is what it is, but in Australia, we don't have a dish that represents a region.

I mean, a pie is a pie everywhere. They will have different versions, but it's not that there's a Tasmanian pie, there is a Victorian pie or even a Gippsland stew.

And that's the problem we've been facing for a long time. We are trying to classify Australian cuisine, but at the end of the day, it could be passed as Japanese, southeast Asian or European cuisine. For me, it's what's in those dishes — and the provenance of the food — that matters."

On the Need for Melbourne's Hospitality Industry to Be More Business-Minded

"The industry is not broken. I think that there are some operators who are more resistant to changing their ways when faced with a situation where we are transitioning into a much more structured industry.

I think, now, a lot of the groups that are growing, a lot of the restaurants that are opening and succeeding, are better and more professional.

The advice is: don't cut corners, do your due diligence properly, and spend the money that needs to be spent in getting advice on HR, accounting and how to face a lease.

It's like that in any other industry. You will not just go in blind and throw X amount of money to open a creative agency, right? Not knowing anything about how to run a creative agency, or at least half of a creative agency.

There are also a lot of decisions that I would like to make that are a personal taste, but I don't for business reasons. I tell a few of my chefs that if you want to put caviar in every single dish, do it in your house. We need to make money here.

So, there are decisions that sometimes go against your personal taste but they are guided by the market and what your clientele wants.

Our industry is becoming more and more professional, and it's becoming more and more serious. That's a good thing."

Morena Sydney

On How Morena Melbourne Differs From Morena Sydney

"I like to see the restaurants as a person. And I think that's probably something that I learned during my time at Johnson & Johnson. They started developing a product, and then the product has a person's name and it has a personality — representing a person who the customer wants to be a friend with.

With the restaurant, I see the same. I like to give them a female personality because that's the warmth and personality that symbolises hospitality for me.

The Morena in Sydney had to embrace that Sydney vibe, personality and charisma. If we wanted to replicate the same concept in Melbourne, it would have clashed because Melbourne people are different.

The first difference is that Morena Melbourne has the Barra venue and Sydney does not. This will have Latin American cantina energy, which is loud, festive and fun without being tacky and over the top. It is more casual as well.

We want to present small dishes that you can share and snack on and have a nice laidback experience. It's like a Latin American wine bar, if you want to call it that.

Morena Restaurant next door is also more innovative than Sydney, in my opinion. The menu is a little more experimental and we're working with concepts of Latin American cuisine that are not traditionally exposed here in Australia.

For example, we've been playing a lot with fermenting, similar to the way they do it in the Andean Sierras and the Amazon jungle."

On the Best Advice That Saravia Has Ever Received

"The general advice that I got and like to pass on to my teams is to always have a plan. I think that's the core of the whole story. And I think that is one of the key points of my success as well. I always had a plan.

For me, you can do anything you want. Absolutely everything. There's no barriers, there's no limitations, but you have to have a plan. If you go blind to the fight, then you don't know where you're going and that's when you're going to fail. And you're going to fail without learning, which is worse.

I mean, failing is part of the learning process, but if you fail without learning why you fail, that's stupid.

I then tell my team that we need to understand the past in order to be prepared for the present and then face the future.

When we have a new project, vision or concept, I sit down and analyse it through those three steps of learning. We need to understand the past to be prepared for the present and to face for the future — that's something that I learned in school from my history teacher. It was a tool that he was giving us to face our lives in different ways."

Top image: Arianna Leggiero.