From a surprising celebrity encounter to interpretive dance in the dining room, restaurant workers strive to accommodate even the most surprising diner desires.
Antoine Moscovitz handled plenty of edible exotica working in the Paris kitchen of legendary French chef Alain Ducasse, but the most unusual request of his career came from a Sydney diner who asked if he’d whip up a possum dish.
Difficult requests, intriguing orders and just plain weird queries are a daily challenge for our chefs, waiters and bartenders. And Australia’s best have to keep on their toes, because they might be called on to puree steak frites in a blender or asked to make a cocktail with breast milk, or accommodate a diner who wants to wield a sword at dinner.
But back to that possum. Moscovitz, who recently opened French-Japanese restaurant Bellevue Woolloomooloo in Sydney, said the request for a marsupial main course came not at the new venue on Finger Wharf in Woolloomooloo, but from a regular customer at his Glebe restaurant, Bellevue Cottage.
“They wanted a private function for 50 people,” he said. With possum the star of the show, Moscovitz’s first thought was, “Is that legal?” He briefly pondered practical matters, like how you’d even cook it? “I’m guessing like a rabbit,” he said.
Moscovitz quickly declined. While used to the sight of exotic ingredients in his homeland, the idea of a possum in his pot was too much: “To me, that was like, ‘Can I have platypus?’”
Chef Luke Mangan opened Bistrot Bisou last year in his home town of Melbourne, but it was a celebrity diner request at his seminal early-2000s Sydney restaurant, Salt, he remembered.
One guest wanted to make sure the leaf of the strawberry hadn’t found its way into a strawberry cheesecake.
“Maybe not a strange request, but when I cooked for Tom Cruise’s birthday some time ago, he had the barramundi and asked me to come out and see him,” Mangan recalled. “He loved it so much, he ordered another one, then another one. So [he] had three main course portions in one dinner.”
Restaurateur Chris Lucas has a stable of restaurants on the eastern seaboard, but it is his upmarket Melbourne restaurant Society that garners the more unusual diner requests.
“Without a doubt, the one that gave us the best laugh was the guest who asked for a small space and a speaker so he could perform an interpretive dance for his girlfriend,” Lucas said. The occasion? “To celebrate their one-month anniversary.
“Another memorable moment was a woman who snuck into one of our private dining rooms, did a full solo photoshoot, then asked if we’d like to buy the images from her,” Lucas said.
With Carlotta restaurant in Canberra and a Sydney outpost of Melbourne’s Chin Chin (Grill Americano Sydney is to follow later this year), Lucas and his team juggle varied diner requests daily. There has been a notable rise in hospital-bound takeaway sushi platter orders from his upmarket Japanese restaurant in Melbourne. “Apparently some new mums just can’t wait for their first bite of Kisume post-birth,” Lucas said.
Said Sven Almenning, co-owner of Mjolner restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney, “Someone asked if they could bring their own sword to cut their cake.” Notwithstanding Mjolner’s Viking vibes, and 1100-year-old swords on display in both restaurants, there were occupational health and safety issues to consider. Staff rustled up something blunter from the restaurant’s armoury for the cake-cutting guest.
House Made Hospitality co-owner Justin Newton oversees a stable of restaurants – stretching from Grana in the Sydney CBD to Promenade Bondi. He recalls one diner who ordered a margherita pizza, minus tomato. And the customer who wanted to know if the halloumi “was grass fed” before switching it out for bacon after being told it was.
Newton doesn’t judge, and accommodates requests where possible. Steak frites pureed in a blender is one of the many requests he and his team have encountered. The request to extract the coffee from tiramisu is a piece of kitchen alchemy Newton is yet to perform.
Requests can get a little fruity at the bar. Stefano Catino, co-owner at Sydney’s Maybe Sammy, a stalwart of the World’s 50 Best Bars list, recalls the night a female customer approached him with a bottle of breast milk and asked if he would use it to make a cocktail.
“We try to be as polite and [accommodating] as we can,” Catino said. While the breast milk request was declined, he was able to help out a recent guest who asked for gloves to eat his truffle toasted sandwich. “We even had some black gloves, so they didn’t look like the hospital ones.”
The scotch egg at Melbourne’s Reed House is a luxurious but filling item from the menu. “They’re pretty hefty,” co-owner Rebecca Baker said. Baker was impressed when a customer knocked off 10, smashing the existing restaurant record consumption of two eggs. Armed with a detailed running order with NASA-precise timing between eggs and some mini martinis on the side, the scotch egg summit was reached.
Not all requests can be filled, unfortunately. The French farmhouse-style kitchen at Du Fermier, in the Victorian town of Trentham, has had its share of unusual requests. Manager Bronwyn Kabboord recalls a booking query for a customer allergic to dairy. “Butter and cream are pretty much the cornerstones of French farmhouse cooking,” Kabboord said. “It’s one of those ones where you had to say, ‘We’re not the restaurant for you.’”
Sydney chef Morgan McGlone said requests had become more specific, and detailed. One guest wanted to make sure the leaf of the strawberry hadn’t found its way into a strawberry cheesecake.
Hospitality professionals will generally bend over backwards to satisfy requests, even if that might entail delivering a vegan omelette or a risotto minus arborio rice.
Occasionally, it’s a bridge too far. Michael Fegent, owner of upmarket Sydney Mexican restaurant Esteban, recounted the opening interaction with a recent customer: “I don’t eat Mexican food, do you have a hamburger?”
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