At 30 years old, the Yiaga and Vue de Monde chef has accomplished something no Australian chef has before.
In 2022, at the age of 27, Hugh Allen made Good Food history as the youngest chef in three decades to be awarded three hats. Three years on, now 30, the Vue de Monde chef has reached another milestone.
With the publication of Besha Rodell’s review of Yiaga in Good Food today, which awarded the restaurant three hats, Allen has become the first chef in Australia to lead two three-hatted restaurants at the same time.
Despite being open only a short time, The Age’s chief restaurant critic describes Yiaga as “one of the best restaurants in the country”, praising the level of care evident in every detail, from food that is “personal, considered, delicious” to the design of the venue itself – even the chairs, which she calls “by far the most beautiful I’ve encountered”.
“If I had the means,” she wrote, “I’d fly in from just about anywhere to eat here. Isn’t that the very definition of world-class?”
Rodell awarded Yiaga a Good Food score of 18 out of 20, denoting “excellence in all areas”, with points awarded for food, hospitality, experience, setting and value. The restaurant joins a short list of just five Victorian venues to receive the rating, alongside Amaru, Brae, Minamishima and Vue de Monde.
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Allen was quick to share the credit with his team. “While I’m of course proud, I do find the attention slightly embarrassing because this never is – and never can be – about one person,” he said.
“There’s a big team behind the dining experience: of course the restaurant team, but also the producers, farmers, fishers, architects and craftspeople. It goes on.”
Allen said that he was proud of the team and the culture they have created at Yiaga.
“If we can work at the level we aspire to, while also being a fun, rewarding and inspiring place to work, that will be the ultimate win for me.
“It’s taken many years of hard work, and as one of my greatest inspirations, Roger Federer, says, ‘effortless is a myth’. Everyone involved has worked incredibly hard for this.”
With Sydney restaurants Quay and Oncore by Clare Smyth set to close in February and March respectively, Yiaga brings Victoria’s total number of three-hat restaurants to five, compared with just two in New South Wales.
For most chefs, earning three hats is a career-defining achievement and the culmination of years of refinement. Allen has now done this twice – at just 30 years old.
Running two fine-dining kitchens simultaneously can stretch a chef physically and creatively, which is why it is so rarely attempted, says Age Good Food Guide co-editor Emma Breheny. “Even the most driven chefs are usually happy to reach the three-hat pinnacle and then open more casual spin-offs,” Breheny says, pointing to Allen’s mentor, Shannon Bennett, who simultaneously ran Vue de Monde alongside cafes and a burger chain.
On top of operational demands, there are also practical challenges, from securing financial backing to building the right team. “Getting the funding for another potential three-hat restaurant − and then delivering on that − is another level of determination,” she says.
Yiaga – meaning “to seek and find” in Woiwurrung, the language of Melbourne’s traditional owners, the Wurundjeri people – opened late last year in the leafy surrounds of Fitzroy Gardens in East Melbourne. It is Allen’s first restaurant as an owner, backed financially by Far East Organization, the parent company of the Vue Group.
The 44-seat restaurant offers a distinctly Australian experience that unfolds over 12 courses, from a cooling sea parsley, finger lime and olive oil sorbet to a chocolate and sesame caramel dessert moulded into the shape of a banksia husk. The experience runs for about four hours and is priced at $295 a head, excluding wine.
The restaurant took six years to plan and build, and Allen’s influence is evident throughout. He worked closely with Melbourne architect John Wardle on the design and materials, which include 13,000 handmade clay tiles, laid vertically to echo the surrounding elms, and flooring mixed with iron dust to evoke the feeling of pressed red dirt.
At a rumoured cost of over $10 million, owning a restaurant of this scale and ambition is rare at any age, and reflects Allen’s exceptional talent, as well as the depth of experience he has accumulated in a remarkably short time.
Allen left high school at 16 to begin an apprenticeship at Neil Perry’s Rockpool Bar & Grill in Melbourne. At 20, he was named Gault & Millau Young Chef of the Year, an award that opened opportunities to stage at several three-Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris. He then moved to Copenhagen to take on the role of senior chef de partie at Noma, one of the world’s best restaurants, where he spent three years working under René Redzepi, learning how to cook with rare ingredients such as cod sperm, wild reindeer and sea snails.
At 23, Allen was appointed executive chef of Vue de Monde, and by the time he was 27 the restaurant had been awarded three hats.
It took five years for Vue de Monde to earn its third hat, highlighting the extraordinary achievement of Yiaga’s debut score. “It is almost unheard of for a restaurant to earn three hats out of the gate from this masthead,” Rodell writes, though there have been exceptions: Brae in Victoria’s Birregurra achieved the same distinction in 2014.
“I’m not suggesting that Yiaga is perfect in its current iteration, or doesn’t have ways in which it might become better,” Rodell adds, pointing to an “uneven” drinks program, with few affordable local wines and no cocktails on the list.
Erina Starkey – Erina is the Good Food App Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously, Erina held a number of editing roles at delicious.com.au and writing roles at Broadsheet and Concrete Playground.
