INTERNATIONAL
Are you ready
for a BBQ?
KELLY MANNING
travels to Australia and
finds an Englishman and
American cooking low
and slow on Victoria’s
Mornington Peninsula
If fusion cooking is a mix of food
cultures, then I have stumbled across the
barbecue world’s ultimate fusion
restaurant.
Actually I didn’t really stumble across it.
Red Gum BBQ is in the Australian town of
Red Hill on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula
about an hour south of Melbourne and this
was a family lunch recommendation from
the locals – namely my parents.
The fusion is in the personnel, rather than
trying to create some quirky, hybrid dishes
to traverse continents and mix pallets.
Australians are never shy of shouting their
‘barbie’ credentials – staple backyard fodder
under an eternal sun. So I assumed the Red
Gum BBQ amid the gum trees of Red Hill
must be ‘Aussie as’. Yes there are a good
number of native diners amid the tourists,
but this 900m² former truck mechanic’s
workshop, now one of the largest barbecue
and craft beer joints in the country, is the
brainchild of Martin Goffin, originally from
Norfolk in England, and his American wife,
Melissa Goffin from Miami, Florida.
Transatlantic love transported to Australia.
Born in Great Yarmouth, Martin read
sociology and politics at the University of
East Anglia in Norwich – not your
conventional grounding for becoming a
barbecue pitmaster on the other side of
the world.
Trips to see Melissa’s family in the United
States saw Martin seduced by the tastes,
smells, sights and sounds of Southern style
barbecues and a fast track education in
slabs of beef ribs, pulled pork and smoked
chicken wings.
“I loved everything about the American
barbecue scene,” says Goffin.
They moved to Australia – Melissa was a
graduate of the University of Melbourne and
a teacher in Victoria colleges – but Martin
was tiring of working in local government
and eventually in 2013 the Goffins decided
to pursue their barbecue dream.
“It all started with a $130 3x3m marquee
and a Texas offset smoker and trailer,” says
Martin.
In 2015 they bought a 4m trailer pit –
Big Red – over from the States, taking
it to food events and markets on the
Mornington Peninsula, before moving into
the Red Hill Brewery.
The following year they joined the
Southern Lovin’ BBQ Tour, travelling round
Northern Florida, Georgia and South
Carolina, with Goffin working with Harrison
Sapp, pitmaster and owner of Southern Soul
Barbeque on St Simons Island in Georgia.
Plenty of hard graft, financial fears and a
lot of love eventually saw the couple open
the doors of Red Gum BBQ four years ago.
“We needed a big space and took a
massive punt, leasing the premises off a
BBQ | Spring 2020 | 39