inthekitchen
merry
morning
Chef Chris Gama brings bold flavour
to breakfast at Clementine.
by Jessie Schmidtke
Chef Chris Gama can finally exhale.
“People were here the minute we opened the door,” he says,
now coolly at ease. Ghostly exposed brick, rustic wood rafters and
Moroccan touches radiate mystique in the space he endearingly refers
to as his dungeon.
It’s been three and a half years since Clementine, the trendy
subterranean daytime nook, opened its doors and Gama and his team
hit the ground running. When keeping up with the hollandaise sauce
alone was nearly impossible, they quickly realized their projections
were off and they needed to cook for double the people they had
originally planned for. It took more than two years of sales data to
realize they weren’t slowing down.
Clementine salutes breakfast culture in cities like Melbourne and
Los Angeles, where daytime eats are granted the same distinction
as evening ones. Here, inventive chef-driven dishes are almost too
stunning to cut your knife into, served alongside elegant cocktails
such as the “morning helper,” a fresh take on a French 75 elevated with
house-made thyme syrup and prosecco. Although Southern cuisine
was the original plan, it didn’t quite feel right, and the team decided
instead to take inspiration from a variety of cultures. The spicy syrup-
drizzled fried chicken on toast, which an ever-compassionate Gama
dedicates to all the hungover boyfriends dragged to brunch, serves as
the only remnant of the original concept.
Much like the menu, Gama’s trajectory as a chef was not clear cut. It
started with a dishwashing job at Green Gates as a teenager. He laughs
remembering the look on the hiring chef’s face when he showed up
in his Sunday best with a makeshift resume listing babysitting as his
experience. After climbing the ranks to line cook, Gama got a call from
an old colleague and chef: Tristan Foucault.
Foucault needed a sous chef to open Wow! Hospitality’s Oui Bistro
(now Peasant Cookery), and Gama was his guy. After five years at
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ciao! / dec/jan / two thousand nineteen