It has been an unusual month at the French bistro on Howe Street.
Zak Resuggan, who served his apprenticeship at Bistro Terroir, has returned from Shanghai, where he cooked for Australia at WorldSkills, the world championships for young tradespeople. He competed in Cooking and finished fifteenth. The Wombat Post ran the Master and Apprentice piece on him on 4 September.
Zak learned the trade at the Bistro Terroir pass, one service at a time, under chef owner Matthew Carnell.
In the same month, Carnell has been nominated for a French-Australian Excellence Award in Culinary and Gastronomy. The awards have been run by the newspaper Le Courrier Australien since 2021, under the patronage of the French Embassy in Australia, and this is the first year the ceremony has been held in Melbourne. It takes place in St Kilda on Thursday 5 November.
There are fourteen nominees in the category, among them the television cook Gabriel Gate.
The unusual part, for local readers, is how the shortlist is decided. A public vote picks one of the three finalists outright, with the remaining two chosen by a judging panel. Voting is open now and closes on 19 October, at lcanews.com. Whether a Daylesford name reaches that shortlist is, for the next eleven days, in local hands.
Carnell grew up in Eltham and walked into his first professional kitchen as a teenager, starting under chef Stephen Mercer, who taught him the classical French he still cooks from. He went on to work with Scott Pickett in Melbourne before moving to France and a period in Paris under Thierry Marx. He opened Bistro Terroir on Howe Street in 2018 and has cooked there for eight years. If you are interested in voting here is the link.
