Smith & Daughters’ Shannon Martinez: creating vegan cuisine that scores with meat-eaters

GOOGLE SHANNON MARTINEZ and you’ll find a plethora of articles introducing her as a non-vegan chef who cooks exclusively vegan food. The qualification is important because it underscores an important aspect of her work: her desire to create vegan cuisine which gets a thumbs-up from meat-eaters, by including the textures, flavours and mouthfeel often missing in vegan food. And this appeal to a broad customer base is central to her food philosophy.

By the time Shannon finished high school, food had become her passion. “I started in hospitality around 1996-97, and then 15 years ago I began focusing on vegan food. I wasn’t a vegan myself, but I saw a huge gap in the market which no one was really catering for. I get bored easily and the idea of making vegan food was a challenge – it was exciting, it was new, I had to be creative and figure out how to make things from scratch, how to make a meat-like texture out of flour. It was really a question of recognising the demand for it – back then vegan wasn’t anywhere near as big as now, and the only places doing it were highly specialist. There were no restaurants with a good wine list where you could go out and have a beautiful vegan dinner!”

She began by gradually introducing vegan dishes on the menu at the East Brunswick Club, a live music venue in Melbourne where she worked. “I started with a vegan parma, because parma was one of our best-selling items, and it quickly started outselling the meat parma. So that was the lightbulb going off for me. After that I ran a kitchen at a pub called the Gasometer where I did two menus which were virtually identical but one included meat and the other had dishes which were vegan equivalents of the first.” This was followed by a stint at the People’s Market in Collingwood, a massive outdoor market where Shannon sold meals out of a converted shipping container. “That was my first business and a test to see whether a solely vegan menu was sustainable. After its success I decided to focus exclusively on vegan.”

From there Shannon moved to the Sweetwater Inn in Prahran, then worked with the same team at Leonard’s House of Love and Leonardo’s where again she served up a meat and vegan combo menu. She worked there while trying to find a building for the restaurant she was planning, which eventually became Smith & Daughters on Brunswick St in Melbourne’s inner-city suburb of Fitzroy. “The name came about because we were originally looking on Smith Street, and I had a female business partner when we opened up so the ‘and daughters’ was chosen because you see a lot of businesses which say ‘and sons’ and we wanted to showcase this was an all-female led business. I think it also evokes a certain sense of tradition.”

Smith & Daughters is now almost six years old and a year after opening was complemented by Smith & Deli which is around the corner – “it’s a storefront operation with almost a factory style kitchen in back which is about four times the size of the restaurant kitchen and is visible from the front. The restaurant does between 160-220 covers per night and between that and the deli we’re doing about 15,000 covers a month. That’s a lot of vegan food – and when you think about the fact that two-thirds of the people eating here would normally be consuming animal products, that’s a lot of animals who are not being eaten! So these two little shops are having a big impact.”

Guilt-free alternative

Shannon describes the customer base as very diverse – “at the start it was mostly vegan under 35 year olds, but it grew very quickly and the majority of our customers now are meat eaters who are looking for alternatives. They come here so they can feel good about their food choices – I do think some people feel guilty about the way they eat, and we’re able to give them a guilt-free alternative. When I look at the stats on social media, our clientele seems around 70 per cent female and the age group is 45 and under, but we definitely get all walks of life – we’re a destination restaurant, which means we get people travelling across Melbourne to come here, so it’s huge really.”

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that much of Shannon’s food is vegan versions of non-vegan classics, “the things that people have grown up with and are familiar with. Most people aren’t born vegan, they become vegan at some point so they still have those food memories, whether it’s things their grandma used to make or the favourite dish that made them feel better the next day – but when you become vegan you can’t have a lot of those meals anymore. So I wanted to create veganized versions of those dishes which otherwise didn’t exist.

“There are some vegan products which are just terrible, and that’s a huge disservice to the vegan movement. If you have a meat eater who’s willing to give vegan food a shot and you give them something that’s shit, they’re very quick to judge and won’t try it again. If you describe something as vegan mozzarella, it needs to be as close to the real thing as possible. There are so many animal products in our foods, and if I can create alternatives that are just as satisfying, then that’s the way we can get people to start to slowly change their diet.”

Replicating meat-based flavour profiles

This is not just a question of flavour – in fact, Shannon says texture is in many ways more important. “Some vegan food tends to be pretty one-dimensional, very soft. When you think about what makes food satisfying, especially in winter stews and braised meats, it’s that feeling of satisfaction that comes from the texture. So we try to recreate that – we use dried shitake stems to make a meat and when you braise it falls apart like a roast beef. 

“After all these years I’ve worked out how to replicate the textures and flavour profiles of meat. We make most of our ingredients from scratch in the restaurant, and in the deli we were stocking some imported products but I’ve recently renovated and made some changes. Veganism is largely an environmental issue to me, and it’s an angle that’s hitting home with a lot of people who understand that continuing to eat the way we do is not environmentally sustainable. So now we source local product wherever possible and keep the imported stuff down to about five per cent of the stock.”

In addition to running her own businesses, Shannon often engages in collaborations and restaurant ‘takeover’ nights where she veganizes a menu. “Almost every collaboration I’ve done has been in a restaurant that’s not normally vegan focused,” she explains. “I want to show restaurateurs and chefs who don’t really understand or see a need for vegan options that the demand is there. I’ll go in, provide an all-vegan menu and show them how many people want vegan food. I recently did a night at Belle’s Hot Chicken where I did all veganized versions of all the dishes – Mac and Cheese, Fried Fish Sandwiches, Fried Chicken Sandwiches – all vegan food and we served over 500 customers in four hours.

“It’s about opening chefs’ eyes to the need for more options, and even if you look at it purely from a business angle, you can see vegan food is not just a phase, more and more people are eating it - so enough of the eye-rolling, you need to start catering for them! You don’t have to go full tilt like I have, but you should have some well thought-out options, not just spaghetti with napoli sauce and hold the parmesan! Your vegan customers are paying the same money as the non-vegans and to me it shows a lack of knowledge if a chef doesn’t put the effort in. I see Facebook groups with chefs taking the piss out of vegan food and vegans, and it just makes them look stupid. If you can’t cook without animal products you’re not a great chef, end of story.”

Shannon is also happy to share her knowledge wherever possible. “I’m not keeping secrets – I want vegan food to keep getting better, and I do think chefs are getting better at exchanging information and ideas. So if anyone out there doesn’t have any idea where to start, they can always come to the restaurant and ask questions. For a lot of people this is like starting from scratch, and it can be a little daunting, but I think you should find it really exciting. Think of it as something brand new, because that doesn’t happen very often.”