Stylish contemporary desserts generate strong customer demand
/Tarts Anon is the brainchild of experienced pastry chef Gareth Whitton, who has worked in foodservice since high school, having started in small town venues and progressed to working at venues like Pier restaurant and Quay in Sydney, then working for a time in Europe and the UK before a budding romance brought him back home, where he headed up the pastry section of Melbourne’s Dinner by Heston.
Tarts anon Co-FOUNDER gareth whitton
The business was born out of the Covid lockdowns, as Gareth recalls: “I’d been doing some baking at home, utilising the classical techniques I’d learnt but in a small apartment kitchen with no access to professional equipment so everything was by hand. And my partner and I started selling them out of our apartment – it was never intended to be anything other than a side hustle but it took off!”
‘The push that becomes the shove’
Prior to Covid hitting, Gareth had spent a year working at Lune Croissants in Melbourne, which he credits as inspiring him to move into the food retail space. “It made sense from a work-life balance perspective – I’d wanted to get away from restaurant service-based work and move more into food production, patisserie and bakery, and working at Lune had been a validating experience in that respect. Once the tarts started getting a lot more traction and exposure through collaboration with brands like Messina, we began to have this
A SELECTION OF TARTS ANON FAVOURITES
cult status – we were selling out in fiveminutes so we started to think, ‘this might have legs!’
“Catherine, the same girl who I ended up coming back from London for, was working with me and we put the feelers out as to how we might increase production, and someone came back and said they had a kitchen with a shopfront in Richmond and we thought, ‘this could be the push that becomes the shove’. We started working out of the kitchen while fitting out the shop, doing pickups and drop-offs and eventually we opened our first Tarts Anon store.”
A second store in Collingwood began as a satellite operation but soon flourished into a fullscale site. And as business boomed, Gareth and Catherine moved their initial retail operation around the corner to bigger premises in Cremorne.
“I’ve seen so many things that could be considered a tart, so we thought we could push the boundaries a little”
“We started with eight different flavours of tarts and we’ve evolved and adapted a lot since,” Gareth says. “It’s been a huge focus to expand the range and make sure we have more on offer. Basically you can put any filling you want into a tart shell – in my last 20 years of being a chef, I’ve seen so many things that could be considered a tart, so we thought we could push the boundaries a little.
“We’ve now really cemented ourselves as more than just a tart shop, particularly with collaborations and events – we’ve tried to keep to our own essence and style as much as possible while continuing to evolve. A lot of our flavours and concepts come from own experience – not just the knowledge I’ve accrued on how to create these things, but also what I’ve learnt over time about what ingredients complement each other well.”
Putting skills to work for Proud to Be a Chef
As the menu changes monthly, Gareth says it’s hard to nail down favourites – “although I was lucky enough to do a guest judge spot on Masterchef and one of the tarts we did in that challenge, smoked pecan and butterscotch, has become a staple of our menu. You can take inspiration from everywhere, but at the end of the day it’s always the kind of stuff I myself would like to eat.”
Next month Gareth will be putting his pastry skills to use in a different way – he’s stepping into the role of pastry mentor for this year’s finalists of the Proud to Be a Chef mentoring program. “I was contacted by the resident mentor Mark Normoyle of Anchor Food Professionals, having been recommended by a mutual contact that I’d make a good mentor,” Gareth explains. “I’m planning on using the opportunity to shine a little bit of light on the classics of pastry – these have stood the test of time for a reason, and I think there is a bit of a return to classic cooking going one right now.
“Taste and texture is the first thing you should consider when you’re creating food”
gareth (FRONT) and the tarts anon team
“People are starting to get tired of food not looking real anymore – you can buy a silicon mould for every shape or size under the sun, but what people are really looking for is real food. So I’d like to impart that knowledge and also show our young chefs that there’s value in learning skills such as how to pipe, how to line a tart shell properly – rather than relying on technology, I want them to use their own hands to make things beautiful as well as delicious. Taste and texture is the first thing you should consider when you’re creating food.”
Kori Executive Pastry Chef Joane Yeoh
Japanese cuisine inspires ice cream store chain
Joane Yeoh, who has also acted as a Proud to Be a Chef pastry mentor, is executive pastry chef at Kori, a Japanese cuisine inspired ice cream store chain which boasts flavours like matcha, white sesame and melon sorbet, with outlets in Melbourne’s Hawthorn as well as its CBD and a third site in Chapel St, Windsor which opened just before Christmas.
“Every store has a different theme – the first is more around heritage, it’s a beautiful building and we even won an architecture award,” Joane tells us. “The second store on Bourke St was deliberately designed as something quite industrial, and this third one is all about fun, with a DJ deck and J-Pop nights.”
Business grows from friendship
The Kori concept grew out of Joane’s friendship with Bernard Chu, whom she met while working at South Yarra pastry shop Lux Bite while he was owner. “Growing up in an Asian family in Singapore, my parents always wanted me to get a degree and my mum actually wanted me to study foot science at RMIT,” Joane recalls. “But I hated it and said I wanted to do something with pastry, and my mum was only willing to let me study in Melbourne because my brother lived here, so I ended up enrolled in culinary management at Le Cordon Bleu.
Bernard chu ENJOYING KORI ICE CREAM
“But I was so keen to do pastry that I walked into Lux Bite and told Bernard, ‘if you hire me as an apprentice I will do whatever it takes’ and I started working for home on my first day in Australia.” After three years at Lux Bite, Joane moved to Rockpool, then Spice Temple and Press Club before working in Japan for a while – which gave her the idea for Kori.
“The great thing about ice cream is that it’s a dessert that the whole family can enjoy ”
Soft spot for ice cream pays off
“I had always had a soft spot for ice cream because my Dad and I used to enjoy it together and he would say how good it would be to have an ice cream shop in front of the beach. That stuck in my mind, and the other great thing about ice cream is that it’s a dessert that the whole family can enjoy without being really complicated. Initially I had an investor who came on board but when that fell through, I talked the idea through with Bernard and he said ‘why don’t you do it with me?’
“And within 24 hours we had the contract – we just made it happen! This was during the second last Covid lockdown and at the time there was no Japanese ice cream in Melbourne. And as I was so familiar with Japanese flavours, and Bernard as a pastry chef knows the quality he wants to achieve, so we just joined forces.”
From the start the duo aimed to make Kori stand out from the crowd. “Kori has 24 flavours but 14 of them are simple signature flavours everyone will love, like Dark Chokoreeto (chocolate), Fuji Apple, Matcha Pistachio, Yuzu and Hokkaido Cheesecake. The rest of them are me going crazy and being experimental – although after three years I’ve learned that if you go too far with the flavour people will just take a taste rather than buying it, so I try not to cross that line. We want people to be able to have a whole cup and enjoy it, rather than in a restaurant where you’re only getting a spoonful on a dessert and it's therefore more intense.”
Joane describes the flavours as “not traditional Japanese, but fun, modern Japanese” and says they have proven to have a broad appeal. “I think nowadays people are more open minded to flavours – they travel a lot, and sometimes they know more than I do and they’ll suggest flavours to me.
“I think if we had opened prior to Covid it may have been tougher, but since the lockdowns ended people have been travelling more and are familiar with Japanese ingredients, which makes my life easier!”
The range includes everything from a fullsize frozen entremet to small bite-sized pieces. “We do ice cream cake versions of mango cheesecake, strawberry shortcake and hazelnut cake – every Christmas and Easter we bring out a lot of new limited edition specials, from cakes to easter eggs,” Joane says. “Somebody just gave me a request for a ‘hot snowman’ so I did it – it’s fun to do whatever the customer wants!”
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