Dirty Linen - A Food Podcast with Dani Valent

In a challenging time for hospitality, I’m also struck by the optimism and investment. It happens with an eye on business opportunity, for sure, but it’s also because of an enduring belief in gathering. Who better to talk about that than an Irishman?

Liam Ganley owns The Fifth Province and Freddie Wimpoles in St Kilda, as well as four other pubs. With a background in construction and pub culture in his veins, we talk about tradition, innovation and the journey.

https://www.ganleygroup.com.au

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We’re back with chef and lamb farmer Jenna Abbruzzese from Addington Downs as part of an ongoing Dirty Linen series. Since we spoke last time, Dani has eaten some of Jenna’s lamb. What’s it like to cook and eat an animal that you’ve seen frolic around on Instagram, that has a name, and that died to be your dinner?

Also mentioned:

Charles Massy’s book, Call of the Reed Warbler

Charlie Arnott’s podcast, The Regenerative Journey

Brookl...

Is it possible to create a balanced, intentional, happy life as a chef?

Sarah Baldwin, chef and owner of Joy Restaurant in Brisbane, is making it happen. The seven-year-old restaurant serves a set menu four nights a week to two sittings of just 10 people. Joy has won many awards but this conversation is more about connection and vulnerability than accolades.

https://www.joyrestaurant.com.au

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Every now and then, we check in with Emma Sheahan from Lumen People, a cafe and wine bar in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Our Illuminating Lumen series is all about small business: the joys as well as the tricky bits and challenges. As winter kicks in, we talk carrots and cakes, beetroot and lamb jus, and the ongoing puzzles of costing and pricing.

https://www.instagram.com/lumenpeople/?hl=en

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We love a milestone on Dirty Linen! Geppetto Trattoria in East Melbourne is celebrating 45 years, marking its 1981 opening with a pasta mista for $19.81 all week.

We talk to owner Adriano Cea about legacy, lovely customers and his dad Nino, who’s still shopping Preston Market for the restaurant’s daily specials.

Now, to get onto the secret coniglio (rabbit) list…

⁠https://www.geppettotrattoria.com⁠

⁠https://www.instagram.com/geppettotrattoria/⁠

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Is there a good reason to buy a grand champion wagyu beast for tens of thousands of dollars and bring it into Australia for diners to try?

Emily Yu thinks so.

Her team outbid all others in a Japanese auction to secure the best beast, which is now being served at her Melbourne restaurants Wagyu Ya, Yakikami and Niku Ou.

We talk about the surprising qualities of premium wagyu and the best ways to enjoy it.

https://www.wagyuya.com.au

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If we’re lucky, we’ll get old. But if we end up in aged care, as many of us will, what are the meals going to be like? David Martin is the executive chef at St Vincent’s Care, which offers retirement living and aged care in New South Wales and Victoria. A former five-star hotel chef, he is soon to compete at the National Chef of the Year competition at Food & Hospitality Week 2026, coming up on 25–27 May at ICC Sydney.'

https://fhweek.com.au/speaker/david-martin/

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We last spoke to Pietro Porcu in mid-January after his home and farm in Yarck, two hours north of Melbourne, was destroyed by bushfires. Four months later, how is he going and how are things at Da Noi, his 30-year-old Sardinian restaurant? We talk recovery, frustration, opportunity, acceptance and why goats and pigs can’t be in the same paddock.

http://danoi.com.au

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How did ‘health food’ get so off track and became expensive, elitist and anxiety inducing?

Muesli whisperer and naturopath Catie Gett recently made a scary leap from the wellness world’s cool kids’ table to the very real world of sharing budget-friendly recipes for people stretched by a cost-of-living crisis. The Staple Store Cookbook is enabling, accessible and anxiety free.

https://www.instagram.com/catie_gett/?hl=en

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https://deepinth...

Are hotel restaurants ever going to be a go-to option in Australian cities and towns? We chat to Ben Creek, Vice President of Food & Beverage in Asia and the Pacific for Accor. From great coffee to smarter buffets to inclusive employment and AI, he shares the levers he’s pulling to make sure hotel hospitality is attractive to locals and visitors alike.

https://www.instagram.com/bencreeklondon/

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Is there anything more perfect than an oyster? Isabelle Pearl Love-Dack runs Finn’s Oyster Bar, which attends events to offer just-shucked bliss. She also works for Shuck Don’t Chuck, which collects oyster shells to use in reef rehab. Finn’s is named for Bella’s son Finn, who died in 2019 aged 13 months. The grief is always present but there’s joy too.

https://www.instagram.com/finnsoysterbar/

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Melanie Lionello is a nutritionist, content creator and author of new book From My Little Kitchen, which brings achievable Italian recipes with dietary information and a practical sense of how cooking fits into people’s lives. We talk about why there are no rabbit recipes (maybe in book 2?) and how she has built her social media audience to almost 400,000 followers.

https://www.instagram.com/frommylittlekitchen/

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Returning to Dirty Linen after a huge 16 months, Umberto Group’s Marco Finanzio has changed the shape of his business, closing venues and refocusing.

In hard times, what matters? Who are we accountable to? What is the mission? A bowl of pasta might be part of the answer…

https://www.umbertogroup.com.au

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Australia imports most of its seafood, and the most commonly eaten locally produced fish is farmed salmon. Do these facts point to problems? Today’s chat is with return Dirty Linen guest Stephen Nairn (Omnia, Yugen), who has recently opened Portside, a retail store at Prahran Market with a focus on high quality seafood from known fishers.

Stephen’s previous chat on Dirty Linen:

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/stephen-nairn-omnia-skipping-asparagus-season/id1518946986?i=1000494057149

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Louisa Dunn farms potatoes, beef and sheep in Blackwood, an hour north of Melbourne. A city girl from Brighton, who married into a fifth generation farming family, Louisa has learnt more about potatoes than she knew there was to know. There are more than 4000 types of potatoes and the Dunn family is proud to grow around 20 of them, both for chipping and sending to market.

Louisa has become a keen advocate for regional farming communities such as hers; she’s a huge wrap for the Great Trentham Spudfest (May 2 & 3), which celebrates local potato farming families every autumn.

Chef John Laureti owns Cafe Lewi in Sydney’s Lewisham with his wife Isabella Leva Laureti, a pastry chef. The pair have a background in fine dining but they decided to bring their skills and experience to a daytime cafe, which now does a couple of nights due to customer demand.

In a tricky time for hospitality, we talk about expectations, scary spreadsheets, and open conversations with a cafe’s community. Oh, and feeding legendary chef Peter Gilmore.

https://www.instagram.com/cafelewi/

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When you’re busy and always thinking about the next urgent matter, it can be hard to stop to celebrate the milestones. I love it when I see a restaurant share that they’ve turned 1 or 5 or 20. It’s great to take stock, find time to be proud, consider the legacy, and what you want to take forward. For Jason M Jones, there are a couple of milestones - he’s turning 50 and his Melbourne restaurant Entrecote is turning 10. Let’s hear some tales…

https://www.entrecote.com.au

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If there’s a type of restaurant that I appreciate most intensely, it’s small independent family places where the creativity has to be as much about business structure as food on a plate. Greasy Zoe’s is one of those businesses.

Run by couple Zoe Birch and Lachlan Gardner, the eight seat restaurant is in a leafy suburb an hour from Melbourne. It’s a special place.

As the business clocks up nine years of operation, we check in with Zoe to see what is consistent and what needs to change.

ht...

We return to a favourite series on Dirty Linen: Illuminating Lumen. In this occasional catch-up, we enter the world of Lumen People, a cafe and wine bar that launched in North Melbourne in 2023, closed in 2025 and reopened in Fitzroy.

Six months after landing in the second site, owner Emma Sheahan tells us how it’s going.

https://www.instagram.com/lumenpeople/

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We’re back with Jenna Abbruzzese from Addington Downs in the second episode of our ongoing series about lamb farming. Jenna and her partner Alex farm with purpose and in alignment with strong values around nurturing land, animals and the humans who eventually eat the meat they produce. We talk about the problems with purity and strict labels, and the emotions around sending animals to the abattoir.

We mentioned:

How Now Dairy

https://deepintheweeds.com.au/podcast/cathy-palmer-how-now-dairy-from-music-to-milk/

Felice Jacka

https://deepintheweeds.com.au...

Daniel Saade and Redmond Stevenson have collected thousands of order dockets from 33 Melbourne restaurants and made them part of a fond, resonant, immersive exhibition called Order Up: A City Fed by Many Cultures. It’s on at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne until May. What can we learn about restaurant culture by looking at crumpled, food-stained scraps of paper?

See Order Up:

https://museumsvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/whats-on/order-up/

They spoke about:

Supper Inn

Kababi

Akwaaba

Abla’s

‘Recovering chef’ Lucy Ridge is the author of Fed Up: A Chef’s Adventures in Food, Farming & Feminism. Burnt out by hospitality, Lucy embarked on something of a chef’s gap year, seeking out female farmers and producers to intern with, all around Australia. There was cheesemaking, distilling, pig farming, salad nurturing, harvesting bush foods on Country and grape stomping.

https://lucyridge.com

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Connecting food and mood - whether good or bad - is probably not a radical proposal for anyone listening to this podcast. But what’s the science behind it?

Today’s guest is Felice Jacka, Professor of Nutritional Psychiatry and founder of the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University. Felice’s work links the food we eat with our mental wellbeing - can foods of different types make us feel better…or worse. She’s also the author of a popular children’s book about gut health called There’s a Zoo in My Poo.

My...

Melbourne Food & Wine Festival is on March 20-29 with local and international chefs and creators heading to Victoria to cook, share and inspire. There’s a big Filipino thread to the program and we’re chatting to one of its stars, cookbook author and dessert remixer Abi Balingit, author of the James Beard Award-winning book Mayumu.

See Abi’s events:

https://www.melbournefoodandwine.com.au/search/?search=balingit

https://www.instagram.com/theduskykitchen/

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Carbon neutral climate positive agriculture is not the first thing many people think of when it comes to cattle farming but in Queensland Carly Baker-Burnham and her family from Bonnie Doone Organic Beef have an incredible story of evolution, generational change and now Australia’s first and largest soil carbon sequestration.

⁠⁠https://www.bonniedoone.com.au⁠⁠

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Greg Sanderson has played a pivotal role in establishing some of Australia’s most beloved bars as managing director of Speakeasy Group, which has eight venues in Melbourne and Sydney.

What’s it like running a bar group in a time of renewed and necessary focus on workplace culture, and when so many people are reducing their consumption of alcohol or not drinking at all?

https://speakeasygroup.com.au

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http...

Shanteh Wale and Dani Valent team up for Dirty Glass, the occasional crossover pod featuring Over A Glass and Dirty Linen.

We talk about fine dining: as Quay closes and Yiaga begins, what can and should high-end dining be? Plus bushfire recovery, the life of a wine taster, the joys of Coravin, and whether buying local and seasonal is a bunch of BS.

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I said in my first episode of the year that I want to cover big juicy topics that draw some of the many strands of the food world together, things like farming, education, cooking, pricing, environment, health.

We do that today with chef, author and farmer Matthew Evans. Matthew runs Grounded, a roaming farming conference that’s also a food festival. I’ll be one of the MCs at this year’s festival on April 22 & 23 in Victoria.

groundedaustralia.com.au

Listen to Matthew’s conversation on Dirty Linen wi...

I said in my first episode of the year that I want to cover big juicy topics that draw some of the many strands of the food world together, things like farming, education, cooking, pricing, environment, health.

We do that today with chef, author and farmer Matthew Evans. Matthew runs Grounded, a roaming farming conference that’s also a food festival. I’ll be one of the MCs at this year’s festival on April 22 & 23 in Victoria.

groundedaustralia.com.au

Listen to Matthew’s conversation on Dirty Linen wi...

We’re chatting to Bill Drakopoulos at a pivotal moment. The veteran restaurateur is handing over Sydney restaurant group SRG to his four children as the family-owned company enters a busy period of expansion. SRG’s venues include waterfront Aqua, Sails and Ormeggio as well as sweet neighbourhood spots.

One of the topics I’m always thinking about is the place of the family restaurant in a hospitality landscape that’s increasingly dominated by groups.

But what about when the group is also a family?

https://srghospitality.com.au

<...

Restaurants are at the heart of community, community is at the heart of restaurants - or the best of them, anyway. Whether it’s a lunchspot in the centre of a big city, a family restaurant in a suburb, or a coffee machine in a servo in a tiny town, a business that understands the value of community and its place within it - to give and to get - is the kind of place that reels me in.

One place I’m drawn back to in Sydney is Rising Sun Workshop, a motorcycle workshop and ramen cafe...

Dirty Linen on the loose…I’m on The Ghan, travelling 3000km up the spine of Australia on an 800 metre long train with 250 other rail riders.

This podcast diary tracks the experience, chatting to staff, fellow travellers and reflecting on the logistics that make this bucket list experience a trove of lifetime memories.

https://www.journeybeyondrail.com.au/journeys/the-ghan/

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Jess Hite (Chef on the Ghan) - tasting the landscape

https://www.journeybeyondrail.com.au/journeys/the-ghan/

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Follow Dirty Linen on Instagram

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https://www.instagram.com...

With the backdrop of enormous upheaval and violence in Iran, we talk to Khash Kohan, part of the family that runs Kitchen 55 in Melbourne’s Templestowe. Kitchen 55 makes homestyle Persian dishes that are rarely seen in restaurants.

What are the stories behind them? What’s it like to be in Australia, serving food and sharing generous hospitality when the country it showcases is in trauma?

https://kitchen55melbourne.com

This podcast discusses violence so skip it if that’s not for you today.

My r...

You’re heading to the High Country…but where to stay? Priscilla Williamson runs Bright Boutique Accommodation, a collection of individual properties suitable for all sorts of trips, holidays and get-togethers.

https://www.brightboutiqueaccommodation.com.au

⁠⁠https://www.visitvictoria.com/regions/high-country⁠⁠⁠

This podcast is part of a special High Country series on Dirty Linen. We’ve eaten the food, sipped the drinks, met the people and paddled the waters of Bright and surrounds, enjoying a very special part of Victoria that’s ready to welcome visitor...

Rachel Reed runs Bright’s Reed & Co with her husband Hamish. The pair are chefs who turned their focus on fermentation into life as distillers. Best known for their gin, Rachel explains why they’ve now branched into shochu and their new Koji Spirits range.

https://www.reedandcodistillery.com/home

⁠https://www.visitvictoria.com/regions/high-country⁠⁠

This podcast is part of a special High Country series on Dirty Linen. We’ve eaten the food, sipped the drinks, met the people and paddled the waters of Bright an...

Jacob Hanna runs Punkah Pantry, a licensed cafe, provedore and pie shop in Porepunkah. Why did he give up a teaching career to work one of the High Country’s busiest coffee machines, and what’s it like moving to a rural community?

https://www.instagram.com/punkahpantry/?hl=en

⁠⁠https://www.visitvictoria.com/regions/high-country⁠⁠⁠

This podcast is part of a special High Country series on Dirty Linen. We’ve eaten the food, sipped the drinks, met the people and paddled the waters of Bright and su...

Julie Holm runs Ringer Reef Winery with husband Mark. We talk family business, the dynamics of small enterprise and how they’ve embedded themselves in community. But will Julie share her secret local swimming spots?

https://ringerreef.com.au

⁠https://www.visitvictoria.com/regions/high-country⁠⁠

This podcast is part of a special High Country series on Dirty Linen. We’ve eaten the food, sipped the drinks, met the people and paddled the waters of Bright and surrounds, enjoying a very special part of Victoria that’s rea...

Marcus Warner is the CEO of Pepo Farms, an innovative and endlessly creative farm, production facility and visitor-friendly retail showroom. We talk about small farms, small business and big dreams.

https://www.pepofarms.au

⁠https://www.visitvictoria.com/regions/high-country⁠⁠

This podcast is part of a special High Country series on Dirty Linen. We’ve eaten the food, sipped the drinks, met the people and paddled the waters of Bright and surrounds, enjoying a very special part of Victoria that’s ready to welcome visitors i...

Scott Brandon is owner and founder of Bright Brewery. A cornerstone of Bright’s community and economy, the brewery has a modern production facility on the outskirts of town and a bar, restaurant and beer garden on the Ovens River in the centre of town.

https://brightbrewery.com.au

⁠https://www.visitvictoria.com/regions/high-country⁠⁠

This podcast is part of a special High Country series on Dirty Linen. We’ve eaten the food, sipped the drinks, met the people and paddled the waters of Bright and...