After Alejandro Huerta left Comedor late last year, following a staff walkout over alleged disputes with the owner, it didn’t take long for the chef to land on his feet.
Huerta was the man behind Comedor’s highly praised menu, which garnered a hat within six months of opening.
The chef learnt of Lottie, the latest project from Liquid & Larder (the group behind Bistecca, The Gidley, and Bar Julius ), through “good friends of good friends in the industry”. The restaurant is located on the rooftop of The Eve Hotel in the newly opened Wunderlich Lane precinct.
“I contacted [the Lottie team] and had a chat with Pip [Pratt], the executive chef,” says Huerta. The team soon offered him the role of head chef, which he started at the beginning of January. “It was really good luck, to be honest.”
Pratt and Liquid & Larder had already been working on the menu for a while, so Huerta began researching and testing dishes.
“When they were getting closer to the opening, they met with me and said, ‘We want to make sure what we’re doing is authentic’. They wanted to see how I could help them make things – not more Mexican – but right. They were very respectful in terms of doing it ‘the right way’.”
According to Huerta, “the right way” isn’t necessarily about following recipes to a tee. Rather, it’s about paying homage to traditions, recipes, and memories from his childhood. “I think Pip is also someone like that… he thinks about what we can take from tradition and then make it fun and interesting,” says the chef.
sour cream, and cheese.
The share-style menu features the likes of rockmelon and watermelon brocheta with house-made tajin, habanero oil, and fresh juice sangrita; swiss brown tamal with pickled shimeji, pinto bean, and kombu broth; and pollo al carbon with meloso rice, and charred squash.
One menu item that draws on this ethos is Lottie’s pastel Azteca, a dish Huerta describes as “Mexican lasagna”. It’s typically made with delicate layers of corn tortillas, chicken, and a green sauce made with poblano chillis and cheese.
“In this case, we’re turning it into a side dish,” says the chef. “It looks really interesting; It’s in a cast-iron pan and baked in the oven. It looks like a proper lasagna, but all the flavours are Mexican and reminds me of my home.”
When Huerta started working on the menu, there were a few surprises on the menu that caught him off guard. “We have pork jowl that we are serving with a mole,” says Huerta (mole is a style of sauce made with varying mixes of chilli, spices, seeds, nuts, and sometimes chocolate). “The first time they sent me the menu, I read that it was pork jowl in Coca-Cola mole. For me as a Mexican, I wasn’t upset, but I did say it was disrespectful.”
Huerta addressed the dish with Pratt, who told him about a ham his family used to eat at Christmas that was served with a sauce made from Coca-Cola. The executive chef had decided to use the soft drink as a substitute for chocolate, which is often used to sweeten the mole.
“Once he explained it to me and I tried it, it actually made sense,” says Huerta. “It’s what made me fall in love with the menu and made me say, ‘Okay, this is fun. This is interesting. In the end, I think it is one of the tastiest dishes on the menu. It’s probably my favourite.”
It’s this openness to experimentation and keenness to bring nostalgia and historic family influences onto the menu that Pratt and Huerta have in common. The result? A menu that is at once authentic and innovative, and perhaps unlike anything currently on offer in Sydney.
Each element is carefully considered, which is what will set Lottie apart. “What we are doing here is very different to what all the Mexican restaurants in Australia are doing,” says Huerta. “We’re focusing on making tortillas in-house with a proper tortilla machine. It’s a big investment of time, making sure the tortillas are done every day fresh for the guests.”
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