FOR chef Lee Cecchin, a lifetime of cooking around the world has culminated in creating a fine dining experience back home in Broken Hill, at her restaurant The Old Saltbush.
Cecchin said she remembers loving cooking since she was a small child, learning from her grandmother who loved to bake.
“I’d always be hanging off her apron strings, licking the bowl,” she said.
“My pop would get upset because when us kids came along he couldn’t lick the beaters.”
She studied her apprenticeship some forty years ago in Alice Springs, where cooking with native bush foods left a permanent imprint on her, one that has lasted until today.
“We were using bush foods, and I always loved working with it,” she said.
“It sort of left a permanent imprint on me.
”After thirty years running a catering business, she realised her home kitchen had become too small for the demand, and began searching for a commercial kitchen.
“I needed a forever home because we were expanding very rapidly,” she said.
“I needed something bigger and this place popped up and I thought ‘yep, let’s take the opportunity’.”
She found the perfect space in an old Chinese restaurant on Crystal Street,
“We were only going to use it as a ghost kitchen,” she said.
“But it made sense to open a restaurant.”
She now opens her restaurant three nights a week; Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and is usually booked out weeks in advance.
All of the work that needed doing to convert the building into the restaurant it is today she and her husband did, almost entirely on their own.
“In 2021 we bought the building, in the middle of COVID,” she said.
“We had keys for three days and then we had to close for six months, which gave us an opportunity to renovate.”
Her husband, a stonemason and painter by trade, helped with the fit-out and converting the kitchen and restaurant space.
“Because it was a Chinese restaurant for twenty-odd years, it needed a lot of work,” she said.
“So we redesigned the kitchen, and added some archways.”
Cecchin said deciding to offer a fine dining experience rather than following another trajectory such as a pub, was a no-brainer.
“There’s a lot of venues around town offering pub meals,” she said.
“I started off in a pub when I did my apprenticeship, but then I’ve worked all around the world in fine dining venues.
“It was something that was missing in the market here.”
Incorporating local ingredients into the fine dining experience was important to Cecchin, who spent her youth out bush.
“I grew up on country and we would go and eat whatever we caught, or grow our own vegetables,” she said.
On the menu are tasting platters which feature all native ingredients, and she’s just added a native wattleseed barbecue rib to the winter menu.
Her favourite dish is the twice baked cheese soufflé, which we serves with honey roasted grapes using local honey.
“We try and incorporate as much local product as we can,” she said.
This summer, Cecchin hopes to convert her native farm garden out the back of the building into an outdoor dining space to offer an open-air dining experience.
