STORY BY LARISSA DUBECKI, PHOTOS BY CHRIS TURNER

Not too many restaurants can claim to be more than 160 years in the making. Ballarat’s Johnny Alloo tips its hat to the gold rush city’s history by taking its name from its first documented restaurateur, a Chinese immigrant who ran what was then known as a “cookshop” feeding hungry miners on the goldfields.

“It’s our way of paying homage to hospitality and remembering the connection of community that’s so important when it comes to this industry," says owner Matthew Freeman.

That sense of community has kept Johnny Alloo going through the rolling crisis of COVID-19. And now that Ballarat is out the other side, it appears “Johnny’s” is one of the rare instances in which the pandemic managed to bring positive change.

“We’d always wanted to do a dinner service but just hadn’t felt we had the time to give it enough thought. Then COVID hit and it went from becoming a necessity to stay afloat to being really successful.”

It helped, too, that head chef Andy Gale arrived at around the same time. Melbourne restaurant and café trainspotters know him as the Brit who ran the hugely successful Duchess of Spotswood café before becoming executive chef at St Ali. His talent behind the pans helped Johnny Alloo make the seamless transition between daytime café and modern Italian diner by night.

Freeman had been running Ballarat coffee temple Fika for four years when he opened Johnny Alloo last November. It was a doubling down on an industry that beckoned him when he was working as a salesman of wholesale food and beverage products, a job that gave him a close look behind the scenes. The jump to the other side of the pass came to make complete sense.

“Hospitality seems to give me energy rather than take it away. You can feed off the energy of your customers when they’re having a good time.”

A complete redevelopment of the iconic 1871 building, a double-storey red brick opposite Ballarat Hospital, took more than a year. No slavish reproduction of all things Victoriana, Freeman’s design introduces the curved lines of the 1960s and `70s to wind up with a timeless Italian feel. It’s a dual-purpose design – calm and relaxing by day, sleek and seductive by night – that takes it from quinoa bircher muesli and Dr Marty’s crumpets in the morning to Middle Eastern-styled spiced cauliflower steak and ricotta gnocchi at lunch to squid ink risotto with char grilled calamari and roast barramundi with burnt leek and hazelnut dressing in the evening service. In between times there’s the celebration of aperitivo hour, helped along by a keenly composed cocktail list. Oh, and St Ali coffee for the time of day before a Sbagliato Rosa, featuring lillet rose and prosecco, is socially sanctioned.

The brief has always been to keep it loose and limber. But sometimes it just takes a global disaster to fully realise the vision.

“It was pretty interesting when it all first happened and no one really knew what was going to happen,” says Freeman. “But dinner has really opened up a new vessel for people to come in and experience what we do.”

Johnny Alloo

32 Drummond St N, Ballarat Central

0409 639 191

www.johnnyalloo.com