Giorgia McAllister - pastry chef, owner of Monforte.
Her purpose.
Giorgia McAllister always knew she wanted to open a bakery. She grew up in the UK and took her first pastry course at age 12, setting herself on a most certain path. Over the next decade, she would go on to work under the likes of Mark Hix at Chop House and Claire Ptak at Violet in London, and with the team at All Are Welcome in Melbourne. ‘My approach to seasonality and small batch has largely been driven by the places I’ve worked,’ she says, reflecting on her time at these institutions. ‘I was strongly influenced by Claire's belief in not compromising on quality in order to grow. At All Are Welcome, I really fell in love with Viennoiserie [pastry made with laminated dough] and was able to nurture and hone those skills there.’
While she’s grateful for the experience gained in these roles, she couldn’t shake the influence of her mother, who has always run her own business back in London, and whose entrepreneurial spirit had imparted itself on Giorgia. ‘Because of her, it felt second nature for me to start something of my own,’ she says. To be able to make choices that reflected her values and to create something for others from a more personal place seemed paramount. In 2020, she opened the doors – or rather the window – to Monforte, a small kiosk bakery in Melbourne’s Carlton North, which despite having launched in the middle of a pandemic, gained cult status in a matter of weeks.
Being praised as one of the city’s best bakeries or having a large following has never been a motivator for Giorgia, though. Rather, her focus is on developing a sense of community and connecting people to the food they eat through putting quality above all else. This means supporting local producers and farmers. It means balancing the time-honoured techniques of pastry with a more adaptable and ethical approach to ingredients. It means small-batch production and limiting hours to maintain sustainable practices with staff, suppliers and product.
Her process.
Of course, this path isn’t the easiest one to take, but it is the only way she wants to do what she does.
For example, working with organic flour means product varies from season to season, affecting the outcome of a dough and making consistency a challenge. ‘There are so many variables in pastry, so this can be tricky to pinpoint,’ says Giorgia. ‘But it’s a priority for me to work with those natural variations, and in the end it results in a more flavourful product.’ In addition to constantly tweaking the dough, she and her team must also be agile in menu development, adapting to whatever fresh produce is available from suppliers. ‘Working out what flavours to use based on what we’ve got coming in is the most fun part for me,’ she says. ‘I usually have a vague idea of what I want a finished pastry to look like, and we work backwards from there to get to where we need to be. This is also a great way to help staff develop their skills within a business that isn’t driven by exponential growth.’
These learnings aren’t just something for the staff to takeaway. Regular customers have come to understand, expect and look forward to the ever-evolving case at Monforte. They have also become accustomed to the bakery’s hours – Thursday to Sunday until midday, or until stock sells out, which it always does. This model reminds people that they are directly connected to what they eat, that yield is not limitless and that they should question the steps between them and what’s on their plate.
‘It takes three days to make pastry,’ states Giorgia. ‘A lot of people don’t realise what’s involved, from start to finish, in something like a croissant. In operating the way we do, I hope we can shift how people are thinking about seasonality, about where their food comes from, about what something made by hand looks and tastes like versus something that’s been mass produced.’
This approach means Giorgia’s pastries are rarely conventional – you’ll find white peach and mozzarella danishes or welsh rarebit with pickled red onion & pangrattato stacked next to ricotta, chocolate and marsala pain suisse or chinotto, blood orange & chestnut tebirkes, and they all come and go quickly. You can, however, always get a traditional croissant, as well as the Monforte signature - a leatherwood honey croissant topped with flaky sea salt. Though innovation is a big part of Giorgia’s process, she aims to keep flavours paired back so the ingredients can shine. ‘At the end of the day, the pastries we make are not fussy. They’re meant to taste good and be enjoyed.’
Making pastry is, by nature, a production. Developing dough requires labor, time and resources. If undergone with care, quality and respect, as is done at Monforte, it can be a sustainable process in which the grower, producer and consumer all reap the benefits.
What keeps her inspired.
As is evident in her pastries, Giorgia is inspired by both the traditional and the modern. She often turns to old Italian recipes, as well as pastry coming out of Copenhagen, where many bakers are similarly looking to honour tradition without the constraints of antiquity. She frequently brings savoury applications to her craft to achieve a more balanced product. ‘I actually never bake when I’m at home, but I do cook a lot, and when I do, I think about our menu,’ she explains. ‘I look at what’s on the plate for dinner. If a flavour profile works there, it can translate to pastry.’
Lately, she’s been exploring new and classic cookbooks like Jeremy Fox's On Vegetables, Bar Tartine, The Italian Baker and La Cucina: Regional Italian Cooking. And of course, much of her inspiration comes from the beautiful produce she gets. ‘We’ve had a delivery of Victorian chestnut meal and honey arrive recently that has gone into our tebirkes and will feature in some upcoming cakes. My fruit and vegetable supplier has some Amalfi lemons and bergamots coming in soon. I've also found a pick-your-own organic farm just outside of Melbourne that I'm hoping to visit over spring and summer to pick berries, gooseberries and blackcurrants for the shop.’ As she rattles off some of her budding visions, it’s easy to see why people love what she’s doing at Monforte, and why they plan to support the little local bakery for a very long time.
