Good Food Month Melbourne: Playful chefs put the fun into dining

Picture this: you're in a darkened movie theatre watching a film about a chef on the path to retirement. Perhaps you're inspired. More likely you're hungry. Conveniently, a chef hands you a snack as if they've just stepped straight out of the screen.

Now maybe you're wearing a blindfold in an art studio and feeling across a plate to bits of your dessert. Or perhaps you're in a shed with a fistful of mussels in one hand and a chef to your left who is enthusiastically setting giant piles of pine needles on fire while people stand and watch, like members of a delicious cult.

Welcome to dining in 2015. It's hands-on, sometimes dirty and often a little bit weird.

The above scenarios are all real events – all taking place in November as part of Good Food Month. The first, a screening at Cinema Nova of Step Up to the Plate (a documentary about legendary chef Michel Bras), which will see four of Melbourne's top chefs recreating dishes of their mentors including Rene Redzepi​ and Bras himself. The mussels? That's a French eclade de moules​ (a pine-smoked mussel party) being cooked by Hobart chef David Moyle, of Franklin Restaurant.

Just as the media industry was forced to change its tack in recent years, to invite readers into the conversation, so too chefs are reviewing how they interact with diners or even get their attention in a highly competitive market.

Food festivals and pop-ups have become so prolific that expectations have been drastically raised. No longer content to be fed, or even entertained, diners want in on the action.

Look to the New York Food Festival, or to MONA FOMA​ in Hobart and you're far more likely to see big-name chefs holding midnight parties rather than serving a 17-course degustation for $500.

There are two ways to look at the phenomenon. You could say we've become a dining nation with ADD, unable to hold focus. This wouldn't be a unfair statement.

On the other hand, you could look at it as an attempt by both diners and chefs to actively engage with each other and remove the boundary that has always existed between them.

"We cook for the public, but there's always been this attitude of 'us and them'," says Ryan Flaherty, the chef-owner of hatted Richmond restaurant Mister Jennings, "but it's a symbiotic relationship."

Flaherty will hosting "Mister Jennings on Demand" in November, a lunch where he'll design every dish based on whatever diners send to him via Instagram and Twitter, be it song lyrics, art, pictures of sneakers – whatever inspires them.

"We can get stuck doing the same thing day in day out," Flaherty says. "Why not use the people who are going to sit down and eat as inspiration? I can learn as much from them as they will from me."

The shift isn't just for the benefit of diners.

Ben Shewry, the chef-owner of world-renowned Attica in Ripponlea, started his own mini food festival last year. Inspired by overseas chef festivals like MAD and Cook it Raw, which made a huge difference to Shewry at a time when he was struggling, Shewry's WAW festival united chefs for paintball, talks (which Shewry held for free) and a lunch that saw diners hiking all around Ripponlea estate for each dish.

Shewry says, "Personally I look for events that are a two-way conversation. Events need to be fun and have meaning for the people attending. I don't want to just stand in a restaurant or on a stage anymore. I think we've evolved beyond that."

Amen.

Good Food Month, presented by Citi runs from November 1-30. Find more information and tickets to Mister Jennings on Demand, Step Up to the Plate, and Eclade de Moyle, at goodfoodmonth.com