'I was writing menus and couldn’t taste anything.' Restaurateur Shannon Martinez on rising to new challenges

In the early 2000s, Melbourne chef Shannon Martinez introduced a vegan parma to the menu at the East Brunswick Hotel that had punk rockers queuing up to dine before they hit the band room. 

“The pub hosted a lot of punk shows back then, and they’d all turn up to eat vegan food,” she says. “It went ballistic. That’s when I knew I was onto something.” 

Under her masterful spell, Martinez has elevated her plant-based hunch of all those years ago to fine dining at her Fitzroy restaurants Smith & Daughters and Smith & Deli.

While the parma is no longer on the menu, she’s found her niche, bringing mock replications to the table one tasty mouthful at a time. And try to find anyone more obsessed trying to make faux chicken from flour as she is.

Martinez has now brought her plant ambition to Lona Misa, a formal restaurant in South Yarra’s Ovolo Hotel. 

“It was such a bittersweet moment for me,” she says. “I was asked to start a new restaurant and thrilled to do it, and then a few months later got diagnosed with cancer.”

Martinez spent the first six months of 2020 undertaking 20 rounds of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Menus were the furthest thing from her mind.  

“My cancer coincided with COVID happening and it actually worked out well because I’m usually a million miles an hour and suddenly had to stop,” she says.

“Both businesses slowed right down. I couldn’t do anything but focus on myself at that point, but once I got through it, it was good to have something different to get my head around. Lona Misa was a chance to start something fresh and work in a new format. I was ready for it.” 

When Martinez opened Smith & Daughters in 2014, the focus was on creating Latin food with a nod to her Spanish heritage. She brings that passionate streak to Lona Misa; think oyster mushroom ceviche, crispy bechamel croquettes, a vegan take on blood sausage and vegan egg yolk too.

“I’ve actually gone very vegetable focused at Lona Misa because I feel clients will be more health conscious rather than straight up vegans this side of town,” she says.

“There will be some crazy meat replications on the menu too because that’s what I’m known for, but what I love about the Ovolo is their commitment to plant-based dining for 12 months. It’s across all their chains from Australia to Hong Kong and Bali. It’s a risk, and I like that attitude.”

The chef actually started out as a classically trained violinist, playing from the age of four. When she turned 20, Martinez went electric with her violin and found her happy place holding a bass guitar on stage.

She played with industrial metal band Voltera in the mid 2000s, finding success in the United States. She’s done a Vans Warped Tour and licensed their music to a Tony Hawk video game.

It was while living between Australia and the US and married to a professional skateboarder that Martinez found herself in the kitchen, cooking vegan dishes for bands on the road.  

“I never trained traditionally and never had a mentor,” she says. “I was always a lone ranger and vegan food fitted in with that. You also couldn’t find anything decent to eat if you were vegan. That’s what really inspired me.”

But for all her career high-fives – and there have been many – Martinez admits she was plagued with self-doubt when she lost her sense of taste due to the chemotherapy last year. 

“I was writing menus and couldn’t taste anything. It was a f—ing wild time,” she says. “It has come back now, but it put me in a space of self-doubt I have never felt before.”

Besides dealing with cancer and pandemic-related lockdowns and dining restrictions, Martinez was also going through a relationship breakdown.

She isn’t one to wallow in her misery, though. She turned her fury into a positive mindset and even wrote a comic book in lockdown, honouring her female friends who made her meals, took her to hospital appointments and kept her focused during a tough year.

Now she’s writing a chemotherapy patient cookbook (and looking for a publisher) and hopes to bring more awareness to plant-based dining as a ticket to better health. 

“The media has played a big part in changing people’s thinking about plant-based dining,” Martinez says. “When I started out, vegan food was still very fringe, not taken seriously and regarded as a hippy thing, definitely not in the world of fine dining. Slowly the attitude has shifted.

“More people have become aware of the environmental impact of eating meat; they’re aware of factory farming and know the health impact of eating it too.

“Not everyone is lining up to turn vegan or plant-based, but I’d love to see the day where it’s Meat Mondays and plant dining every other day. People are more conscious now than ever before.”

• Lona Misa \ Ovolo Hotel, 234 Toorak Rd, South Yarra

ovolohotels.com