Last Word from Julian about Navi's eighth birthday

I met Georgia when I was 25, and I told her then that one day I would own my own degustation restaurant in the country. That was the plan. Somewhere quiet, just food and wine, and the people who cared enough to come and find us.

We committed to it fully; six years at Paringa Estate, down on the Peninsula. We loved every part of it. But in the end, we missed the city too much. Melbourne kept pulling us back, the way it does.

So we came home. We were looking for a rental in Yarraville, of all places, when we noticed a “for lease” sign going up on a shopfront and we were on our way to view the very house we were about to move into. That shopfront is where Navi sits today.

It was nothing back then, a shell of a place that we fitted out with the help of my brother who is Navi's architect.

We started with about 20 covers, four tables and a bar, and built it from there, piece by piece. At some point I simply couldn't settle on where that bar sat - it never felt right within the room - and around the same time, the space next door became available. That's the Lounge now.

One small frustration with a bar became an entire second room.

When I was 25, dreaming up that country restaurant, all I wanted was a single hat — a degustation room, my name on the door. That was the whole ambition. I never once imagined Chef of the Year, or two hats, or anything that's followed since. If you'd told 25-year-old me where this would end up, I'm not sure I'd have believed you.
Eight years on, and the thing I'm most excited about right now is truffles.

Truffle season holds nuances most people never see — how wet the ground needs to be, and at what point “wet enough” tips into “too much.” I was genuinely a little worried back in March about the conditions. You want rain, but the right kind, in the right measure, or the whole season shifts. This year is shaping up beautifully, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Simon Friend, who supplies us, loves talking truffles with me, because I think about them a little differently to most. A truffle isn't simply an ingredient I shave over a dish for effect — it's something I want to understand properly: where it sits within a season, what it's telling you, how it shifts week to week. That's the conversation I want to keep having, every single year.

So as we celebrate eight years of Navi — from a shell of a room with four tables, to the restaurant and the Lounge beside it, to two hats and far more than I ever set out to achieve — we're marking it the way that feels right: with truffle season in full swing, and a menu built around it.

Come and celebrate with us. Eight years in, and we're still just as taken with a good truffle as we were on day one.