It can be fraught anointing someone as new talent when the person in question has as many runs on the board as Mischa Tropp. On the Melbourne food radar for more than a decade via pop-ups, a pub residency and a raved-about lockdown-era butter chicken business, Tropp has attracted increasing attention through his embrace of regional Indian food, in particular the cuisine of Kerala. His work has been integral to the surge of awareness of the diversity of India’s cuisine that’s become a feature of Melbourne’s dining culture in recent years, not least since he opened his wildly popular restaurant Toddy Shop in a Fitzroy backstreet late last year. That Toddy Shop (full name Toddy Shop by Marthanden Hotel, in a nod to the non-Anglicised form of his family name) landed so fully formed is tribute to the work Tropp has been doing, the research and the experimentation that has featured in his cooking with each iteration of his career so far.
It started with family influence. From the food his mother, whose roots are in Kerala, would cook at home and from his father, who sometimes made a living from cooking and often had young Mischa in the kitchen with him helping out. From there it was learning to cook commercially in European-style restaurants before a trip to India in 2014 opened his eyes to how little of the stupendous regional variety of Indian cooking was available in Melbourne.
One of Tropp’s great talents has been his ability to embrace traditional and regionally- specific Indian cooking while also approaching it from a thoroughly modern dining perspective. In an era when pop-ups had started to become a thing, he applied that model to his series of We are Kerala events and then to his residency at the Rochester Hotel in Melbourne’s inner-north. He was also fully across the wholistic approach to dining, making the visuals and the music as integral to what he was doing as the food itself. Far from bringing a theme park sensibility, his style is more about adding context, immersion and a sense of fun to the bright and vibrant flavours of the dishes he produces.
Toddy Shop is a beginning rather than a destination. There’s nothing static about it. The way Mischa Tropp keeps applying what he’s learnt thus far is why we can award him Best New Talent with easy conscience. Observing a talent like Tropp’s solidify and expand always feels new.
Find all finalists for the Gourmet Traveller Best New Talent Award here. To see the full list of winners in this year’s Gourmet Traveller Annual Restaurant Awards, head over here.
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