When Broadsheet meets Iain Hewitson at Bistra on a Friday morning, one thing is noticeably missing. The chef, better known as “Huey”, is without his signature suspenders, an item that keeps him recognisable, like Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island’s bucket hat and red pyjama shirt, Hewitson mentions. “I only wear braces for film,” he explains (though they’re in his bag in the event that someone asks him to put them on). 

But we’re here to talk about restaurants, damn it. Specifically, Clichy, the Collingwood fine diner he co-founded in 1977 with Sigmund Jorgensen, a food critic best known for his involvement in the Montsalvat artist community. Clichy closed in 1982, but Hewitson and the team from Carlton restaurant Bistra will bring it back to life for four nights, from Monday March 23 to Thursday March 26, as part of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival.

Emblazoned at the front of the original Clichy was the tagline, “original food in the French manner”. It wasn’t a traditional French restaurant; instead, the team used Australian ingredients, French techniques and had a looseness around what they served. One time, Hewitson even put on marinated tuna with a Thai-style slaw inspired by Mogens Bay Esbensen, a Danish-born Sydney-based chef who was known for Thai cooking. “But it didn’t work,” says Hewitson of the Southeast Asian addition. “Was far too ahead of its time.”

At the reborn Clichy, dishes will come back with “a bit of poetic licence”. He’s not jumping into the kitchen, but has handed over his recipes to Bistra chef Alex Nishizawa. A four-course menu will have less offal than Clichy of the past – “Australians in those days ate lots of offal” – but there will be a chocolate and nut gateaux he says ex-staff and customers always request.

The event coincides with the release of Hewitson’s memoir, Who Called the Cook a Bastard?, which details his time from folk singer to chef, and eventually television personality. The self-published title is a collaboration between Hewitson, his wife Ruth Krawat and Melbourne design collective TCYK.

TCYK designed the book and is managing the print run. It also connected Hewitson with Bistra. The restaurant’s two dining rooms will be transformed with two-storey-high fabric sculptures that are a palimpsest of Clichy and Bistra content. 

A generation of people who grew up watching Hewitson on television may know very little about his day as a restaurant chef. Over his career, Hewitson owned more than 10 restaurants, including Tolarno Bar & Bistro in St Kilda, Big Huey’s Diner in South Melbourne, and Fleurie in Toorak. 

Clichy was the first spot he was part of from day one. “They were lovely times. Why they were so good was, it was the days that being in the restaurant business was a bit of fun. It wasn’t all about, ‘Jesus, it’s going to be tough to make a buck’. It was easier. And the [front-of-house] staff were interested, but they were not talking like, ‘this is going to be my career for the rest of my life’. It was a very interesting, very different era.”

The event is a fun return to restaurants for Hewitson, who stepped away from television in 2019. “Towards the end, television got to the stage where we were doing five recipes every day, and there was no fun in it.” But his daughter suggested he get online. “She came to me and said to do it, but she said, ‘no one will know you, dad, because it’s a young persons’ site’. Instantly we had all these people who said things like, ‘we thought you were dead’. I got lots of those.”

But he’s nonplussed, and happy to be finding joy in front of the camera again. “It’s like back to the old days of television – warts and all and a bit of fun.”

Clichy will be reborn at Bistra in Carlton from Monday March 23 to Thursday March 26. Bookings essential.