Two Sri Lankan hearths are going into a Melbourne kitchen

Gayan Pieris is building a dara lipa and a poranuwa into the kitchen at Agnii in Windsor, bringing two traditional Sri Lankan ways of cooking with fire into a modern Melbourne restaurant

Live fire is familiar territory in Australian restaurants.

Firedoor in Sydney, Arkhé in Adelaide, Manuka in Fremantle and Embla in Melbourne have all helped make wood, charcoal and embers a visible part of contemporary Australian cooking. Internationally, Asador Etxebarri has been one of the most influential modern examples of what a restaurant can do with fire.

What Gayan Pieris is building at Agnii comes from a different tradition.

The Sri Lankan-born chef behind Many Little in Red Hill is fitting his new Windsor kitchen with a dara lipa, an open clay hearth used to cook in earthenware pots, and a poranuwa, an enclosed hearth closer in function to an oven or kiln.

Both have deep roots in Sri Lankan cooking.

Gayan has said publicly that he does not believe the setup has been used in a commercial restaurant kitchen before.

Whether it proves to be an Australian first is difficult to verify.

The more interesting question for chefs is how these methods translate from a traditional kitchen into restaurant service.

What a clay hearth asks of a kitchen

Cooking in clay is not a like-for-like replacement for cooking in steel.

Gayan believes repeated use changes the pots themselves. Over time, he says, they develop their own character, something his family tradition describes as adding soul to the vessel.

For a professional kitchen, that creates a very different relationship with the equipment.

Earthenware pots used over fire require different handling from stainless steel, particularly around temperature changes and heat retention.

Then there is the fire itself.

A dara lipa does not give a chef a numbered setting to return to. Heat is managed through the fire, the condition and amount of fuel, the position of the pot and the judgement of the person cooking.

Agnii plans to burn rivergum and applewood.

For a brigade accustomed to induction, gas or a conventional solid-fuel grill, that changes the rhythm of the section. The cook is not simply controlling the food. They are managing the heat source and the vessel at the same time.

The poranuwa is more than an oven

The enclosed hearth also has a role beyond cooking dishes during service.

At Agnii, Gayan plans to use the poranuwa in the production of umbalakada, the intensely savoury dried fish used throughout Sri Lankan cooking.

Bonito or tuna will be hung for days, losing moisture and taking on smoke before being used to add depth to sambals and curries.

Gayan has compared the result to Japanese katsuobushi. The traditions are different, but both demonstrate what happens when fish is transformed through drying and smoke into an ingredient used for concentrated savoury flavour.

Bananas and pineapples will also be hung in the poranuwa to take on smoke before being used elsewhere on the menu.

For chefs, that makes the hearth interesting as a production tool as much as a cooking one.

It introduces another timeline into the kitchen. Some work happens in minutes during service. Other ingredients may spend days over or around the hearth before they are ready to use.

Regional cooking, not national shorthand

The fire is only part of what Gayan is trying to bring into the restaurant.

Agnii's menu will focus heavily on the cooking of Kandy and central Sri Lanka rather than attempting to represent the entire country on one menu.

Finger millet, sesame and cassava will feature prominently, while Gayan plans to source spices and kithul palm syrup directly from Sri Lanka and continue working with Polperro Farm and other Mornington Peninsula growers for vegetables.

One dish he has outlined is thalapa, made from finger millet and served with a slow-cooked stew of seven legumes.

The millet preparation sits somewhere between a puree and a porridge in texture, before being finished with smoke-dried venison.

It is a useful example of what sits behind the restaurant's use of fire.

The dara lipa and poranuwa are not being introduced simply because open fire looks good from the dining room. They belong to the cooking Gayan is trying to reproduce and reinterpret.

A different way of thinking about fire

Agnii has not yet had to make any of this work through months of restaurant service.

That will be the real test.

Traditional methods do not automatically become easier when they are moved into a professional kitchen. They have to coexist with prep lists, consistency, food safety, staffing and the pressure of getting every table fed at the right time.

That is also what makes Agnii worth watching.

Much of contemporary restaurant fire cooking in Australia has centred on grills, embers and radiant heat.

Gayan is putting the emphasis somewhere else: clay vessels, enclosed heat, smoke and preservation.

If those methods can be made to work at restaurant pace, Agnii could broaden the way Australian chefs think about cooking with fire.

Not simply as something to grill over, but as a complete system for cooking, preserving and building flavour. Agnii is opening soon at 105 Chapel Street, Windsor.