All accounts of Two Faces acknowledge the restaurant as one of the most significant influences on Melbourne’s culinary scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. It was founded in 1960 by Hermann Schneider, a Swiss chef who had originally come to Melbourne to cook at the Olympic Village in 1956.
Born in Baden, Switzerland, in 1936, Schneider had worked first as a baker’s assistant, then did an apprenticeship as a cook. He took seasonal jobs at ski resorts and summer resorts, before a colleague drew his attention to a Victorian Government advertisement seeking chefs for the Olympic Games. Arriving in Melbourne, he was employed in the kitchen at the Heidelberg village catering for the French, Belgian, Swiss and Luxembourg teams. (As it happened, the Swiss team did not compete as Switzerland was boycotting the Melbourne Olympics because of the participation of the Soviet Union, which had brutally crushed the Hungarian Revolution earlier that year).
After the Games, Schneider was convinced by friends to remain in Melbourne. He worked at several hotels and restaurants, beginning with the Chevron Hotel, then a fashionable venue in St Kilda Road. In a 2001 interview, he recalled the sameness that characterised Australian menus at the time:
In every hotel you had their carpetbag steak. It was very, very restricted. Wherever you walked there were the same dishes served. That was very, very limiting in a certain way. And even the vegetables—there were firstly very few vegetables served. If you went to a pub you got peas and carrots, or those shredded beans. They used to have the bean shredder. If you went to a finer restaurant you may’ve got spinach. But that’s all you ever got—spinach, because that was the fashionable restaurant vegetable.
In 1960, with backing from a hotelier friend, Harry Young, Schneider opened Two Faces. It had previously been an unsuccessful theatre restaurant in a basement in Darling Street, South Yarra – a fashionable inner suburb. Its name came from the traditional tragedy and comedy masks often used as a symbol for theatre. Schneider retained the name, redecorated the premises and offered Swiss and French cuisine.
For the first two years, he had no liquor licence, but continued to build the business with a series of advertisements in the society pages highlighting his weekly specials. In July 1962, he could finally announce that Two Faces was fully licensed.
Reading restaurant reviews, it’s clear that the menu at Two Faces was anything but restricted and became even more refined over the years. The fondue, cassoulet with saeurkraut, and Pilaff Colonial of the 1960s gave way to the casserole of marinated cubes of venison in red wine and black currants, and pot roast of wild duck in a rich sauce with brandied grapes and creamed turnips of the 1970s.
One of the foundation dishes that remained on the menu, and one that I chose on several occasions at Two Faces, was the Geschnetzeltes with Roesti, described as “Finely sliced vealsteak served in a creamy white wine sauce with mushrooms. Swiss fried potatoes and salad as a garnish.” In the days before hash browns, the Roesti was a treat. A crispy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside patty made from shredded potato and fried in butter to a golden brown.
Schneider’s food was not cuisine minceur. Lavish amounts of cream and butter featured in many recipes. Game of all kinds made a frequent appearance, often teamed with fruit. Reviewing the restaurant for The Age in 1986, Rita Erlich wrote:
I had the roasted squab pigeon with preserved comquats and blackcurrants and a cognac sauce… I really do not care for the combination of fruit and meat, because the fruit is usually too sweet and overpowering. But this was wonderful, since the fruit was rather tart and added a delicious complexity to the balance of flavours.
In her later book Melbourne by Menu, Erlich described overcoming similar misgivings about another Two Faces dish, Quail with Cherries. ” I’d never understood until then why fruit was served with game, but this dish explained it to me,” she wrote.
In 1987, Schneider and his Australian wife, Faye, moved Two Faces to the Mornington Peninsula when they became partners in a new hospitality venture. Delgany was envisaged as a luxury country-house hotel with a fine dining restaurant. The Darling Street premises, under new ownership, became Trade Winds, specialising in North Queensland food. As far as I know, it sank without a trace. The Delgany venture had mixed success and, in 1994, the Schneiders left to run a restaurant at Arthur’s Seat, a hilltop overlooking Port Phillip Bay, but the business collapsed in 2003 when the chairlift to the peak broke down.
The lasting legacy of Two Faces was the number of Melbourne chefs who served their apprenticeship under Hermann Schneider. Among them were Guy Grossi, Luke Mangan and Teage Ezard, all of whom went on to run restaurants of renown. Schneider died in 2001.