© Copyright SALife Magazine 2006
THE
I N T E R V I E W
INTERVIEWER NIGEL HOPKINS PHOTOGRAPHER TONY LEWIS
Vili
milisits
the whole
world in
his hands
W
HEN IT CAME TO MAKING THE PERFECT
pastie, young Vili Milisits failed at the first hurdle.
Forget what you’ve been told about the legend of
Cornish pasties being miners’ lunches. The key
attribute of the perfect Australian pastie was its
ability to be eaten with one hand while driving on a bumpy road, filled
to the brim with tomato sauce, without collapsing. None of that flaky
pastry stuff, either. Although the vehicle might be littered with old Coke
cans and empty iced coffee cartons, the perfect Australian pastie had to
stay intact so that every crumb of it could be devoured. No wasted flakes
of pastry landing on the King Gees en route to the floor. Vili’s first pasties
failed on every front but, by crikey, they tasted great.
For many customers, their first exposure to Vili’s European
interpretation of a pastie was at Olga’s Cakes, his sister’s café in Leigh
St, in the mid 1980s. The were clad in soft, flaky, yellow pastry and
filled with a hot, peppery mix of meat and vegetables – these were the
days when “homemade” pies and pasties were all the rage, almost as
a protest against the dull, boring, mass-produced item.
“
NOT A BAD CLAIM FOR A HYPERACTIVE
HUNGARIAN BAKER WHO CELEBRATED
OBTAINING HIS DRIVING LICENCE AT THE
AGE OF 16 BY BUYING A HOTTED UP AUSTIN
A40 THAT COULD FLY AT 95MPH (150KM/H).
HE HASN’T SLOWED DOWN SINCE.
”
Vili clearly recalls the first commercial pastie he tasted, bought
outside the Albion Hotel in Churchill Rd while his older brothers
were inside having a drink. “It cost me ninepence (18c) and I wanted
my money back,” he says. “It tasted terrible. Bland and greasy, with
thick, doughy pastry, and it smelled of mutton. It stank.”
As a European, he hated mutton. Goat or horse were OK, but
not sheep. He still won’t put lamb or mutton into his pies or pasties,
and he once fired a major meat supplier because he slipped some
mutton into the mix to make up the weight.
© Copyright SALife Magazine 2006
49
“I put real flaky pastry top and bottom on my pies and pasties,”
he says, “and added spices – pepper, chilli and garlic. At first people
said yuck, they stink and they taste too hot. They were not an instant
success, but Australian culture was changing and tastes were
broadening. If I can lay claim to anything, I revolutionised Australia’s
pie and pastie industry. I broke the rules.”
Not a bad claim for a hyperactive Hungarian baker who
celebrated obtaining his driver’s licence at the age of 16 by buying a
hotted up Austin A40 that could fly at 95mph (150km/h). He hasn’t
slowed down since.
“He’s gone from zero to hero,” says his friend Michael Pratt, who
claims to have virtually discovered Vili when, as marketing director of
the Norwood Football Club, he organised a pie and pastie fundraising
day at the club and arranged for Vili to provide the goods. “Vili was
known then as a ‘home brand’ product with virtually no retail
marketing outlet,” Pratt says. “I introduced him to Andrew Killey from
KWP! Advertising and suddenly everything started to take off.
“
LEASING EQUIPMENT AND EMPLOYING HIS
FIANCÉE, ENFIELD GIRL ROSEMARY, AND
HIS MOTHER TO WORK PART-TIME, HE
STARTED A HIGH QUALITY CONTINENTAL
CAKE BAKERY. HE HAD TO SELL THE HOT
AUSTIN A40 TO BUY A STATION WAGON
AND HIS FIRST WEEK’S STOCK.
”
50
“Vili is a self-taught financial genius. He’s become a brilliant
businessman and, like so many other post-war European refugees, we
have to ask ourselves how lucky we are that he came here.”
He nearly didn’t. Vili’s parents were both chefs in the Hungarian
town of Narda, near the Austrian border. After the 1956 Hungarian
uprising, more than 900,000 Hungarians became refugees. “We were
the first post-war refugees and no-one wanted us,” Vili says. “First we
went to Austria, then Italy, France and England. We hoped to go to
America, but the entry queue was too long. It was much faster getting
into Australia, even though we didn’t know where it was.”
Vili was 10 when his family – parents, seven children and two
grandchildren – took the 28 day voyage to Australia, arriving in January
1958. His mother wept all the way from Melbourne to Adelaide, he
says, at the sight of what appeared to her to be desert.
Home became a single fronted cottage in Carrington St in the
city. Vili got as far as first year high school until, at the age of 14, he
was told he had to go to work. He got a job as an apprentice
continental pastry chef with Kazzy Ujvari, whose Kazzy’s Cake Shop
remains a landmark at Burnside.
“I was taught well and was determined to go the distance. I
needed the knowledge,” Vili says. At 18 he’d finished his apprenticeship, having learned to make every sort of continental cake imaginable,
and with $50 capital started his own business. He still has a healthy
distaste for bankers after they refused to lend him money to start the
business because he was too young.
Leasing equipment and employing his fiancée, Enfield girl
Rosemary, and his mother to work part-time, he started a high quality
continental cake bakery. He had to sell the hot Austin A40 to buy a
station wagon and his first week’s stock.
“I made the cakes and delivered them, and when I made $64 in
my first week, I thought I was a millionaire,” Vili says. For the next 10
years he made only continental cakes, employing up to 15 people.
When his older European customers started dying, he realised he had
© Copyright SALife Magazine 2006
to make more Australian-styled fare and find newer generations of
customers, which started him making those home-style pies and
pasties in 1978.
A lot was changing for Vili through those years. At the age of 20
he’d moved to a small cottage at 14 Manchester St, Mile End. He told
Rosemary it was their new home, but in fact it was his new bakery,
with a few rooms at the front in which they could live and his bakery
in the backyard. Vili now owns 13 properties in Manchester St, as
well as leasing a large warehouse across the road from his bakery.
“Sixteen years ago I realised I had to make a big shift,” he says. “I had
to go the whole hog or sell out, so I invested millions of dollars
building a bakery to standards not seen here before, with stainless
steel running three metres up the walls and the highest standards of
hygiene possible.”
Starting with 27 employees, it took Vili more than five years to use
up all his new factory space. He now has 200 employees in Adelaide
and 70 more at bakeries in Melbourne and Sydney. In Manchester St, he
has kept buying properties and now even owns the corner block facing
South Rd, creating a very visible “home of Vili’s”.
Vili initially took his message to the streets, scattering 600 A-frame
signs through the city streets, all with a big blue “V” insignia, inviting
diners to “taste the difference”. And there was a difference. The pies and
pasties remain hand-made – there’s no magical machine pumping them
out. Vili, ever the baker, often puts in shifts in his bakery.
His pasties – which he boasts contain meat and six vegetables, not
three veg like the English – consume six tonnes of pumpkins, 12 tonnes
of potatoes and 1800 tonnes of flour a week, and millions of dollars
worth of beef each year.
Export markets have grown fast: “I have the Japanese eating pies –
they like the beef, steak and mushroom, and curry chicken varieties,” he
says. “Austrians and Germans like the gamey flavour of kangaroo pies.
We sent beef pies to Twickenham Stadium in London, and they now
buy 30,000 cocktail pies each time they have a game – they love the beef
satay pies best of all. Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand
and Cambodia are taking half a million pies a year. It’s quite invigorating
when you find that someone likes something you never thought they’d
eat. I’ve been on a learning curve all my life.”
Vili now has FDA approval to sell pies in the US, which was one
of the toughest barriers to overcome, and is talking with major chains
that control up to 850 stores: “They all ask ‘what’s your capacity – can
you do 30 containers?’ It’s another buzz altogether. There’s been nothing
new in catering in America for 30 years and I think Australian pies could
make a breakthrough. If people say something’s too hard, well I just say
it’s a challenge. I hate to be bored. I see hard as a challenge.”
Vili’s Café in Manchester St was a challenge. He was told he was
nuts to start a 24-hour, seven-day café in the depths of Mile End. Now
he describes the café as “guinea pig territory”, where he tries out his
latest pie inventions. But it wasn’t just the opportunity to taste a really
fresh pie or pastie that drew the customers; it was also licensed – with
Vili putting wines from his own cellar on the list at bargain prices, such
as a Wynn’s John Riddoch Cabernet Sauvignon for $4.50 a glass.
In the cafe’s early years there would also be whiting and snapper
from his fishing forays off Port Victoria, a much loved hobby he rarely
has time for now. Two weeks before this interview he went out for the
first time in a year: 28 snapper, 29 whiting – all of them more than
50cm. Vili can hardly stop laughing at the memory.
With his two children – son Simon, 36, and daughter Alison, 28 –
now involved in the business, Vili says the hard work has now been
done and he has a little more time to give something back to the
community. He’s heavily involved with Rosemary in charity work, often
using their sprawling home Northgate House, which previously had been
a function centre, for charity functions. They were jointly awarded an
Order of Australia Medal (OAM) last year for their charity work.
“I never thought I’d be in a position to help anyone else,” says Vili.
“It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling – and that’s a feeling I never thought
I’d have. I could have retired at 45 but I’m terrified of being bored. It’s
a buzz, business is a buzz, and when it loses its buzz, that’s when I’ll call
it a day.”