It’s the end of lunch service when I go into and there’s a lot going on as I perch at the bar and watch the pastry chefs putting up beautiful desserts. Tim arrives clutching tweezers and we embark on a fascinating journey from Hamilton to Melbourne to Holland and back to Melbourne. Awesome.
Hi Tim, thanks for your time. I know how busy it is here.
My pleasure.
You’re a fellow Kiwi. ..
I am.
How long have you been a chef?
Since I was about 16, so…
[Danny, the pastry chef] 14 years.
[Back to Tim] Thanks, mate.
You started off in New Zealand?
I did. I started off in Hamilton. I come from there originally. I started off doing catering and stuff at the casino and then I moved to Wellington and worked at the Matterhorn and at Foxglove before coming here. I lived here for about five years and worked for Raymond Capaldi and then at Circa. Then I moved over to Holland where I worked at a couple of one stars and did a year at a three star before coming back here and working for Scott [Pickett]. He recruited me from over there.
Wow. That’s pretty good.
Through mutual friends.
You’re really hanging on to your tweezers there. Is that a really cheffy thing to be doing?
They give me a bit of support.
What made you go to Holland? Often people go to France or London? .
France or London are kinda the go tos aren’t they? I actually wanted to go to London. My missus is from Finland and we met here. When her working visa expired here, we wanted to move to Europe. She wanted to go back to Finland but it was a little bit too extremely cold for me. I wanted to go to London but she thought it was a little bit big. So we landed on Holland as an in-between and most people speak English.
There is a burgeoning food scene there. There’s obvious reasons why it’s busy for tourists in Holland, but over the last five years, all the really big museums have been redone, so the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the MoMA have all been redone and reopened in the last five years, so that has brought a big wave of tourists who are not there just for the drugs and prostitution. That kind of demographic tends to have more inclination to go out and eat at nice restaurants. So in the last five years, they’ve seen quite a big scene, especially in Amsterdam, really beautiful high end restaurants really pop up. Before that it was mostly monopolised by high end hotels. There were a lot of Michelin star restaurants but all in the vein of classic French uptight white linen kind of European hotel restaurants, if you know what I mean? Now there are more restaurateurs opening big venues that aren’t little nine table luxury places. Independent restaurateurs are opening quirky restaurants that are starting to get a bit of attention and a bit of love from the Michelin guide. That was our motivation going there. And also because you could speak English there.
It was great. And now I speak three languages. Before I used to only speak shit New Zealand English. That’s the thing.
Here and in New Zealand it’s not seen as important and over there everyone speaks at least two or three languages.
That’s the thing, you’d never be able to go to a McDonald’s in New Zealand and order in Dutch and have them understand. That’s maybe being a little unfair describing a McDonald’s worker as the lowest common denominator, but you can roll into a McDonalds there and the guy behind the counter is going to understand Dutch, Flemish, German and possibly English. And it’s expected. That was a beautiful thing in itself.
I started off as a pastry chef in a one star there, that was great, and then I moved out to Zwolle, a tiny little town with a beautiful three star restaurant that was number 31 in the world when I was there, called De Librije. That was an amazing experience. They do everything themselves there. They have a farm and massive dry ageing chambers with meat and ducks and we would go foraging and catch eels and serve the eels that night in the restaurant. It was a beautiful restaurant. I got to learn a lot. It was owned by a couple who had built it up over 30 years. I had to learn a lot about management, for one, but also the importance of produce and the process things go through, that you usually don’t get to see. You usually just see the end result. But there you got to see a lot of the steps along the way which was really fascinating.
I was going to ask you about the foraging because I know it’s really big in Holland.
Yes it is really big, Here you have the luxury of a lot of beautiful ingredients, especially in summer. You’ve got al the lush tropical fruits and stuff like that. Holland is a really big farming country, but in terms of fruit it is pretty diabolical outside of apples in winter. In summer you get a few berries. But what they do excellently is greenhouse produce which is not something I worked with there because it is more an export and money thing. But what they grow great wild and in their farms is leaves. A lot of the things you take for granted like rocket or watercress, it is packed with so much flavour over there. So those were the sorts of things we would forage for. Which sounds a bit dull but when they are packed with so much flavour. It’s all that estuary and reclaimed land from the sea. It’s really low under sea level reclaimed land so all those shrubs that grow around the water are big and prevalent there.
And nutrient dense I guess.
Exactly. Full of flavour.
Are any of the things you learned over there able to be used here?
For sure. I mean, it’s been a pretty busy start so some of it has just been survival mode, but a lot of the skill set remains the same, despite it being a different environment. It’s the attention to detail, the attention you give to your staff, it’s the way you approach making a new dish. All those little parts remain the same. It’s about care, I think that’s the major thing I learned over there.
It’s important isn’t it? And there is obviously a lot more to being a head chef than just cooking; all those things you just mentioned come into play. And you’re in the open here as well.
Yeah, you have to mind your ps and qs a little bit.
You can’t be a shouty chef.
Well we try our best not to be.
So you worked in with Scott to create the menu?
Yeah sure. We had a lot of help also from Steve Nairn, the chef at ESP, the three of us and Danny our pastry chef spent a lot of time in R & D, I suppose you could call it and especially in production leading up to the opening of this event…restaurant.
I reckon it is an event. It’s an event every day here, I imagine.
It has been. We had about eight or nine weeks before we opened. We had all the rigs set up, all the fire rigs set up in a warehouse out in Thomastown just cooking hard. We had the ESP kitchen early in the morning and late at night so we were working weird hours where we would start producing our stocks and sauces and a huge amount of pickled vegetables, trying to fill the fridges here so we could hit the ground running which we did, luckily. Well, not luckily, it was due to hard work.
Absolutely and it’s good you have that team approach.
I’m really lucky with the senior guys I’ve had around me. I’ve had Danny and my sous chef, Matt who I worked with and in New Zealand at Matterhorn, so we’ve known each other for about nine years. Tommy our other sous chef who works in the production kitchen downstairs came from ESP and has been on the project longer than all of us, really, in different ways. I’ve been really lucky to have that senior team around me. They are all absolute rock stars, really dedicated, really hard working, really organised. It makes my job a whole lot easier.
You have to make realistic goals and strive to achieve them. Push yourself. Loving it is probably the easiest part. But loving it after 80 hours is tougher, isn’t it? That’s what separates those who stay and those who leave.
Had you cooked with fire before in this way?
Sure. Not on this scale. Again, it’s the same as what we were saying before. The medium changes a little bit, but a lot of the skills you learn earlier on in your career remain the same. The initial growing pain of controlling your fire, being able to control it so you have one part that’s really hot, one part that’s a little bit cooler and one part that is just gentle, gentle and you also have a place where you are just loading up your charcoal throughout the night so that you’ve always got good charcoal to work with. You have to play around with different types of wood; all of them have slightly different aromas. Some are very bitter at high at heat, some respond to high heat better. All of that takes a little while to get your head around. But we did a lot of that in R & D and created cheat sheets for the guys for when we started. All those things took a little while to work out but we tried to get those systems in place before we even opened the doors and trouble-shooted where there might be issues and how we were going to run the systems because everyone started on the same day other than that senior team. We had to have that information ready for them so we could just instruct them and not find out as we went.
We’ve tweaked a few things but most of it has just remained the way we thought it would. That’s just from taking some educated guesses and some calculated risks. For a guy starting here, it’s a growing pain of about a week to two weeks before they are on top of how to control the fire. The mistakes have never been too huge. The worst thing that can happen is that you get caught at the end of the night and you’ve let your embers die down and then you get a cheeky last check and it takes a while to cook. It’s not ideal but as far as problems go, it’s ok. And that’s getting less and less as the guys are getting more familiar with the rigs. The rest of the cooking techniques remain the same. The big difference is there are no pans so you can’t baste anything. But we get flavour into our food in different ways. We have the most amazing seasoning in the world with the wood.
That’s interesting. I feel as though you would have hit the ground running because it as so heralded before it opened as anything Scott opens is.
It has been busy.
What sort of volumes are you doing? Lunch service seems to be huge as well as dinner.
We’re doing probably around 200 covers a day and more because we have an event space downstairs. Last Saturday we did 250 covers. It has really been like that since Day 4. It’s been really busy.
How do you sustain that? Your mind must be on a lot of different things all at once. Clearly to get to where you have and it sounds as though you’ve had a really lovely pathway, I mean you’ve worked really hard…
Nah it’s been pretty easy…
I don’t mean easy, I mean you’ve worked in really good places all along the way and clearly you had something from the start and you’ve sustained that, so what do you think it is that makes a chef succeed like that?
It’s about hard work and a little bit of self belief, I guess. Every job is going to have its little hiccups and every restaurant has things that grind you the wrong way. Even working at a three star where you assume that everything is going to be perfect. After working there for six months, little things are still repetitive. You do the same things every day. There’s no over-glamourised thing where you’re learning something new every single day. You can’t let that bring you down. You have to make realistic goals and strive to achieve them. Push yourself, that’s about it.
You obviously love it as well.
Exactly. That’s a pretty important thing but I don’t think that’s a step, that’s something that is already there. I think it would be hard to learn to love it.
I see what you’re saying. You have that and then you put in the work behind it.
Exactly. Loving it is probably the easiest part. But loving it after 80 hours is tougher, isn’t it? That’s what separates those who stay and those who leave.
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