Jojo Parkinson

Hi Jojo, thank you for my delicious matcha. It’s your signature matcha.

We call it Matcha on a cloud. The matcha that we use is ceremonial grade. It’s really, very good matcha.

It’s got a nice coconut refreshing flavour as well. We’re sitting at the bottom of Odette house and there are a few different levels. So tell me about Odette house.

The whole building is called Odette House. We are open for all day dining. We are open from breakfast to brunch, lunch and dinner. We operate on weekdays 10.30 to 3.30 and then Saturday and Sunday we open around 8 o’clock in the morning because locals come out to have breakfast in the morning, and dinner time we operate the Uday restaurant. We have limited seats in Uday, so on Friday, Saturday or Sunday if we have big bookings, we set up Odette House to be the dining room as well. Above Uday, we have a roof top bar. The roof top bar at the moment because of winter, we open on Friday, Saturday, Sunday until the weather gets better, then maybe Thursday as well. The roof top is really, really nice and you can see the city wheel and sunset. We also have an outside area as well. We have a plan to do a dog cafe in that corner. Because I love dogs and I have a dog myself. It’s really hard to find like a dog friendly place with very good food and worthy Asian food. So I thought, okay, I will do that, but I’m waiting for warmer weather. A lot of people have a dog here and me as well. I want to bring my own dog here as well. That’s the plan for the next couple of months when the weather is warmer.

It’s a big venue. How many does it seat?

Here in Odette, we have about 80. So but we can organise functions for 120, with standing room. 60 to 80 seated is comfortable. For the restaurant, we have about 45 to 50.

And why Spotswood?

To be honest, I didn’t know Spotswood before. The landlord is a friend of a friend of mine, and he went to have my food at one of my restaurants and then he said, okay, I have the spot for you; I want you to have a look. I wasn’t sure, because I have always had a business in shopping centres. I drove all around here and went to other restaurants in the area. And I thought we could do something different or do something to give to the community a nice place where locals want to hang out. When I saw the roof top, I said, that’s it.

Having a rooftop and having that view from this side of town, that’s amazing. No one else has that.

That’s the thing. When we were doing the fit out, I was here and I could see the fireworks from here. In the city, you can’t see them all. But from here, you see everything.

All my team have been with me at least, eight or nine years. We don’t always agree. They sometimes say I’m bossy. I am bossy in that I am picky in all the details. Sometimes that makes the job harder but, they get used to it. But the team is very important for me. I can’t be a success without them. So when I talk about myself, I give them the credit, that is very important for me.

Jojo Parkinson, Odette House

I read that the food is Asian fusion. What do you mean by that?

I say Asian cuisine. Sometimes, if you say fusion, it’s tiny things, too tiny. But I say Asian cuisine. Because I’ve had Thai restaurants for almost 10 years now. When I put Thai in the name of the restaurant, is so hard to create a different menu. Here you can find Japanese food, you can find a little Malaysian food as a curry or Chinese food, like the dumpling or a bun or something like that. I think it allows for more variety. That’s why we don’t use the word Thai, but most of the menu at Odette, 60% is Thai food. The rest is Japanese, Malaysian, Chinese. We mix and match. We make Szechuan sauce with the dumplings in our own style. Even in Odette House for breakfast, we have pie as well. We have a beef cheek pie, it’s very popular. If I say, oh, this is Thai, I can’t just offer another menu to the customer.

It gives you a greater scope, doesn’t it, to experiment with different things, and also, I guess to see what this community likes and what the food kind of foods that choose. How long have you been open?

About nine weeks now. It’s really young. Seems like I just gave birth to this baby. So I need them to go through crying, walking and running. So at the moment, it’s just crawling. Most of my customers, after they try the food, they come back and they bring all their friends and I appreciate that.

The menu is huge with some small dishes, bigger plates. And the chef’s collection are they more like the signature dishes? Then there’s curry and soup and salads, there’s a lot there. The Feed Me menu would always be my favourite, because I don’t like to decide.

Normally we just ask what you prefer, what kind of food you like, and then it’s easy for me to choose dishes.

If someone had to feed Me menu tonight, what would you do?

I will ask first if they have allergies, and if they don’t have any allergy issue. The larb chicken is one of my recipes which is really nice. We make larb first and wrap in a spring roll. It’s different, its flavour is very nice. Everyone knows Szechuan sauce, but this one, we do with a twist with Thai and Chinese is really nice. It’s not overpowering. A very popular one is satay chicken we don’t do satay chicken on a stick, we roast the whole chicken and we marinate it for a day and then sous vide it. It is very, very juicy and very, very good. That’s a really popular one. All the curries that you see, we make our own chilli paste from scratch. Even the Tom Yum, we use prawn shells, prawn head with herbs and we cook for three, four hours to get that Tom Yum broth. We don’t just get the jar and put in water. Everything here is made from scratch. I’m very proud of my team and they’re really good. All my team have been with me at least, eight or nine years.

So they’re very loyal to you? You are obviously a great person to work with.

We don’t always agree. They sometimes say I’m bossy. I am bossy in that I am picky in all the details. Sometimes that makes the job harder but, they get used to it. But the team is very important for me. I can’t be a success without them. So when I talk about myself, I give them the credit, that is very important for me.

It’s such an extensive menu. I don’t know how anyone would decide, you definitely would want to do to the Feed Me. Desserts as well.

We make the sago with rose water and lychees. It’s not overpowering. It’s really light, when you eat it, you can’t stop eating it. Because the texture is right. And we serve it as a cold dessert, not a warm dessert. Also, we have a warm dessert, a Black sticky rice. We use a coconut mousse and normally Thai food, if a dessert is sweet, we make the coconut a bit saltier. You’re supposed to mix together to get the flavour right.

I know that you started out as a passionate home cook. How did you did you get from your kitchen into restaurants?

When I was young, my mum and my grandmum always told me I had to to help them in the kitchen because otherwise I’d be outdoors fishing and doing activities girls don’t do. So they tried to put me in the kitchen. I learned from them most of the time. And then after that, I loved cooking, I had to live by myself when I was studying. I had to learn how to cook. My friend told me my food is nice, why don’t I try to open restaurant? I said, no, no, it’s hard work. No, it’s really, really hard work. I don’t want to do it because I was working long hours when I came here and I was a nurse as well. Until one day, it’s a coincidence my business partner from Thai Alley, asked me if I wanted to do a restaurant, he just taught me how to do it. And then I just used all the thing that I’d like to make at home. And I got a good team to say, hey, this is the one I want, the favourite I want, how can we do that on a bigger commercial scale. The team is more important that can help, they can create, they can do it, but it depends on my flavours, because I don’t like sweet, personally. I don’t eat sweet food. I think everything has to be balanced. Everything has to be right, perfect. But before that, people keep complaining that Thai food is sweet. And for me, Thai food is not sweet. Thai food is very perfectly balanced. And for me in my restaurant, we always use the ingredients that belong to that kind of food. In my curry, I don’t put too much veggies or something that doesn’t belong to the original dish and isn’t authentic. So, a green curry in Thailand, we put only Thai eggplant or eggplant in some regions we might put bamboo or, but it’s not like here where people put broccoli, carrot. That’s not authentic. But anyway, when you talk about food, no right, no wrong, it’s personal taste. For me, it’s my personal taste that I like this way. So that’s why I do it that way. Sometimes customers say, but, can you add some meat? I say, yes, I will do for you but you have to request that. Or they love to add some veggies or add something that I don’t add, but we can do it for them.

Was Thai Alley your first restaurant?

Yes, Thai Alley in Eastland East Shopping Centre and then we opened another one at Thai Alley Water Garden. We closed that one last year and then we opened this one instead. I still have Eastland, I’ve been there almost 10 years already. In January, it’s going to be 10 years.

Was it a good move to move into hospitality? Are you happy that you did it?

Everything happened for a reason. I took my kid skiing and had a fall and broke my arm. Really broke it. Four places in my arm. I was in rehab for six months, then back to work again. I felt like it was too much because I worked night shift most of the time. A friend said, ‘Do you want to try a restaurant?’ I thought, okay, I’ll try. It was hard. These days it’s harder. Very hard. Some people do well, some don’t. It’s hard these days. Staff are a very important key to the success of the restaurant. That’s what I think.

And dealing with people, customers, is that joyful, is it challenging?

I’m lucky, all the customers here are very nice. You can’t make 100 people happy, but if you can make 95% happy, that’s success already. For me, if I can do anything to make people happy, I will. Hospitality means you have to listen and adapt to the people. ‘Customer is king,’ sometimes yes, not always. You have to be reasonable. When I go out as a customer myself, I understand hospitality more. If you don’t work in this field, it’s hard. Expectations are very high. For example we sell Mango sticky rice, it is very popular. In season, mango is always perfect. But sometimes out of season it can be a bit sour and we don’t know and customers can’t accept that it is sour. But if you buy them at the supermarket and the mango is a little bit sour you can accept that, but not in a restaurant. So I only make mango sticky rice when mangoes are in season. Out of season I say no. People don’t understand pricing and how high costs are: labour, electricity. Hospitality is tough right now.

What do you like about it, what keeps you going?

My personality, I’m really quite hyper. I work and work. When I closed Thai Alley Watergardens I had time, and I thought, ‘I should do something again.’ I opened Odette House and then I have no time at all. That’s me. But I love hospitality. I want to create beautiful food and let people try new things. Food is like fashion, it keeps changing. You can’t stay still. You have to improve your skills, your recipes, your quality. Hospitality makes me try new things all the time. I love to try different restaurants, see how they cook, and bring it back to improve. Sometimes I taste something and think, we can do it better, or twist it. One of my dishes is a potato croquette with curry salt and herbs. It’s not Western, not fully Asian, but very yummy. It can be vegetarian. Food has to be flexible. People want different things.

Do you write those ideas down or keep them in your head?

In my head. I think, I can do it, twist it, change it. That’s how I work.

Do you cook at home?

No, I don’t have time. I’m at work early, home at eleven or midnight. I depend on my staff to cook for me now. When we create something new, we do it together.

Odette House, 43 McLister Street, Spotswood