Lorcán Kan has one of those reputations that precedes him, not in the loud, headline-grabbing way, but in the quiet way that matters more. Mention his name to other chefs and their response is usually the same: “He’s such a lovely guy.” Kan, head chef at Etta in Brunswick East, carries that reputation with the same understated composure he brings to food. Born in Donegal to an Irish-Malaysian family and in Melbourne since he was one, Kan grew up resisting his dad’s Malaysian cooking (hot dogs seemed more appealing at the time) before circling back to it as comfort food. His path has been anything but linear: New York fine dining, German art studios, years of travel guided by one-way tickets and kitchen doors that opened when he knocked. He’s studied food science to answer the “why” questions, explored fermentation before it was fashionable, and learned that creative control is as much about restraint as it is about freedom. At Etta, his cooking sits at that intersection; comforting but restless, grounded but curious, waste-aware but playful. Talking with Kan feels like talking to someone who still finds wonder in the work. He’s calm, thoughtful, and very much the real deal.
Hello, it’s nice to finally get to sit down with you, Lorcan, because I have been wanting to talk to you for quite a long time. Your name is out there everywhere, as another one of the nice guys in the industry. I just spoke to Kyle Nicol the other day and I think he’s one of the nice guys and he just spoke volumes about you. It’s good to know that there’s a community of great people out there in hospitality.
That’s such a nice thing to say. It’s good to know that there’s a positive sentiment behind myself. It’s a great community. There are a lot of nice people out there.
There’s already a bit out about you, but I wanted to maybe start at the very beginning. Coming from an Irish Malaysian background and household, do you have early memories of food?
Absolutely. My dad cooked a lot of Malaysian food growing up and I actually really didn’t like eating it when I was younger. I just really wanted to eat hot dogs and stuff like that. I think growing up with it you want whatever everyone else is having, but then over time, I eventually grew to appreciate it and really like those things and that’s probably what I go to for comfort eating now is Malaysian stuff.
You were very small when you came to Melbourne?
Yes. I was born in Donegal and then moved to Australia in 1989, when I was one year old.
And you grew up here until your 20s before you travelled overseas.
I was here until I was 24 and then went overseas and then was overseas for about eight years and then came back about three years ago.
Is it important, do you think, for chefs to go overseas as part of their growth?
Absolutely. I think with the industry itself, it’s so suited to travel that’s a lot of how I travelled. It was just going to restaurants and working there and connecting or experiencing the city through what the chefs would recommend. It was an amazing way to travel and an amazing way to have access to stuff all across the world.
Did you know where you were going when you set off, what was your first destination?
Thailand. I only had a one-way ticket to Thailand booked and then I vaguely knew I was going to go to New York to help open a restaurant and then did whatever, just changed plans and went wherever I needed to go, which was good.
Fun to be flexible.
It was so good. Pretty chaotic and stressful at times, but it was only myself, so it’s pretty easy to change plans.
I’m always impressed that chefs can turn up in different kitchens for pop -ups or even starting out in a new kitchen, but going overseas, what are your first thoughts when you step into a kitchen? How do you adapt? How do you get the feel for it and slide in?
The first time I ever actually worked overseas when I was young, I won Les Toques Blanches, which is an apprenticeship competition. I was given some money to go anywhere. I went to New York and I worked at Le Bernardin. It’s a three Michelin star restaurant and I was incredibly anxious and stressed that it would be some other world of cooking. But the first day I got there, I was just grating zucchinis. So it was very like, oh, yeah, it’s just the same. There’s different products, but ultimately cooking has a process to it and it’s just about being really adaptive to what other people want to show you and what you need to do. If you’re not sure, just clean a bench or sweep the floor. There’s plenty of things you could be doing and it’s about being sensitive to the environment. Everyone needs help. It’s a tough job.
Were the teams welcoming in those kitchens?
Absolutely. Everyone was. I don’t think I ever really faced a difficult kitchen and everyone was super nice and it’s novel being the only Australia in the room, which is nice. Chefs have a really selfless quality, in that they want to make people feel welcome. And they’re providing food. They also like to provide space for people, which is nice.
That’s possibly a shift because it feels like I’ve spoken to some older chefs who found some of those kitchens very competitive and unhelpful. So it’s good if things have moved on from there.
Absolutely. There’s definitely a time I missed out on in a good way. I think it shifted dramatically in my time as to what the kitchen should be and can be.
The comparison between art and food is when you make art, it sits in the room with you and there’s a physical presence, whereas food, it’s like this moment that you’re creating. And once it’s eaten, it’s gone. And people’s thoughts and feelings about it change over time and people can say they had an amazing experience, but not actually remember anything they’ve eaten. It’s like, that experience, although food is important in it, there’s so many other things that add to it and so many times people are paying attention to stuff that you aren’t even thinking about.
Lorcán Kan, Etta
Did you spend some time in Germany?
I moved to Germany and I had a studio and I tried to paint and actually stopped cooking for four years and was exploring my other pursuits.
What’s your medium?
It was painting, but the conclusion from that time was I’d try to paint for two hours and that would be really challenging and unsuccessful, but I could cook for 14 hours a day and then at the end of it still be engaged in it and think about it and take it home. Whether that’s just through having the ability to cook things in your mind.
Where did the art come from? Is that something you’d studied or are you self-taught?
It was the two paths that I went down. It was either study fine arts or just do food. But I think food always was a massive part of my life and I just really liked working, I think as a child of immigrants, work ethic and working a lot is just something you do. So it was nice to just jump into a job. I think I wanted to work when I was 14 years old.
I want to come back to that. I was just on a different tangent in my mind because I was thinking about maybe we’re harder on ourselves on some of those other things. I did a PhD in a really useless topic, which was medieval French literature. It does not help the world. But I loved it. But I’d had a year in France in the nineties. And when I came back, I naively in Christchurch, New Zealand, set up a catering company where I went into people’s houses and cooked dinner. No licence, no training, nothing. Just wanted to share the amazing time I’d had in France and some of those little simple things with food. It was relatively successful for the three times that I did it, I think. But anyway, I found like I would get really bogged down with the study side of things, it’s my thing is writing and studying and everything. But I’d get so bogged down in it, and then I’d go and cook dinner for people and there was that immediate success of happiness and just the simplicity of putting food on a plate and people enjoying it and having a nice time together. There’s something so rewarding about that.
Absolutely. The comparison between art and food is when you make art, it sits in the room with you and there’s a physical presence, whereas food, it’s like this moment that you’re creating. And once it’s eaten, it’s gone. And people’s thoughts and feelings about it change over time and people can say they had an amazing experience, but not actually remember anything they’ve eaten. It’s like, that experience, although food is important in it, there’s so many other things that add to it and so many times people are paying attention to stuff that you aren’t even thinking about.
Now, to go back to what you were saying before, that you were in the kitchen or wanting to work at the age of 14. I did read that you always knew you wanted to be a chef, and that’s often a question I ask. I think, what a glorious thing, because then you just don’t have to think about anything else, although you did have your two prongs with art as well. When you were thinking, I’m going to be a chef, can you remember what that looked like for you? What were you imagining?
I just remember probably around seven or so, I’d ask people, how did they know what they wanted to do? I think a lot of it comes from seeing my dad cook food at home and all of the family coming together, I think there’s something really nice about that eating experience. It’s just really interesting, the process of cooking, there’s so much to learn. It’s so skill-based, you could cook for 50 years and still have so much to learn. It’s just a really interesting, incredibly deep feel that has loads to it. I just really enjoyed it. It was just such a nice thing to do. I think it’s so different compared to studying or writing or analytical stuff. It’s very hands-on and you can see how you can improve. Every time you cook something, it gets better and better each time. So that was a nice thing to it.
And you have done study and writing as well, a Food Science degree. You strike me as someone that needs to be constantly challenged. What’s that about?
What’s that about? I like to do things. The food science thing is just…I think I always was interested in it. When you’re asking questions as a young chef, like, why do we do this? And chefs say, you just do it, and that’s it. There’s no reason. And now when we talk in the kitchen, it’s like, well, why do we do this? And you’re like, oh, you know, we do this because that absorbs heat this way or the difference between boiling something and frying something and talking about the molecular level of the cell structure of things like that and that information is just so helpful to teach people and also to really help them understand why we’re doing these processes. It’s always there. The science is not not there. It’s happening. And then once you become aware of it, it’s just another depth to the learning. You can learn kitchens and professional food service and fine dining, and you can learn about agriculture and how the produce has grown, but then there’s also this other avenue of what’s actually happening as it’s cooking and when you’ve been cooking for 20 years, learning about that, it just opens a new appreciation to it and I feel like it makes me better at it, I think, maybe.
I think that chefs have a much better understanding of why things work out and ingredients and how they all come together anyway, I would say than most home cooks. And I think in this day and age, people have become a little bit fearful of, not fearful of food, but perhaps fearful of cooking, because they don’t want to ruin things and they’ve seen these great examples of things, but perhaps it is about that education and knowing why, as you say, what happens when things are absorbed at that temperature or why two ingredients go well together or why the acid, you know, salty, sweet, whatever, why that works.
I think it’s a nice way to help people look at it, especially like food pairing or flavour pairing things, there’s a reason, there’s classic dishes and those pairings, there’s science behind them and it just helps you, I think in experiencing this later on, it’s like, oh yeah, of course these two things pair together. We’ve had it a million times and then you look at it and you can see how it connects to other things.
If you’re buying something that costs, 50% or 40% more than it used to and you’re throwing away a portion of it, how do we throw that away? How do we completely value the whole thing? I think that’s something that happened before the financial struggles that we’re facing. I was telling my chefs, it’s like a diamond. A diamond is valued by how many edges can be shaved off and how beautiful it can be, but how can we value the diamond without having to cut any of it away? Or how can we value its irregular shape and appreciate all parts of it and not just strip it of its mass just to make it look a certain way.
Lorcán Kan, Etta
That kind of food science knowledge must really come into play with fermentation as well.
It’s a reason why I got into it. We were doing a lot of fermentation in the UK when I was working there, but it was some pretty, rogue, kooky stuff, to say the least. And I think it was great. Obviously, we felt it was safe, but what is actually happening and how do we control this and how do we have a consistent product and yeah, we can do fermentation, but how do we do it in a precise controlled way that has a consistent outcome? And I think that’s what’s so helpful for this food science thing. Even making charcuterie, we can do all this stuff, but I feel so much more comfortable to be like, I’m happy to serve this because I understand what the limits are with this food.
When I was in Christchurch, I used to listen to a university radio show and the two Breakfast Show hosts had a segment called Can We Soda Stream It? And they would just obviously, as the name says, try soda streaming everything, so probably it’s quite good to realise…can you ferment everything?
Can we do it? But, should we do it? We could do that. And I think I’ve been very lucky in my last job where we were able to do all of this stuff and it was a tasting menu. There was a lot of dishes, so there was a chance to serve a very small amount of something and to interact with a guest and be like, this person’s up for it, so let’s take them on a journey to this stuff. But in a more normal restaurant setting, giving some of this more challenging stuff to people, the concept is interesting from an aesthetic taste point of view. Sometimes it’s just, that’s just not very nice to taste. Beyond the interesting part, I think some people won’t enjoy that.
There’s a technical aspect and a fascinating aspect, but at the end of the day, food should be delicious.
I always ask that question, does food need to be delicious? If you think about music and if you listen to only good music, you need the changes, do you serve a really unpleasant thing before something really nice? Like bitterness. If you’re always trying to make good things, you miss out on making mistakes. I try not to make good stuff. I just try to make food in general. And if there’s a question, what will this be like? That could be something. And if it’s not something, it’s actually kind of more satisfying because you don’t have to do it again. That’s actually bad and we don’t need to do that anymore.
Is that what the pop-ups allowed you to do?
The pop-ups for me, were mostly about creative control. I think as a chef, you can get put in these positions where people say, we have a great opportunity for you, you can be part of a team. We’ll give you creative control. For me, I found that really interesting in that we should all have that independently so that when we come to these meetings, it’s like, yes, I have creative control. I have that on my own, but I’d rather that you would support me or pay me or give me what I need as opposed to allowing me to have creative control.
In this current climate climate, how does creative control marry with food cost?
I think the creative part of cooking is, one of the very early steps of it, and that is in the concept of designing a dish or what is the premise, for me, it might be like, we want to make a dish that is really green and we want it to be really soft. And it needs to be at the start of the menu. That could be the creative part of it. And then as to what we use along the way, it becomes less creative or more defined. It’s like, well, we need to do this to it now or it needs to fit in this way. There is creativity in making it functional, but it’s always at the start and then it loses that new excitement and it becomes more honed in and towards execution, I feel like the creative part meets the financial part. Is it labour effective with our limited time? What do we want to be doing in the kitchen? Do we want to be picking crab? Do we want to do that? And I don’t really want to do that. What other things can we do? What if we just blend the crab up and I think there’s creativity in solving financial problems and I think that’s a big part of what’s happening now with the cost of everything going up. But it’s just a challenge and a constraint that will breed amazing dishes that will be super unique to the time we’re in.
You’re very waste conscious as well. I feel like you have to be creative to factor that in as well.
Absolutely. I think with this big tallow trend that’s happening and we actually have a beef fat butter that we’re making at the moment, if you’re buying something that costs, 50% or 40% more than it used to and you’re throwing away a portion of it, how do we throw that away? How do we completely value the whole thing? I think that’s something that happened before the financial struggles that we’re facing. I was telling my chefs, it’s like a diamond. A diamond is valued by how many edges can be shaved off and how beautiful it can be, but how can we value the diamond without having to cut any of it away? Or how can we value its irregular shape and appreciate all parts of it and not just strip it of its mass just to make it look a certain way.
I need some time to think about that. So, your menu now, have you leaped into spring or are you in between seasons?
We’re definitely in spring and utilising a lot of the amazing citrus at the moment. Asparagus has come through and we’ve just put on a new asparagus dish. Spring also marries with Christmas a little bit, as we head towards the end of the year, it gets a little bit warmer, a little bit fresher. People are more excited at this time of year and they’re open to more things. So we’re trying to get a few special things on the menu.
Is it a secret?
Is it a secret? I think it’s a mystery to myself as well. It changes dramatically. You’ll be working really hard on something and then one day you’re like, nah, we’re going to do this. It’s kind of nice that it can change and the team here is up for it as well.
Do you have lots of notebooks or is it all on your phone?
Yeah, I have a lot of notebooks. I actually have two at the moment, which is kind of annoying because I keep forgetting which is in which notebooks. It’s like a hook, I guess: this is the dish that I want. Like with the current beef dish, I want to cook a curry into butter and then I want to set it. And I’m not sure how that is. Instead of using coconut milk, the butter is the coconut milk. And that itself would be enough of an idea, really. And then whether it goes on to vegetables or beef, it’s very process driven. How do we utilise the team as well? More often not it’s like, “can we achieve it?” is the biggest thing that stops or starts stuff, I guess.
I think just try to be in the moment when you’re cooking. There may be this idea oh, I need to develop, I need to progress and I’m not there yet and I need to do certain things. For me, cooking is incredibly calming and relaxing. If I’m really stressed out and I’ve had a difficult time, I can just go home and cook some things that I really like. There’s a very systematic and enjoyable part to it. It’s like painting or making something. We’re taking raw things and we’re preparing them really nicely, and that’s just such a nice thing to be able to do. So just really try to take a moment if you can, and just enjoy cooking. It’s such a nice thing to do.
Lorcán Kan, Etta
As head chef, what does it mean for you to be a good leader?
To be a good leader, I think it’s a lot about like really understanding why they’re there, why they’re in the kitchen and really trying to share what’s good for me. What’s allowed me to cook for as long as I have? What do I find interesting and engaging? And I think a lot of it is like drawing attention to what’s happening to the food as it’s cooking. If you’re cooking something, even if it’s just grilling asparagus, the way this is cooked is perfect right now. If everything can be like this, if we can cut things perfectly, if we can do all of this stuff, there’s a calming effect. I like people to be able to work here at the end of it, go home and not have to worry about work because we’ve achieved it. That’s what’s really important is just trying to make a really positive attitude, a positive atmosphere that has a lot of people questioning and being engaged in what we’re doing.
Now, without sounding creepy, I did see when I Googled you that you’ve got 66 days and until you get married. Congratulations in advance. How do you go about thinking about the food for your wedding? Oh, is it a special day, big food moment?
I’m a bit hands-off in that regard. I just trust that they’ll do something nice and there’s a lot of other things non-food related that I would like to put myself in to that day.
Like getting married.
Like getting married and saying a really good speech and I’m actually making the cake for the wedding. Maybe I’ve dug myself a little bit of a hole, but no, I think when I eat, I’m very open to what people have. I’m not too controlling in that regard. I do that enough in my job.
So you’re able to sit back and enjoy it and not critique it or think I would have done this.
Absolutely. I always say it’s similar to when you learn to drive a car and you get into a car, you wouldn’t tell an Uber driver how you think they should drive. A lot of people ask, “How is that food?” I’m engaging with it in a way that, it was food and it was perfectly fine. I struggle when people are really critical of food and I’m like, that guy’s probably by himself and we’re in the middle of a country town. This isn’t a place for that harsh criticism. I think anyone that spends time to cook for me and I’m not cooking for myself, I try to like be grateful and appreciative that.
Do your friends cook for you?
Well, I try to cook for everyone a lot. I think it’s such a nice thing in this economy just to have a bunch of people over and cook food all together.
Obviously you still find it a joyous thing to do?
Absolutely. It’s less complicated in what I do, now that I’m a head chef. We try to make it pretty chill. My partner’s pretty good at making me do less.
That’s good. It’s important to have a balance. So, you don’t think about food 24/7?
I think I can find myself thinking about food quite often. But I feel like it’s very similar to having a song stuck your head. I like trying to like solve problems as well. It’s similar to a part of the canvas that is slightly blank. I know something could go here, but I just need to figure out what would work and then just thinking about different things. I could easily keep myself occupied by that. It’s interesting that it’s always in there.
It’s what you do, isn’t it? And it has been since you were very little, so it makes sense. Well, with all that in mind and the fact that you’ve lived and cooked overseas and here in different roles, and all your studies and everything, what would your advice be to be a young person starting out as a chef?
I think just try to be in the moment when you’re cooking. There may be this idea oh, I need to develop, I need to progress and I’m not there yet and I need to do certain things. For me, cooking is incredibly calming and relaxing. If I’m really stressed out and I’ve had a difficult time, I can just go home and cook some things that I really like. There’s a very systematic and enjoyable part to it. It’s like painting or making something. We’re taking raw things and we’re preparing them really nicely, and that’s just such a nice thing to be able to do. So just really try to take a moment if you can, and just enjoy cooking. It’s such a nice thing to do.
Etta, 60 Lygon Street, Brunswick East