There’s something genuinely uplifting about sitting down with someone who’s spent over forty years in hospitality and still lights up when they talk about food. That’s Darryl Hand. He’s been in kitchens since the days of Hilton Melbourne’s grand dining rooms in the ’80s, cooked for queens and rock stars, and seen hotel dining evolve from silver service to share plates and open kitchens. But what’s most striking is that he still exudes pure, uncomplicated joy when he talks about cooking. He’s the Executive Chef overseeing not one but two new hotels in the heart of Melbourne: Hotel Indigo and Holiday Inn on Little Collins and yet he is still the guy who gets excited about discovering a different kind of prawn in Sicily and wishing we could get them here.
Hi, Darryl. You were just telling me off mic that you just got back from Italy, which is very exciting.
Yes, it was fantastic. Lots of eating, and drinking as well, enjoying the food of Italy. Mainly down in Sicily.
I’ve heard a lot about Sicily, and I haven’t been there, but it feels as though Sicily has got its own food culture down there.
And the different regions. We started in Catania, it was a bit of a shock, it was a bit grungy, but then you see the markets. We ate the first night, it was the seafood market, but then the restaurants open and the staff wash the floors down and they pull out the tables, and you sit there and it’s all that fresh fish. It’s sensational.
Was it an inspiration to your own cooking?
Yes. It’s hard though. They do a lot of these red prawns, they’re raw. You always eat them raw and I thought, ooh can we get them here in Australia, but unfortunately we can’t.
They’re quite sweet, aren’t they?
Yes, they’re beautiful.
How long were you away?
Four weeks.
Okay, so you probably got the end of the really warm weather. Was it starting to get a bit cooler?
It wasn’t all in Sicily. We started off in Rome and made our way down and then detoured into Germany for a week. But then from there was mainly 10 days in Sicily. So Catania, Ragusa, Agregento, and then finally Palermo.
So good. I’m really jealous. Now, we’re in Hotel Indigo off Little Collins Street and it’s a dual property. I did see two doors down below. It’s Holiday Inn and Hotel Indigo. What does that mean?
There’s two actual hotels, so a total of 452 rooms One kitchen that services both hotels. So obviously, this is Indigo. We are in a 55 seater restaurant. We’ve got a courtyard behind us that we could do sit down dinners for operations to about 60 people. We just do one long table, so it’s pretty cool when they do that. We try and do a lot of sharing menus out there. It makes it a little bit interactive for the guests instead of having guests waiting and then wanting to swap swap the chicken and the beef. And then Holiday Inn, which is next door is, I think it’s about 100 seat restaurant, 273 rooms, a small little function space. So it’s interesting. I had a guest coming up to me yesterday. He said, I’ve been hearing you calling out service, but I haven’t seen food coming out. I said, yeah, it’s going to the other restaurant.
Oh, so you share a kitchen. I didn’t pick up on that.
Yes, we share one kitchen. The kitchen is an open kitchen that faces into Holiday Inn. But then we have two printers, one for Holiday Inn, and then obviously Indigo, which is full à la carte for breakfast and then also à la carte for lunch and dinner. One lot of food goes one way for Holiday Inn and the other way for Indigo.
Same menu?
No different menus.
Oh, my goodness. Have you worked in a situation like that before?
Look, I’ve worked in a few multi-venue places, but we had separate kitchens. We try and match up a few ingredients here and there, so we’re not holding lots of stock and we don’t have wastage and spoilage. But with Indigo, we try and give it its own identity, and then try and tell that story of Melbourne, whereas Holiday Inn is more of a cookie cutter menu that is globally what you’d expect to find in a Holiday Inn.
But one team?
One team.
There must be such an amazing choreography in the kitchen?
It works well. So at the moment, and I’ll probably refer more to breakfast at this stage because breakfast is the one that is doing 140 in here for breakfast and 200 in next door. Next door is a buffet, but they can order eggs and omelettes to order, and then here is a full à la carte. For dinner, it’s your fish and chips and burgers and pasta through there. Here, we try and have a little bit play to the food and make it a little bit more interesting, a little bit more Melbourne; what Melbourne has to offer which is quite global.
Give me some examples of what that looks like on the menu at Hotel Indigo.
At Indigo, we do a cured salmon. We cure the salmon using gin from Little Lon, which is a distillery in the top end of the city. They’ve got a gin called Miss Yoko, which has flavours of lychee and vanilla. We use some of that in curing the salmon. Then we’ve made a simple salsa with lychee, pear, chilli and mint. That’s a nice one. We pay homage to historical tenants here. At one stage, there was a pie shop down there. They used to make Scotch pies last century, so we’ve put a pie on. We actually use the pies from Wonder Pie, Raymond Capaldi, and then we just try and give that little bit more of a fill. Instead of just a meat pie and mashed potato, we’ve got peas and speck and some confit shallots. So again, we’re just trying to reflect on it and tell that story of the past.
We’ve got a small Asian element with some of our canapés, which we try and tie in to Little Bourke Street. It’s not really a mishmash, but it works in quite well. The canapés are the dumplings and a prawn toast that we do. The duck dish that we would like to be our signature dish has those slight Asian overtones, but a little bit of French with it. We use duck breast and it’s flavoured with honey and star anise and we add some orange and then do some nice confit duck croquettes with it. It’s proving to be quite good.
So good. How long has it been open?
Mid-September.
Oh, it’s pretty new and you’re getting people through.
Our sales and marketing team do a fantastic job getting the word out. It’s doing well. Like everyone, we want to be busier, but it’ll come. It’s a beautiful space.
Oh, it’s such a beautiful space. Actually, even just walking in round the curve of gold chain, I’m a sucker for those grand entrances and it’s kind of mysterious because I didn’t really know where I was going and then there was the elevator and you arrive up here.
Even the print inside the elevator has got the laneway scenes. We’ve also got a dessert that we call our Graffiti Brick. Melbourne has graffiti and so a chef that I’ve worked with before helped us come up with a dessert. It’s basically what we think of when we think of Melbourne: it’s a brick shape, Melbourne’s coffee is renowned, so it’s got a coffee financier, then a white chocolate cream, and that Asian element of the yuzu jam in the middle. Then we’ve created a tuile brick wall with the splash of the different sort of colours that should represent then all the colours of the laneway graffiti.
Did you come up with that?
Yes, it’s just those sort of things where you get inspired, whether it be from Instagram or dining at another place, oh, I could do that, but if I do this and this…
Coming in here I had a lot of questions and one of them was, as you mentioned, maybe next door is a bit more cookie cutter because you have to do what the other Holiday Inns are doing, and I wondered whether, as a hotel chef, you get to have much creative input, but you clearly do, which is great.
Yes, that’s the beauty of Indigo. When I was in recruiting, all the people were saying, oh, I just want to work in Indigo. It was always going to be a hard one, no one wants to just cook burgers all day, they all want to do the fancy food. I don’t have those fights because they have to do it all from that one kitchen. But they love the balance too. They love the fact that they can do some simple food but then we try to do something a little bit different here.
And it has to be a good burger anyway, doesn’t it?
Well, exactly. We try to make it a little bit interesting on both sides.
The 80s were a little bit stricter than now. The Hilton really opened my eyes. It was what you read of in books, of these grand hotels. You walked in in the morning, the bakers were working overnight, so you smelled the croissant and the pastries and the coffee, there was a lot of percolated coffee back in those days, so you could smell the coffee coming in. The structure with the senior chefs was really strict. If you were sick, they cancelled your leave. It was probably not very good on an HR level, but it taught us some discipline. I enjoyed the fact that I worked at the Hilton.
Darryl Hand, Hotel Indigo & Holiday Inn
The other part of my question was, not wanting to bandy numbers around, but after 40 years in the industry, what excites you about coming to work? And I can see you are really excited, talking about dishes.
I love the creative side of it. Over my journey, I’ve worked with some really creative people. Some of my apprentices that I’ve worked with over the years, I keep in touch with and I’ll ring them and ask, how did we do that? And get inspiration. Because these guys are pretty cool with what they do, so you get inspiration from them and we dine out at a fair bit and you get an idea, whether it be from my recent trip to Italy or whatever. Something very simple can excite you in that respect.
That’s good. I have this idea that I’ve brought up in the past about a book I read called Like Water for Chocolate, and it was about a woman who every time she made a dish, her emotions went into the dish and then the people that ate them felt that and so then I like to think the chefs are still enjoying coming to work and making the food.
My end goal is to have that feeling that people are coming to Indigo, not just for the hotel, but because they want to come for, whether my food or the team’s food. And that’s the big plus for us, that we want to get that recognition, that you have to come to Fern Bar and Dining because the duck is fantastic or the brick wall is really different and something like that. So that’s what I want, and if we ever take it off the menu, we’ve got people going, put it back on, and saying that, we’re not going to take that one off.
I really want to come in. It all sounds amazing. You started in hotels in in the 80s at the Hilton. Back then in the 80s, what was hospitality like in Melbourne?
The 80s were a little bit stricter than now. The Hilton really opened my eyes. It was what you read of in books, of these grand hotels. You walked in in the morning, the bakers were working overnight, so you smelled the croissant and the pastries and the coffee, there was a lot of percolated coffee back in those days, so you could smell the coffee coming in. The structure with the senior chefs was really strict. If you were sick, they cancelled your leave. It was probably not very good on an HR level, but it taught us some discipline. I enjoyed the fact that I worked at the Hilton. Back then, it was probably one of the big hotels, pre-Crown. They used to do a lot of the big shows, cabaret shows. I met Tina Turner just as she became big again. It was just for the fact that she walked through the banquet kitchen at that stage. The Hilton at that stage was probably the only hotel where they had security, so there were a lot more of the celebrities. Back in the day of Culture Club and Wham and all that sort of stuff.
And some royalty as well?
Not so much there of what I can remember. I did two stints at the Arts Centre and my first stint was when I worked with some talented people there. We did the food for Queen Elizabeth. She came down on a Sydney ferry based in Melbourne called the South Stein. She was on there for a cocktail party and we did the food for it and then the executive chef and one of the other chefs went on board and served her. So I can say that I’ve made a canapé for her. I didn’t give it to her or anything like that. Again, that was pre-Crown, so we used to do all the big steak dinners and things like that. We cooked for Margaret Thatcher. I think we did Queen Beatrix of Holland. That was pretty cool.
So you really have to be working in certain venues to have that opportunity because those sort of people don’t go just anywhere, do they? When you started at the Hilton, was it part of an apprenticeship?
No, I’d finished. I actually did my apprenticeship at Queen Victoria Medical Centre. Which was the QV building.
What was there, a cafeteria?
No, it was the whole of the hospital. We did meals for all the staff and patients and so forth like that. And as a 16-year-old, it was probably a little bit a little bit easier to have that sort of, it wasn’t as many nights and things like that. A night shift was classed as you’d finish at 6 p.m. But then, after that, you get a bit bored of hospital food. So that’s when I went in worked at Hilton.
I read that you used to love making Anzac biscuits with your mum. 16 is young to do your apprenticeship, so did you always know you wanted a career in food?
I always made the Anzacs. I’d eat the raw mixture more than bake the biscuits. That was the only thing that I used to cook back then. But mum’s always been a good cook. So I’d make the Anzac biscuits and took an interest in it from there. Then I wanted to pursue cooking.
You’ve been in all these very large venues. In those kinds of big places, are there mentors or is it more that you just have to have your wits about you and observe so that you can go up the hierarchy?
There is. I remember it at the Hilton, the chef, Patrick Biddlecome would always say that what he did, he would spend time in a hotel and then move to another country, mostly Europe, he was an English guy and then he got work in a different section. He mentored us into the idea that we should do that. If we’re not going to travel overseas and you want to stay in Melbourne, but then you should go and work in a couple of different areas at the Hilton, but then maybe go to another hotel and then work in that section. Then you see what they’re doing. You look at the good, the bad, and all that sort of stuff, and you take that on board. So the good is what you want, but you also want to have a good understanding of the bad, so not to do that sort of thing.
I worked at the Arts Centre with a chef called Andrew Ormsby, I think he’s been in the States for probably the last 20 or 30 years, he was great. He was firm and hard, but he was also pretty fair and he showed us along. I worked with David Gilligan, who was highly regarded back in the 80s. I don’t know what he’s doing now. I worked with some really good people. I work with Andrew Blake at Stokehouse in St. Kilda. He was good to work with and when I do see him, it’s, hi, how are you and we have some friendly banter. A chef I worked with is now the chef at Cptn Jack’s on the Mornington Peninsula. But he worked with me at a few places, then he worked at Point Leo Estate. He’s worked at some good places, and I learned from him as much as I hope that I’ve taught him you know sort of thing.
Well, look, as someone said within the organisation, we will go down in history. We are the first, the original people to open this hotel. When you look at it like that, you go, wow. It’s something you can say in the future: I opened that hotel. I think it’s pretty special.
Darryl Hand, Hotel Indigo & Holiday Inn
You worked in a couple of pubs as well, the London and Albert Park Hotel.
There was a stage where Tooheys wanted to get a foothold into the Victorian market, so they bought 47 icon hotels. I opened the Albert Park Hotel and then I ended up taking over the London and then I became the regional chef. I had looked after the Albert Park, the London, the Provincial in Brunswick Street, the Greville and also the Imperial in Chapel Street. That was more like fries and stuff like that. I worked with some good people there from the kitchen side, but obviously from a front of house management side as well.
You have had a pretty varied experience, but the theme does seem to be maybe hotels. Just coming back to Indigo and Holiday and what’s the are you. You’re the Executive chef overseeing everything. How long pre-opening were you here to get that run in?
I started in March and then we just built it up and organised everything from the plateware to the glassware to the food and to putting it all onto the plate, to recruiting the team and things like that. We moved in downstairs in, I think it was June, when we were able to get in, then slowly we were able to, then when all the staff came in, all the all the equipment came in. So I was in six months prior.
It must feel like it’s yours.
Well, look, as someone said within the organisation, we will go down in history. We are the first, the original people to open this hotel. When you look at it like that, you go, wow. It’s something you can say in the future: I opened that hotel. I think it’s pretty special.
I think hotels are changing. There are hotels that are coming into town at the moment and there’s some pretty interesting food happening. It’s not just your normal club sandwiches. I think when I started at Hilton back in those days, it was Nasi Goreng, hamburger, chef’s salad. I don’t think I’ve seen Nasi Goreng since I left the Hilton.
Darryl Hand, Hotel Indigo & Holiday Inn
You were saying that you love the creativity of it and you’re really inspired by eating out or by what you see online and I guess back in the day cookbooks how do you keep those ideas? Do you have your own notebooks?
I used to have a series of notebooks, probably not so much these days. It’s probably more that I’ll take photos on my phone. I think there’s 90,000 photos on my phone, not all on food. I am one of those people that take if I get go out, I’ll take a photo of it. It reminds you sometimes when it comes to writing, not that I want to go and just copy what someone else has done, but it’s that sort of inspiration where you could do something and change it up.
So it’ll be a seasonal menu here?
We’ll probably normally change every season, but because we’ve just recently opened and we’ve done a couple of tweaks, we might miss the summer one, because this spring menu is light and will fit into summer and then look at doing a bigger change when it comes to autumn. We’ll do a little tweak soon. We’ve identified some dishes that probably aren’t moving as well, and it might be just in the wording, or just something simple. We do a prawn salad in Holiday Inn with risini. And whether the risini is the thing that’s putting people off, I’m not sure, but we might just bring back the old classic prawn cocktail, but with a nice twist.
I guess with all the experience you’ve had, you can’t take those things to heart, but are you disappointed sometimes if you have an idea and it doesn’t work?
Yes. It’s like everything. It’s sensational in my head. And then when you put it on the plate, you think hmmmm, yeah, I don’t like that and that’s hard because you feel committed to that dish. But then, you know, but the beauty is that we can quite easily change things.
Do you do room service here as well?
Yes, but it’s mainly more from the Holiday Inn menu.
Well, I think when people are eating in their rooms, they probably want their comfort food, don’t they?
Exactly. In saying that, if we had a guest that came in here and say, can I get a burger? Yeah, we can do one, that’s not a problem.
So you won’t make them go next door?
No, well, we can open the door, but they can’t and you don’t want to send them back down the ground floor to walk down the corridor and go in the other door.
Do you have any sense whether people are staying for just a couple of nights or longer?
We’ve had a few people that have stayed for a couple of weeks, and you see those people coming through. And we get to the stage where they might get sick of the menu if they dine in a fair bit. But we’re willing, if you give me 24 hour’s notice and you want something that’s not on the menu, if we can get it in, we’ll do it for you. If you want bangers and mash sort of thing, the old I have no problem with that.
It’s amazing that they are eating here multiple times when there are lots of other restaurants to go to.
Yes, that’s great. Look, obviously, breakfast is different. If you’re staying three or four nights, you might eat once. Generally, when we travel and we’re staying in a hotel or whatever, we’ll try the restaurants, but then we might go and explore other places as well.
It’s funny because I often have this wrong impression, obviously, going on your hotels, but when I’ve been overseas, sometimes the food in the restaurants in the hotel can be expensive and not great or not very inspired. I was in Amsterdam last year and I made that assumption and then tried to find places. Obviously I didn’t really research it that much because there’s plenty of great places in Amsterdam. But the place where I stayed was called Pension Homeland, and it was actually a converted officers’ quarters over in what used to be the Navy area, by the Maritime Museum. They had a brewery attached to it and they had a restaurant and the food was amazing. One night I tried it and then I just didn’t go out anywhere again because it was so delicious. So, I think it really depends, doesn’t it, on the hotel. If there’s a bit of independence there and who’s in the kitchen.
I think hotels are changing. There are hotels that are coming into town at the moment and there’s some pretty interesting food happening. It’s not just your normal club sandwiches. I think when I started at Hilton back in those days, it was Nasi Goreng, hamburger, chef’s salad. I don’t think I’ve seen Nasi Goreng since I left the Hilton.
Well, with all that in mind, your experience over time in different places, what would your advice be to a young person starting out?
You have to love it. Some of the young guys over the time have come in and they don’t realise it’s 365 days a year. When your friends are down at the beach on a Saturday or a Sunday and you’re working, it’s a different sort of lifestyle. I really think if you really love cooking, do it, it’s great. You can travel, it really brings out that creativity side for people. I think it’s a fantastic industry. I’ve enjoyed my time. I’ve met some really fantastic people over the time who I still stay close to and I keep in contact with all my chefs that I work with or even floor managers. I just think it’s a good opportunity.
I think you have to be a people person.
Yeah, you do a little bit.
You seem very approachable and calm. Is it like that in the kitchen as well?
Yes. Every now and again you have to show a little bit of urgency, but it’s not by yelling or anything because in the end it doesn’t achieve anything. We’re in an open kitchen and we don’t want to do dinner shows. And look, I try and look after the team. I’ll give them the days off that they want. We try and structure our roster so that you’re off certain days that you want. I’m more than happy. We have had zero sick leave, obviously, we’re brand new at the moment, so we’ve had no turnover as such. But I think that way works. If you show a bit of interest, you say good morning, thanks for today. They sort of little bits and pieces. You do find that they adopt that sort of mindset as well. And then, you, and then it’s reflective in what we’re trying to serve. But if you’re a little bit over the top and staff are scared when you walk through, I just don’t think I don’t it’s a good recipe for success.
And just on a final note, I did read that your two favourite ingredients are sea salt flakes, and good quality olive oil. What do you do with those?
Well, I think, they enhance things, a little bit of salt here and all that sort of stuff. And obviously, extra virgin olive oil. Instead of bringing wine home from Italy, I did bring extra virgin olive oil. I think good quality ingredients, whether it be salt or extra virgin olive oil can just liven up a dish. You don’t need a dressing or put a vinegar to something if that’s a good quality sort of oil.
Thank you. I can’t wait to come in and I’m going to have the salmon, then the duck, then the graffiti brick and I can’t wait.
Fern Bar and Dining, Hotel Indigo & Holiday Inn, 288 Little Collins Street