I drove out to Heide Museum of Modern Art on one of those moody Melbourne days where the sky feels low and the landscape seems to have been arranged by a painter. Which, at Heide, it sort of has. Sitting out the back in the museum office, looking out the window, the view felt like part of the experience before the conversation had even begun. And then Heide Kitchen‘s Laura Boulton and I just started talking. As with all my favourite conversations with chefs, we just launched in. No formal introduction. No neat beginning. Just straight into the gardens, the old houses, the kitchen, and the strange, wonderful things growing on the grounds: medlars, cardoons, herbs, flowers, and whatever else the garden team brings her to see if she can make something of it. Laura is thoughtful, articulate and incredibly generous in the way she talks about food, waste, creativity, burnout, education, and the restless, many-tentacled mind of a chef. She has spent 26 years in kitchens, across hotels, fine dining, cafés and events, and now at Heide Kitchen she has found a place where history, art, gardens and food are layered together. This conversation is about that, but it is also about what happens when a chef keeps asking questions: of the garden, of the bin, of the plate, and of the way we’ve all been taught to think about food.
Conversation with a chef: Looking out that window looks like an artwork. It’s beautiful.
Laura Boulton: This is the second house. The original house is up on the hill, that’s the cottage that they started in. Then they built the second house and had an artist commune up in the old house. That was where all the artists would come in and out of a like communal living. This was their big house. Because of that, there are two kitchen gardens: one on the top of the hill, I guess it’s more fertile. It’s been tended longer. And being on the top of the hill, it has greater sunshine and light and water, drainage. The second kitchen garden, which is down here is in the bottom of a bit of a gully, so it can flood in winter. It’s less productive and slightly less fertile in the bottom half. The top half is a little bit more raised. The gardeners tend to use that more for flowers. There are a lot of roses and a lot more flowers and ornamental stuff. The top garden is a lot more productive for fruit and vegetables, and there’s the orchard up the top as well, which is incredible.
Do you have a say in what’s in the kitchen garden?
I’ve been here now for two years, and over that time, I’ve developed the relationships with the museum and the garden team because quite a lot of that was very fragmented. As a company, this is our fourth year, we’re halfway into our fourth year. The first year was just finding their feet, figuring out what Heide was going to be. The second year is when I arrived halfway through the year. They were here for 18 months, and doing what they could with what they had, but were still trying to find their feet with everything. Then when I arrived, I built a really good rapport with the garden team and they started engaging with us a lot more around what was coming and going, because the chefs who were here before were like, Oh, this is great. We get stuff from the garden. Thanks. But not really understanding the full potential of what’s on the grounds. When I started, I started engaging a lot with Rebecca the gardener. I was spending a lot of time with her talking about what was on the grounds, when things were coming in and out of season, and, once she really, truly understood that I wasn’t joking when I said, I will use anything, she started to bring me little bits of pieces of things and say, Oh, would you use this? Would you use that? I’ve got this thing that just popped up out of nowhere. We started getting very creative with some of the things in the garden, which was really exciting. It meant that she was more excited because there were always things to find and so she would bring them and say, What can you do with this, and we’d figure out a way of using it. For example, medlars. I don’t know if you know what a medlar is, but it’s a strawberry sized fruit, like a cross between a Nashi and a quince. It’s got a very watery texture, but it’s grainy like a quince. It’s an old English fruit, and typically, they are brown, and when they come off the tree, they’re very hard, and very astringent, and you can’t really do anything with them. But you do a process called bletting, which is essentially like letting them sit there until they go overripe, and then they go almost custardy. They’re incredibly sweet and they have a real custard flavour, but they still have that watery texture. They’re incredible for jam. We did this process just for fun just to see if we could do it. And it was quite a process, because there’s a lot of seeds inside. We made a rhubarb and medlar jam, and it was just sensational, so delicious. That was just one of the random things that grows in the garden that everyone said, I don’t think so, mate. And I was like, Bring it on. Let’s find a way.
I love that. Isn’t it fascinating, these fruits and vegetables that you have to do things to before they’re edible or before they’re delicious? And that people have worked out what that is, even coffee.
They would have just sat there without refrigeration in the old days and gone bad. And they wouldn’t have wanted to waste them, but they smelled really good. Why don’t we just try making them into sugary jam? Even things like the cardoons, for example, no one’s ever heard of a cardoon in Australia. That’s just not a thing. But they’re fascinating, because if you look at them, they look like so prehistoric. They’re enormous, big thistles, essentially. They’re part of the artichoke family. They grow a flower like an artichoke, but the flower’s completely inedible, it’s all fibres. There’s no heart, like a normal artichoke. But the leaves, the big stems that come off them, are edible. In the southern states of America, it was a plantation food, because they grew out of nowhere, and they took no looking after, and because people were poor and had no food, they learned how to eat them. You strip all the leaves off, you peel them and you’re supposed to go through this process of boiling them to get rid of the bitterness, because they’re very, very bitter. Rebecca brought me down some of these and she’s said, I really want to use these because they’re an amazing product, but no one ever wants to use them, because they take too long to process. I said, just give them to me and I’ll figure out how to do it. She gave me a big bucket of them, and I put them in water in the cold room so they didn’t go bad. Then life happened. We got sick, there was an injury in the kitchen. It was chaos for two weeks and over that two weeks, we’d consistently had to change the water, and because of that, they had bled out all the bitterness. We didn’t realise we’d accidentally figured out a way of bleeding them. So we went through this process, we peeled them, and then we put them in a bag with a pickling liquid and steamed them until they were soft. It looks like celery when it’s peeled, it’s got the same shape, like a wide version of celery. Anyway, it was really yum. They’re quite fibrous, quite nutty in flavour. I don’t know how to describe it. We were putting that in our seasonal caponata that we put under the fish; it’s braised chickpeas and onions and herb powder that we make, and then we put a seasonal vegetable in there, and that’s the fish garnish through the year, but it changes every six weeks. It was just so yum, but no one had ever heard of cardoons before. Then we just figured out this random way of using them, and we had a seasonal vegetable garnish for the season, which cost us nothing. It cost us nothing, except time. No one would touch them, but we figured out a way of using them by accident. All it takes is a little bit of interest. And then time.
Often, speaking to chefs, they talk about their really important relationship with the supplier. This is next level, because it’s right here, and you can see it as well. Also working with someone that’s so curious and excited to try those unknown.
Lesser known.
That’s right, and this is an age old lament that supermarkets here, and I guess some markets are better. But it’s just the same old carrots and potatoes and sweet potato and broccoli and zucchini.
There is not a lot of variety because we come from a very blonde background in terms of a very neutral palate. A lot of Australia comes from Europe; British Europe. I think that palate has not really changed much. We have an enormous amount of influence from multicultural facets now. Modern Australian food is really exciting because we have such a vast influence from so many different places. We have Persian and Southeast Asian and Turkish and Lebanese and all of these amazing foods. That’s brought us a lot further in our palate. We are starting to see a lot more in terms of varieties of tomatoes and apples and different types of cucumbers but it’s frustrating, because we’re such a privileged country. We never really had to use the lower cuts. We never really had to scrounge for anything. Sure, we had a recession, but how long did that last? That hasn’t really impacted generations upon generations, which has caused people to get really creative, like they had to do through Europe, or through Southeast Asia, or South America. We haven’t had wars, like other countries have had. We haven’t had the hardships that other countries have had that have forced them into this way of thinking. We’re just constantly searching for the next best. We’re so privileged, which is great in a lot of ways, but it’s also sad culturally for us. Culturally, we’re a very shallow country, which is not ideal. The modern landscape of Australia is very multicultural, and it’s incredible to be a part of a country that is so progressive. But we’ve just got nothing holding us up in terms of foundational culture. In terms of white Australia, which is the sad part of Australia, it is culturally bare. And because we did such awful things when we came, we’ve lost all of that culture as well. We’ve lost all of the heart and the soul of what Australian food was before we came, which is really sad because we eradicated the best parts when we arrived, and then we’ve just continued to eradicate, as we’ve gone higher and higher up, the food chain. That’s a bit of a tangent, but I really like the fact that we are so culturally rich now as modern Australia. I just feel, I guess, a bit sad that we don’t have that nostalgic layering that other countries have.
It’s interesting that you’re talking about using the lesser cuts and that whole notion of zero waste that we talk about, that chefs are doing some amazing things, which you are. We should all know how to do that, but we don’t. We just are so spoiled that we throw things out.
That’s what I mean in terms of the layers of privilege. We’ve created supermarkets, right? We are the consumers. They’ve only tailored their business model to suit what we are asking for. We have made that change and we can make that change again. And we’re starting to see that, even though it’s commercialised: the odd bunch, free fruit for kids or, veggie boxes that come with all of the odd fruits and vegetables that no one wants, the food rescue movement is huge. It’s great to see it happening on a broader scale, but I think we have so much room to move in terms of what we’re capable of as a community, to make change. As a consumer, we’re the ones buying the products. If we stop buying the way we’re buying, it changes everything, because they have to change their business models to give us what we want. We’ve created a market that now we don’t want.
I train all of my chefs in the way that I work in terms of the mindset of zero waste. The bin is lower than the last resort. There are so many avenues that we can traverse before the bin , and the compost bin isn’t the first option. I train all of my chefs and then they eventually leave, go out, and then they train their chefs. And that flow on effect of change is happening. It’s a small ripple effect, but it’s a ripple effect. It’s good that we have the opportunity to do that. I think we need to nurture our talent more.
Laura Boulton, Heide Kitchen
I wonder if we’ve become a society that doesn’t cook at home as often either. I’m speaking very broadly, but is there a lack of knowledge, too, of what to do with all those different products and how to use every part of something and not throw things away.
This is exactly where we’re a society of consumers now and a society of convenience. In the years gone by, in generations past, we had one working parent, not two. We had supermarkets that were only open certain hours. We had availability of products that were truly seasonal, because we didn’t have international shipping. We didn’t have air freight. We didn’t have access to fruits and vegetables from Queensland and WA, and everywhere else, year-round. We had very limited access because it was truly local. We had to think outside the box. But now, we’re so privileged, and there is nothing wrong with being that level of privilege, it’s great that we have that. We’re very lucky. But we have built the society that we live in. But now we have families who just don’t have the capacity to cook because they’ve never had to learn how. Or they’ve never learnt how because it wasn’t something that was of interest to their family, and so it was just never passed on. We are suffering the consequences of that consumerism now. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, or there’s anything wrong with that necessarily, but it’s just an interesting conversation to have. Because we’re now looking at things differently, and now everyone’s celebrating, zero waste, that’s so cool, let’s teach people about that. I’m like, this is not new. This is history repeating. I’m just picking up what people put down a long, long time ago. We have modern techniques now, which is fantastic. Dehydrators make everything a lot easier. Ovens with steam functions, sous vide cooking, all of those things have made our lives a lot easier, and I love that. That’s amazing. But these techniques, they’re generations upon generations old, and we’re just revisiting the past. I think we’re recognising the damage that we’ve done in terms of how consumer we were or are. And we’re turning the tables on that now and bringing it back in and going, well, hang on a minute, we can’t just throw away everything. That doesn’t work.
Now people are starting to recognise that 60% of the fruit and vegetables that are grown in Australia end up in the bin. How is that a thing? 60%. That’s crazy. It’s insane to me that that happens, and there’s great companies out there, like the food banks and the food rescue companies that are creating meals for people. But it shouldn’t get to that point. It should just be the fruit that ends up on our tables is the food that’s grown. If we’re growing too much, then stop growing. Slow it down, change the model. We have the power to make those changes. People are starving too, which blows my mind. We’re throwing away 60% of the food that’s produced in Australia, but people are starving. How is that a thing? Government and policymakers and the people who make the rules around the way that food is produced, stored, and delivered, have a lot of thinking to do, and they have put the rules in place on purpose so that people don’t get sick, and the regulations are followed, but at the end of the day, they’re paper pushers, and they’re not seeing the end result of the consequences of what they started by making these rules. I know it’s very important for food manufacturing to follow a set of guidelines and to be safe for people to eat en masse. But where does that end? That has created a system that produces 60% of its waste. And that’s just really sad. It’s also waste from the farms, because it doesn’t meet spec to go to the supermarket in the first place. Or it’s waste at the farm because it’s too expensive to be picked, to be put into the supermarket. It’s cheaper for the farmers to let food rot on the ground than it is to have it picked and put in supermarkets or given to people. That is nonsense.
Education has to play a part. We have food studies, or home economics, but it’s a small part of a program at school. I think it’s the same with financial literacy. All of those things are life skills and knowledge. Perhaps we need to give them a bit more weight in our education.
Everything in the system comes down to education. Absolutely everything comes down to education. Because if you educate people from an early age, they won’t think about things the same way, right? You teach them how to boil an egg. You teach them how to do a little stir fry. You teach them how to do some pickling. Those life skills stay with you forever, and then your mindset is forever changed around the way those foods work. So if we start from a young age, even around education of how food comes out of the ground, it’s like the whole Jamie Oliver movement when, back in the early 2000s, kids in the UK didn’t even know how apples grew. They don’t know where potatoes come from. They don’t know what meat is unless it’s in a packet. It’s insane to me that people don’t understand these things, but it makes sense because of the way that we are as consumers. But if we don’t educate, we’re going to get nowhere, right? The people that we are training and educating now are the people who are going to be the policy changers and makers and doers later. But we stopped educating a long time ago through convenience. We’re starting to see a lot of awareness in social media, and general media. Social media has a lot to answer for in a lot of ways, but the good thing about it is that exposure. People are starting to see a lot more, do a lot more, behave differently, and enact change in their own homes around these things because they’re exposed. It’s so nice to be able to have an opportunity to make change, even if it’s in a very small way. All those little bits add up.
I train all of my chefs in the way that I work in terms of the mindset of zero waste. The bin is lower than the last resort. There are so many avenues that we can traverse before the bin , and the compost bin isn’t the first option. I train all of my chefs and then they eventually leave, go out, and then they train their chefs. And that flow on effect of change is happening. It’s a small ripple effect, but it’s a ripple effect. It’s good that we have the opportunity to do that. I think we need to nurture our talent more. It’d be great if we could see some more commercial layering in that. I think MasterChef even is starting to do a bit more around that, which is really cool.
My mind is like an octopus. I’ve always got like eight tentacles out; I’m looking in four different directions. I’ve got my hands in different pies. I’m stirring this, I’m on the phone here, I’m doing that. There’s always something. This is the beauty of an ADHD mind; I don’t switch off. My hyperfocus comes down to food. Flavours to me is like breathing. It just happens naturally. I see things and hear things and taste things and things just happen without me realising it’s happening. That’s the beauty of a neurodivergent brain, it just happens. I think it’s taken me a long time to harness the power, and it’s been a developmental process through the journey of my career. I hated that at the beginning and I’m really grateful for it now it took me a long time to build the discipline, to harness the power. But I’m very grateful for it now because it’s something that I’m recognising not everybody has. It’s a point of difference that I can celebrate rather than try and hide, which is really cool.
Laura Boulton, Heide Kitchen
What happens at culinary school?
Not a lot, to be honest. I’ve actually just been invited to sit on an advisory board at William Angliss to discuss the change that they need to make. I just did an event at William Angliss a couple of weeks ago called The Great Chefs Dinner. It’s a fundraising lunch and a chef comes in and they teach a class a menu, and then we present the menu and it goes out to the public at a lunch function. I was talking to all the chefs and showing them how we were going to use like all the greens from the farm and all the pumpkin with the skins and the seeds and everything and they were minds blown: what do you mean you don’t throw the stems away? What do you mean you don’t peel the pumpkins? What are we going to do with that stuff? I’m like, we’ll make a stock. We’ll use the skins. They could not understand. What are you teaching these kids?
How did you find out about those things?
Time.
Curiosity and research?
A lot of it comes down to curiosity. This year is my 26th year as a chef, which is a long time. Over that time I’ve worked in a multifaceted set of restaurants, from catering to weddings, to fine dining kitchens, to not fine dining kitchens, all sorts, everything. The common thread amongst all of that is waste. It’s just a variation on waste, and a lot of that comes down to rules. We need those rules. That’s important. But, understanding how to be more specific around the recipe development, what you’re putting on the plate. Excess isn’t always better. How do we refine this process to create less waste is where it started. Because I couldn’t stand to see all my hard work going in the bin, and then I translated that to, that’s a lot of money going in the bin. Then, how could we take some of that money back, and then how can we take the hours back that I put into that work? I continued to break it down until I was at the point where it’s actually all just about waste. So, if we were able to taper that in, we would save money. I would save time, and I wouldn’t be throwing money in the bin. It went from there, and as I progressed from my career, it was more and more about the dollars and cents, because as I became higher in the kitchen, I became able to manage that stuff and got really granular with it. Because of that, I was working with a friend of mine who did her PhD in Food Waste Systems, and I got really into the detail with her. She created a system called Watch My Waste, and she had it across a bunch of restaurants, and they were literally measuring their food waste from different avenues: production to off the plate, and they would see, at the end of the day, what was coming off the plates, into a waste bin, and what was coming out of production into a waste bin, and they would weigh their waste every day and calculate it. She would put it into a graph, and show them, over time how their waste was going. At the beginning, it was very high. And by the time they finished the project, it was very low, because they recognised what was happening. They would look at that and go, okay, there’s way too many chips on the plate, for example, or there’s too much bread coming back from eggs on toast. Let’s just serve eggs on toast with one slice of bread. Let’s put less chips on the plate. Tapering in their portions so that there was less coming back on the plate. There’s less going out, less coming back. Customers are happy and they’re making more money. Then all of a sudden, they are a more profitable business, purely because they educated themselves and were more aware. That was just a really interesting turning point for me in watching and understanding how that worked in that project across the board. I started watching everything more closely in the restaurants, understanding, the processing of things in the restaurants, how chefs were working, looking in the bins in kitchens, making sure people understood what to do with things and how to process things. It just became more and more and more niche, I guess. And then it’s developed into this real obsession around not wasting herb stalks. When we were making our own chai, we were using all the aromats from the garden and I didn’t want to throw these in the bin once they’ve been infused in water. That doesn’t make sense to me. We started dehydrating all the aromats and then blending them into a powder and putting them on the top of the chai and we would have the powder left over and so we started a chai spice granola. We’d use the spices in the granola and it was amazing. Very aromatic and delicious, but not overwhelming because it’s been poached already, so half of the flavour is gone, but it’s still flavouring, it’s nice.
Is your mind going all the time?
It never stops. It never, ever stops.
The boundaries of being a chef are just so wide: it’s a huge job, at your level you’re thinking of all of those things, but then you’ve got menu creation, and then you’ve got technique, and then you’ve got training, your staff.
I call it octopus. My mind is like an octopus. I’ve always got like eight tentacles out; I’m looking in four different directions. I’ve got my hands in different pies. I’m stirring this, I’m on the phone here, I’m doing that. There’s always something. This is the beauty of an ADHD mind; I don’t switch off. My hyperfocus comes down to food. Flavours to me is like breathing. It just happens naturally. I see things and hear things and taste things and things just happen without me realising it’s happening. That’s the beauty of a neurodivergent brain, it just happens. I think it’s taken me a long time to harness the power, and it’s been a developmental process through the journey of my career. I hated that at the beginning and I’m really grateful for it now it took me a long time to build the discipline, to harness the power. But I’m very grateful for it now because it’s something that I’m recognising not everybody has. It’s a point of difference that I can celebrate rather than try and hide, which is really cool.
I read somewhere that you didn’t really consider being a chef initially.
Oh, yeah, no. I was just so terrified of the chefs in the kitchen. When I was 14, I started in a deli, part-time on school holidays, and then when I was a little bit older, I went to a restaurant and I started on the floor as a waiter and I thought that was okay. Then I went into the kitchen as a kitchen hand. It was much better than being out there because it’s back in the ’90s, I had to wear a skirt to work and wear a nice apron and I couldn’t handle it. It wasn’t me. So they stuck me in the kitchen for a bit to help out. I thought, this is alright, but the chefs were a bit gnarly. There was a bit of a cowboys game back in the 90s. They were a bit scary. I did an advanced diploma in hospitality management straight out of school. I started working in quite a big hotel, a resort on the Sunshine Coast. The head chef there was one of those guys who was this giant German, stoic creature that wore a big, tall hat and always full whites, always with a stretched white apron, crispy. Euro chef, very intimidating. And he just terrified me. And that brigade of chefs was enormous. There were probably 20 or 30 chefs, and it was very intimidating. I left that and moved to Melbourne, I started trying to look for front of house jobs, because that’s pretty much mostly what I’d done because of my diploma. I thought, I’ll just do front of house. Then I just gradually got sucked into the kitchen more and then someone said, oh, why don’t you just do your apprenticeship? I didn’t know if I could actually do that. Then I just bit the bullet and was like, yeah, I’ll just give it a go. I started and I thought, this is really cool. It’s structured, but it’s not structured. There’s lots of time and creative play, but it’s busy, but there’s quiet time zone. It suited my brain. I just progressed from there. I did a lot of jobs in my first two years and didn’t really find my feet, and then I moved to Sydney and started working at Bistro Moncur. I was just like, what the fuck? My prep list was all French terminology, and the brigade was 50/50 men and women. The food that they were producing…it was a pivotal moment in my life where my eyes were saucers and my jaw was on the floor and I was just like, Fuck, what the fuck is this place? This is amazing. I have to be here. I got the job, which was really exciting for me and I started working there and it was one of the hardest transitional periods of my life. The people were really nice, but I struggled with the discipline of that kitchen. It just constantly had to be better. I hadn’t really trained in that way where the accountability was so high, and it took me a while to understand that unless you’re really honest at the beginning of a mistake, that mistake will come back and bite you so hard in service and you cannot hide in a space like that. I would try and like squirrel things away that I’d made mistakes on. The fear that I would get into trouble was so great that I would try and hide the mistake and then I would figure out that later that I would get into trouble so much more. It took me a minute to catch up on that idea. Once I caught into it, I was like, right, if I just go straight away to the chef and say I’ve made a mistake, how do I fix it, the learning process of how to fix it was far greater an opportunity than the getting in trouble part.
How old were you?
I think I was maybe 20. I went to boarding school and I was very immature and young in the mind. It took me a long time to grow and learn as an adult to be an adult. I’m there now, don’t worry. I came from a very insulated upbringing, a very small-ish country town growing up. I went to boarding school, and was very insular. Then I left school and went straight into a comfy little course and had a nice little group of friends and was very insular again. When I moved to Melbourne, I was a little bit more exposed and then moved to Sydney, was very exposed. It rapidly caught up with me. Once I recognised that the learning process far outweighed the fear of getting into trouble I was learning, learning, learning, learning. I just pushed myself really hard to try not to make mistakes, and if I did, I’d learn how to correct them very quickly. That process of growing and discipline and the food that they were doing, it cemented my love of food in a way that I hadn’t had before. It was French food, and it was the history of it and the romance around the passion everyone had for the development process. It was so pivotal in my life, that part of my learning. Then I moved to London and was in London with another sort of very insulated little French niche French restaurant.
Did you know you were going to that restaurant?
No. They were doing very French provincial food. What we were doing in Sydney was beautiful, two hat, incredible French food. What we were doing in London was not as fine, but it was more rooted in the history of the French provincial style. I learned a lot more culturally about what we were doing and the intricacies of the seasons that they have and where things come from and the different provinces. It made so much more sense to me then. It solidified my love of food and the history of food and the culture of food. I’ve gone on to develop in different areas from there, but I think that fundamental learning and at that pivotal point in my life, I could have gone either way. I could have kind of gone down the rat bag route or I went down the more disciplined route.
We didn’t realise that we were doing it until we did it. I was at Code Black, and there were a few that opened around the same time. It was all the coffee roasters, all about coffee. Then it became about the coffee going with the food, and then having to match the food with the coffee, and it just kept layering. We kept layering on top of each other. We would say, oh Top Paddock’s doing this hot cake situation, and then we were doing coffee cured salmon, and then all of a sudden, there were cafes all over Melbourne doing coffee cured salmon, and watching it happen on socials was the biggest compliment to watch people start to copy what we were doing. Watching that unfold was really special. It was a pivotal moment, I guess, to sit back and recognise that. We were part of a huge movement of change in the scene, and I guess that’s something to be really proud of. It’s a different landscape now because there’s just so many people doing it, but it’s kind of cool that we were part of the change.
Laura Boulton, Heide Kitchen
You’ve said you’ve worked across a lot of different venues and styles and all of those things in different countries and cities. Does there come a time when you need to move on because you need more challenge? How does that shape your journey?
Life is a big spectrum. I’ve had different requirements in my life, different needs to meet. London, for me, was all about learning. I wanted to learn so much, and do so much, and just constantly be better. Coming home from London, it was more about changing my lifestyle, because I was so burnt out from the craziness of London and the stupid amounts of hours. My biggest ever week in London, I think, was 111 hours and you get you get paid for 38. There’s no question of overtime and you’re literally doing four times the number of hours in a week that you should do. The pay is a lot better now. That was a second apprenticeship. I did four years in Australia and then I did another four years in London, and by the time I came home, I was just so burnt out and exhausted and frayed. I was frayed in all ways. I just didn’t have the mental capacity to keep that up. I didn’t have the physical capacity to keep that up. And I settled into a lifestyle that was more sustainable for me, which was cafe work. I was of the generation of chefs that was at that peak where we had done so much, learnt so much, but so burnt out. I needed to just work days and have a life again. There was a bunch of chefs that were of my level of training that just went, nah, fuck it, let’s do days. We slowly built up the bar and turned the cafe scene in Melbourne into the cafe scene in Melbourne. We wanted to be restaurant chefs in the day. We just translated that high quality food into daytime. That was Code Black, Kettle Black, Top Paddock, Proud Mary. It was 2011, 2013, that couple of years, it just exploded on the scene, and then, all of a sudden, it was acceptable for these chefs with this amazing training to be working days. Sure, we cooked a lot of eggs, but we still did great food.
That’s when I arrived in Melbourne. That all brings its own challenges, because to cook that kind of top food, but at a daytime price, that’s the challenge, isn’t it?
Getting people to understand that paying the same amount for breakfast as you would for dinner was a big shift. That’s been a massive turning point for the industry. We still can’t get people around that fully, but it’s turned a lot. People have options.
It’s amazing to be part of that historical wave.
We didn’t realise that we were doing it until we did it. I was at Code Black, and there were a few that opened around the same time. It was all the coffee roasters, all about coffee. Then it became about the coffee going with the food, and then having to match the food with the coffee, and it just kept layering. We kept layering on top of each other. We would say, oh Top Paddock’s doing this hot cake situation, and then we were doing coffee cured salmon, and then all of a sudden, there were cafes all over Melbourne doing coffee cured salmon, and watching it happen on socials was the biggest compliment to watch people start to copy what we were doing. Watching that unfold was really special. It was a pivotal moment, I guess, to sit back and recognise that. We were part of a huge movement of change in the scene, and I guess that’s something to be really proud of. It’s a different landscape now because there’s just so many people doing it, but it’s kind of cool that we were part of the change.
Absolutely. Is Heide quiet over winter?
Typically it used to be. It’s a very moody landscape and quite wet and windy. But we’ve been in talks with the museum a lot over the last couple of years in changing the way that they lay out the shows. Typically they would always put their highest grossing shows on in summer and they would have a boom in summer and their lowest grossing shows on in winter. We said to them, it’s Heide. We’re going to be busy in summer regardless. Why don’t we put on the biggest show of the year in winter? That way, we get a more even playing field. We can level it out staffing wise for you and for us. They did that last year, and that was incredibly successful for winter. It was a game changer for winter. It was a very difficult summer. We’re always going to have ups and downs. It was just more about lowering the threshold between the up and the down so that it’s a little bit more even. Because if we’re just purely seasonal, we have to have a whole new team for summer and that’s hard because we have to train a whole new team, to retain staff throughout the year, to have consistency in business is everything. We’ve curated a few different styles of events that we can sell through winter. People can come in for a private viewing in the afternoon, doing a show, private viewing, and a tour with a talk, and then come up and have dinner at dusk. The dining room is stunning. The lighting is amazing. Then you come out after having a unique experience in here. It’s a beautiful way to celebrate a team or to do something special, or if you’re having a wedding, you get married under the big old oak tree, you go off and have your photos. Your guests come down and do a private viewing of the museum, have cocktail hour on the courtyard and then come in and have dinner. And then you can come in and join them. It’s a completely unique experience to Melbourne.
Laura, this has been so great and I’m sure you need to get into the kitchen, but you’ve had so much experience, and you’re so reflective as well, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?
Education is everything. It doesn’t matter if you go to the best school or the worst school, you’re in charge of how much you learn. If you have an interest in something, just study. Study could look different in so many ways. It could be watching a great YouTube channel. It could be researching in the library. Ot could be eating in different places. It could be travelling. If you have an interest in something, just study it in a way that suits you and just learn as much as possible about as many things as you can fit in. And mental health is everything. You have to have respect for that as well. That’s a huge part of my journey has been learning how to balance my hyper-fixation on topics, and people, and things not allowing myself to get to the point of burnout every single time. Learning how to taper and get to a point that’s exciting and thrive off that, but also learning that I need some downtime as well and then balancing the downtime with the hyper-fixation and the zoning in on things. I’ve spent a lot of my career really thrashing myself and not allowing myself the space to recover. Recovery is a huge part of it; you can’t just spend all the energy and then not have any time to recover. So, allowing yourself small spaces to do that is really important. Education and recovery: huge.
Heide Kitchen, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Melbourne