Michael Lambie

Conversation with a chef: Michael, it's lovely to see you again. This is my third visit to Juni, and I feel like each time I come, I notice something different. There's a lot to see here.

Michael Lambie: Yes, there is. And usually it's quite busy as well, so you don't get to see some of the details.

There are a lot of details. We're sitting up in the private dining room, which is so beautiful. I really like the juxtaposition of this old school carpet, which is like your grandma's old carpet and then your beautiful embroidered Japanese style curtain along the back.

Yes. It's been quite popular, this room. We're in into our 11th week.

Wow. It's gone fast.

It has gone fast, nearly three months. I think more and more people are beginning to realise that we are open now and we're here. We're starting to get really, really busy.

It's a funny time in Melbourne over summer. I feel like the city can tend to be quite quiet.

Well, there's pockets of action. When I owned Lucy Liu in Melbourne, everyone during the summer kind of gravitates to Federation Square, South Bank, Flinders Lane. Everyone's down on the river. And I did notice that when we first opened here, the city did seem a bit quiet up this end. But I have been informed quite reliably that once daylight savings is finished, then this end of the city all comes alive.

I think a venue like this with all that beautiful lighting and so on, I think once it does get into, darker evenings, this is going to really glow and people will be drawn in.

Yes. That's, that's exactly right. It was quite interesting that when we first opened, we had a few problems with our lighting and we came in early one morning and we blacked out the whole of the front with black bin liners. It was really dark and we redid the lights and it looks completely different when it's dark. It wasn't getting dark till 9.30 at night, so you didn't get to see what it was actually like when it was really dark. I think once daylight savings comes, it's going to be very different.

And you'd had some time away from Melbourne, and now that you're back, does it feel good to be back?

Yes. I was at a bit of a crossroads in my life prior to Covid where I got an opportunity to sell my business, Lucy Liu, and I wasn't sure what to do. These things only come around occasionally when someone comes along and says, I want to buy your business and it's a big number. My accountant said to me, you know, what's the worst that can happen?

We sell it and we just do it all again. I ended up selling it, and my plan was to stay in Melbourne and do something new. But then, then we hit the Covid years and I was at home and wasn't sure what to do and I got a phone call one day and I got an opportunity to open something in Queensland, and it's sort of something that I would never have done, but because it was Covid and right in the middle of Covid, and there was no chance that I was going to put money in investing in something in Victoria that Queensland seemed quite a good idea, even if it was short term. I bought a restaurant up in Queensland in Broad Beach, in the Gold Coast, and set up a really good business, actually. It was great. I stayed in Melbourne and I flew up there and I stayed up there for a couple of weeks, and then I'd come back and then I'd go back up. It probably took me four months to realise that I wasn't on holiday, because you go up there and it was just really different in terms of the business was great, but people's eating habits are really different. I don't care what anyone says, but you go up to the Gold Coast and you don't have the calibre of restaurants that you have in Melbourne and Sydney, and people are not as educated in food and dining habits, it's just a different environment. I just didn't take that into consideration. I thought, ah, yeah, we've got a really, really good brand, we've got a really good name, everything's going to be great. But you get up there and they're like, Michael, who? And they're like, oh, what you worked in Melbourne where? Oh, Lucy Liu and I own The Smith and used to be at Taxi Dining Room. And they're like, where? People just people don't know in general. I found that a bit hard to deal with, and it's a different lifestyle up there. Everyone gets up at 4.30 in the morning and they go for their morning walk and they have their coffee, and then they go to work and they're done by 2.30, 3 o'clock. They have dinner at 4.30-5 and they go to bed at 8.00pm. And that's the whole of the Gold Coast. There was just a number of different variables when I went up there that I never really took into consideration. I was expecting it would be really busy. I had a really successful business up there, but I thought, you know what, I'm going to sell it. So I sold it. One year, bang, put it on the market, and a pub group bought it off me, and I thought Id take some time to breathe, come back to Melbourne, find a site.

When I sold Lucy Liu is, I had a competition of work against me, which meant that I wasn't allowed to open a restaurant within five kilometres of Lucy Liu for three years.

That's a tough rule.

It is a tough rule, but if you're going to spend that kind of money on a business, then everyone puts it in there. They all do it and it's just called a competition of work. They wanted five years, I wanted two years, and we settled on three. But you know, by the time we'd hit Covid, we'd gone into lockdown, I'd gone up to Queensland, I'd renovated the restaurant, I opened the restaurant, and I closed it, I sold it, and then I came back to Melbourne. That was the three years, there was probably six months or something left on it. And it took me a year to find the right site. I had loads, I had the basement site in David Jones, had a deal done, but that didn't go ahead. I had a site across the road from, is it Maison Batard. Chris Lucas's place had a site right across the road from that with a double frontage shop. That was a great site but the landlord was quite difficult to deal with.

So here you are.

Here we are. This space was available. It was an Officeworks space. I came and had a look at it, and thought, it's really big, and what are we going to do and how are we going to do it and then thought, nah, the Bourke Street one's probably more suitable, but couldn't get the deal over the line.

I think that's amazing vision. There's a lot of work on a site that's never been a restaurant before, putting in a kitchen and all of those things.

The landlord here, it's a group called PGA, they're really, really good people. I met with them and they said,we've got properties all over Australia and we'd love to have your brand here. They were really accommodating in terms of helping me financially and helping us with putting all the essential services in. There's so much that goes into opening a restaurant like this that no one even thinks about.

But, that's also that incredible thing of being a chef. And, for me, I have to say, Michael, you are like royalty chef. You were one of the big names in Melbourne and you're part of the culinary landscape. You've worked with phenomenal people in phenomenal places in the UK and in Europe. So there's that, but then you have to have that other knowledge. You can't just be good at cooking, once you get to that level of having your own place and then sustaining that, you have to have that business knowledge.

I remember when I was a young man, or young boy, let's say, and I was working for Marco Pierre White. I always used to criticise Marco Pierre White for not being a great chef, but the skillset that he had in terms of negotiating deals, getting restaurants built, getting the staff, that is something that I've just realised. I've realised how great an operator he was. I was just so immersed with all the food and the butchery and filleting the fish and cooking, and the lamb sauce and the salmon sauce and all of these sauce. He'd say, the food will only take you to here. You want to have the rest? You have to learn how to run it, how to build it, how to manage it.

How to be a brand. I mean, Marco Pierre White, that's a brand. What do you mean when you say you criticised his being a chef?

I don't mean it in a bad way. I'm really creative when it comes to food and stuff, I have so many different ideas and I don't think that he had those ideas. I think that he was always playing it safe, but there's nothing wrong with that. I've realised that you don't need to be the most creative chef, because if you are the most creative chef, your food's probably really inconsistent and Marco was all about the consistency, and this is how we do it. I suppose you just don't understand and appreciate that until you get a bit older and you have a few wins and you have a few losses. When I think of him as an operator, he's the best. I think he's been surpassed by Gordon Ramsay, but Gordon Ramsay was in his camp as well, and he's taken it all to the next level. Anyway, it's just an observation and a good journey.

Well, it's interesting because, if we're talking about big names, that's an interesting concept, this concept of big name chefs. Perhaps it's the generation that I am as well, there's certainly some excellent chefs out there nowadays. It just feels like it was a different world in the nineties. I feel like the nineties was this sort of heyday of Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Jun Tanaka, all those really big names. Is this my romantic view, because probably the kids that I teach now, they've got no idea about the nineties, that was the olden days. Was that the heyday or is it just because it was a bit more rock and roll than now?

I remember when I started, everyone took the mickey out of me. Oh, you want to be a chef? Oh, your souffle isn't going to rise. It wasn't a great job to be a chef. I had my heroes, like Raymond Blanc, the Roux Brothers, Nico Ladenis, Pierre Koffmann. And then there was a space in London where this young superstar chef came on, Marco Pierre White and he just revolutionised the whole dining culture. All of a sudden it was really cool to be a chef. You'd go out and people would say, so what are you doing? You'd go, oh, I'm a chef. Oh, you're a chef. Fuck. That's fucking great. All of a sudden you were a rockstar if you were a good chef at that top end level. All of a sudden, I remember my hometown, I used to go home, catch up with my family, and catch up with all my mates, and I'd go out and everyone would take the piss out of me and then they'd be like, oh, Fanny's back and then after I worked for Marco and I was working at the high end, I'd go back and they'd be like, oh, fuck, Lambie's back. He's a fucking rockstar chef who works for Marco Pierre White and that's all down to Marco who changed that.

It does explain it. There's two parts to that, though. I think yes, the making of the idea of the chef is cool and rock and roll is down to Marco Pierre White. But what I'd also say is from the stories I've heard about you that you were in with Marco Pierre White and the esteem he held you in, that's about you. From what I've heard, you were in the kitchen at 10 because your parents had pubs and something drew you in because you weren't just doing it for the pocket money.

No. My mum and dad had a great big pub, and I started working for them for pocket money. I was helping in the pub part, doing all the cleaning, all the cellars and the cool rooms. And my mum used to look after the kitchen, and I was fascinated by the kitchen. I used to go in and look at all the salads and stuff, and then I started helping in the kitchen. I used to peel potatoes and cut chips and then I just got the bug.

How do you get the bug from peeling potatoes and cutting chips?

I don't know. When I was 11 or something and they said to me at school, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I want to be a chef, and I just followed it through and I got more and more into it. I went to trade school and then my parents moved to a little seaside town called Whitstable. It was a beautiful little seaside town. There was a seafood restaurant, and my sister was working there, and my sister said, why don't you come and work with Johnny, the owner and I went there and they used to do cold lobsters and oysters and prawns and grilled Dover soul and steaks. I started working there. And then I we've got these chain of steakhouses in the UK called Beefeater. I was working at one of them grilling steaks, and I was reading books and then the owner of the seafood restaurant said to me, you are wasted here, you need to go to London. I ended up going to work at Claridges, which is a big hotel in Mayfair as a 17-year-old. I remember walking into the kitchen there and I had my floppy hat on, and I couldn't do my apron up properly. I was tripping over my apron, and my jacket was too big for me and I was absolutely shitting myself. I remember going into the kitchen and it was like Piccadilly Circus. There were 50 people all running around in the kitchen and one of the chefs said to me, go and get me some basil. I said, yes, chef and I went running up to the herb fridge and I opened up the herb fridge and there's all these herbs and I'm like, fuck, which one's basil?

There was a chef there called John Williams, who was the senior sous chef who has just ironically won two Michelin stars. He's now the executive chef at the Ritz. He's from Newcastle. I used to be shit scared of him. He took me under his wing and he loved me and he guided me and helped me, and he'd help me in the morning. I just got into it.I started buying books, reading books, Id go to bed at night and read books about different restaurants all over France and Germany and then Mr. Williams, I still call him Mr. Williams, he said to me one day, you come here and he pulled me into the fridge. He said, you've been here three years, it's time for you to go to Europe. He said, I've got contacts in Germany, don't go to France, go to Germany. The best restaurants in the world are in Germany. I ended up going and speaking to my mum, and I said, Mum I'm going to go to Germany and work. I ended up going to the Sheraton in Munich, and you needed a lot of different documents so you could stay in the country. I got all my documents, and then Mr. Williams got me a job in a two Michelin star restaurant in Germany. It was unbelievable work. I used to wake up thinking, right, I'm in Germany, I'm in Munich, I'm living in Marienplatz, and I'm working at the Konigshof and that was two Michelin stars. And I met a guy there, an Australian guy from Melbourne and he goes to me, I can pass your details to The Waterside, which is the three Michelin star restaurant in Bray. I know that they would probably want to take you on. Back then there were no emails and stuff. I wrote them a letter.

How old were you then?

19. Anyway, long story short, I ended up getting the job at The Waterside Inn. I left Germany, went to the Waterside Inn, and stayed there for three years, which was brilliant. Best place I've ever worked. Hard work and a lot of discipline.

What did you love about it?

It was just really well organised. And you had to work really hard. It was really hard. But, the training and the pressure and you're working with the best, all the guys are really good and the team's really tight there. And if you're not good, you just get kicked out. I did the hot entrees, I did the fish section, and Mr. Roux wanted me to stay, but this is when Marco Pierre White was on the scene and I wanted to work with Marco. I rang up Harvey's and asked to speak to Marco and he said to me, come and see me on your day off. I went and saw him, and I sat in the front window with him, and he was the most intimidating man I've ever met. I remember he sat down and he had a packet of cigarettes and he took out a Marlboro and he lit his Marlboro and then he threw the packet at me and he goes, so you want to be a chef? Mafioso style. I went and worked with him and I stayed with him for four years and then I came here.

What's the difference then between a good chef,you sort of touched on it before with being creative and so on, and I guess hard work. Can anyone be a chef? What's the difference between being a good chef and then being a great chef?

Well, look, that's an interesting question and it's hard to answer. I think that you've got a lot of great chefs that never get recognised. Marco was so perceptive. Marco said to me, cooking alone, gets you so far, so you can be a great cook. You can be a great cook. But once you're a great cook, you have to be a great organiser. You have to be a great leader, you have to be a great motivator. You have to be able to help people when they're under pressure, and that's all the kitchen operations and maybe the front of house operations as well. But to be a superstar chef, you have to have the right connections. And that's what Marco had. Marco had everyone.

I remember being at the restaurant with Marco Pierre White, and I was obsessed with food. It was all about food and cooking and plating and the Michelin Guide and winning three Michelin stars. That's all I could think about. That was my whole life. And Marco came in one day and the Michelin guide back then was this bible and you dont know who the critics are, and theyd come in and theyd review you and it's all anonymous and all of this stuff. I've realised now that it's just a crock of shit. Do you know what I mean? But back then it was everything to me. And Marco came in one morning and said, we've got a really VIP guest coming in and I'm having lunch with him today. Michael, I want you to cook for us. We're having this on the menu. He went through the set menu, and told us to make sure that we had some gifts for him to take away. It's around Christmas. He's like, get a Christmas hamper, put some hams and turkey, some crayfish and truffles and a couple of bottles of wine and well give it to him when he leaves. He's a real VIP. So anyway, Marco came in after the lunch, walks into the kitchen, all dressed up with his suit, clapping away. Hesaid to me, come here boy. And he goes, guess what? And I said, what Marco? And he goes, I reckon we're going to win three Michelin stars this year. And I'm like, really? How do you know? No one knows, it's anonymous. He said, I just had lunch with the head inspector for Michelin, Europe, Derek Brown. I was a bit disappointed at the time, but now I think its genius. When we was slogging it out, working at Wandsworth in his little shitty 40 seat restaurant, and we were all working a hundred hours a week, he was signing book deals in France, in the media spotlight, marrying supermodels, in the paper every single day, getting deals done with Trust House Forte to open restaurants all over Great Britain. You think back and you think, well, if I'm a great cook, is that going to make me really successful? Or if I'm a great person like Marco was, is that going to make me great.

It depends how you define success then, doesn't it?

I was just captivated by the food and I think that Marco was a great cook and still is, but he was a cook who had the edge because he knew all about the contacts. I remember he said to me once, remember this Michael, life is all about the contacts. It went straight over my head. Until I'd been away from Melbourne, came back to open Juni, and I realised, who do I know? Who's the contact that can put me on the map here? It's just interesting.

It sounds like you're ballsy as well. All those situations, especially as a young person, it would be difficult to front up to someone like Marco Pierre White, for example. But it seems like every time you were offered an opportunity, you grabbed it.

But I also had a very demanding father who pushed me to do stuff and pushed me out of my comfort zone, God bless him. I owe that to him as well, because otherwise, I am actually quite a shy person, and I'm very private. But I also think that there's opportunities that are there. It's just the people that take them are the ones that get there. A lot of people said to me as well, coming back to Melbourne, opening a new restaurant in the CBD, everyone's saying that the hospitality industry's dead. Why are you doing it? But if I make this work, which I am, then that's great.

But also, you are here. You've got really great staff, and Hendri is fantastic. But you're here and you're still on the pans. Is that important for you?

I think it is. It's different these days. What constitutes being successful now? Is it having a really good Instagram profile and having great reels and great photos of what you are trying to portray what youre really doing. But when you're not even there, and I feel that I do have a following of people and everyone comes here because they want to see me. I don't want to be here a hundred hours a week and I can't be. But I love it. I've missed it and when I've worked so hard to put all the things in place to get this restaurant open, then what's the point of opening it and not being here? The only thing I want really is to be here on my terms. Do you know what I mean? I've got aspirations of building this group and more restaurants and taking my team with me.

How great. You were a trailblazer in terms of Pan-Asian sort of menu when you started at Taxi and, and then you've just run with it, haven't you? And it's become your thing.

I left Marco, came to Melbourne, and I kind of had it in my head that I was going to bring the Marco style to Melbourne. And I did. And it didn't really work that well. It did and it didn't, but it wasn't super popular. People said to me, just because it works in London doesn't mean it's going to work in Melbourne. And it didn't. My wife said to me, you need to reinvent yourself. She said, all this stuff that you're doing, it's all 1990s Marco Pierre White. She said, come on, Lambie, let's fucking up the ante. Go and have a look around Swanson Street. It's full of university students that are all from Japan, from Thailand, from Hong Kong, from China. She's like, the new cuisine is Asian, let's get with the program. That's exactly what she said. I met a guy called Paul Mathis who had this idea about Taxi dining room. He said, I want to do an Asian restaurant, and I didn't want to do it. And that's when Vic said all that to me, and then it was almost like, boom, the light went on.

Gosh, you've had great voices and people in your life advising you.

So that's how it all came about. Paul was really good. Paul said Melbourne was going to be the hub where it's going to be a melting pot of cultures and it used to be Italian and Greek and cafe culture, and now it's going to be Asian. And I thought, you know what? He's right. Its modern Australian, isn't it?

It's interesting that you say I've had a lot of voices because what we tend to do is we always listen to the people that tell us what we want to hear, but we never listen to the people that tell us what we should do. I've been down that road with everyone blowing wind up my bum, and now I listen to what I have to do in order to make things work.

Do you still, maybe not as feverishly as when you were 18 or 19, are you still reading books?

Well look, it's different now I think because the internet is so available and you can basically look at any menu from all over the world at the click of a button. But yes, I always look at what the new trends are and drinks, cocktails, ingredients. But I think since Covid it's different. And since wage theft scandal and all of that, this generation of people are different, the kids are different. They're not so driven, it's hard to find really good staff. Everyone wants to work on from home and get a job selling bloody toys on the internet or whatever. It's hard to find the right people.

When you were coming through, people did stages because they wanted to learn. They were willing to not be paid just to learn all of the stuff. It must be harder and harder to learn and put in the hours.

That's good that you brought that up because I used to do stages everywhere. When I worked at the Waterside Inn, there were 11 chefs on the payroll and 20 chefs that were all doing stages. Any top restaurant that you can name in the nineties, I worked there for one day.Mr. Roux sent me to Strasbourg to a restaurant called Le Crocodile, which was a three Michelin star restaurant. I went there and I worked there for three weeks for nothing. Now that's deemed wage theft. That's my backbone. That's what made me who I am. That's what gave me the knowledge.

It's a shame that for lots of places it's difficult to teach staff butchery or filleting fish or whatever it takes so much time.

They have no idea. At the Waterside Inn, one day we'd get whole lambs the next day they'd get whole pigs. The next day they'd get an argie of beef. It all used to get hung in the fridge and it all used to get butchered. All the fish would come in, whole live lobsters. Now these kids wouldn't even know where to start.

So, what's your advice to them?

I think first of all, you have to love it. You have to follow your dreams. You have to work hard. There's no shortcuts. What you have to do is you have to be diligent and you have to look around and keep your head on your shoulders. I worked on the fish at The Waterside Inn, but I spent most of my time on the meat watching the chef on the meat do all his sauce and his butchery. I learned how to do that section by not actually doing it. I went to The Waterside Inn, after working at Claridge's and the two Michelin star restaurant in Germany, and they put me on the salad section and all I used to do was pick salad and make a vinaigrette and I used to serve the salad that went out with the main course. That was it.

For how long?

Three months. It's the discipline. The head chef there, I can't remember what his name was now, but the head chef used to say to me, oh, it's not busy tonight, Michael, so you can do the salad and we're going to send the kitchen hand home and you can wash the dishes as well. I'd be like, okay, but I just did it. It's like a test. And you know, working with Marco in the kitchen, he was a lunatic. And I used to love it.

Would he throw things?

Yeah. Crazy. Unbelievable. I can't even explain what he did.

Did people leave because of that?

Yeah. He used to weed them all out. He was a nutcase. When I first started there, it was really hot in that kitchen and we'd all be prepping in the morning and then all of a sudden he'd come in and if he had a jacket on and jeans and shoes, we'd be like, oh, Marco's going out tonight. Everyone would be relieved. If he had a chef's jacket on, I'd be like, oh my God, what the fuck is going to happen tonight? Because he used to just go crazy. And it would just be a switch. He used to sit in the restaurant and answer the phone. This gives you an idea of what his character's like. He used to answer the phone and try and get customers to come in. He came into the kitchen one day and he said, Guys, every second phone call is for one of you in the kitchen. He said, can I just let you know from now on, no fucking phone calls while you're at work. And this is before mobile phones. Next thing the phone rang. It's like something out of the comedy movie. The phone rang, someone answered the phone and went, Roger phone call. Marco just turned and he went and grabbed the phone. It was on the wall, and he ripped it off. He's like, get me the meat cleaver. And he smashed the phone up and said, do you understand? No more fucking phone calls in the kitchen. And he just walked out. That was it. But I got into it and I loved it. Working with him, you're like the SAS of kitchen staff. But it was great. Nothing would phase me. And I was tough, mentally tough. I still am. There's a guy called Dana White. He's an American guy who owns the UFC. I know it's not to do with cooking or this podcast, but he says in this generation of kids, if you want it and you've got it, and you are tough enough, you can do anything that you want. Because theyre all weak. All the kids are weak. He says, they're not mentally strong. That was something that just touched me from him.

Good luck to the youth.

Well, no, they're great. But it's just different.

I totally understand. Thanks so much for your time. I love your stories.

Well they're all true.

Juni, 136 Exhibition Street, Melbourne