Phillippa Grogan

Conversation with a chef: It's lovely to meet you Philippa. Thank you for your time today. I'm such a big fan and when I was invited to speak to you, I couldn't really believe it because you are a legend on the Melbourne landscape. Congratulations on 30 years of business.

Phillippa Grogan: It's hard to believe. Who would've thought 30 years ago.

That's right. 1994, what were your thoughts when you opened? Was it always going to be a bakery?

It's a food store and we were baking bread. I was shortly off the plane from London where I had spent nine years working for Sally Clarke in a lovely food store. That was in Kensington, Church Street in amongst all the antique shops. So when I came here, I felt very comfortable in amongst all the antique shops, because this was the antique strip and Tartine was across the road. I'd known that because I went to school not far from here and I remember going in there when I was still at school. I thought, okay, well one food store and lots of antique shops, it feels good. Everybody said to me, no, you can't have a food shop unless you are near a supermarket or a bank or a chemist or a whole list of locations that I should have been in with a bakery. I hadn't heard of all that theory. It just felt right. I found this place and renovated it, and it was open within maybe two or three months in the May. On the first day we took $284 and then we took more the second day, and the third day and word must have got out. It just slowly built, and it was great.

The other thing that was in my favour in a way I think is that we'd just come out of recession here. We'd already bottomed out. People were looking for things that made them happy, new, fresh ideas. I guess my ideas were coming straight from London that's always a little bit different but very sympathetic to our culture here. My focus has always been deeply steeped in traditional, usually baked home homemade goods. Being from New Zealand, my grandparents and my parents always cooked and baked. There was always an emotional connection with the food that was in my family home, whether it was the aromas when the oven was on, or the flavours that would take me back to a happy time, it usually takes you back to your childhood. I guess opening in High Street, Armadale surrounded by families, many young families, meant that we had young mums with kids and young dads with kids, little kids coming in who ended up growing up with us and getting used to the flavours of my baking because their parents were too busy. That became their emotional connection now to their childhood. They still talk about the honey bears, and they talk about the mince pies, and they talk about hot cross buns that have a particular flavour that is distinctive to them and reminds them of their childhood. That's what it was like back then really.

Do you think that's what you owe the longevity of the business to as well? That link for people to perhaps nostalgia and childhood memories and the consistency of those things?

Yes. I think a lot of it's got to do with that connection to nostalgia and growing up. I've been in this location for those 30 years and so people have come in here as babies and come in here as teenagers and they're used to the flavour profiles. But also in terms of the longevity, I would say that very early on we did as much as we could to get as much food into people's mouths, so they tasted it, and usually the net result was they would taste it and they would love it and talk about it. We found that the more people we gave tastings to, the easier it was to build a customer base. Doing that early on meant that we had a big wide customer base and because we've been around for 30 years, that's just come with us and grown.

On that first day when you first started out, what products were you making?

We made some loaves of bread, cornbread, pane toscano, not so much sourdough back then, sourdough came a little bit later. But all of the breads that we made that we yeasted, and still make that are yeasted, are very low yeast, low salt, no additives, no natural or unnatural additives. Unnatural would be a bottle of improver and a natural one would be malt or vitamin C, but we don't add anything at all because we don't want to influence the natural slow proofing of the bread. We just let it slowly go through that pre-digestion process of the wheat by long slow fermentation unassisted. We also had little brioche fruit tarts, and we had a large fruit brioche tart, almond tart and lemon tart. We always had the lemon tart from the very beginning, chocolate chip hazelnut cookies and chocolate brownie. It was a slightly different chocolate brownie, we've morphed that over the years. We've developed that recipe further, but that's still been in our range for a very long time. It was one of our top sellers and Parmesan sables were very early. On the very first day we had jars of crab apple jelly because in the lead up to having the store open, my parents' house had a crab apple tree and we made jelly. Weve always had jars of jam and relishes and things that we make out the back in the kitchen. So yeah, I remember all those products being in there.

Do all your stores have kitchens out the back?

This store in Armadale has a kitchen out the back where we make tarts, lemon tarts, meals that we cryovac into the containers, pizzas and sausage rolls and pies, jams and cakes. Our other store down in Brighton makes bread and we now sell the bread from Brighton. We get that here every morning and we take meals down to Brighton. Brighton is really a full-on bakery. The grocery range, the packets of the granolas and the biscuits and the nuts and the subways are made in Richmond in a bigger kitchen because we supply them to a whole lot of other on-sell retailers.

It's huge. It's interesting hearing you talk about those memories of childhood because often when I think about cuisines from other countries being quite distinctive and I often think, oh, you know, New Zealand doesn't really have a distinct cuisine and yet when you talk about baking and then when you talk to some people about their childhood memories of growing up in New Zealand, baking is so distinct and I definitely grew up baking as a child. Mum taught me to bake and we had children's step by step baking books and it is interesting to be reminded of that. You're right, that is a really huge thing for New Zealanders and maybe Australians. There's different things like ginger crunch and proper caramel square and Anzacs and Yoyos and all those kinds of things.

Louise Cake. I think anything from the Edmond's cookery book, whereas I think in Australia you might go to the Country Women's Association books. I think there's the Golden Wattle from WA is the one that they use. But everybody has a number of versions of the Edmonds book in New Zealand.

That's right. I guess that you have to evolve those products over the course of 30 years. I saw 42 products online and a lot downstairs as well. How often are you changing, adding, replacing?

We definitely have a core range. We have slices and brownies, we have spiced nuts. We have granolas and mueslis and then we have the biscuit range. And then at Christmas and Easter we again have a core range that we bring out every year. But we usually have one or two new things every Christmas, every Easter. And we also have a winter range that comes out just after Easter. And that can have six or eight items and whichever products become the most popular, they usually stay in the range. And then over time we might take something out of the range that's not performing as well. So we have a bit of an evolution and we're about to focus more on that because we recently, at the end of last year in December, closed down our wholesale bakery. We don't supply wholesale bread any more, we just do retail bread in Brighton for Brighton and this store. It means that our focus can now go into the grocery range, and we can start to really have a look at that and have some new products coming out. We're doing quite a bit of testing at the moment.

Where are you getting the ideas for that? What's your inspiration?

I like to travel every so often and I definitely come back with ideas from travel. But I also get ideas just from friends if they make something and it's really good. It doesn't have to be wildly exotic, it can just be something that really delivers and then that inspires me. Sometimes it's just flicking through books or revisiting things from the past that I've got forgotten, recipes and items that we used to have. Ginger crunch was one of them because it's not very well known here. We did introduce that and we do make that in the winter and that has its own solid following as well.

I don't have a sweet tooth, but I do love a good ginger crunch. And with all of the things that you are juggling, are you a spreadsheet person or are you more of a notebook person.

Notebooks. I like writing. It helps me think.

I was interested to see that you did an Arts degree and then went and spent some time in France. Was that Paris?

Yes. And down in the south near Toulouse.

Ok. I was actually an English assistant in a school in Provence in 1993 – 94, so around the time that you were coming back from London maybe. The south holds a special place in my heart. What drew you to France?

That's an interesting question. My mother was always a Francophile from a young age. She studied French at school. My father began working at BNP, so he became quite entrenched in French culture inevitably. And that just sort of made it a bit more intense in our family because mum was into it, dad became into it. And then my father through work became very friendly with somebody, Jeanne, and then I became friendly with her daughter and we've stayed friends for the last 40 years. She's actually staying with me at the moment from Paris. And she is out here for two months. But I would go and stay with her. My kids will go and stay in her apartment in Paris. They just have to find the key under a tree. They've got a view of the Eiffel Tower. She's got a house in the south of France where I first met her parents in the middle of winter. And I remember very strongly the smell of the bread in that French kitchen because at six in the morning in the middle of winter, it's still dark. The baker came in his little van and dropped the bread off to their house in the country, which was a hamlet. And it was one of those bien cuit, well cooked, loaves with that smell from the crust. There's a loaf we make in Brighton, the boule and when I smell that, it takes me back to that fragrance. Anyway, I've got three kids, and I took them to live in France and we stayed in that house down near Toulouse and put them into school for three months down so they were learning French. It is just a very close connection, but particularly because we are close to that family, it's that family connection.

What was the leap or the sidestep from an Arts degree into working in food?

While I was doing my Arts degree in Melbourne, I worked for three different caterers. Peter Rowlands, Louise Lechte and Jan Rogers. That fed my love of working with food. When I went to live in London indefinitely, after I finished my degree, I wanted to work in catering, doing office catering. I worked for a man in one of the insurance companies, he was the chairman of Lloyd's Insurance Market. I was cooking lunches every day, that was great. But in the evening I would work for Sally Clarke in her restaurant as a waitress and that would feed my inspiration for what I would cook during the day in the lunches. Id see what Sally was making, and I'd think, I might do something like that tomorrow. Then I'd go to the Leadenhall food market, it doesn't really exist anymore, but it was a proper food market then in the middle of the city of London. I stayed with Sally for nine years because then I went and worked for her full-time. I worked in her kitchen and then I ran her shop, which was the genesis I guess, of this store downstairs.

So you were learning on the spot and self-taught?

That's right.

That's amazing. How many were you catering for at the insurance job?

Usually six to eight, sometimes twelve. Not too big. But then on weekends, the chairman had a house on the Isle of Sark and there was one summer that every other weekend, so twice a month, we would go over there and he'd have his guests and there might have been twelve of them and I'd have to cook every meal. But to get there, it was every form of transport. It was the train to the airport, a small plane, then arrive, go on a boat, get on a tractor, and then get to the house because the Isle of Sark had no cars on it. And wed take our crayfish and all our ingredients. I had to be reorganized.

Where is that?

The Channel Islands between France and England: Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney and another one. But Sark is a small one. And it was a feudal system. I think there were 42 property owners and they were all governing the island.

How amazing. It's quite cinematic, isn't it? What is it that you loved about food and feeding people then?

I love tasting and tasting new things. And I enjoy seeing people sitting around a table enjoying food and having good conversations and the connection with my past too, I guess, that connection to my childhood and those happy memories that flavours can evoke. They just take you back to the happy childhood.

It sounds brave to me trying all those things. Did you cook on a yacht as well?

I did cook on a yacht. That was different. That was working for the insurance company. A group of them decided to sail from Brighton, England to Cadiz in Spain. And they decided it would be good to take me along because I would cook for them. There were six of us, I think on this yacht, it was eight days and eight nights. We sailed along through the Bay of Biscay and I cooked. They weren't too serious. We were supposed to be in a yacht race, but they were more interested in having ginger beer in the afternoon It was fun though. We ate very well.

Did you call in in at places or did you have to have your menus all sorted before you went?

We didn't stop anywhere so we had to check everything and be very organised.

And work in a small galley.

Yes, and moving around in the high seas and we all had to do night watch, 2am till 5am was the difficult one. Two of us would have to make sure that the yacht was going ok, in the dark. It was fun.

So now 30 years on, where to from here? Do you have more plans?

Definitely putting a lot of energy into the grocery range, and developing products and new markets for that. We can see a lot of opportunity there. There's a big demand for high quality products without additives, unnecessary additives, really good natural ingredients. It is hard to find products that are made with butter. If we make something with candied orange peel, we make the candied orange peel ourselves, because if you buy it, it's got a whole lot of chemicals in it and that imparts that chemical flavour. If we're making something with chocolate, we use really good chocolate because you're only as good as the last mouthful. So as long as somebody is eating something and it tastes good and over delivers on flavour, then we're ahead. We don't know gas flush things. Our recipes are just as my mother would make them. We don't put long shelf lifes on them, you could eat our products for a lot longer than the shelf life we put on. But we want people to eat them as though they're freshly baked because they're not going to last a long time. Nothing tastes great six months down the track. The way we package, a lot of our products are purchased as a proud gift to give somebody. Usually people are proudly going to gift something from Philippas. But equally it's not a product that's so packaged that it looks too good to open. You can get things that are so pretty, you just want them to sit there. You are never going to open them. We like to think we've got that balance and we've got that transparency so that people can see how much product is in there and what it looks like as opposed to things in boxes and you can't see anything and in fact it's only a quarter full, that whole game that people play. There's a whole lot of honesty around how we go to market.

How do you go because everything costs so much these days, and consumers and diners are often disgruntled about the cost of things in restaurants, for example. Even though we know when we go through the supermarket that things cost a lot. It must be hard to balance that really good quality with food costs.

Look it is, but I think that our customers absolutely know what we stand for, and they know the real cost to them of trying to make these products. The time and the energy, the risk of burning it, the amount of cleaning and tidying up to do, the amount of planning and shopping. And then you actually don't have an egg, so you have to go back. When you think about it, it's actually inexpensive because we are making the quality that you would make if you were spending as much money as you could afford on your ingredients, as opposed to let's spend as little money as we can on the ingredients and make everything for the lowest possible price. And then we can offer it for $3 or $5 instead of what it should be because it's been frozen for 10 months, it has actually no flavour. Our products are different. Our products are fresher, our products made with good ingredients. They're fresh. We have a good turnover on them and, we don't do anything to help them last longer. We don't add anything. There are natural ingredients I could add that would help them to last longer, but it would take away from the flavour and the enjoyment and the quality. We make jam. We do not add pectin to our jam under any circumstances, because if you compare a jam made with pectin and one made without, the ones made with pectin, it's almost like they've had some flavour sucked out of them. I dont know what happens, but if they have a nice set jelly, to me that's a bad sign.They don't have as much flavour. I like complex flavours and when I'm tasting things, I like to see a range of flavours. When I worked in the UK, I worked closely with Neal's Yard Dairy and I sold a lot of Neals Yard Dairy cheeses and they were generally unpasteurised cheeses. That meant that if you ate a piece of cheese, the flavour went from here to here to here and it kept giving you flavour while you were eating it. Whereas if you're not careful, now you can eat a piece of cheese and there's one dimensional flavour. It's cheese and that's the only thing you know, as opposed to levels that keep giving. That's all about the ingredients and how they're treated. In the case of cheese, it's about pasteurisation. You can have very good cheeses that are pasteurised, but they're pasteurised at a low temperature for a longer period of time and it doesn't kill off all the flavours. It's just a better way to make cheese. I'm interested in products that deliver and they're not just one dimensional, they're multi-dimensional. That's what I'm after. Natural, it's good for your gut, it's good for your health. It's a luxury, but it's just not full of nonsense and rubbish, and it brings back those memories too. When our mothers and grandmothers baked, they baked like this, so that's probably why those memories are very strong, apart from the fact that when you're younger you've got taste buds that are more sensitive, but there was a lot more flavour coming out when you were younger. If you were eating products that were made at home, they weren't made in the shortcut manner.

That's right. I remember mum making lots of tomato sauce. I guess thinking now, I mean I guess it's like when Italians make passata, but that's not a tradition Mum would've been following. It was just tomatoes are in season and her tomato sauce was amazing. It was always, it had all the seeds in it and it was just really, really flavoursome.

And not with shortcuts.

No, that's right. I think she tried a few different methods with stockings to strain things. I remember it was a whole thing in a huge pan.

With all that in mind and your experience here and overseas, what would your advice be to someone thinking about getting into hospitality or cooking?

I remember when I was planning on coming back from the UK to come here to set up a store, a business. I had some friends that were in finance and accountants and they said you have to have a business plan. It wasnt my thing really to have a business plan, but we sat down and he made me pull out figures and we put something together. It is a good idea to have a business plan, something that you can measure yourself against. Not that you can't make changes as you go along, as you understand the situation more and more, but that is a good idea.

The other thing I think that is a really smart idea is to surround yourself with some good people that you can get advice from, and even a mentor, because if you have good people around you and you get good advice, that'll make a big difference to the direction in your future.

I think the other important thing is to work out how to generate the widest reach. Once you have your restaurant cafe products, you want to be able to make sure that as many people as possible know about you and have a reason to try you out. You often see new places and they just open the doors, there's nobody there and they are next to a place that's new and open the door and you can't even get in. Usually it's about the product, but it's not always about the product, it's just about influence. It is important to have a good product. It's not much point having a whole lot of people coming to have something that doesn't taste any good or doesn't deliver on what they say they're going to deliver on. I think they're probably the most important things.

Have a clear vision of what you stand for. I know that we stand for tradition, using traditional ingredients and traditional methods and good quality ingredients and having distinctive flavours and textures and it means that any ideas and inspiration and thoughts can come up or are thrown at me and I can just go back to that, and ask, is that going to be part of it or not? For example, let's make jam and we can make a lot of it, but we'll put some pectin in it. No, that isn't going to work. That won't deliver what we need, pectin is out of the picture. It just means you've got a bit of something to guide you through. It depends on how your mind works, but if you can easily be influenced and be overwhelmed by too many thoughts and ideas, it's quite good to be able to distil it back and bring it back to where it needs to be and to know why it should be there.

Phillippa's Bakery, 1030 High Street, Armadale