Jessie Rae Crossley

Conversation with a chef: Hi, how are you? Nice to see you again.

Jessie Rae Crossley: Now I'm not fully up to speed on exactly what today's conversation is all about, but I'm assuming it's what we touched on before.

Generally with Conversation with a chef, it's what you're doing now, how you got here, Id like to hear more about the working on the yachts. It's just a genuine conversation because I'm really, I guess, nosy and I love to hear people's stories. It's very low-fi, I just record on my phone.

I'm trying to sort out the whole filming cooking demonstrations and getting the right speakers.

Do you do some cooking classes?

We used to back in the day. We're thinking about revisiting them. Probably next year. Winter has been quite tight trying to run a business right now. But yes, the cooking classes are great. Thats how I started Locavore really. It all kicked off in 2015. The whole idea was based on when I was working on the yachts still. I did a lot of cooking classes with the guests on the boats, just to keep their holiday fun. I really enjoyed it. We were doing pasta classes and just all sorts of fun cooking bits. I found a real love for teaching people. I knew that yachting wasn't a forever thing and I was finding it quite difficult being on my own. It's very isolating in the sense that there's so many people coming in and out of the industry that you just start to become friends with someone and then they move off to another boat. All my family were back here, so I wanted an exit strategy and I knew that I wanted to open a business. For me that was a fun idea.

I came back in 2014, got everything together and then found a studio space just around the corner on the railway line. It was a factory. Me and my dad fitted that out to a big studio kitchen with workstations for people and a big demonstration bench as well, where I took the demonstrations and then it was more of a hands-on. I would show everyone how to start cooking the dish and then I'd move everyone onto their stations and assist them as they moved through the recipes. That was really fun. But I found myself getting quite anxious through that whole situation. There were so many people coming in and I was very young. I was 23. I was running this business and I'd only been, I'd been a qualified chef for five years by this stage, but cooking for eight. It was just one of those things where I was in my head too much because you'd have people coming in saying, oh, I went to a cooking class with Gary Cooper out in the Yarra Valley, and he told us to do something different. And then that would start ticking away in my head.

That's a problem with teaching, because you've got an audience all the time and, and everyone's got an opinion. You are in your head a lot, reflecting about different ways of getting things across.

Very tricky. But it was the start of the journey, because I think we were a year into it and I had a couple who had received a gift certificate for their engagement and they had come in and they did the class and then approached me afterwards asking if I'd cater their wedding. I'd only ever catered weddings when I was an apprentice at Yering Station. I figured why not give it a go? It was one of the biggest weddings we've done.

It was 160 pax, shared feasting in the Yarra Valley. I thought, sure. Let's do it. And I loved it. The challenge was amazing. I quickly found at that time in my career it was better for me to be locked in a kitchen doing what I love, cooking all of this beautiful food and then taking it out on site and serving it. I think that was kind of the precipice for catering. And then from there, catering took off. Then I had people that attended that wedding that just said, far out this food is just the best. It all started to lock in moving forward. That was when I made the decision that cooking classes for me at that time werent right. I needed more experience in the industry and even just as a person.

From there, me and mum made the decision to stop the classes and go really hard on the catering. And that's what we did. And for the next three years I worked really hard on building some great relationships in the Yarra Valley. Not only with wineries and wine makers, but also with wedding venues. I built a really good reputation from there and then in 2017, this space came up for lease. That was one of the things I was falling short on as a caterer, that I didn't have an establishment for people to come and see how good we were. They were just going off recommendations. We figured that would be a good way to showcase what we do and the people that work for me and the quality of food. I had no idea how grand of scale that this simple little cafe was going to be that I opened a couple years later. It just grew. And then suddenly down the track, four years down the track we found ourselves looking at building a whole new shop to attach to the cafe. And here we are.

I know. It's like a whole little village in here with all the aspects. It's very interesting to hear the progression of that. I guess as you become more confident in one aspect and you get good people in as well, you can look at those other things. It's really well done though, super impressive.

Thank you. It's funny when you think back, and I guess I probably never thought about it until now that things like cooking classes and putting yourself on show in front of a group of people, at the time I thought it was all this anxiety that was running through my head. But really it was just people skills that I needed to learn and how to carry myself and have the confidence to carry myself and know what you are teaching people.

Absolutely. And it's to your peers well, or to adults, which is I think is really difficult. When I first started teaching in my early twenties and thats teenagers, I found that really hard because there's lots of eye rolling and it's as much learning about how you convey things as knowing the topic. Conveying them in a way that's going to meet what your audience needs and in a really logical way. You know what needs to happen or I know how to speak French, but learning how to really give them the little bits that they need to put that together for themselves. So definitely, I think it's a maturity thing as well and experience.

Which I definitely feel now I could pick up on again, even just having those extra years under my belt as well.

I'm always so amazed watching chefs because I'm not very practical. I really do love cooking. But then I think I just do things in my own sort of haphazard way. A few times when I've been to a cooking class or I used to volunteer at Fare Share and the chefs would demonstrate what we were going to be doing and just the way they would deal with vegetables and things, it's really impressive.

It's a process.

There are really good practical things that you do to make it easier to do a whole lot of stuff or to not cut your fingers off or whatever. I wonder sometimes, maybe it's just me because I'm not practical or very logical, but do you think that everyone can learn how to cook like that? Or do you think there are certain people that are just better at it?

I would say there are certain people that are just naturally better at it. Not only being a chef, working under people, but also having a business, it's certainly a natural skill to some. I think you can still learn. It's just that continuous building habits and day in and day out working in the kitchen and learning how to do those processes.

That first wedding that you catered having really only done it as an apprentice. Where did you begin? Do you just sit down and think, okay, Im going to do this food and then how am I going to make it happen? Do you start from this is what I want to achieve, these are the steps I need to do to get there, or what?

I suppose the first step was sitting down with the couple and we worked together and completely constructed their menu for what they wanted. And perhaps it was probably the experience that I gained from the yachts, from ordering on mass. I was already able to sit down and say, okay, well this is my menu, this is how many people are coming, what's the portion sizes? I was able to do all of that ordering, then break down the menu into a prep sheet. Which I feel like every chef has already got that skill. They can take a menu, break it down, and then you just work through your processes leading up to the wedding. I think the real challenge, which is something I've come so far with in the catering team over the last eight or nine years, is that packaging and moving off site for catering and then setting up and then packing that deck back down. We've got such a formula now that there is no way I was anywhere close to that. I was 23 years old when I was catering for this huge wedding. I just remember once we'd send that last dish out, then pack down and the mess everywhere was hours to clean up. And now it's 20 minutes after service is done, the van's packed, everyone's out and it's like clockwork.

I guess you have to learn too how to convey that to your staff or how to delegate, how to be thinking about the food, but then also thinking about all the moving parts.

I was just very lucky in the early days. My head chef now of catering, we were friends before I'd gone overseas and he had mentioned he'd like to jump in and just do some jobs here and there anywhere to earn some extra money. He was there from the very start as well, he was almost there when I was learning and we were both learning. As soon as I had to step into the role of being the boss and let him takeover, he took everything that we'd learned together. And then over the course of more chefs coming in and learning new processes, it just tightened up even more. Which was great.

Just to go back to before that whole thing happened, did you always think you might like to be a chef?

Yes. I often talk to mum about this. She seems to think I was six or seven years old and I'd be sitting in front of the TV watching all the cooking classes and I would tell her every day I wanted to be a chef. We had a school career project in grade four. And I'd done it all about me being a chef and created a recipe book and all the things that I was going to have in my restaurant. From a very early age I was hell bent on it.I had all of my relatives telling me, you're not going to have a life. It's a very unsocial job. You are going to work really long hours and it's only going to test you. I absolutely didn't care. It was what I wanted to do. As soon as I hit the age of 14, work experience came in and I went straight into Yering Station and absolutely loved it. They took me on as apprentice. I finished Year 10 and went straight into an apprenticeship. And then I was qualified by 18.

That's amazing. It's so young, isn't it?

It is young and it was a massive culture shock. This little 15-year-old female walking into a kitchen with men 30 plus years old and the conversations they're having, and the environment was very daunting.

How did you navigate that?

There were a lot of moments that I probably didn't and then have little cries in the back cool room. But I don't know any chef that hasn't done that. I just had to adapt. Thankfully I was in a kitchen where there was no screaming and yelling and throwing things and demeaning, or making people feel horrible. There was none of that. I was in a really lucky spot to be growing and learning as a chef. My very first head chef, Colin Swalwell, who's still at Yering Station as a head chef, he was a fantastic mentor and had so much patience and even all the other chefs in there, they wanted to take me under their wing. They could see the potential, this young person that had given up doing VCE and just absolutely loved cooking. They could see that and they just wanted to foster a good environment for that. I think I was one of the lucky ones in that situation because Ive heard some really bad horror stories.

That's right. So even though, it was such a culture shock and, and it would've been hard physical work, you're standing all day, that didn't put you off?

No, it didn't. It was really weird. My mum would often be waiting in the carpark past the time I was meant to finish because we were still doing prep right up until five o'clock in the afternoon. She would say, you started at eight, you finished at five. Have you had a break? No, I haven't had a break, but it doesn't matter, mum, I'm learning so much. I just wanted to be there. There were still days where you're like, oh my God, I'm exhausted. But I just wanted to keep learning and I wanted to be given opportunities to step in onto sauce section or like come off as a little sidekick chef, I wanted to be stepping up and I got that opportunity. I did really well. Things have definitely changed in the industry now. You have to stick to that 38-hour week for apprentices and you have to give them their breaks. And I know that's the right thing to do, but sometimes I wonder if that hinders them and their growth as a chef. I know that comes with a lot of complexity and questions and legalities but for me, I wouldn't have wanted to do it any other way.

No, and I think you're right, it's definitely a hard conversation to have because it feels like we're almost not allowed to talk about the fact that you have to put in the hours with anything that you're doing. If you think about if you're learning art or whatever, you have to put in all those physical hours for your body, get that muscle memory. And learning and experimenting. I think it is really hard to do within 38 hours. That's why a lot of places too now can't afford to teach people how to break down animals or to fillet fish or to do all of those things. And I think that's a shame and I totally understand the reasons behind the award rate and paying people properly. It's just tricky.

It is tricky. I feel like there'd be a lot of chefs from my generation that would feel that same way. And it's just learning how to teach the next generation of chefs the opportunity that we've got to give in the time that they've got and do it well. But like you said, it's really hard when there are so many businesses that are trying to cope through this financial situation we're all finding ourselves in and any way that we can get things in cheaper, rather than getting whole fishes in. There's all of these sorts of things that even I'm finding myself in the kitchen going, all right guys, we really need to save money. We can't indulge ourselves on getting in a half a carcass and breaking it down.

And then I guess too, maybe in that that new generation, the ones that are going to really succeed and still be top chefs might be the ones that are going home and putting the hours in just refining those. You'd have to, wouldn't you?

Yes. I think what's really, really good, and something I didn't have as a young chef is all of these amazing inspirational chefs coming onto social platforms and doing these videos and you can sit there and learn more on knife techniques and sauce techniques and things that I would've loved to have had that opportunity of that extra bit of education. But I spent the time in the kitchen.

But then I was talking to Diana Desensi at Karen Martini's Saint George Restaurant the other day and she was saying that a lot of the young ones spend a lot of time on social media, and you then need to be able to discern who are the people to watch. Not just by the number of followers, but that they actually do have the right skills and that what they're talking about in terms of quantity, consistency, all those kinds of things are correct. I think that's the same with anything in social media and the internet and AI, the next thing is to learn is how to filter through to get the good stuff or the right tools and skills and things.

It's a new age though. It's crazy.

What do you think it is that you love about it? Because it sounds like you've got a real curiosity for learning. Is it that hospitality side of it where you are making people happy? Is it the creativity? What is it?

I think the first thing I love about cooking is definitely making people happy and creating that experience with people. That has always been something I loved. That probably really came into its own when I was on the yachts because I was cooking for between 6 to 12 people and it was so intimate and you came out every meal at the end of the meal for the guests to thank you. That really encouraged that passion in me probably more so than ever. I did bring that back here and when I started looking at opening a cafe and with those big catering jobs, I was always involved with a couple and it was always about how to custom build their menus and seeing them come up or having them come up to at the end of the wedding and just being in awe of what you've just done for them and their guests.That that was definitely the passion for me. The creativity is certainly high on the list, but for me it's always been about making someone's experience so special through food. I might not be on the pans now, but I do it a lot for my friends and family now, cooking those intimate meals and so forth, that's for me what it is all about. And also I think giving young people an opportunity to grow and learn in a space that I had when I was growing up.

That's been a huge thing about Locavore from the start is fostering an environment where you don't have any of these horrible people or stresses being thrown at these young people and giving them a really good chance at a learning to be a chef, but loving that job as well. I got that opportunity. I never had massive aspirations to be a really top gun chef working Michelin star restaurants or hatted restaurants. I mean that was obviously there, but I think when I came back from yachts it was all about how I can help the next generation and do that in a way that was a safe, comforting environment for them to to love coming to work and not be absolutely dreading each morning.

Let's talk about the yachts. So exotic and fun. But how did you get from this? You did your apprenticeship and then what happened?

I finished my apprenticeship and at that stage wanted to go and try working in a Michelin star restaurant. So I went to London, it was a very, very quick short-lived feeling.I went to London and did a few work experience shifts and was thrown into some pretty hectic situations and quickly realised this is not where I wanted to be.

How do you even get into those places? Do people recommend you? Do you just door knock?

I door knocked, I dropped in my resume and door knocked.

How old were you?

I was 19 years old. It was just this crazy confidence I had back then. I'm not quite there now. So then I had a conversation with my auntie and she suggested doing a ski season and I thought, okay, that's a great idea. It's a bit of fun. I'm still young still, so I wanted to get out there. I joined a company called YOC in Val dIsere and did six months ski season in France and worked in a chalet for 12 guests. That really started that career in private cheffing. I absolutely loved that. I got to work with some really great ingredients and just be in an amazing environment. That season was starting to come to an end and I was sitting in a pub with a few of the other chefs that just continually do seasons and I was asking them what their next summer job was. A lot of them were mentioning they were heading down to the South of France to get a job on yachts. I looked into it and booked all of my courses when I came back to London when I was staying away with my aunt and then flew over to the South of France with 500 euros to my name and nowhere where to stay.

Was that Antibes?

Yes, I went to Antibes and managed to get chatting to these South African guys in a bar and they said, if you cook for us while you're staying, we'll let you have free accommodation. It all was just very serendipitous how things kept opening up. I got there three days later after going to all of the agencies to check in. They kept saying to me, if you're not getting day work, you're not going to get a job. On my third day, I had 25 euros left in my name and no return ticket home, I got a call from a chef that was working on a yacht called Unbridled. He was a Perth based chef and he'd come across my resume. He knew I was young, but he saw all of the cheffing competitions I did when I was an apprentice and my experience. He felt like out journeys resonated. So I did a quick 15 minute interview online and the next minute I knew I was getting flown to Barcelona to join this yacht as the sous chef. I was 20 years old and I got off the flight, got a taxi, still didn't have money to pay for the taxi, so I had to quickly ask someone from the yacht to pay for the taxi. And I was standing there in front of this $80 million yacht and I was like, what the hell am I doing? It was only meant to be a five week gig, it was for the owner's trip. They'd met me and over the five weeks they were coming into the galley and having lots of chats with me and I was cooking food for them and they had told the captain after five weeks that they wanted to keep me on as their sous chef/crew chef. And that was kind of the start of everything.

Those five weeks were just mental. It was very hard. My chef, even though he was a lovely guy, he was really hard on me. But being on boats, there were so many complexities with how you can run the galley and receiving goods and getting rid of goods and storage of garbage. It's a whole other playing field. But he saw a lot of potential in me. I was working under him for a year, still on Unbridled and became really good friends with him and his wife, who was the chief stewardess. We were all over the Caribbean, we did all of the Med, we cruised back from the Mediterranean, did a crossing back to Florida. He went on holidays, and I did a whole three week crossing, just cooking for the crew on the boat, which was quite an experience. They approached me and said that they were willing, they, they were wanting to go home and start a family and he said that he wanted me to step up and be the head chef. So after a year I'd just turned 21 and I had the captain and the owner sitting down with me. Mind you, the owner of the yacht was William Wrigley. So Wrigley's chewing gum. He's in Forbes, he's a billionaire. And he was sitting down with me and the captain and he said, I want you to be my head chef. And next thing I knew, I was the head chef of this $80 million yacht cooking for a lot of affluent people as a 21 year old.

So how many cabins does that have? You're saying 10 to 12 people, would that be the guests?

Yes. There were six cabins for the guests. And then we had six cabins for the crew. We had a crew of 13: two chefs and anywhere up to 12 guests onboard at any one time.

How do you go with hours worked and time off in that sort of situation?

Hours were really just dependent on whether you had guests on or not. When you're during season, well we had the boss trip for five weeks straight. You didn't get a day off, you worked all the way through and youre either the early chef or the late chef and it was roughly about 12 hours a day for five weeks straight. And then you'd have a quick break to turn over the yacht and take on another charter group. And sometimes that break would be half a day and sometimes it would be a couple of days. It just depended on whether you needed to move the boat to another location to pick up the guests. So the first boat I worked on was pretty relaxed in the sense that it was mostly the owner's use. And he would come on maybe once every one to two months for a couple of weeks.And then when we didn't have the guests on, it was just purely Monday to Friday, eight till four, cooking for the crew, lunch and dinner, cleaning, reorganizing and restocking type of deal.

The second boat that I worked on was a lot worse. I worked 102 days straight. I wanted to take on a tougher role to try and push myself. That was a sole chef position, still with twelve guests but a nine crew, slightly smaller yacht. I started the season, and it was 102 days straight, 19-hour days. I was getting up at sometimes 4.30 in the morning, five o'clock if we were in in port. I'd get off the boat, go straight to the bakery wherever we were, come back and just start getting ready for guest breakfast, then crew breakfast, then guest lunch, then crew lunch, then guest dinner, then crew dinner. And that was my day. There were no breaks.

Do you not lose your mind a bit after 102 days of just doing that same thing?

The calendar was up on the board. You were marking down the days until you were done. But feel like you had a whole crew of people that were in it together and you just made it as fun as it could be. There were certainly times where it was really hard, but you just find yourself getting into a formula and it's just rinse and repeat all the time. It was purely a charter yacht. Guests would come on for five or six days, then they'd step off the yacht probably about 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock in the morning. Then you'd turn over the yacht and pick up the next day. So you did have a night off. But you were working right through to clear out the fridges and get everything ready for provisions to come back on the boat.

And does it have to be fine dining?

Sometimes. On the first yacht, everything was fine dining from lunch onwards. Breakfast and snacks were very casual. A lot of people want family style shared feast for lunch and then dinner would always be plated and then it would just really be dependent on the guest coming in. Some of the guests we had were just really lovely families from New York. And often we'd have a very, very affluent family coming in from Russia. We had Harvey Weinstein on the yacht for a week. And that was an experience. This was before the whole Me Too movement happened. He brought on the Kardashians. So we had to cook lunch for them, but they just wanted a very relaxed lunch and we got sent their dieticians list of what they can and cant have.

Did you have much of interaction with these people?

I welcomed them on the yacht. The whole crew would welcome them on the yacht. I would go up and speak to Harvey every now and then about, this is the menu I'm creating tonight. Are you happy with this? Do you need to make any changes? Those were really the only interactions. The first yacht that I worked on, the family were very, very interactive and they'd always be in the galley having a chat and they were a lovely family, but it just depended on the guests. We served some very, very rich Russian lawyers and the mayor of Kiev came on at the time. I've got some very interesting stories.

How did you come up with the menus? How did you get ideas?

And especially as a young person, because that's the thing, I didn't really have a lot of restaurant experience. I was working six months prior to that on in the chalets and then mostly on my own. I spent a lot of time on Gourmet Traveller and really just researching. Every time we were in a port, I'd have a whole new set of cookbooks come in. I was just very eager back then. I think I really worked with the client as well because a lot of them were either American or Russian and they had particular cuisines that they wanted to stick to. That was good because I had a little bit of a direction in those moments and I'd either get those books out and come up with things. Peter Gilmore was a big inspiration at one stage and I think I went right through the Quay book at one stage. It was just a lot of research and a lot of moments where I could try and sit down and quickly read up or when I'd finished and the galley was clean, I'd spend a good hour every night just reading through books and making notes and recipes.

It's incredible. You've lived several lifetimes. You must have had lots of notebooks. Do you still have those?

I still do. They're in storage, which is nice. I've often thought about going back for a winter season here and there, but I just don't know if my body could cope with the hours now. It's crazy.

Did you get to see a lot or were you just working so much?

I definitely got to see things. I was thankful for the first yacht that I worked on, we were on the main deck level, so I had big windows looking out wherever we were. And when we were in port, the owners were really firm on me going to the boulangerie every morning to get fresh baked goods and things. So I got the experience where I got to walk through those cobblestoned streets and smell my way to the bakery and go to the markets every morning. When we were in Capri, the boss wanted me to go ashore and go to the food market and get as much local produce as possible and cook him a huge feast. That was really cool. As a chef, that's part of the reason why you go to Europe is to immerse yourself in the food. And I got to do that. There were times where you'd be looking out the port window and everyone's having fun and you think, oh that looks amazing. Turn back, keep cooking. But no, as I mentioned, the first year I was on the first yacht for three years and so there were a lot of times in that where the boss was on and off and wherever we'd move the boat to for him to jump on board, we would be there for two or three weeks. We were in Tahiti for eight months stationed and Mexico. We were in Auckland for eight months while the boat got a refit. We were everywhere and I got to experience it, which was great.

You have just got back from overseas, when you are overseas, is it about the food?

It was a big part. I made sure that the places that we were going to were places I didn't really get to immerse myself in fully. So we spent a long time in Puglia going to all of the food markets and I did a lot of cooking there as well. We went to restaurants but it was a moment in time for me to get back to researching, cooking, experimenting and working with beautiful produce again, but doing it in beautiful spots. We went to Greece and that just reopened a whole new avenue. I wasn't really into Greek food until now. Now I love it.

I feel like I'm not really into Greek food, I just can't quite get the flavours. Although I did have a really amazing dinner at Salona in Richmond and I felt like that was a bit different to the other Greek food that I've tried. But it must be different again in Greece.

It's very traditional and very basic, but they just nail it. It's yummy. It was a great trip for just re-inspiring me because business is awesome but like I said, I haven't been in the kitchen working. I fill in the occasional shift, but it is all about working on the business now. And there was a time there where I lost inspiration pretty bad and I didn't even know why I was doing it. So part of this trip was just re-inspiring myself and cooking and I feel like it has done that and I've got a lot of recipes hopefully to put into a book one day. Its tricky stuff.

It sounds like you've got several books in you.

Exactly. I just have to collate them in some way.

So just to finish with, because you've had a lot of experiences and started so young, well the question I ask is what would your advice be to young people who are starting out as chefs and lately that's changed a little bit to be, how do you encourage young people to become chefs? So either of those questions, if you have any answers.

I think for me, I would suggest doing your research and finding a kitchen or restaurant that resonates with you and you really utilise doing that work experience because you get a really quick gist of whether it's for you or not and if you're up to the fast pace. That's the first one. And then I guess the second one is not letting any outside life get in the way. I had so much of my family and friends telling me it just wasn't the right choice.

That it wasn't something I wanted to do. You have to be very prepared to do the hours and work very hard. And if that's already there, then it's just about finding the right kitchen for you, the right environment.

Locavore Studio, 148 Main Street, Lilydale