If you have not been to Dessous, you are missing out. I say this with absolute certainty, because I, like you, had absolutely been missing out until I went and spoke to head chef Dan Sawansak and then spent a glorious evening completely in his hands with the 'Leave it to us' menu, my favourite way to eat. If you are amongst the wise people who have eaten at Dessous, then you already know how good it is down there in that intimate low-lit basement vibe that is Dessous. Dan is one of those chefs that 'fell into it' and then developed a deep abiding love and curiosity for cooking that you feel when you eat his food. Dan is humble and softly spoken and said things like, cooking is all I can do and thats not true. He started off as a guitarist in a band and worked in kitchens to pay for that, but he fell in love with it and now that half his house is filled with cook books and his Notes app on his phone is bulging at the seams with ideas, is testament to the fact that Dan absolutely knows what he is doing. I caught glimpses of him at the pass putting up the most exquisite dishes which he told me are a mixture of subversion and memory and just really good flavours, and the serenity and focus he exuded are things we should all be aiming for in life. If you haven't been to Dessous, go again now. If you have been, go again now. There's a new menu and it leans heavily into Dan's Thai background as well as all that is good about excellent produce and delicious flavours.
Hi Dan. Nice to meet you.
Thanks for coming.
It's so nice to be here. How long have you been at Dessous?
I was the opening head chef. So I have been here since the beginning. That was the end of 2019 in October.
So, ages. You must really love it.
Its good. We opened just before like the first lockdown, so it was a bit tough. There was a year and a bit there where we weren't really open.
What did you do over that time? Did you pivot?
No, we didn't because we literally just opened three months earlier. So we didn't really have anything to work with. Hazel did something. They joined Providoor. We just got Jobkeeper, got fit and didn't do anything.
But it's interesting because I know for some hospo people, that was their turning point of not coming back. So it's great that you came back.
I thought about not coming back, but I didn't know what else I would do.
Tell me about the food here. You've got a new menu and I've heard the flavours described as punchy, so tell me about that.
We are leaning towards doing straight up Thai food.
Looking at the menu, there's a lot going on. It's not your run of the mill Thai. What are some favourite flavours that you're enjoying and maybe techniques as well?
I'm still trying to figure out how to work Thai food into like the menu properly. Some of the things on there are just have Thai influence and some are literally just straight up Thai food. I'm trying to figure out how to make it work within this space. Before I would just lean into the Thai food thing. But then I started doing it and realized that some of the things don't really fit the context of what the restaurant is, because when people go to a Thai restaurant and have a Thai meal, you sit down and you order curry and stir fry and dishes to share. But people just want to have individual dishes that and I'm still trying to figure out how to do it properly. It's a work in progress.
That's so true. Thai is a feasting thing. Well it looks lovely. So it goes through smaller bites, and then on to starters and mains. So delicious. Dry aged duck. That sounds amazing. How long do you dry age it?
We hang it out the back there for minimum of seven days. We can let it go long as long as 14 days sometimes. It depends on how fast we need it. But a minimum of seven days.
I see you are using things like pork jowl and roasted bone marrow, they're really good old fashioned, old school using all of the animal type things. That's seems like the way to go these days, doesn't it?
I think they're just kind of interesting cuts, I suppose. I always like offal and those secondary cuts. They're not as cheap as they used to be anymore. So they're not really helping out with the food costs much. But I just think they're delicious. Pork jowl is good. It's sometimes difficult to cook well, but it's good.
Is it harder than like a beef cheek to cook?
There's a lot of fat. You can grill it and it's fine. You can't grill a beef cheek and serve it. You don't have to pork jowl. You can, but here we just grill it. We cut it thin and put it on a skewer.
And you're obviously a fan of donuts because I feel like donuts are often on the menu at Dessous.
Look, yeah, I've been trying to work on that. There were so many different versions of that donut in the first couple of years, and it took us a while to get the recipe right for the donut itself. It's like a potato bread that we make. There's nothing really Thai about that, but it is something that I don't really want to take off the menu.
Is it a signature dish now, do you think?
I guess so. I guess you can say that, but I like it. There are a few dishes on here from the last menu as well. We just sit around and look at it and go, oh, we can't really take that off because it's really good. They're easy to prepare and delicious.
I’ve got pages and pages of notes in my phone with menu ideas. Generally, I’ll look through what I’ve got and I eat out and I read a lot of books and I’ll see what’s in season and what produce is around and then just work the menu around that. I try to have a balance, lighter dishes, a bit heavier down the bottom, and just the idea that they all work together if you order them next to each other. That’s what I try to look at. ~ Dan Sawansak, Dessous
How do you go about choosing what goes on the menu? Do you have to think about a variety of textures and flavours and proteins. You must have so many ideas. How do you distil it down to this menu?
I've got pages and pages of notes in my phone with menu ideas. Generally, I'll look through what I've got and I eat out and I read a lot of books and I'll see what's in season and what produce is around and then just work the menu around that. I try to have a balance, lighter dishes, a bit heavier down the bottom, and just the idea that they all work together if you order them next to each other. That's what I try to look at. If I have a curry here, what would be something in the middle here that would go with it?
I see the 'Leave it to us.'And I love that idea of not having to decide because I see all of this and it all looks amazing and then I get overwhelmed. So I love it when there's a Feed me or Chef's menu. Do you like it when people order that?
It's good. I think normally that is when we try out things that will go on the menu or not. That's when we kind of get to play around a bit. The menu has to be streamlined. It has to be within our power to build the prep day in day out. But when we do a set menu like the Leave it to us, we get to work on dishes and spend a bit more time on it just to try it out. And then we might keep a dish on the set menu for a while. If it turns out, oh yeah, this is too much work, we'll take it off and try something else. Or some of them we will think, this is actually quite good. We can manage this. And it goes on the menu So you get to experiment a bit there and people get to try things that aren't not normally on the menu. It's a mixture of what's on the menu and then there'll be some off menu stuff.
That's cool. I like that. I saw that you were at MoVida and also Higher Ground. MoVida being a restaurant and Higher Ground a caf and now you're back in an evening situation. It feels like they'd be really different contexts to work in. Are there different pressure points and different things to think about?
I was actually doing dinner at Higher Ground. However, that being said, I was running events and dinners at Higher Ground and people didn't really know that Higher Ground really did that. We did a lot of events and we were open for dinner for three or four nights a week. But I have worked in cafes before. I worked in MoVida for ages and then I went overseas a bit and then came back and took a job in the cafe, Auction Rooms in North Melbourne. Then I ran another cafe after that for a friend of mine in Richmond. When you work nights all the time, you think, oh, it'd be nice to not have to work nights. So you go and work in the cafe and after six months work in a cafe, you think, oh, its not that fun because theres not a lot you can do with food.
And you have to keep it under a certain price, I guess, too.
Yes. And then, people don't want to think too much when you go out for breakfast or lunch. And also, its all well and good having the nights off, but then having to wake up early. Its not great. I think the best is the hybrid where you can work some nights and some lunches. But here we open all nights. You get used to it.
When you went overseas, where did you go?
I went to Hong Kong for a bit. And then went to Norway for a little bit.
Did you work over there?
I worked in Hong Kong. Nothing of note. I think when I left MoVida, they had planned to open in Hong Kong. It was a coincidence. But I went there and then I ended up working with the people who working to open MoVida in Hong Kong, and waiting to see whether they were going to open or not. But it ended up not happening, so I had a friend who was in Norway, so I went over there and worked there for a bit. It wasn't a culinary like journey or anything. I just worked because I had to work. I did learn some stuff, and it was interesting.
Well, each country has different ways of doing things. There's different produce available and fish and so on.
It's crazy how much people worked in Hong Kong and how little they got paid working six days a week.
What's hospitality like in Norway?
It's grim. I lived in the far north of Norway, on the border of Russia and Finland in a small mining town. I worked in a hotel there.
Was it freezing?
Oh, it was minus 20 on a good day. Minus 40 on a bad day. And no sunlight. Yeah, it was cold. I earned some money.
I guess a lot of veggies and things are being bought from elsewhere.
There's not a lot of vegetables. The best produce they had were all the deep sea fish. You get good Turbot and halibut and the reindeer were amazing and King crab. Otherwise, in terms of vegetables, they just eat potatoes.
Do they do lots of curing and preserving?
Yeah, so strange, strange preservation techniques. Have you heard of klippfisk? It's like a Norwegian Christmas food. Its pretty similar to baccala. They soak it in a mixture of lye and water for a week and then it becomes a weird, rubbery texture and then they boil it and eating it with peas and white sauce or something. I can't remember now. It becomes this jelly like texture.
There was like a moment when – it was the first year – I realised, oh my God, all the food I used to like eating growing up, I could make that myself. I got a bunch of cookbooks and then started learning how to cook. It was cool. I learned that if I could just read a recipe, I could recreate things that wanted to eat. ~ Dan Sawansak, Dessous
Where did it all start for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?
Nah, I started pretty late. I think I was 24 or 25. I was playing music in a band and in between, I was just washing dishes to make money. Then one day the chef said, why don't you just become a chef? I thought, maybe I can do that. And I started doing it. It was pretty hard because for a lot of my career in the beginning I was trying to balance both and when you are playing music, you have to be away on weekends and play music at night.
Was that here?
It was in Brisbane.
What do you play?
I play guitar, but I don't play anymore. It's just funny because like our aim was never to make money out of music because as long as music paid for itself, then it was fine. But then it meant that you needed another source of income.
So I did two years of my apprenticeship in Brisbane, and then I moved to MoVida to finish my third year apprenticeship and stayed there for quite some time. After I went overseas, I came back to MoVida for another couple of years. So I fell into it, in a way, but after a couple years I really got into it. Every time we'd go on tour somewhere, I'd scrape up some money and just go by myself to eat somewhere and just sit there by myself in a fine dining restaurant.
So you've always loved food, obviously, and being curious about good food.
Yes. There was like a moment when – it was the first year – I realised, oh my God, all the food I used to like eating growing up, I could make that myself. I got a bunch of cookbooks and then started learning how to cook. It was cool. I learned that if I could just read a recipe, I could recreate things that wanted to eat.
Did you grow up in Brisbane?
No, I'm from Thailand. We moved from Thailand, from Bangkok to far north Queensland. I ended up inland, far north Queensland, but then I went to school in Cairns.
Wow. So different.
Yeah, it was a hard one. That was 1995, 96. I was probably the only Asian kid out there.
So, in terms of food memories growing up, was food important in your family?
Yeah, food's important in Thai families, but I had a weird upbringing, so food memories are few and far between, but the ones that stick – there's a dish on here, a noodle dish, I used to love that dish when I was a kid. There was like one time Mum knew I liked it and she just made me so much of it. I ate so much that it made me sick. And then I became allergic to seafood for years. When I grew up a bit, I had to start slowly eating seafood again. Now I still get a little bit itchy, but I can eat it again now.
Goodness. So this was like an overcoming of your fears, to put it on the menu.
It's good because I put that dish on straight up, as it is. I didn't make it any more fancy than what it was. It's like a nice act of subversion. I put this dish straight on the menu as it's meant to be and make people pay the proper price for it, because you get a version of this dish in a lot of places for quite cheap. But we use good prawns, good ingredients.
And what's the flavour in there? There's the vermicelli noodles, king prawns, pork belly.
It's quite a popular dish in Thailand. Normally you go to a shop that just sells that dish in Bangkok. It normally comes in a clay pot. We don't have the clay pots here, so we use like a little paella pan. Normally they line the clay pot with pork back fat and then noodles, spring onions, ginger, sometimes they use crab, sometimes they use prawn and they just put that on there and there's a sauce with sesame oil, oyster sauce, some chicken stock, and they put in there and just bake it in the clay pot. That's pretty much it. Then a whole bunch of white pepper goes on top.
Delicious. So subversion and childhood memories combined.
It's good to be able to just put a dish on that is as it's meant to be. And then people see the worth in it, you know?
How are your pastry skills?
Oh, terrible. None of us can do pastry. That's why we keep our pastry pretty simple.
But they are pretty simple usually in Asian cooking.
Exactly, yeah. That's just what it means. There are Thai desserts that are really time consuming. We just can't make that. So we pick up some influences and make them our own. With pastry, I find over the years, it's not that you're not good or you don't want to do it, most kitchens don't have a pastry area where you can do it. It's a lot of mess and a lot of weighing stuff. Unless you have a particular space for where you can make pastry and someone who enjoys doing it, it's just hard. So you just have to work through. You are fighting over one combi oven, with people trying to cook duck, cook whatever, and then you're going to be there trying to bake a cake. It's just hard.
I like the idea of this pandan lamington. That sounds delicious. And sorrel, that's a really interesting flavour. You don't see sorrel much.
I love it. It's just got this tangy sour leaf that can lighten anything up.
And then there's coconut sticky rice, sweet corn, palm heart. It's very kind of savoury, sweet.
Well, you would've had the Thai sticky rice with mango. Mangoes aren't always in season, so what are we going to do? So we just made ice cream instead.
Sweet corn ice cream.
It's pretty good.
You've had lots of experiences, and you didn't initially think you'd become a chef, but what would your advice be to young people who want to become chefs, and this is a barbed question because the last chef I spoke to said, where are those young people? So, if there were young people who are wanting to be chefs. How do we encourage people to come into the industry given that there's such a lot of media around the moment about it not being great.
We still get a few young people coming through, and not so young. But personally, I find that the only thing that's good about being a chef is you get to cook. I love cooking. I cook at home. I've got like my cookbook library takes up like half of my house.
Amazing. What do you love about cooking?
I just enjoy the process. It's one way that I know how to turn up for people as well. If people are sad, Ill cook for you or whatever, Im not much good at anything else. In that sense, it's a hard job. I do it, I don't hate it, but managing people, managing costs, managing all this stuff. All this stuff is done so that you can cook. What I'm saying is that if you don't really enjoy cooking at all, as a person, there are probably easier ways to make money. But that being said, you can probably learn to like it. Start eating out and enjoy food and go, oh fuck, I can make this myself. Basically what I'm saying is if you don't think that you really like cooking, just do something else. But if you do, as a career, it can be rewarding.
So, I guess if people wanted to be as good as you are, because you've worked in great places, then you have to half a house full of cookbooks, then is that the way to go? Do you think to become really good you have to continue being curious and loving it? You have to keep finding out more.
A hundred per cent. People you work for don't really have the time to teach you everything. You have to do your own external research. Back in the day when I was an apprentice, my payslip didn't say how many hours I was at work. It said $380, that's what I was paid. And my roster was like on/off. They didn't pay you. But on the flip side, I got to learn stuff and I was there all the time. It's not healthy. So nowadays, most places that I know, as they should be, are paying you properly but then they don't have time to teach you what you need to know. So you need to take your initiative to learn. It goes back to that thing of if you don't enjoy that, if you don't enjoy cooking, you don't want to know about it. At the end of the day, it's hard labour. You need that passion. But that passion I think can equally be built, given the right nurturing environment.
Dessous, 164 Flinders Lane, Melbourne