Tom Jones-Davies

Conversation with a chef: How's your day been, Tom?

Tom Jones-Davies: Hectic. We've got a prep kitchen and the head chef is on holiday. So, I'm jumping in to cover for him. It was all morning prepping.

So you're executive chef over all of the venues?

Yes, but I am less involved in the pizzerias because we have an executive pizza chef as well, who's the head chef at Carlton. But I help them with their creative side and then they do the rest.

How long have you been with the group?

I've been with the group coming up to two years.

Where are you based? Are you largely based here?

Just for the opening. I float between all the venues. The idea is I do a couple of days in each venue. Usually I'll do Friday, Saturdays here and then the other venues which have been running longer are smoother sailing, so I'll spend weekdays there.

Is that in the kitchen on the pans when you're there?

In the other places not so much, but here, yes. The espresso kitchen is very small. There's not enough space for me to be on the pans in there. They've got the full team running over there. When I'm there, it's more quality control, helping out with the paperwork and just making sure that the place is running smoothly.

And the St. Kilda one's a little bit different because you've got some extra items on the menu as well as the pizzas?

St. Kilda is different for us because it's a mix. We've got pizzerias and then we've got Espresso that does just pasta, but no pizza. And here is a bit of a blend of both, but with a couple of extra things, like, we've got the Fritto Misto. In espresso, it is just pasta and antipasto. There are no real main courses. We don't have the kitchen for it there. Here, there's a steak on the menu. There's the fritto misto, a swordfish steak as well. We've got a better kitchen here that allows us to do a bit more.

It sounds like you had to do a bit of adjustment in that kitchen from the previous restaurant that was here. The pizza oven had to go in piece by piece.

The pizza oven went in piece by piece. I didn't know how they were going to get it in. It was the base, which is so heavy, was rolled in through the doors. And then the rest came in piece by piece over the counter. A lot of the equipment is new, but we essentially shifted the whole cook line down to the other end of the kitchen and put the pizza section at the end there.,

It looks like a small kitchen. But it goes back, doesn't it?

It does. It is a small kitchen. I think it's maybe not a small kitchen for most people. If we weren't doing the pizza, it would be more than enough. But when you are, it's a bit of an odd fit down the end because you're almost working back to back with the dishwasher if you're on the pans section. They're very close to each other. I think more from a, like a prep space and storage, what you see is what you get here. We do have a store room, which is about a three minute walk through the building.

It's an extensive menu. Quite a lot going on. I would imagine you would need extra space.

Luckily we try to keep everything fresh. So we do it smaller amounts and more often. We don't have the space to prep up huge batches of stuff. Luckily we've got the prep kitchen as well. The main issue that I found was trying to do the fresh pasta here, because the pasta machines are quite bulky. During the week, it's okay because we're closed for lunch, but on the weekend when you are open for lunch, there's no space in the kitchen. I had a pasta trolley made up with all my pasta machines on it that we used to wheel through the store room over to here. But it meant that doing pasta became a really long job from going to the store and to get everything and bring it back. I've moved those out to the prep kitchen. We do all the fresh pasta from there and deliver it daily to here.

I had the Campanelle with the duck ragu. That's a frilly pasta. How do you get those frills?

The frills are an extruded pasta. What's interesting about extruded pasta is when you look at the dye, you can kind of figure out what it is from the shape on the outside of the dye. But the main part is actually what's behind it. So it's not just a hole in that shape. There'll be channels on the back that push larger amounts of pasta on one side then to the other. So that one is a sort of like a question mark shape cut out of the dye. But it has two holes on the other side, one being large and the other one being small. So that forces it around in that sort of frilly way. I've tried to explain it by saying it is maybe like a trumpet shaped pasta or something like that, a frilly trumpet.

It's perfect for holding the sauce from the ragu. It really really grips onto it, doesn't it? So delicious.

Thank you. I've had Campanelle before, and its not to say to say that nobody in Melbourne is doing it, I don't go and eat out every night in new places. But it's not something that you see on menus regularly here. And it's a shape that I have loved in the past, so I really wanted to get that dye to do it.

You've got some filled pasta as well.

We've got the agnolotti. The agnolotti is different from the extruded pasta because the extruded pasta is just water and semolina. It's not an egg pasta. Because it's extruded, essentially what you do is you mix it in the hopper and they're very dry doughs and the pressure pushes it together. Whereas egg pasta that you, you can make egg-free pasta, which is rolled, but it's a little bit harder to do. That one we do an egg yolk, just egg yolks, semolina and flour. It's quite a classic filling from North Italy of roast or sort of roast then braised rabbit, veal and pork.

I'll have to come back that obviously.

I've said to people, for me it is very classic and we stick to the classic recipe. The only thing that's maybe not classic about the way that we do it here is usually what you do is you separate the jus, the braising liquids from the meat and mince the meat. I actually mince the jelly braising liquids back in. So the filling is super soft and it's kind of got the jus that is on the outside is also mixed inside as well.

So delicious. I was just speaking to McKay Wilday at Alta Trattoria and then Enoteca Zingara and he was saying it's quite hard to get hold of rabbit nowadays.

It is.

Why is that?

I'm not sure. I dont know whether its true, but from my understanding, there was one rabbit farm in Victoria and he closed down two months ago. Which is when it started to get really difficult to get it and super expensive. Rabbits get so many diseases and they have to inoculate them against them all. It actually was more expensive to give all these rabbits these injections than it was then to actually produce it. So he decided to close down. And there's only one rabbit farm left in Australia, which if I'm not wrong is in South Australia.

It seems crazy.

It is. We use Vic's Meats as our supplier. Vic's Meats stockpiled a load of rabbit when they found out that it was happening and it's upwards of $49 a kilo.

So what do they do in other countries? They eat a lot of rabbit in France.

I think a lot of the rabbit in the UK comes from France. I used to use a lot of French rabbits. I think things are just cheaper there. I grew up in a regional area, so I worked on a farm for a year. I've got a little bit of knowledge about how it all goes. I know that rabbit farmers have had hard times with myxomatosis. But also where I grew up, we all went hunting and we shot rabbits. I grew up eating rabbit. The only problem with wild rabbit is it's not consistent. It can be really amazing and other times it's really tough.

So farmed rabbit is much more consistent, but I think there's just less of a market for game meats here as well. Because wild boar is something that I love. Wild boars are not quite the same in Australia as it is back in Europe, but some specials fly out and people love it. But wild boar is not something that people go crazy for here.

Even goat, it's not a big seller, is it?

No. It's interesting, it's not difficult to get hold of goat but people just don't go for it.

Fascinating. I remember when I lived in France for a year, a long time ago, and whenever my friends would invite me over, there'd always be 20 people and at Christmas time there'd be 20 people at Christmas and they would all have brought something. And one of them had done a civet de sanglier, and they had macerated the wild boar in blood for three days and red wine and everything. There was goose too, all these things that we are not used to eating here I guess.

I've got family in the south of France, and I went there three or four times a year throughout my whole childhood up until I moved to Australia actually. My pronunciation's not as good as yours, though. I'm not very good at French, but I remember we used to go to these small restaurants in the middle of nowhere and a lot of them were very average. Food in France. is not that great actually. There are some amazing restaurants, and they are the reason why France is famous for its food. But in general, most restaurants in France are pretty average.

I agree. But the product you get in the markets is incredible.

Oh yeah. The meat that you get is amazing. I remember I just fell in love in this one place with the daube de sanglier and whenever we went back home, wild boar is not that popular in the UK either, but you can get it pretty readily anywhere. If you ask the butcher, they'll get it for you. So then that was my request, I told my mom just cooked that, that's what I want to eat, you know,

I remember hiking in France and I think it was the last weekend of hunting season and number one, we were obviously in the wrong place because I could hear like guns and then there'd be the sound of boar running. I thought I was either going to get gored by a pig or get shot.

We used to go hiking and my dad's friend used to shoot off up in front and hide in a bush and then make big noises. My dad actually back in the seventies, ran a company in Turkey taking German tourists hunting wild boar because the locals there were Muslims, so they didn't really eat it. He used to take all these Germans there and he heard those pig noises and he would be really protective and start worrying that one of the pigs was going to attack us.

I read that you grew up in Wales and that you did a lot of hunting and foraging.

Yes, I grew up in Wales. I didn't grow up on a farm, it was a small holding where we had fields that we rented out to other farmers. But I spent a lot of time on farms, and I worked on friends' farms for a bit of pocket money. As a kid I always hunted on our land. My dad is a very outdoorsy person. So he used to build homemade bows and arrows and we'd go hunting with bows. He used to hunt pigeon and rabbit. When you have all this random game meat, most people cook it in a classic way. We and all of our friends who always had loads of game meat, were always trying to find weird and wonderful ways to do different things with it, like sweet and sour rabbit or Kentucky Fried Rabbit.

Did it work?

Not really, no. I think when I did experiments with the rabbit, quite often they were maybe a bit old and tough. But we used to have a lot of venison and we did try it in many ways. But it is just best to stick to the classics really. But then we also grew up very close to the coastline. So my dad used to take me what we call cockling, because we call them cockles, not clams. And we'd go down to the beach when the tides went out and we'd go panning for the cockles.

I'm not a fan of it, but there's a delicacy in Wales, especially in my region called Lava bread, which doesn't have anything to do with the name, but it's basically seaweed puree. We eat it for breakfast with oats and clams and sometimes bacon.

It must be very salty.

Yes, very salty. Slimy. My mum makes a sort of oat cake with it, mixes it with oats and then pan fries it. It doesn't matter for me, no matter what you do to it. I'm not a fan. It's more the texture than anything, because it's like a sort of slime paste.

It's probably really good for you though, right?

I'm sure it's really good for you. Young people these days don't eat it that much. But it was the hangover breakfast. So you've got the full English breakfast and then in my region, which is Southwest Wales, we had cockles and lava bread with bacon for breakfast. I remember my dad had a friend who lived in London. He used to come back to the village once or twice a year and they'd always have big dinner parties. And then the next morning he's cooking cockles and lava bread and I was a kid so it is not like I was hungover, but I'd wake up in the morning and look at them eating that. I would think, no way. I didn't know what it was like to have a hangover then, but it's not my idea of hangover food.

It feels like you had a pretty strong connection to food and cooking from early on. Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

I did. I was strongly encouraged to not be a chef. Everyone says that their mum is the best cook in the world. It is like this nostalgic thing. When I say that my mum was a very good cook, it's not me being nostalgic about her cooking. My mum did cooking classes, had a catering company. She never worked in a restaurant because I think 40 years ago, women didn't really work in kitchens. But she is really one of the best cooks ever. She knows all the classic French recipes, always trying new things. I grew up with very good home cooked food. A lot of people hate on British cuisine. And I'd say that maybe in general it might be warranted, but I think that most people haven't tried real British cooking. I think that British food is some of the best food in the world. And I think that when done properly, it can rival classic French cooking because they are very similar. There's a lot of braises, it's pretty similar but maybe less finesse. I grew up surrounded by food, always interested in what my mum was doing. I think a lot of it came from that. Some of the stuff my mum cooked, I didn't appreciate it and I didn't like it. I was always trying to, she'd go out of the kitchen and I'd be there throwing stuff in the pan to make it more the way that I would want it. My dad used to do the same and we used to encourage each other to do it. And my mum used to get so pissed off always when we'd always play around with what she was doing.

I probably started cooking when I was around 10 and from a young age, I wanted to be a chef and then we had some family friends who owned restaurants and always said that it's a horrible life, and back then it was much worse than it is now. But I always wanted to do it. For me it was chef or military. Both sides of my family are military families really. We are the first generation to not go into the military. My dad was pushing me towards military. My mum wasn't pushing me towards being a chef, but definitely anything but cheffing really was her thing. Back then there was a big taboo about chefs doing 90-hour weeks. It has been a while since I worked in the UK but chefs in the UK are very poorly paid compared to here. I started cheffing when I was about 18. It is pretty much the only thing, other than working on a farm, I've ever done. But I only did it because I didn't get into the Army. I tried to join the Army as an officer, because my dad wanted me to go in as an officer and I didn't get in because I didn't have the grades. I had the choice to go back to school or be a chef. I walked into a restaurant, asked for a job as the dishwasher. And that's how I started.

Was this in your town?

Yes. It was in an Italian restaurant called Compassionata. And I learned a lot there. It was a fun place to work. I did that for about a year and then I moved to London.

Where did you work in London?

I worked in a lot of places in London, but I trained in La Gavroche, I did a few months at La Gavroche. I quit when somebody stole all the money in my wallet and my Oyster card. So I had to walk home and I didn't have any money and I think he stole my phone as well. I went to the head chef and I raised it and she basically said, yeah, that happens sometimes there's nothing we can do about it. And I thought, well, I don't want to work in a place where there are staff that do that, then I didn't want to work there.

How big was the staff?

I don't remember that. It was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure that it was around 20 or 30 chefs in the kitchen. It was a very, very interesting place to work. I was there as a commis and as a commie, you don't get to see everything that goes on in the kitchen. My job was picking herbs, splitting peas out of the skins. Eight hours of just picking chervil and nothing else. Standing in the cool room so that it doesn't wilt. I would do that for eight hours and then go home and that was it.

How do you learn from that?

Mostly just by watching because you are doing something that doesn't really require much. You're picking, watching what other people are doing. They actually have at La Gavroche, or they had then anyway, a chef that was working full time just to make staff food for the whole team. The chefs there were not particularly helpful. They didn't want to teach me anything. Nobody knew what was going on in other people's sections in a big kitchen like that. It's understandable. So I would just go and help this chef who's doing the staff food and then I would look at what other people are doing and they would sort of explain what they're doing. I wasn't allowed to actually cook anything or get involved. I did that for four months. I did learn a lot because you hear the terms and you hear the dishes. And then I'd go home and I'm a very curious person, so I'll always research and look things up. And I think you just learn like that. They wouldn't show me how to do it. But then I'd go and try and figure out how to do it just in case they asked me. And then I could say, yeah, I know how to do that. After that I went to work in a place called Salt Yard Group at one of the restaurants called Dehesa, which is on Ganton Street. It's still there now. But I was there for a good six years where that's a Spanish tapas bar. But they were the first ones to do the sort of elevated tapas, not really fine dining, but edging towards that style. The executive chef at the time was a guy called Ben Tish, who's a very good chef. I learned a lot from him and stayed there for six years. It was a really good team. For me, those were the best days of cheffing. The head chef there was Italian, and they weren't very strict on what the food was. It was Spanish, but we did a lot of Italian stuff and it was sort of Spanish and Italian. And that was my first real intro into Italian cooking. I stayed there for six years and then I went to go and open a place with a chef who's now TikTok famous called Thomas Straker. He's got a series called All Things Butter. He's a very, very, very good chef. But he does all these videos on mostly making different compound butters. I don't know how many, but I reckon over 300 videos just about butter.

But you have a really good butter here.

Yes. The cacio e pepe.

I've never tasted butter as delicious as that. That could have been you on TikTok.

I think he's done something similar. Maybe I got a bit of an inspiration from him. But I think one of the secrets of that butter is the actual butter that we use, Del Bocia butter. It's made by a guy called Alberto, who is from Venice. He makes it up in Coberg. He actually works for Marana and he sold us the oven and then I got chatting to him. It turns out that he misses the butter that they had in Venice. There's that split where Italians always generalize about Italy. They say, in Italy we don't use butter, but the thing is, in the south they don't, but in the north, they use just as much as the French do. Alberto was going on about how he loves and misses the butter that he grew up with in Venice. He wanted to make something similar to that here. He gets his milk from Gippsland, and he churns the butter himself.

I thought it would be the milk that made it different. But is it the technique as well?

I think people put additives into butter here. I think sometimes maybe there's vegetable oil and other things. I'm not sure. But I think he's brought an old Italian butter churn over and he's restored it. It's a vintage one. I wouldn't be able to tell you where he gets the milk from exactly. But I know that it's a very good quality cream that he's getting from Gippsland.The butter is really good. It is really delicious. I think that's and the fact that its mixed with a really good quality Pecorino, you can't really go wrong. It's just two great ingredients.

So good. So you were going to go and open a restaurant with this guy?

No. Well, so there's an Argentinian restaurant in Buenos Aires called Casa Cruz. And the owner of that opened a place in London and Thomas Straker was the head chef. I went and I did the opening there with him as a junior sous chef. And I did that for about a year. But in the end, I went back to Salt Yard group just because I had such a great time there. It wasn't really my thing, it was ultra-fine dining. Every night was diplomats and celebrities, and the owner wanted to cater to everyone's wants and needs. I was there in charge of the, the pastry section and I was there from 7.00 am until 3.00 am just in case all the guys were staying there drinking after the restaurant closed at 12. But all the guests would stay till two, three having a party. I had to stay just in case any of them wanted desserts. And then I was working from 7.00am until 3.00am in the morning. There's no tube at that point in London. So an hour on the bus home, go to sleep and then be back and work at 7.00am, five days a week in a row.It was unsustainable. But at the same time, if I loved what I was doing, then I would've kept going. I like pastry, but it's not my forte. It's not what I want to do all the time. So I didn't really have much satisfaction doing it. I went back to Salt Yard Group, did a stint at Merchant's Tavern, which is Angela Hartnetts restaurant. Or was, it's closed down now. She was Gordon Ramsey's sous chef. It was sort of fine dining, pub food doesn't do it justice, but it was modern British. The idea was that it was meant to be a sort of fine dining pub, beautiful restaurant, great food. I think they did have a star. And then they lost it. I stayed there until I came to Australia.

Why did you come here?

I'd been in London for 10 years and for me, London's where I spent pretty much my whole adult life, its my real home. But it is so expensive. I got job satisfaction, but then you're living paycheck to paycheck and I just needed a change of scene. The idea was to come here as a holiday, do a working holiday visa and maybe just do something new for a year and go back. I came and actually I arrived here 12 hours before they closed the border for Covid. I came before that, but just as a holiday. And then I decided that I liked it here and I left. I went traveling around Asia for a couple of months and then when I heard the borders were closing, I thought, right, Id better get back. I arrived 12 hours before the borders closed and then jumped into however many months or years of lockdowns it was. I just figured it would be better to stay and back.

How'd you go for work then?

I didn't really. I did a stint at a place in Port Melbourne because it was the only place that got back to me and offered me a job and not a great place.I didn't really enjoy it. And then as soon as the next lockdown happened, they let everyone go anyway. But I just burnt through my savings and then waited for it to end. Then I went up to Daylesford and I did two years in Daylesford working with a friend up there, which was interesting. It was fun. Then I ended up coming back to Melbourne.

Well I don't know what people were doing before DOC St. Kilda opened, because it's so busy, especially at the weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.Isn't it crazy when a place opens and then it's so busy you think, well, where were they going before?

I know. I think we've been really lucky. It's a great location. There was a lot of buzz around it when it opened up and then we've just been flat out. I think we had to slow it down a bit at the beginning because usually when you go into a new restaurant, if you're taking over one that was already there before, usually you'd assume that everything is the way that it should be. But what we realised that it wasn't enough space for us to keep all the prep. So we just had to slow it down a bit so that we could offer a product to the quality that we really are happy to give. We've even been busy midweek, and I've spoken to locals who said most places are not busy midweek here.

Anywhere where you can sit and see the sea and palm trees is pretty amazing.

It's a nice view when you're on a break. We did joke when we opened that we could run down to the beach and have a swim. I don't think anyone ever has. But it's a nice idea.

You're obviously drawn to Italian food and making pasta. It feels like and sounds like you're surrounded by lots of Italians.

I am. I think I'm the only, in the kitchens anyway, I am the only one that's not Italian in the whole group.

How does that go?

Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot of Italians in London and I've always worked with Italians. So for me it just sort of actually feels pretty normal. Even in London, it's not like you go to the UK and there's loads of British chefs working in the restaurants. Most of the places I worked in the UK, I was one of the only British chefs there. So it just feels much the same for me.

Do you speak in Italian?

I wouldn't go out and say that I speak Italian, but I definitely understand 50, 60% when people are talking, especially if it's got anything to do with food or the kitchen or work in general. Sometimes I'll sit in on meetings and everyone just starts talking in Italian and then after about five minutes they're like, oh, sorry Tom, we forgot you are here. But it was alright because I actually did understand what they were talking about. But it's one thing to understand and another thing to speak. But I reckon, give it another year. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm in there speaking Italian with them as well.

Well, necessity's a great teacher.

That's the other thing, all these guys need to learn English for their visas. I'm also a bit of an English teacher for all the guys in the kitchen because they stay in their own little world of Italians and they never learn. I try and correct them and help them out with that. It would be hard for them if I started speaking Italian.

I had a conversation with Greg Feck out at Marnong Estate, and he used to have Vaporetto in Hawthorn, a Venetian restaurant, which was hugely successful. He's a Kiwi, as am I, and he too has been really drawn to Italian food. I asked about authenticity and whether Italians take him seriously? And he said he feels like he was an Italian born into a Kiwi body. I'm not questioning anyone's right to do pasta. But it's just interesting when you're in a kitchen full Italians, what do they think of you cooking Italian.

I think that you have a lot to prove when you are not Italian to the rest of the guys who are, and I think that if it was just any old chef who jumped into it, but, like I said earlier, I'm a very curious person. So actually before working at DOC, there's a lot of fresh pasta at French restaurants as well and I'd say that I'm more trained in French cooking than I am in Italian, but I think that once you've got the basics in French, it's pretty easy to learn anything. At home, I mostly cook Asian food. My partner is Indonesian Chinese, so she gets annoyed when I cook too many Western dishes and she prefers Asian. Once you've got a grounding in French, I think it's pretty easy to get a grasp on everything else if you actually put yourself out there to learn.

I'm always l looking for recipes. I'm always reading in my spare time. If I'm on a train going somewhere, if I'm in an Uber, if I'm just sitting and I've got three, five minutes, most people would be watching TikTok reels but I'm there reading recipes or just reading, going down wormholes and reading about a certain technique. And then through that I'll go to another one. Especially when I started here at DOC, I had a lot to prove to the Italians in there that I actually knew because I felt like it was, ok, this Welsh guy's going to come and tell us how to cook. It's Italian food. But I think once you actually start and they start shooting out dishes or different types of pastas and then you shoot some back and they don't know them, then they say, okay, maybe this guy knows what he's talking about. They quite often joke that I know more about Italian food than they do. But I think it's just if you're passionate about something and you are curious and you want to learn, then you might need to prove to the rest of the guys that you know what you're doing. Its been pretty easy really fitting in with a group of Italians. I haven't had any issues really standing in there with people saying, oh, you're not Italian, you dont know what you're doing.

But I think the same goes for all cooking, because some of the best, let's say French chefs in the world are not actually French. They're guys that learned French cooking and then mastered it.

Absolutely. That's quite true. So with all that in mind then, what would your advice be to a young person starting out their journey as a chef?

I would say, if you're passionate about it, just keep learning. Don't stop learning. I'm still learning now. I've been working in restaurants close to 15 years and I'm learning new things every day. Never think that you already know everything because in the grand scheme of things, you don't know anything. But I'd say that it's a bit of a taboo now because chefs have always been treated quite badly by employers in terms of long hours for really low pay. But it's not that way anymore. The thing is that because chefs get paid quite a lot, people are not going to invest time to teach people when they don't have to. Now it's, do your job and, and go home. You lose out on the time. I'd say that a lot of the older chefs who re doing 80 hours a week, theyve done double the hours that somebody else is doing now. So that's double the experience you're getting in the same amount of time. And I'm not saying that people should be treated badly or get paid less, but if you really want to learn, you've got to put yourself forward. For years I didn't go on holiday, I would request a week off, and then I'd go and work in another restaurant for free just so that I could learn what they were doing. Now if you're not that passionate about cooking and you're doing it for money, then you don't need to do that. But if you do really want to be good at it, and you want to learn as much as you can, you're not going to just learn if you're looking at the clock and you're coming and you're clocking your 40 hours then going home. It will take you so much longer to learn than the other guys in the kitchen who are older than you. I think a lot of people don't think about it that way because everyone looks back and says, oh, I did so much, I did 80-hour weeks and I didn't get paid for it. But you do get a lot out of it if you, if you are trying to take something positive from it. Essentially, it's like doing an apprenticeship, you're getting paid, but you're not having to pay any school tuition. So maybe that's the difference.

That's right. What does that mean for the next generation coming through if there's less available time for teaching and so on if you're not doing the time.

I think, as employers, it's a bit of a grey area to tell people to come to work and not get paid for it. But I think what it means is that for the whole industry, and you see it already, you've got younger chefs who are stepping into positions that they're not qualified for and a lot of people chasing a bigger pay cheque. I always was of the opinion that I'd rather get paid less and try and learn everything than jump up. There's nothing wrong with just stepping back a bit and learning as much as you can and then just letting it grow organically rather than, the saying, oh, if you don't ask, you don't get, so then everyone's always asking for pay rises. The more money and more responsibility you get, the less chance you've got to learn. What it means for a lot of chefs is that they've got to put in a lot more effort themselves to actually go out and learn. And it means that you have to do a lot of learning in your free time rather than coming to work and learning there.

DOC St. Kilda, 14-16 The Esplanade, St. Kilda