Mark Krueger

Hi Mark, thank you for your time. What is this room?

This is Indu's private dining room. The concept behind Indu's cuisine is Sri Lankan Southern Indian. We have Mejico on one side, you come down Pink Alley from Little Collins Street. Then from Collins Street, you have Indu. You come in from different entrances and you are transported to a totally different place. You wouldn't think you're in Melbourne.

That's right. I actually didn't even know that Indu was right there when I came in to Mejico. It's very multisensory because it smells so delicious as well. All the spices.

Yes, it's amazing. All the flavours and the profile of the food as well.

How does that work with the kitchen then?

One kitchen, two restaurants and two different cuisines. You have to be innovative in what you're doing as well and just ensuring that we're using similar proteins across both restaurants. In the kitchen we have our larder section which looks after Indu and Mejico. Then the mains come from one side from Mejico and the other side comes from Indu. It is a bit of a challenge, but when it's really busy we'll have two people on the pass, one for Indu and one for Mejico.

What a challenge.

It's unique. We also have the venues in Sydney as well. We have Mejico, Sydney, but it's a total separate property and you've got Indu in Sydney and another restaurant called Kid Kyoto, which is Japanese.

You know, I always think chefs seem to continually give themselves challenges and it sounds like you're definitely doing that.

I think that's just my career in general.

Tell me about that. I saw on your LinkedIn that you have been in the industry for a good amount of time.

I'm not as young as some.

I saw you worked in a lot of hotels initially.

As a young person, I was a bit confused. I studied civil engineering for three and a half years and decided it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. I felt like I needed to be more creative than just sitting in an office doing work. I took some time off and ended up falling into a commercial cook's course, which was a government funded course. I did about three months full-time and quite enjoyed it because I did enjoy doing a bit of cooking at home with mum. The teachers there said I should do an apprenticeship. That was a challenge because I was 23 back then and most places took on apprentices who were 15, 16 years old. I pretty much cold called every place in Melbourne, hotels and stuff like that. One of my teachers at school at William Angliss got me my first job at a place in High Street Armadale. That was an eye opener, 18 hours a day, working from seven till three in the morning. We had this beautiful grill and they just shipped in all the wood for it and I had to scrub that down in the evenings. It was pretty unforgiving for a first job. I did that for about three months and then got a call up from one of the places that I had cold called and that was The Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. From then I was off.

The Windsor Hotel was an amazing experience because that was in the day when we had the Grand Dining Room and that was a premiere hotel dining room in Melbourne, if not Australia. It was just such a beautiful place to dine. Celebrities would be there. And it was a totally different structure. You had the main dining room, which was fantastic fine dining. We had banqueting, we had the lounge next door, which did pre and post theatre buffets. It was a good experience in every facet of cooking. From doing catering and banquets to fine dining, breakfast, lunch, dinner.

What do you think it was that that kept you there? You knew you didn't want to do civil engineering, but what was appealing, then about cooking?

When I did my commercial cook's course, I saw one of the lecturers up on stage and he was cooking, and I had a spine tingling sensation. And it was almost like a calling. I knew it was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I saw myself cooking and maybe dropping dead over a stove one day or something like that. I haven't lost the passion. I've been cooking for over 30 years now and still really enjoy it. I've had stints doing more managerial office work and then I get a little bit bored doing that and I jump back into the kitchen side of things as well. Its always nice to be creative and cooking the food as well. I think sometimes as managers we can be so driven with regards to the financial side of things, which is very important,but you can sometimes get out of touch of the reality of what you need to deal with in terms of producing the goods and getting the food out.

Absolutely. I think it's probably the case in lots of workplaces.

It keeps you in touch with reality and times change and, you know, being an apprentice 30 years ago and working on a salary for 18 hours a day, there was no overtime or anything like that, so you just had to keep on pushing to learn. If you were in a section, you would do your section and then jump across somewhere else to learn because no one else would show you.Then someone would call in sick and the chef would ask you to cover that section? And because you knew the majority of the stuff already, they knew that they could throw you across there and you could do a service successfully.

I am so impressed with chefs. Obviously I've spoken to a lot of chefs and I like cooking, but I I still can't quite get my head around how confident you are in any situation. I feel like you could just go in to the kitchen and you'd know exactly what to do and you're getting all these plates up at the same time and I find it so impressive. Which I guess is why I do this podcast because I'm so impressed.

I think it's one of those jobs where you have to be able to multitask. If you can't multitask, then forget being in the industry because you have to be able to focus and do many things at the same time. And especially if you're doing the dockets and cooking all the food and it's all being shouted out at you and you're just trying to keep focused and get each dish out in the best possible manner. It is a challenge.

How long were you at The Windsor?

Close on three years. The Windsor Hotel was pretty much a breeding ground for chefs to go to the next level, which was Paul Bocuse in Melbourne. As apprentices, that's where we aspired to go. I worked very hard and did long shifts, even as a second year apprentice, I worked really hard and I was running the Windsor Grill, which I don't think exists anymore. It was a grill restaurant. I was doing that as a second-year apprentice and having chef de parties assist me. As a third year I got into the Grand Dining Room, which generally, you'd had to be a fourth year apprentice before you could even set foot in there because it was really hard and the food was very precise. If you didn't have the skills, you wouldnt survive. And I managed to do that. After that, I managed to get to Paul Bocuse. I started off in pastry, did the larder section, then I jumped across to mains and fish and then prep as well. I worked hard to learn as much as possible because being older I felt like I had a lot more to achieve, that I needed to improve in a shorter time. There were all these 16, 17-year-olds, and I'm on the same wages. It was hard.

Were they old school kitchens?

A hundred percent. I remember the Windsor Hotel, I was probably there one or two weeks and I won't name names about the head chef or anything like that. He was a great mentor. But I remember prepping oysters by the sink and one of the chefs had cut some lobster with a serrated edge knife. Man, did chef lose it? He was yelling and screaming, picked up the knife, threw it across the kitchen, it bounced off my leg, went into the bin and I had no idea what I had done wrong?Which was nothing. I wondered what I had got myself into. Seriously. I've just stopped studying civil engineering and I'm getting knives thrown at me for no particular reason. Not even an apology or anything like that. The chef just lost the plot and walked off. I had to really assess a lot of things. I never called chef anything but chef, because I do remember another time I'd just been hired and chef was walking up and said, hello Bruno. He just looked at me and said, Hey, oh, it is chef to you. I was an apprentice, I was nothing. And that's really what it was like as an apprentice back in the day. You were nothing. You would do all the, the crappy jobs and stuff like that and you had to work your way up. Again, I was fortunate that the chefs could see how much effort I'd been putting into what I was doing and on days off and after work, after doing 18 hours, Id still be writing all my prep lists and organizing my day for the next day. I would have my prep list, which is about two pages long and assign times next to every task. I allowed 15 minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour depending on what the job was. I always made it a bit unrealistic, so I was always behind, and I would just push harder and harder and harder to get everything done. I remember on the larder side of things, they had a cheese trolley and salad trolley, and I did all the afternoon teas, plating up in the afternoon for the lounge. There was one entree for the larder section. That was it, but 10 entrees on the menu. By the time I had finished on that section there, I had eight or nine of the entrees plus everything else. They just threw it all my way because they knew I would actually get it all done. I was pretty happy with everything that I achieved.

Does that make it tricky now that you are a group head chef and you've got newbies coming in, do you expect them to be likeyou were?

No. I look at it realistically. The industry is trying to go towards that 40 hours a week and I appreciate that. I mean, we have to humanise the industry and it is tough. I've said to many of my peers and owners that you can't have the same expectations that you had coming through. It's not realistic. Not in this time and this age. You need to be able to adjust to move forward with the times. Otherwise you just won't survive. It's so hard to make money in this industry. It really is. Wage cost is high, food cost is high. Its a struggle. It's not a place where you can easily make a killing. Back in the day you could. People sat down, spent the money and wages weren't high and the only issue you really had was trying to maintain food cost. But now it's totally different.

I guess you've got the challenge too of keeping a team and getting staff nowadays.

A lot of people in the kitchen aren't Australian. You have a lot of international students because Australians don't want to do those hours. They know what it's like and they might do some casual shifts as a kitchen hand, but to progress into a kitchen which is antisocial hours, people like to go out in the evenings and that's when you are cooking predominantly. There are not a lot of people that want to do that. So it is hard to find the right people.

I know one of the questions you ask is is my advice for people getting into the industry. My advice is that you have to be really passionate about it to move forward. Its more than just a job. If you want it as a job, there are plenty out there, that you can do. Whether it's catering, production. The a la carte scene is a totally different kettle of fish. Its just so much harder. You have to be really passionate, dedicated and commit time outside of work. Previously doing the 18 hours a day you could do your job and then see the other sections and learn.

Nowadays, if you're doing your 40 hour week, you are just trying to keep up with the work that you need to do in that timeframe and you don't see much else. If you do look at the recipes that you get and research it a lot more and understand about it, you'll actually be able to produce food a lot quicker. Thats probably the main advice; really love what you do. It can be a little bit antisocial because I know all the friends I had growing up in high school and stuff like that have all gone by the wayside. But you meet so many more people and the community is very diverse, but it's also very rewarding because there are not many jobs where you can say you've had a hundred people come into dinner, you have done an amazing service, and everyone's enjoyed the food. How many jobs can you say, yeah, I've just satisfied a hundred people.

That's great, isn't it? So then you worked your way up through the ranks I guess. So when was your first head chef job?

I suppose it was a long time in the making. I did the Windsor Hotel. I did a couple of stints at Queenscliff Hotel. We opened up Langton's in the city, down Flinders Lane. I think there's a stage in every chef's career where you get a little bit disgruntled, whether it's just with the employer's environment or whatever and you just question everything, all the hard work you're doing. I remember being at Langton's and I was probably getting about two and three quarters hours sleep a night. We started early, finished late. I was a bit disgruntled, and I went overseas for three months. My parents are German, so I had a German passport and was living with some relatives over there. A friend of mine that I worked with previously was in France, so I spent some time in Brittany and I came back after three months holiday feeling a bit refreshed. I remember my old sous chef at the Windsor Hotel, Andrew North, I had kept in touch with him quite constantly and gave him a phone call to see what he was up to and he said to pop in. He was at Sofitel. I popped in and saw him and the executive chef there, Marcus Moore. I just ended up having a bit of a chat to Marcus and next minute he offered me a job.

I took the role as chef de cuisine at the Sofitel looking after cafe, room service and the Atrium all coming from one kitchen. We could do numbers, like 500 people, you know, 180 in the caf, room service, the atrium. It was pretty full on. During that period, Marcus suggested that I go overseas and work in Hong Kong because he was from Hong Kong. I wasn't really ready at that stage. But after two and a half years at the Sofitel, I took a role as executive chef at Maryland's Country House in Marysville, which was a 62 boutique coat hotel. It unfortunately burnt down in the bushfire, which was really tragic. I was overseas at that stage, but that was my first head chef job.

Did it feel like a big step up?

Not really because I knew I was ready. I had always said to myself, work hard for 10 years in the industry and I wanted to take the role on when I felt I was ready and, and not just be driven by money or anything like that or getting the first job available. When it came up, I applied for it, had the interview out there and got the job. It was interesting because my sous chef was 22, just a kid. And I had 16- and 17-year-olds in the team. We were trying to do some really good things, which we did over there as well. I think we nearly got a hat.

But you did go overseas?

I was at Maryland's Country House for about two and a half years and Marcus was still adamant that I should work overseas. He ended up giving my contact details to Frank who was a head hunter. He called me to see whether I was interested in working in Thailand and I said, no, I had European background, I really didn't have much focus or want to go to Asia. If anything, I would've gone to Europe to work. I almost made that decision of working in Europe when I was there for three months. But I came back to Australia for a friend's wedding. So anyway, I had about 10 phone calls from Frank and I think Marcus must have kept on encouraging him to speak to me. And he wore me down and eventually I took the interview with Frank who is the resort manager at Six Senses in Thailand. They were really interested and wanted to fly me out. I thought to myself, you know, I'll go for a flight out there, have a three to four day break, enjoy Thailand, say no to the job and then come back home to Australia. I wasn't really serious about the task at hand and I remember the race to get there. I told my boss that I was just taking a few days off. It was a Saturday night, and we had finished service, but there ended up being a kitchen front of house issue and the boss was chatting way to me about what we needed to do to sort it. I told him I had a flight to catch.

It was probably about 11.30 at night. I hadn't even packed because I hadn't hadtime. I was working crazy hours there as well. So I ended up taking about 45 minutes or some ridiculous time from Marysville to Tullamarine. My friend was literally at the long-term parking, waiting for me so we could park my car and then I jumped into his car and he drove me to the terminal and I managed to just get onto the flight, flew to Thailand, had my interviews there.

It was totally different. They have different departments, head of departments, the spa, engineering, stores. I had an interview with everyone and by the first day, and I was supposed to be there for three days having interviews, but at the end of the night they ended up offering me the job. I was just taken aback because I wasn't really expecting or prepared for it. I thought they had more candidates and they're going through the whole process. It was a brand new resort, an amazing product, an eco-friendly resort. I asked if I could sleep on it. I went for a walk down the beach and I thought Id do it for 12 months and then I could always go back to Australia. Well, eight and a half years later, married with two kids, I came back to Australia.

Goodness. Was that cooking European food or was it cooking a variety of cuisines?

I remember after accepting the job and getting all my finances settled and putting all my stuff in storage and flying out there, I was sitting at the airport thinking, I know shit about anything. I was taking on this role in a foreign country and I didn't know Thailand. I knew what I'd learnt, which was a lot of European cuisine and obviously management, but being transported halfway, well a quarter of the way across the world to a foreign country, not speaking the language, not really knowing Thai food. We think we know a lot about different cuisines in Australia, but back then Thai food was pretty average. If it was spicy we thought,wow, this is delicious, this is amazing. There's a lot of chili. I learned a different level of cuisine over there. You really have to go in there and know so much about everything. And I guess I was very lucky during the course of my training that I knew about pastry and entrees and mains and desserts. But I watch TV I was watching cuisine from the Mandarin Oriental and stuff like that and all these wonderful places in Bangkok and Thailand and I wondered what I had got myself into.

I remember writing my first menu for the living room, which was their premiere restaurant. There were three restaurants there, a beach restaurant, the living room and villa dining. I did my first draft of ideas that I wanted to do and you know, in Australia there are five entrees, five mains, five desserts. They looked at it and asked, where's the rest? I had to develop all the menus for the beach restaurant, for the living room, which ended up being the a la carte side. It was more like 10 entrees, 10 mains, 10 desserts. But then you had to have a supplementary Thai menu as well, which I developed. That has different categories as well, appetizers, soups, stir fries, rice and noodle dishes, curries, desserts. For every category I was doing about 10 of each different dishes. I had to do a lot of research, which was quite exciting.

I also remember getting there and I really didn't have a high chili tolerance, coming off a lot of French cuisine and creams and butters and stuff like that, being quite rich and the whole fat is flavour philosophy. I sat in the staff canteen for about two weeks, breakfast, lunch and dinner, dripping wet, just eating with the staff. And the chili was so spicy and I wondered what I was doing. It's amazing, after you develop your palate, you can actually taste all the flavours through the heat and then you understand more about the balance. I ended up doing Thai cooking classes and I learned about the curry base where you'd fry off your curry, separate it, so all the oil's coming out of your coconut cream and before you started adding palm sugar, fish sauce and lime juice, there's not much balance. It's just a raw heat. But then you add the sweetness of palm sugar and it just develops the flavour of the dish and then you add your fish sauce, the salt comes out and you add lime juice, a little bit of sourness and suddenly you have this amazing dish with all these flavours exploding in your mouth and it's just like three ingredients really can change the whole dish.

I guess you have to get used to some new ingredients as well. And, and you probably relied on your staff or suppliers for that, did you?

A hundred percent. I would take the knowledge of the staff that I had and blend that into the cuisine that I would be doing. I had a Thai executive sous chef for the Thai food. He would be able to do all the Thai food and I would help him with the presentation. Flavour profile wise, he was the master of that. I would not over step the boundaries and suggest it needed more fish sauce. Although, I don't really believe one Thai chef knows all Thai cuisine, because it's very regional. You have northeast food, and you have northern Thai food, there iscentral Bangkok food, Southern Thai food and it's all different. In the north they don't have as much seafood, so it's not very seafood based, it's more game. There is deer and pork. Whereas down south the focus is a lot more on crab, lobster, all the different fish prawns. It is different. I suggested to my sous chef that we should look at some of the junior who came from the different regions to incorporate their knowledge and their palate in the food and we could make it broader than a central Bangkok Thai chef trying to do southern Thai food. You just have to find a chef who is not so proud who would listen, because it's very classist and very structured in Asia. A sous chef couldn't be told by a chef de partie or a an apprentice how to do things. It was interesting use a bit of kitchen psychology to get them all on your side so you could actually deliver the best product available.

And coming here? What was your experience with Mexican food or the Sri Lankan flavors?

I was very fortunate cause I worked in the Maldives for two and a half years in my stay overseas and I worked with amazing Sri Lankan, Indian, Nepalese and Bangladeshi staff. They were the staff in the kitchen. The Maldivians were quite clever. They didn't want to work in the kitchens because all the tips would come from front of house so they knew they could get more money and do less work doing than being in the kitchen. I had the utmost respect for the staff that we had on the resorts. I was working a resort called Coco Palm Dhuni Kolhu at the Baa Atoll. It was probably about the size of the MCG and we would do, on a busy day 220 people on the island, and staff-wise probably about 180. So not only do you have to cook for all these guests, breakfast, lunch and dinner and they can't go anywhere because there's nowhere to go to and you're totally isolated, but you have 180 staff on the island that you have to cater for them as well. We had a whole different restaurant just for staff meals.

Coming from Thailand to the Maldives and having my Sri Lankan executive sous chef who knew I'd come from Thailand, and they like to test you, lets put it that way. They would do their curries which are quite spicy, and I'd just be going, is that all you've got? Because I was so used to spice by that stage.

Our main restaurant restaurant was a big buffet restaurant with live cooking stations and we had a lot of Indian Sri Lankan Western food as well. It was very multicultural. It was almost a little Melbourne just in one restaurant I was so fortunate working with these staff to experience their flavours as well and, and just using all the different spices because it is totally different from Thailand and Vietnam and places like that. I have made some adjustments at Indu, but I haven't done the new menu yet, so that's quite exciting. I can't wait to get onto that one. I've only been here a couple of months.

We're starting the new Mejico menu in a couple of weeks and yes, that's been a little bit different because I've never really done Mexican cuisine ingredients. But there are similarities to Thai ingredients. You've got chili, lime, sweet sour, salty.

It was really fresh when I ate here. I don't think I've really eaten at a Mexican restaurant for a long time. And it used to be all the rage back in the like the nineties and the two thousands, but it was all refried beans and just tacos and just, it was quite stodgy. When I came here a couple of weeks ago, it was just so delicious, and I just loved that whole making the guacamole at the table. That was the best. And I don't know where your avocados are from, but they're the best avocados I've ever seen. They were so delicious and big and green andbeautiful.

I think Australia's just an amazing country because it's just from temperate to tropical and it varies all year round. You can get lamb all year round and it's a bit like that with avocados. We have Victoria ones at the moment, a couple weeks ago, they were from South Australia and about a month ago they were from Queensland. It does depend on where the market is getting them from at the best price as well and whether they're ripe or not. There's a lot of freshness and lime juice does that as well. I think it brings out a lot of tartness and then obviously with the right amount of seasoning, it is great. I've really enjoyed it.

I think working on the new menu, there's been a push from me as well just to try to get it done and get it out there as quickly as possible so we can see a bit of a change. I was up until about 5.30am the other morning just to finalise it. I had bits and pieces all over the place. I had the ideas, but it just wasn't finalized in my mind in terms of the whole menu yet and how it was structured and the dishes I wanted to put on. I just had to push it out and I was in the zone and doing a lot of research and I think I finished up at about 5.30am in the morning.I'm happy with it. Now I have to get onto all the costings and the plate ups and the photos and the trials. It's a bit of an arduous process, but it, it's really worthwhile getting it right and consistent.

Where do you get that inspiration? Particularly if it's a different cuisine. We've talked about that, but are you looking on Instagram? Do you have lots of cookbooks? Where do you get inspired?

Cookbooks? Yes, but probably not so much these days as back in the day. Yeah, I've got a library of probably about a hundred different books, but to flick through pages and I think it's not even about the recipe so much. We've sort of got the experience of knowing what we do to put together and create our own recipes, but it's more visual, seeing things that look appealing and like something I would like to eat. But I don't really get the time to look through books anymore. I've got a couple still and new ones as well, but I think the internet's an amazing place. If you are going taco beef brisket taco and then you do a search of visual images and Ill see something that looks pretty good. Then I'll look at the flavour of it and you think, ok thats pretty basic. Then I'll see something else and grab a few ideas together and combine all of them to create the dish that you want to eat and the dish that you want to serve. Not knowing a lot about Mexican cuisine and the terminology or the names of things because it's Spanish, so I have to learn all these things and that has been quite the challenge. I've been guilty of watching MasterChef Mexico.

Why not?

I know it's all staged, but it's interesting to see the different processes. Then I will Google that and have a look and get some more images and then make my own version of it as authentically as possible. I do try to also find the ancient authentic dishes so I can have a look at those recipes to see how they're done and then push that forward. I think also the difference is that the ingredients in Australia are totally different to the ingredients overseas. Thats what I really noticed working in Thailand as well, the Thai restaurants here have their version. But Thai basil tastes totally different in Thailand. It's the soil, it's the climate. All the different products just have a different taste. Sweet potatoes are totally different. You know, you can throw sweet potatoes in Australia on the barbecue, try doing that in Thailand. I remember doing that the first time and it just all goes to mush. Theres a different starch content and water content. And the soil has different flavours. It's just amazing. I never feel I know enough. I think that's the biggest challenge. I've had a very diverse culinary career working from fine dining to wedding venues and doing large functions and things like that to where I am now. But I still feel as though I don't know everything and I don't think I ever will. I'll never have that claim and I just don't feel like I'm that type of chef who thinks they know everything. I'm learning every day I step into the kitchen, there's always something new. That makes it quite exciting.

Mejico

1 Pink Alley, Melbourne