Lucas Parkinson

Hi Lucas. How are you?

Good, thanks Jo. How are you?

Good, thank you. Thanks for getting in touch with me. I've been doing a bit of investigation and you've got a pretty interesting story. Just to start off, Lucas, where are you right now? Obviously in Aotearoa.

Yes, I've moved back to my home city of Auckland, and I live out in a beautiful native forest.

I'm from Otautahi, Christchurch, and there's always been a rivalry between the North Island and the South island, but I know that where you live now is very beautiful. Let's start at the beginning, because I always like to know a chef's journey and I was reading a little bit about you this morning and was interested to see that you started off as a panel beater, but then found your way into a pizzeria, and from there you've kept going. So can you tell me what brought you into hospitality?

I was actually in trouble in a bad way with some people in the city. My family shipped me off to Italy for three months to keep me safe. And then when I came back, it still wasn't quite safe. So then they sent me down to Ohakune, where we had a bach and I did the winter there, snowboarding. My first day there, there was a place called Italian Cafe, and I'm half Italian, and I walked in and said, I'm half Italian, do you have any jobs? The chef there was about 64 or 65 at the time and he said, yep, can you make pizzas? And I was like, yeah, yeah, of course I can make pizzas. I didn't really know how to make pizzas, but he gave me the job and it just clicked, it flew. It was great. I had a good time snowboarding. Came back for a second season and after the second season, my father asked, are you still going to be a panel beater? I told him I wasn't going back to that. He asked if I had thought about training as a chef? What do you do? He looked it up and there was Auckland Hotel and Chef Training School. And I applied and I got in and that's really where it kicked off. I got there and I had a great tutor called Peter Cartwright. He really fuelled that passion in me. And it's the first time in my schooling history that I was deeply interested. And I studied and I really, really wanted to pass, turn up every day on time. And I just fully got into it.

I ended up finishing top of my class, had to go for an internship, and I walked down the road from my flat where I was living. There was a restaurant called Taboo run by a chef called Ben. I walked in and said, oh, I'll work for free for a few weeks. I've got to pass my internship. And he had that gleam in his eye. Free workers, yes, please. I got my job, and on my first night there, I realized that being the top student at school meant basically nothing in a real kitchen. I got screamed at, yelled at, had a broom thrown at me. It was intense. But on the first night, I saw a perfectly square potato gratin go up on the pass and something in my mind just clicked. I was, wow, look at that shape. Look how beautiful it is. Look at how amazing that one thing is. And then I was, over the following week just looking around the kitchen and loving it. I quickly got demoted to kitchen hand but I just loved the camaraderie of it, even though he was pretty much a psychopathic chef who was super old school. You know, you do it his way, and if you fuck it up, he's going to go nuts. And I definitely had that. But I liked the discipline. I liked the camaraderie. I really liked the organization, how five chefs each had one component from a dish and they'd all come up together at the same time. It was like, like watching a choreographed dance, just going well. And the buzz went off the night where the chefs wouldn't yell and everything went well. I felt on cloud nine. I stayed on and got moved up to commis chef and stayed there for a while, and then the snow bug kicked in again, and I went back down to Okahune and got a job at the Powderhorn Chateau as a commis chef and that was great. I had a great time. I met my, well now ex-partner, but I did the season there and I had a good friend from America and he was always saying, come over to America. So I packed my bags. I went over thinking I could get a green card because of my American grandfather, which legally I could. And I got there and got a job in a massive grill house, a big smokehouse that did smoked meat and barbecue.

And it was like nothing I'd seen before. Five or six line chefs out the front, five or six prep chefs out the back. It served around 1300 hundred people a night. And it was just insane. First night I got put on meats on the grill. The grill and the hot pan was eight feet long. It's weird, there was an angel on my shoulder that night. Because the head chef said, look, you jump on there if you can do it sweet as, if it's too much for you, we'll have a beer and you can go your own way. And I caned it. I cooked every single steak, every single burger. And he gave me a pay rise to $10 an hour. So I got that job and then I went for my green card and a lawyer said, yeah, yeah, of course. Just get your grandpa to sign here and your green card will get sent to you. And I made the mistake of saying, oh, he's dead. He said, well, do you have any other nuclear or immediate family? I said, no, he was the only one. He said, well, if he can't sign it, then you can't get it. I went back and told my work, and they said, that's alright, you've just crossed the border, like half the other kitchen members. And that's what I got. I just worked for cash for a while there, and I went snowboarding. It was great.

I came back to New Zealand back to the Powderhorn for a winter because it was 2008. We were in a recession. I just had to get a job somewhere and there wasn't a hell of a lot of jobs around. And I liked it. I got back with my girlfriend there. At the end of the season I applied for a job at a place called Pure in Herne Bay with Stefan Loetscher. He was a young Michelin star chef from Switzerland. I got the job there as a chef de parti and that was amazing. He ran a 35-seater restaurant off two chefs, two front house and a kitchenhand. That's the first time I really saw a small restaurant that could make money, ran efficiently, ran like a Swiss watch, extremely precise. He was so extremely calm about everything. He would not yell, he would not raise his voice. If I really pissed him off enough, which I'm adept at at times, he just wouldn't talk to me for a few days. But I learned so much there. Halfway through there, at about seven or eight months in, I was 22 and I got my girlfriend pregnant. We found out she was three months pregnant and there was no turning back. So I said, well, this is us. We're having a kid. And that's my daughter, Tiger Lily, who's with me now. She's 12. I said, look, I'm not going to survive on $30,000 here in New Zealand, I can't get ahead. I was always this really independent guy. I didn't want to ask my family for money or help or anything, which in retrospect was pretty stupid. I should have stayed around as much family as possible with my daughter on the way instead of going to a country I didn't know. But hey, we do these things.

I finished my year at Pure and then headed off to Australia for double the money. I worked with Sean Connolly at Sean's kitchen. Not that Sean was really there at all ever. Tony Gibson was our head chef and he was one of the young Gordon Ramsey boys who got trained by him and deployed around the world. There I learned high end cooking with velocity. It was insane. At Sean's Kitchen there would be 150 for lunch, 350 covers for dinner, 11 entire dishes on my station. It was insane. I'd work 90-hour weeks, no days off. I actually had a heart attack there two weeks before my daughter was born. They found me in bed bleeding out of every hole. Convulsing and hyperventilating. I was taken to the hospital, and I collapsed. And then I just remember waking up with IVs in my arm and the doctor saying, you've had a type of a severe type of clinical burnout where all of your nutrients in your body and minerals have depleted so much that your body just couldn't cope anymore. I had basically been running off adrenaline and caffeine, and that's what they found prevalent in my system. I was in there for three days and I was back to work, and two weeks later my daughter was born. And the casino just did not care about a human being as a whole, trying to cut my parental leave short, bring me in early, and I just said, stuff this, I need to go work for a human again. Id done almost a year at the casino, it was a great learning experience, and I made really good friends there who I'm still good friends with today. Would I do it again? Definitely not. Would I recommend it for young chefs? No. But I would recommend working in very busy places where you learn high quality food at velocity. Just maybe not in a casino or a place where you're just a number to them.

I was reading something you said in a Stuff.co.nz article about those kinds of conditions and being yelled at and being in those very stressful conditions. And you talked about your philosophy, or your approach now is that whatever the atmosphere of the kitchen that is probably reflected in the food. And I've always believed that as well. There's a book called Like Water for Chocolate, and it's about a chef and whatever she cooks, her emotions at the time go into the food and the people eat it and also have those emotions. I think that's a really interesting idea. I'd like to think that things are changing now in the industry, but I know there are still lots of places where people would have the same experience as you at that time.

Of course. I think there's always going to be a percentage of that. Like Water for Chocolate is amazing. Ive read the book. By and large, the industry is changing. People are changing. Staff shortages are also making employers treat people better and more fairly. You know, you work out my career and I worked over 40% of my career for free. Because I was on a salary and working hours. I was paid for 40 hours but work, 60, 70, 80. That was the way it was. My first chef, Ben was actually smart when he said you can finish chef school, go work in a hotel, go work in a pub and you'll top out at 70 grand a year, and that's you, you know. And this was a day when I was asking what all these things on the wall? He told me they were the top 50 award. That's another award. And he said, look, boy, you can take 10 years and you work at the very best places you can get your foot into, and you're going to be paid like shit. You're going to be treated like shit, but you're going to learn a lot like a sponge. And you take it up and after those 10 years, you'll come out into the industry. And without a doubt, you'll always get paid over six figures. And it's true. It was like doing your degree as a doctor or passing the bar as a lawyer. When you pass the bar as a lawyer, you come out and get paid 50 grand a year for the first few years. Its long studies. It costs a lot. You don't get paid much. But then at the end, there you are on top of the world. A few traumas and scars, but hey. That's my view on that side of things.

To get back to the story, I left the Star and went to a place called Flying Fish in Sydney which was just around the corner, there's now a place called Sala in its place. And they moved Flying Fish into the casino. I was there with my friend who was there, is now the executive Adam Hall. It was inspiring because I stepped into this kitchen that had a big, Peter Kuravita was the celebrity chef, and then the head chef was Stephen Seckold, who was 28, running a kitchen of 20 staff, and was just hell bent on getting second hat back. We really pushed and we really became a team. Of course, there was a bit of sabotage here and there from people as happens in the industry, but overall, it was a great experience. We worked bloody hard, didn't get paid a hell of a lot. I was there some days. I was there from 7.00 AM till, till 1.00 AM, whilst having a baby daughter. But it was great. It was all open. You could see the ocean. Unlike the casino where there's no windows and no clocks. I loved Flying Fish because I learned high velocity cooking at an extremely high level, but also how a team runs cohesively together, and really got a taste for the league that was above New Zealand, because now I think we've equalized a bit, but then the level of food was more advanced than New Zealand.

I was at Flying Fish for a year and a half, and that was great. When I left there Larissa, Tiger Lily's mother really wanted to move to Wanaka. We had been for a ski holiday. I said, okay, I like it too. The deal was, we do two years for my career in Sydney, and then we go where you want to go for the next two years, hers was Wanaka. So we made plans. And what we found was basically no jobs in Wanaka at the time.

We settled on Queenstown and I worked with Josh Emmett at Rata for about a year. I'm not going to comment on my time there. Then I went and worked for the Rees Group. I worked at Sasso with Sal Grant, who's an iconic kind of Italian chef here and I bounced between the two. That was my introduction to what a working in a hotel was like. And it wasn't for me. It is for some people. It wasn't for me. The food at the Rees was really cool. Very molecular kind of food. And the food at Sasso was very classical Italian, but I just got sick of working at a hotel. I didn't like finishing a night shift at midnight and then having to be back there at five in the morning for, for the breakfast shift the next day. And that would happen twice a week. It just started wringing me out.

I resigned and headed to Matakauri Lodge with Jonathan Rogers just outside of Queenstown. That was next level of cooking. We would have 30 guests at a time while we were there. We got Conde Naste and Gourmet Traveller, top 10 in the world lodge restaurants. We were awarded Relais and Chateau, which is a very high accolade. But it was intense. We had a five-course menu and an a la carte menu. No guest was allowed to see the same ingredient twice during their stay. So you can imagine if you have 14, 15 sets of guests staying at one time, we could run up to nine menus in a night with only a team of four or five upholding what would be a, a two or three Michelin star standard.

That's crazy.

That was crazy. I'm actually going back 1st of February to help Jonathan out for a couple of weeks. Jonathan is an amazing friend, a very intense chef back then. I know he's calmed down a lot now, but he was a very intense chef. I was there for a year and a half, but it was hard. You know, you're there five, six days a week, you're changing the menu completely every day, running multiple menus, helping everyone out to extremely high standard.

And I burnt out. I just completely burnt out. I got found on a golf buggy shaking uncontrollably, and I had had a mental breakdown. Jonathan said, I really don't want to let you go. It's the best team I've had. He dropped me down four days, three days, two days. And by the end, I was working one day a week and helping Sasso out another day a week. I come in one day and asked Jonathan what I was doing? I come in and make ginger chili sauce for a few hours because apparently I make it the best and chopped some other stuff. But I asked him what use I was for one day. He said he honestly just liked hanging out with me. So that was Matakauri Lodge. Then I decided cooking wasn't for me anymore and I stopped cooking. I went on a spiritual journey and said, I'm just going to see if the universe can take care of me. And I full-heartedly believed in that. I have a strong belief in God or the universe, not a set religion, but that there is a greater force in us out there that we can depend on in hard times. So I did that. I was helping out at a friend's restaurant a couple days a week, and just casually, back at Sasso. Just casually, not serious. I got a flatmate to help pay the mortgage. Larissa was working part-time and studying business law and accounting. And we got by.

Then one day I made a chilli sauce. People came over and tried it, said that's amazing. So I started getting, uh, a Mexican restaurant would give me all their old hot sauce bottles, and I would fill it up and sell it on Facebook $10 a bottle and I would deliver it anywhere in Queenstown on a Tuesday. And it just went nuts to the point that a policeman knocked on my door and he said, ah, I'm here with a warrant to search your property. I told him I was just selling hot sauce. And he goes, oh you're the hot sauce guy. Because cars have been coming and going all the time out my driveway, so the neighbours called the police. I gave him a bottle of hot sauce and he went on his way. I get a letter from the council saying, we believe you're running a business, but the Queenstown Council was into commerce growth back then and they took my hand, and walked me through the process. I got a part-time kitchen where a cafe would finish in the day, and I'd go and cook my hot sauce at night. And the hot sauce company, Frankton Heat was born and I ran it. It did very well. It won a lot of awards. I got to continue my journey as a full-time father and my spiritual journey to deal with things and calm down. After a couple of years and a trip to the Peruvian jungle and back, I decided I did want to be a chef and move to Wanaka and it would work out.

We bought a property just outside of Wanaka for a good price and built a home on it. I tried consulting for a while and didn't seem to be very good at that. So then I got a job as sous chef at Bistro Gentil who had just got their first hat. And there was Mario Rodrigues. He was calm, very firm, but calm, and it was a well-oiled machine there. His kitchen ran well. He never yelled at anyone. The staff were happy there. And, and I just got the bug again and loved it. Six months in, he moved me up to head chef and he became executive chef. I started writing parts of the menu and I really fell in love with it again. I didn't know I would. I turned up there telling him, look, I'm a skilled worker. I'm here to work. I'm not passionate. I don't have a love for the industry anymore, but I'm good at this and I can guarantee you, because you're paying me that I will do my job to the best of my abilities. And he liked that. But I fell in love again. They had an awesome organic garden out the back. And we had a gardener and it was really great. Six months in I got the Napoleon Hill Think Rich, Grow Rich thing going on and I start telling people, I'm going to open my own restaurant. It's going to be all organic, it's going to be all wild meat. It's going to be all hand caught fish. We're not going to use single-use plastics. We're going to change the way the industry views food. The restaurant had to be sustainable, and it would be the epitome of that. This would be the, the prime example. Then family got together and friends got together and the money came. And then the old Botswana Butchery site popped up for lease. So we took it and built Ode. I didn't have a 100% plan on what I was doing, but I had a good idea.

What year was that?

2017. I said I was just doing set menu. I want to go for hats. I want to make a mark on the industry. And we opened and no one came. Oh no. We're a restaurant in a tourist town in a secret location. I had no idea about restaurant marketing. I had no idea about proper restaurant business. I was just a good chef. And some business stuff Larissa could handle. The first three months were tough where we were in a South Island town where people want a la carte. People don't want to take on this new idea. Most local people thought when we said organic, that that meant vegan. After three months, I was pretty much bankrupt.

I called Arna Craig from Fever Pitch Media, which is now One Media. She walked in the door like this glowing angel. There was just an aura around this beautiful woman who walked in the room, and she sat down and said, look, let me pop the hood on this. She opens Facebook and that's why that's not working. Opens my Instagram. Oh, yep. We'll connect these. We'll get it going and she gave me a media plan. We organised photographers and started getting going within a week. Sales were up 30%. Wow. And then it started just kind of plateauing there. I said, look, I'm starting to break even, but we're not making money. I had said, I didn't want my name on it. I didn't want my face anywhere near it. I didn't want the publicity or the fame. I just wanted the food to speak for itself. I wanted Ode to be a team thing. And she gently put her hand on the table one day, which is her equivalent of yelling and said, look, we need to sell the chef. We need to sell you. We need to put a face to the business so people know who you are and connect the face to everything. I said, okay, let's do it. And then the cameras came. And then the photos and that all went out and started selling the chef. And I had to hold up my end, which was go live every on Instagram going foraging and going to farms and producers and giving shots of what's happening in service. It went crazy. People just loved seeing it all.

And was it easy, the whole sustainability thing and single use plastic? I feel as thought it would still be quite a hard thing to do because of suppliers and different things as well.

It was extremely difficult. In the beginning our food costs were really high. We were using organic stores.Evidently organic farmers at the time could barely even send a text message or even had a cell phone. Because they're organic farmers. So that was hard. I'd have to drive out there and meet them. I met Paul Kummerow and his wife. They had a garden out out in Hawea 15 minutes away. And I met Lorne Knight. He had another garden in Hawea. And then it just started coming together. We started getting more and more local suppliers. By the end, we had three or four local farms contracted to us and we would basically buy everything they grew. For meat, we started off organic and ended up just using wild meat. Fish was one where you kind of go down the conspiracy hole and find out that everything we are told is sustainable is a lie. Basically, Nate from Gravity Fishing, doing his jig lining is the apex and Tim from Spear Caught does spear fishing. And then a few hand harvesting people that do shellfish were our only options.

So, in the beginning it was extremely difficult, but as time went by, we got known and we reached out and, and organic became more normalised, and it got better and better. And by the end of it, you know, in peak season, 90% of our produce came from within 50 kilometres or a hundred kilometres. It was all wild meat. It was all hand harvested. We used no glad wrap, no plastic gloves, no piping bags, no sous vide. We actually started filling the sous vide with beef fat and then put the meat in there so we didn't even need a bag. We called it the fat vide. You clear it, cleanse it every day, and then use it for deep frying at the end of the week. It was really cool system. Very symbiotic at the end of it. We were in our first year, chef Niko was with me, my amazing sous chef for my first year, pumped through front of house as a tourist town does. A year in, we get a review on Cuisine Magazine praising us as a new young chef with a deft hand. We got a hatted review, half a point off two hats for our first review. And then in the mail comes a letter. We've been invited to the Cuisine Good Food Awards. Wow. Okay. We know we are in for an award now. That was Thursday. On Friday night, Kelli Brett from Cuisine comes in to dine.Wow. Kelli Brett's here to dine. That means we're in for an extra award and we know we're going to get hatted at this point if it goes well. We're on cloud nine. We go into a Saturday service. It's fully booked. The website has crashed. The phone lines have gone bonkers, fully booked for the next five weeks. We're getting calls or congratulations. It's amazing. We've got a hat. It's finally happening, after a year of struggle and hardship. On Saturday, we're all exhausted. We get the tea towels out of the laundromat next door and we would usually fold them and put them away. This time we're exhausted. We had worked hard enough this weekend so we just left them in the laundry bag and put it under the bar. Then I wake up Sunday morning, my daughter runs in the room with the phone. It was Kevin, our landlord. Amazing man. He said, Lucas – and I think it's going to be congratulations. He said, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Ode has burnt down last night. That was it. One day up, one day down.

I'm getting shivers just hearing you say that. I can't even begin to imagine what you would've felt in that moment. How does that happen with tea towels?

Moisture and oil caused spontaneous combustion because of the electricity of spinning your clothes. But if you fold them, then it releases all of the electricity the static. I walked into Ode. It was just the most surreal feeling of my life outside of walking in, outside of seeing my daughter being born. But this was the other side where it was like, this is shit. Instead of this is amazing. It was extremely surreal. I cried, I cried all day. I cried all night. Just couldn't fucking believe it. And then I had friends calling, asking if I had done an insurance job, which made it feel way worse. They were asking me if I'm trying to get a free rebuild, fuck, man. We had been on cloud nine there. Why would you burn your own restaurant down when you're fully booked for the rest of the year when you finally made it?

It was really difficult. A few days in, I was like, wow, I've just been through something big. The media is on me. I've become one of the best chefs in the country and invited to the awards. I know I'm in the top 100. I know I've been hatted. Evidently the hat was taken back, but we still got to stay in the top 100 and still got awarded the one to watch. A few days later I said, fuck it, I'm going to go on tour.

I'd been to watch Kendrick Lamar a couple months earlier, and I thought, the way artists tour is really cool. I'd love to do that as a chef one day. And then that just hit me. I said, I'm going to do a tour of the bottom of the South Island and the top of the North Island, promote organics and keep my spirit alive. I reached out on Instagram and a bunch of other top 100 restaurants came forward. And two weeks later, I was on the road for a five week tour at 11 different restaurants, finishing with a private dinner at Clooney. It was amazing. I felt the industry accepted me. I got taken under the wing by the biggest names, chef of the year, restaurant of the year. Three hatters, two hatters, one hatters. It was extremely good for my spirit. It was hard. What musicians and artists go through touring, that is an extremely difficult life. It's not easy. But it was amazing. But then after the tour of the lights went out, the cameras turned off and I was just left to me and my thoughts.

And a massive insurance battle with an insurance company that was just giving us hell by the day, trying to not pay for things, et cetera. You know how it goes. My relationship deteriorated and I slipped into a pretty deep depression. A year passed by and finally we get to reopen. It's one day off a year, one day off indemnity period where we just have to take a cheque and walk away. We reopened. I decided to all-day dining. I believe that we are walking magnets and the energy we put out is kind of what we reciprocate and, and, and bring back into our life. And I was in a bad way. I was smoking, drinking, just trying to keep my head up. Id had too much time off and too much thinking. And I built a toxic team. I hired someone who I thought was a close friend of mine, who ended up really screwing me over. I won't go too far into that.

How did you find your way out of that?

Well, through difficulty, really. There was no easy way out. All day dining didn't work. The cafe was losing money after three months. Night time was doing great, but we were understaffed and overworked. Then Jack Foster turns up says, I'll take any position you've got. He came in as the commis chef took it on and went instantly up to sous chef, me and him doing 40 covers and eight course dinners. That's a lot of dishes to go out in three hours. He was there early every day with me. He was there late every day with me. He was prepping after service with me. He never complained once. He was staunch and forthcoming and would tell me if something was working or tell me if I was sending mixed messages. And it was really good for me. We became great friends and great workmates. He is a large part of how we got through it. How I got through it. He came from a family of strong morals, strong connections. He knew who he was in himself. And that was a great example for me to have around.

At the same time, I had a culinary skill that he wanted. And I said, look, forget everything you know, everything here is different. Just forget it all and learn again. I swear he almost quit on the spot when I said that. He apparently went and talked to his parents and they said, hmm, maybe there's something to learn there. Hang in there just for a little while longer. And he did. And he learned a lot. And then not long in, I said, hey, put a dish on the menu. It was beautiful asparagus and confit egg dish. From then on, it started going really well. We just had a nine-month run where it was just epic. We got our hat back. We made it into the top 50. We started winning awards in other divisions. The workplace was healthy. The people who worked there enjoyed working there. My life became better.We were making money. We were popular. I had a good relationship. And then, lockdown came a couple months after we got our hat back. That sucked. But I called it a few days before. I said, look, this is crazy. I don't know if this is the media hype. I don't know if this is real, but I'm fucking anxious. And if someone comes in here coughing, everyone gets anxious and the workplace environment feels horrible. I'm going to shut it down. Because the rest of the world is locking down. And then a week later, she locked it down and the streets were empty and we were locked in our houses.

We had a week where I was just selling everything out. And I thought, oh, maybe we'll get locked down for a month. Maybe we'll go the Sweden or the Japan route. And, you know, we'll keep commerce going and, and, and, and rely on science where we've learned that, you know, you've just got to push through it and you build an immunity. But it turned into an almost four-month lockdown. And we were losing 30 grand a week, which was extremely stressful. The time off was great. Family time was great, but losing so much money was not.

So we came back out. I didn't have enough money to reopen and I didn't have money to pay my staff. I told everyone that. I said, look, it's apple season. There are apple trees everywhere. We've got a great community around us. We're not going to do the takeaway thing. We decided, no, because Wanaka had enough establishments to feed a hundred thousand people a day, and there were only 8,000 locals. So we saw it as just a waste of our very limited resources. But right at the end we said, we're going to do apple crumble. Lockdown ended and people were allowed to open up for just commerce again and we decided to do apple crumble. We put the word out saying, can anyone donate us apples? Or if you have an apple tree, we'll come and pick it. If anyone has any flour, sugar, or oats or butter, please donate.

We would love it. Support and help us get open again. And then I put out a post: apple crumble. $10 feeds, four people, free delivery anywhere in Wanaka. That was about 8.00 PM. I woke up the next day to missed calls from my manager at the time. I called. She says, what did you do do? I said, oh, crumbles. Let's sell a few hundred of 'em. She told me we were up to 890 and counting. We got to 900 and she told me to turn the thing off. Then my inbox was full of, we've got apples, we've got apple trees, we've dropped off 20 kilos of flour to your door. We're dropping off sugar today. Everything was donated. We did three weeks of crumble and it went viral on Instagram. We had celebrities from Canada buying crumbles to pay forward to the frontline workers. It really just went nuts. I can't remember exactly how much, but we did it for three weekends and we sold tons of crumble. We had all the chefs in the kitchen just chopping apples, roasting apples, covering it in crumble. It was insane. At the end of it we had got enough money to open again.

Then we hit up our hunters from Fare Game and asked for anything they could give us a cheap deal on, we wanted to do a rib night to fundraise. They ended up providing all the ribs on the house because they wanted to see us open again because they loved what we did. Cool. So, Fare Game sent us, I can't remember how much, a lot of venison ribs. We did the fundraiser that made an extra seven, eight something grand and then we had enough money to stock the restaurant and reopen. It was all from the love of community and that really felt amazing. We decided to put on a la carte so the locals would like it more because we had no more international trade and we decided to, to simplify a bit and make it more casual while still holding the high standard. And that went well. You know, that was all good. Things were going well, we were only open three nights a week, which was great. And then lockdown came again. We lost all the money again. That bloody sucked. We had tried to reopen. It didn't work. I said, that was it. Sorry everyone, the restaurant's closing unless we can find investors. But I said that three weeks out from closing. And we just got so much overwhelming support. People coming in, buying the most expensive bottles, buying as much food as they can. We had customers coming in and just giving us envelopes full of cash to be like, just keep the place open and we got pumping again. It was amazing. I built the strongest team I've ever had. By the end of it, the last three, four months, my family had moved to Auckland, so I let Jack take over as head chef. I became executive and Jack took over a majority of the menu. A lot of people said, ah, it's not going to be the same without you. It won't work. But that wasnt true. It made more money than it ever made. We had more five star reviews than I'd ever seen in my life. It was amazing.

My team was so good. We had Lucy out the front and Elliot Hawkins on the bar. We had Jack Foster and his team in the kitchen. And I could come up and down to check on things if he wanted to make a change.

We'd just talk about it. The symbiosis was amazing. The place made a lot of money. Then a friend in politics called and says, it's not over, man. You guys are going to have another lockdown. That stressed me out. It really stressed me out. I started having problems, liver problems. My mental state was degrading. Just being under the anxiety, knowing at any moment they can just turn it off. And that this lockdown was going to be the harshest one of all. Even though we know this disease, 99.9 something percent of people survive it. So it's really not going to make sense and really mess with people's minds. I knew it was coming and my health just degraded. So I went in and I told the team, look, I'm going to sell Ode. I can't do this anymore. It's going really well. We've got our hats. We make money. Let's finish on a high. If we go through another lockdown and it's harsher and there's less support, I'm not going to make it. We're going to lose it all and I'm going to be up to my neck in debt and I don't know if I'm going to be able to handle that. So we put it up for sale pretty quickly. Someone made an offer. I kept the IP for Ode. They started their new restaurant there. I helped them get it going. And we sold Ode. Two weeks before our handover date to the new owners, she called lockdown. And that was our longest and harshest and most confusing lockdown.

Now looking back, I think I made the right decision. I wouldn't have coped mentally or physically going through another lockdown, having a restaurant that goes backwards, 30 grand a week. But just in those two weeks she called lockdown, we had to shut it down. And those two weeks cost a hundred thousand dollars. And that was basically all our savings, our nest egg at the time. That was the end of it. We had a fully stocked restaurant for our last two weeks. They were our two highest earning weeks we would've ever had in our history because everyone was booked on a five course set menu with matching drinks. So we knew exactly how much money we were going to make and it was a substantial amount to get us out and take a year off to enjoy life. We had stocked up two weeks before and the day all of our deliveries arrived, all our wine arrived, all our food arrived, pretty much everything had arrived and she called lockdown that day. Mentally and, economically, it just really stuffed things up.

But we still sold and the deal went through. We got to sell off the food at cost price, take away options just to have a team and have a closing night and have a party together. The money was gone, but we got our money from the new buyers that paid back all of our debts, paid our staff and came out just even keel. Start again.

Wow.

And so when was that? 2021?

September 5th we closed, 2021. I took a year off to spend it with my daughter. Her mother took her to Wellington and they got locked down there. And I got locked down in Auckland. So I didn't get to see my daughter for four months. But now I'm pretty much a full-time father. Her mother runs luxury yoga retreats down in Queenstown and comes up often and they have a good relationship. It was a great year. And then a few months ago I decided that I'd like to open up again. So I talked to the banks and they said, no, we're not giving you any money. You haven't made any money. But look, you still own the company, you need to start putting money through the company. And then once you can show you're making good money, then we can finance you. I started freelancing a couple months ago and I've been bouncing around New Zealand when I have the time and around Auckland doing freelance work, which is great money to actually get paid by the hour.

What does that mean though, a freelance chef? Is it different to being a private chef?

I do private work as well. But doing private gigs is a large undertaking. It's like opening a new restaurant every time you go to work. Freelancing is, well you're basically a bounty hunter. I went out saying I'm going to do consulting. What we have is this paradox in the industry in New Zealand right now, I can't speak for anywhere else in the world cause I'm not there. But in New Zealand we have had a massive culling of the industry where in the last two and a half years, 70% of our hospitality industry has closed permanently. A few restaurants have filled the spots, but by and large, there's a lot less restaurants.Over 90% of our tourism industry has closed permanently. That was our largest industry in New Zealand and it collapsed, and is slowly making its way back. But it's rough when you get into the statistics of what lockdowns have done, it's hard to talk about. But here we are. So, being freelance, I set out to be a consultant.

No one really needed a consultant because everyone who was left are well-oiled machines that are going hard, they're making money, but they're buckling at the knees because of staff shortages. A call around the world, every country, every industry can't find staff. Where have all the humans gone? What's happened to them? Who knows? But this is where we are. People started asking me, can you just come and help us? We need skilled hands. I said, sure.So that's what I've been doing. I walk into a restaurant with my uniform and my knives, and I just do whatever they need. Whether it's filling in for the head chef, or chopping garnish. I get paid handsomely for it and my company has started to make money and the next step is opening my next place up again.

Will that be in Auckland?

Yes. However, I've studied the world economy. I studied Japan because I thought, wow, theyve been through huge inflation, massive crashes, world wars, but they've held the highest end of dining for hundreds of years. Japanese cuisine is simple. It's beautiful, it's very well done. We all know Japanese cuisine is amazing. Look at sushi. Took over the world. So I studied their economy and I studied their hospitality economy and how they've made it through and how they preserved their culinary culture was through small restaurants. Usually less than 10 seats with one to two people working in them. And that way they could always adjust to inflation and adjust to the market. I decided, I'm healthy, I'm young. There are staff shortages. I'm going to open an eight-seater. I love cooking. I love customers. I love the connection between us. I'm going to open an eight-seat restaurant where it's just me and the customers.

That's awesome. Will it be a set menu?

In my mind, I imagine it'll be a set menu. Itll be based around how services run in these small Japanese places. However, with the knowledge and style that I have as a chef and as a person. So that's where I'm aiming to go. And while I'm freelancing, I'm saving up my money and trying to get enough leverage so that I can step in and do that again. Ive been watching that restaurant Chae in Melbourne. And that was hugely inspiring that they got a hat out of an apartment. That's really something. And then that built up and now they've got their own epic little place out on the forest.

It's pretty amazing that story, isn't it? Good for you. You've had to learn some hard lessons, but the things that happened to you that were really beyond your control, so it's not really about asking what would you have done differently, but more what do you take from all of this?

Personally what I've learned is that the bigger the highs, the bigger the lows and that sometimes you need to even that and not focus so much on the highs being so high. If you win a hat, that's amazing and that's great. And congratulate yourself. But also, after taking a year off, I have learmed that having your daily purpose is an important thing. Having a purpose that fills your day is a really important thing for a human being. Being a full-time father this past year and being a chef here and there, I found myself with too much idle time. Then I start overthinking and, and, and after a while of it, it starts with meditation and ends as looping and overthinking.

I didn't get into this industry to get rich. I fell into this industry because I stumbled into it and fell in love, and I fell in love with it for the love of it, not for the money of it. Obviously being paid is great. We all love money. It's a good thing if we've got enough of it. The more money you have, the more you can help the world around you. If you're that way attuned. I like to do charity work. I like to help people. But the main thing was the daily purpose. And this is the daily purpose that I love. Do I love running a 400-seat restaurant? Not really. Do I love running a 30-seat restaurant. Yeah. It was a good experience and I thought that's exactly what I wanted. But then after doing some small dinners and having this intimacy with the customer and the full experience of being able to speak to them and explain every little thing, and you're fully engaged with each other as guests and as chefs, it's just this amazing feeling. And I want to hone in on that. And people say, well, what if you get sick? Oh, well, I close the restaurant for a night. It's fine. What if you want a Saturday off? Same thing. I closed the restaurant for a night. It's fine. It's only eight people. In the West we have the saying no man is an island in Japan, they have a saying, every man is his own island.In the west, we say, there are opportunities in crisis, in Japan, opportunity and crisis are the same word.

Wow.

So it's all about how we see things. The older I get and the more hardship I go through, the more I learn that perception is almost everything. How we perceive it and how we get through it. And, and that having our daily purpose, learning about financial education and also finding gratitude and love in the world is something we need. It's not to say I'm a perfect person. I still get in bad moods; I still get angry. I can still have a grump at my daughter or, or my family members, or my friends or become upset at things in the world that I can't control. But these are natural human emotions. And especially for someone of my mindset and having been through trauma, of having PTSD, of growing up in a rough neighbourhood. You know, there is a very calm side to me. There is a very loving and grateful side of me. There's also a very tough and rigid person. But as I get older, I learn that that's something that we should have, we should know how to use. But it's most important that we learn how to control that. And that's what I'm going through, is learning how to control all of that. And that's part of what I've taken away from all of these hardships and massive highs and massive blows, is that we just have to sit with our dark side, learn about it, and then learn how to control it. And then a better day comes.

Lucas, thank you so much. I feel like you've, you've been so open and honest and shared so much. That's an incredible story and incredible how you've worked through this yourself as well. So thank you. I'm really glad you got in touch with me.

Ode Hospitality