Inspired by his father's cooking and baking and by the food his grandmother made, Diego Cossio started his journey to become a chef in South Africa where his family had moved and he made sure he did his internship at the top restaurant in Johannesburg. Throughout his career, ambition, and a drive to be better and better has propelled him from one elevated dining venue to another and now, 16 years on, he is now at The Dining Room at Lancemore Lindenderry Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula. His summer degustation menu is all about local produce and Diego prefers to let the ingredients speak for themselves, without too much fussing from him, although diners will notice some Peruvian nuances coming though from his background. I loved talking to Diego and I am sure will love reading the chat. You can also listen to it on Spotify.
Hi Diego, you have been atLancemore Lindenderry Red Hill for 18 months now and it is looking pretty green out there, which I suppose we have to thank the rain for, but it feels ironic that I wanted to talk to you about your summer menu when it really still feels quite wintery. Let's begin at the beginning. Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?
Yeah, from a pretty young age I would be in the kitchen with my grandma and my dad. My dad used to bake banana bread and cakes and pizzas so I would always hang around waiting at the weekend for him to come home and make something to eat. My grandmother was a very good cook. She never really taught me anything but there was always food around. She would cook heaps and we would always eat. When I was 16 years old, I decided I wanted to become a chef although my mum wasn't really all that impressed because she wanted me to go to Uni.
Did you grow up in Peru?
I lived there until I was 16 and then we moved to South Africa, the whole family. That's where I trained as a chef.
Is it the same sort of apprenticeship program as here?
There is no such thing as an apprenticeship there. I did a two year course, full time studies for the first year with some practical internships and then my second year was a full internship, full-time work and I had to hand in projects and assessments.
While you were training, did you have any particular leanings towards pastry or fine dining or was it quite general at that stage?
I wanted to be a well-rounded chef so I always had an interest in pastry and wanted to be good at everything. I wanted to work at the top of my game so when they asked me about my internship, I chose what was at the time the best restaurant in South Africa, so I managed to get in there. It was good. It was a very eye-opening experience, I was barely 18 years old and straight into the kitchen. My English wasn't very good and it was tough, but I learned a lot and it was a very good experience for me.
That's good to hear, because sometimes I guess when you are doing your training and you have that love but when you get into the kitchen of a top restaurant, I imagine it is quite stressful, so that could put some people off. What was the atmosphere like there?
It was insane. I used to work with the owner, an Italian man, second generation, but he was super volatile. He was a really nice person and he really looked after me because I was by myself, my family were elsewhere. Those guys were my family basically, I used to go there on my days off and help move chairs around and set up the restaurant prep. He loved me but he did give me a hard time, not just me, but everyone. You learn from that. My goal was to go to work and not get yelled at. When you don't get yelled at, its a good day. I was always ambitious and I still am ambitious and I wanted to be the best, and that was the price to pay, I guess.
What kind of food were you cooking there?
At the time I guess it was called fusion and we did a lot of Asian influences, French ingredients; we used to get things flown in from France like foie gras and mushrooms and things like that and meats. I got really good exposure to ingredients that a young fella so I was very lucky. It broke a lot of boundaries because Dario (D'Angeli) wasn't trained formally so he was self-made and didn't have any rules. We did a lot of strange things that I probably wouldnt do these days but to a young chef it was very exciting and it opened my eyes to the fact that you can make your own rules and I liked that very much.
What a great place to start. Certainly I hear you say you are ambitious and starting off at the best place in the country you are living in is an incredible springboard. From there, what was your next move? Were you already thinking about where you would go next?
I moved back home to Peru for eight months. I wanted to go home and learn a bit about Peruvian food and ingredients because it has always been very interesting and there has been a big boom about Peruvian food and its ingredients. At the time I wanted to get exposure to the food I grew up eating. Again I got myself into one of the best traditional Peruvian restaurants in the city. I had to work there for free for a month because they didn't have a spot for me, but I said I would work until someone left and I was there for six weeks until there was an opportunity and I took it. It was a good experience, but going from living by myself and supporting myself to living with mum and dad and not being paid very much, I made a move to Australia. My older brother was already living here and he told me there were heaps of jobs here. After eight months, I came to Australia. I was on a student visa and my plan was to come to Australia and get sponsored. I came to Australia to study pastry because I had already done my cookery training. I did my Cert IV in pastry, got sponsored and then got my permanent residency.
Wow. And I see you have worked at really impressive places here as well; Gimlet, Marion, Quay, Tetsuya. There is no down time for you, is there?
No, I am always thinking about what's next. I ended up in Perth when I came to Australia, but I always had my eyes on the best restaurants in Australia and they are all on the East Coast. As soon as I settled my paperwork and by then I was married, my wife wanted to go to Melbourne and I wanted to go to Sydney. So we made a deal. She told me to pick three restaurants in Sydney, if you get a job in any of the three, we will move to Sydney, otherwise we will move to Melbourne. That's how I ended up in Tets. I called them for a trial, a work experience thing and when I went there, luckily for me it was when everyone was leaving and they offered me a position and we moved to Sydney.
Then you have also been in London and Singapore. When did those opportunities happen?
I always wanted to train and be better. I did eight months at Tets then I moved to Quay and did a year there and then I said to my wife, let's go to London. The Ledbury was a big thing at the time, everyone was talking about Brett (Graham). We got our paperwork ready to go and we were intending to go for two years, but due to family circumstances we had to come back, but I worked with Brett for a year, then came back to Australia, to Perth to look after my mother-in-law and that was when I was offered my first head chef role with a guy called Russell Blaikie who I worked with in Margaret River and he offered me the head chef role at his wine bar.
How different was that? That step up to head chef? There is a lot more going on than just good food.
I felt ready for it. Obviously you learn a lot of things along the way. It was good, it was intense. I had come back from London and that had been an intense environment, into a bistro wine bar and it didnt work out very well for me. It wasn't the right environment for me, but I learned from that. It was six years ago and I there were a lot of things I learned there; to be patient with myself and with the staff and understanding. The best advice I got given in London was from Brett who said to me, you are the head chef of your section; nothing goes past you. And that has stayed with me. I run my kitchen the way I used to run my section; always clean, always organised, check everything in the section. That escalates to a bigger scale, but the same principles apply. I try to have eyes on everything and know what I need and when I need it. It was a real experience for me to do that.
Thinking about all the different places you have cooked, different countries and different cuisines, what are some different things you have to be aware of when you go from one country and one cuisine to another? What are some things that surprised you along the way?
When I went to Sydney, especially at Quay, there is a lot of staff, a lot of chefs. That's what the food requires. When I went to London there were nine chefs on a good day and six on a bad and that was insane. It was extremely busy. I learned how to cook there. In Australia, in Sydney, you can hide in the corner and prep something, but in London you are always exposed. Every restaurant there is a lot more intense and people work very hard. Singapore is different and there is a big ex-pat community and they told us to not swear or scream because they would walk out. They don't like that. We were very mindful of that. It is very different. In Singapore we had to overstaff the kitchen to reduce the hours, because you can't work too many hours.
I don’t consider myself very talented, I just trained very hard. If you have that goal in your head, and keep working, honing your skills and trying to be better every day. I am 30 years old and I want to do better every day. I still have that drive to be better. That is the only thing I can say to young people; don’t give up and keep trying harder and harder. You can’t learn skills or attitude and desire. You need to have fire in your belly to become good at something and become better every day. ~ Diego Cossio
After 16 years as a chef, you must also have a real repertoire of recipes of techniques, do you write them down or do you hold them in your head and your body to recreate later?
That's funny because I was telling my brother that. I worked with my brother in the past when he was a chef. When I took my first head chef role, I was quite arrogant, I'd say. When I developed a dish, I wouldn't write it down because I wanted to keep moving forward and then when I started working in Melbourne, I needed recipes. I was working at Marion and Making tarts and I didnt have a recipe for that. So I would always call and ask for recipes. Now I record everything. Now I have a big repertoire of recipes that I put together for different reasons. I did some take home meals over lock down so I would refer to my older recipes and that came in very handy. We did boxes of take home meals that we changed every week and when you are cooking for 100 boxes, you need a recipe. That's also when I developed a lot of recipes and I continue to develop recipes. I have paper everywhere that I need to put into a folder. I record things now.
I am interested in hearing more about the food you are doing now on the Mornington Peninsula and I guess you are using some of the great produce from there. Its a degustation menu, isn't it?
Yes, we have a set menu of five courses.
Some of the things I'm reading on the menu like new season asparagus, the lamb loin, spanner crab, talk me though some of the ideas behind that? What do you want people to experience when they sit down and eat your food?
I place a lot of focus on ingredients. When people come and say it was amazing, I say I did nothing, I just got some lamb, some artichokes, some kohlrabi on the plate. It is not about me, it is about the ingredients. I try and get the best I can possibly get within my budget. I treat it very simply and very respectfully and just put it on the plate. One of the most liked dishes at the moment is spanner crab with a cucumber gazpacho and green almonds. It is literally a bit of gazpacho, crab dressed on the plate, some mint oil and some almonds and flowers. It is delicious, it is a nice refreshing way to start a meal.
I don't believe in touching food too much. Maybe with desserts I get a bit more creative, but on savoury dishes I try to put them on the plate as simply as possible to highlight the quality of the product.
Because it is in that wine region, do you have to be mindful of the wines that are going with the food?
Yes and no. Usually they work around me. When we do a special event with the wines, they give me a brief on what sort of food to make, but in the restaurant, I have a lot of freedom. I don't use many spices, I try to keep my flavours nice and clean, so that helps with wine pairing. I don't necessarily cook a dish to the wine, it is the other way around, they match the wine to the food.
Tell me about your eight-year-old sourdough starter called Matilda.
I always liked baking breads and I have a lot of interest in fermenting and brewing. When I went to Singapore, one of the first things we did was to start a sour dough. I was there from October and the restaurant only opened in January so we had a lot of time to do research and development and Sam the owner suggested we make a sour dough starter. We named it Matilda. When I came to Australia, the very first thing I did was to get hold of some sour dough. I landed a job in South Bank and we used to make our own sour dough, so I asked for a piece of it which was three years old then. I changed it and started baking at home and when I came to Lindenderry, I started baking with it and named it Matilda as well, because the restaurant in Singapore, Whitegrass, is a place I hold very dear to my heart. She is eight years old now.
It all sounds lovely, a real treat for people once it is sunny. Just as a last question, Diego , what would your advice be to people who are thinking about becoming a chef?
Work hard. Have determination. I don't consider myself very talented, I just trained very hard. If you have that goal in your head, and keep working, honing your skills and trying to be better every day. I am 30 years old and I want to do better every day. I still have that drive to be better. That is the only thing I can say to young people; don't give up and keep trying harder and harder. If you become excellent at something, try to be faster. I have a race with myself. It keeps me entertained and it keeps me moving and I have always been like that. You can't learn skills or attitude and desire. You need to have fire in your belly to become good at something and become better every day.
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