Michael Smith

Hi Michael. I was thinking when I was driving here (The Prince Hotel, St Kilda), are you executive chef over here and Hubert Estate? What about Mitchelton and Nagambie?

Dan Hawkins runs Nagambie Brewery and Distillery as well as Mitchelton Estate. I've been hired to do Hubert Estate and Dan helped with the planning and all the process before I started. Once I came on board he was able to go back to his two babies. We got set up and opened Quarters restaurant and we have Harriet, the events space which is ready to go. Daniel Cooper our executive chef here at The Prince wanted to go traveling, so he has done that and with us having just opened Hubert and the events space not being crazy yet and the hotel hasnt been built yet so I have a bit more freedom to come and help here as well. So I am moving between the two.

I did think that Hubert Estate would be quite enough on its own.

Hubert is a beast. It is definitely the biggest venture I have taken on in my career; the sheer volume of what it will be when it is at its full potential. Even now, Quarters is a very busy restaurant.

I just saw on your Instagram that you've done, how many pizzas?

It was a rough estimate but I reckon we are just shy of 10 000 in 3 months.

That seems like a lot of pizza.

800-900 a week. We are doing around almost 500 people on a Saturday or a Sunday. And so we do close to 300 pizzas then. Which is crazy.

That's a lot of wood.

We have the top of the line Marana pizza oven, so it's gas thermostat controlled. We light a little fire in the wood belly to one side and it has an electric turntable. It is unbelievable; it is gas, electric and wood. We light a fire in the fire section and there is a gas element under the base and that gives the pizzas a nice crust. That's a little turbo boost you only use every now and then it has a gas thermostat to make sure it keeps hot with the fire.

That's amazing and I love the colour.

And the dome. The colour is copper coin looking.

It smells so delicious in there, but you are also cooking other things over wood fire there.

Yes. We have our char grill. It is a dual char grill with a hand wind so we can adjust the heights on it and one of them has a little smoke hot box over the top of it.

Had you cooked with fire before?

Yes. But we used to do it in a bit of a dodgy way back in the early 200os by throwing coal in the grill to get the flavour burning through it and then I graduated to cooking over coal and wood after my time at Innocent Bystander in Healesville. I was there for about a year. After I was there I went and turned a little venue in Ivanhoe into a smokehouse, steakhouse. It's not there anymore but it was the Ivanhoe Steakhouse. It was an old RSL-style venue and the owners wanted to flip it on its head and do top-end steaks and smoked meats. We had an amazing 300 kilo smoker out the back and we also had the chargrill imported from Spain; rotisserie style and had a massive chargrill that was hydraulic and that was amazing. I think that cost about $90k to purchase and then another $30k to get over here. That was a bit short-lived because they hadn't looked into their client base and they ended up changing direction. It's not there anymore.

You've been in a lot of great places and you've been a chef for a while.

I don't want it to sound like I jump in and out but my tenure is usually three to five years.

That's pretty normal, for chefs isn't it?

As you get older, yes. I wouldn't want apprentices to stay with me any longer than a year. I think they need to get a good base of experience. As you get up into Chef de partie and sous roles, you hope that people will be there for a year or two because you invest in training them and getting the business to a point to where it can cater to what we are doing and I would hope they'd be there three to five years. After that they can get a little bit stale if the business doesn't have something else to offer them. I have been around though.

This is just a thought that occurred to me as I was driving over here so it isn't a properly formulated thought at all, but I have just written an article for Broadsheet about Chinese-ish which is Rosheen Kaul from Etta and Joanna Hu's cookbook and they write about their experience growing up in Australian with a multicultural background and they pointedly talk about the food as non-authentic and I was thinking about this whole authenticity thing. For chefs, like you, you've cooked Mexican, Indian, French, you're doing Italian now, so this question of authenticity, what do you think about it?

That's a loaded question and there is so much to unpack. I think that growing up in Australia when I did, it became very multi-cultural very quickly in the seventies and eighties. I was a northern suburbs boy and it was all European migrants. I was surrounded by Turkish, Italian, Greece, Yugoslavian families. I loved their food so much because it was so interesting compared to what my mum cooked. God forbid if she listens to this; she wasnt the greatest cook. My parents are kiwis, although I was born here.

Believe me, I grew up in the seventies in New Zealand and my mum wasn't the best cook either; she had her meals.

Mum had her meals too. She did a Ki si min and I wonder now how we called that Ki si min. My approach to food and my love for food is that I love looking into food I dont know much about. When I went for the job at Mamasita, I knew nothing about Mexican, except that I love tacos. My wife said to me I was an idiot because I knew nothing about Mexican food. I said that I knew how to run a kitchen and thats what they needed there. I was hoping to go there and learn as much as I can about Mexican food and I wanted to put all my time and effort into learning the cuisine. And then I put my Michael Aussie spin on it, using great Australian produce but with Mexican techniques. I was responsible for bringing eight or nine different chillies that weren't here before. I was lucky enough to go to Mexico when I was at Mamasita and I thought I knew chilli and loved chilli but when I went over there and found out that there was a while world of chilli didn't know anything about. Spicy chilli, yes, and the way you can cook with it in Asian food and get it to develop its flavour differently so it wasn't just hot, was what I thought I knew how to do, but when I went to Mexico I found chillies that were bitter and chillies that were just smoky and not really spicy at all and chillies that when you cooked them were really warming and they made onions taste different; I was blown away by it. I worked really hard with Casa Iberica and other suppliers from Sydney to bring other chillies in. They told me no one wanted them but I said they would when we started buying them. We were bringing in tiny little chillies, cascabel, they look like a child's dummy but believe me you don't want to suck on them, they are so spicy. Back to the question, I love getting into the cuisines and paying homage to them and learning about how they got there is the part I like to spend the first few months on and then after that, I pull them apart to make them my own.

That's what I wonder as well. So then is 'fusion' redundant?

I don't like the word, fusion.

I don't think anyone does.

I think because I was a chef in the early nineties when fusion went extreme and got the extreme slap it deserved as well. We took it too far and it got a negative connotation to it. Forgive me, what IS Australian culture? I was born and lived here for 43 years, and I don't know what I would call Australian culture when it comes to food. We just adapt and I love finding out what we can bring in from other countries and other cuisines. If you end up offending someone with that cuisine, I hope they see it for what it is. But otherwise, I try to pay homage to it. Mamasita and Tonka are two places I really tried to do that. At Tonka I had to have a couple of really good Indian chefs there to bring me back to Indian food. We were going a bit crazy. I was making a beef vindaloo where we made a really loose vindaloo-style stock, braised the beef in it, and then used that stock to make a vindaloo sauce and then chargrilled the beef and put the sauce back over it. Everyone asked what we were doing, but then we served it with a smoky yoghurt and it all came together on the plate and then the chefs came to me, Ved (Navghare), one of the best chefs I have ever worked with and he said he couldn't work out what to serve with it because it wasnt something they would do in India. I asked him what he would do with a nice warm beef curry and he suggested a cucumber salad so we played with it and with pickles. We made a pickled red onion and then when you plate something like this in the kitchen it needs to be done fast and he said it needed a tempering dressing, which I hadnt heard of. Its where you heat up vegetable oil with a little bit of mustard seed oil, you thrown in the mustard seeds in and then you build whatever you want from there so curry leaves, turmeric, fenugreek seeds. So we made that and poured it over the salad at the last second and tossed it around. It was a step we didn't need to do, we could have just made a dressing, but we brought it in to what he thought was more Indian. I stood there proud that we had created something he was proud to serve as an Indian dish but it really wasn't Indian and it is only when you work with someone like that. I did the same with Mexican but went to Mexico to learn. Our General manager and one of our owners there, Matt and Nick were all about Mexico and South America and they helped me do that there; I didn't have a Mexican influence in the kitchen as such.

I'm interested in, when you learn to be a chef in Western countries you learn French techniques as a base and then I have always thought that French cooking as incredible and high as it is, is quite strict. Is that changing?

I don't want to be the guy who says it, but it definitely is.

I follow some restaurants in France and there are certainly some that are pushing boundaries and moving away from the rules.

I think we have all held French cuisine and French techniques as the highest accolade for what we can do, but I think we are finding as we explore other cuisines in more depth, that there is the same relevance to the way you do something in French as the way you might do something in Thai. Look at Thai cuisine. David Thompson's book is phenomenal, the first one, the pink one, I used to call it my bible. The way he dived into that cuisine and what he found out about it, it put it right up there in my chef's heart with the techniques you can learn from French cooking and the foundation that can give a chef, having the proper understanding of what you do and why you are doing it. It was trained into me that you should always have that good foundation of French cuisine to understand how to cook in general, so that is still in there somewhere, but I think it is slowly dissipating to really give respect to the cuisines and understanding why they do what they do so that you can really understand what to do afterwards.

And you had five years at Jacques Reymond's restaurant?

Just shy of five years.

Where were you in your career when you started there?

I was only just 24 when I started. Looking back, I think I was quite young. I started as sous chef. I had been over in Perth. My now wife and I were over there working in a place I don't really talk about much and we had finished up there and were heading back to Melbourne. We are both from Melbourne and we had been over there for almost three years. It was my first sous chef role and I thought to myself that I didn't know anything. I knew what I knew and thought ai needed to step back a bit and learn some more. I wanted to go to some of the greats and just grind my teeth and learn more in the kitchen before I go back into a sous chef role. I rang a few places and on the Tuesday I was on my way in to Jacques Reymond and my wife had gone out to get the Espresso, which was where chefs looked for work in those days and she is a chef as well. She rang me and asked if I knew what job I was going for because they were advertising for a sous chef. It wasnt what I thought I wanted. But I loved it. I got in there and found out there was more than two types of seaweed in the world, and I realised how much I could learn there. Jacques, while being very French himself, his cuisine isn't, it's a melting pot of Australian culture driven, and he loves Japanese and Southeast Asian influence but it is all done with French technique. That might sound like you want to shoot yourself in the head, but it is his mind and his background that gives him the drive to want to lift Australian cuisine to where he has. He was one of the first to degustation here back in the nineties and I dont know how he got it through, but he did. It was that Southeast Asian thing that I was most excited about when I started; the mirin and sake and three different types of soy sauce. Then the other side of the coin was that he wasnt shy to throw white balsamic into a dressing with soy sauce. He was driven by his palate. So yes, I wanted a job there and ended up getting the sous chef role there which was some of the best and worse times of my career. It was very very stressful.

And many chefs wouldn't make it through that.

We had people come and go through there.

And if you do make it through, then you can look back and be thankful.

You should be better for it. You hope. I'm not saying there was anyone mean there, it was just a strict level that was required every day, every moment. Imagine trying to be at your best every time you walk in the kitchen, every time you pick up the knife.

Which is still the case now, you want to be at your best. But I know when I came here I have spoken to both Dans here and they talked about how important wellbeing is for the group and I really liked hearing that. They talked about smoothies at the end of the night rather than knock off drinks and doing yoga together and so on. And being open in talking about wellbeing and looking out for one another.

I have loved that about this group. I only started with these guys with Hubert, so six months so far. I think their approach to their business, while at the heart of it they are hospitality for the customer, they are also hospitality for their staff and showing each other respect and looking out for them so that they have what they need and can do the job they need to do and retain their wellbeing.

Yes, it's as much about sustainability of people as it is of products and environment.

I think it is interesting you talk about critics coming in. I'd like to think, well on one hand there is a slight shift because, for example, writing for Broadsheet, we dont give ratings and we talk about the places, showing rather than telling and not making a judgement but sharing our experience. From my non-journalist trained perspective, I think that is important. Obviously there is a place and the top food critics, their writing is incredible, but I like that I don't have to give a rating and be critical. Everyone's experience is different. But that's the other side; everyone's a critic and people very quickly jump on and talk about a bad experience. And maybe there's room for that but how much store do chefs place on the average punter who comes in and then jumps onto the Internet. Do you worry about them?

Yes of course. Prior to Mamasita and at Jacques' we weren't looking at reviews, by which I mean from the general public, we did look at what writers thought but it wasn't like today where you have Yelp and what was Zomato and Trip Advisor and it does affect your click flow on the Internet and people research where they want to go and eat so all the four stars etc do mean a lot to a business at the end of the day. Back at Mamasita at the weekly meeting there would be discussions around wages and food costs and then there was always a discussion around what was happening in our online presence. I hope the audience understands this but there were some things we would draw a line at, like, this is our business and if they didn't quite understand that, that's on them but other things we wouldn't have wanted that experience for our customers and we would reach back out to them and give them an explanation and an apology and reach back out to invite them back in and fix the problems. That was a big drive at Mamasita and I love that. Its the same thing here with the Ryan Hospitality Group. Out at Hubert Estate, we are doing something quite different out there. Our level of food is high in quality but it is also a fast-paced environment so it's not finicky and it is not fully worked. We are in a super doper brand new restaurant and so people come in there and have an idea of what will happen But our service is very casual in that room. It's a big turnover, it is 220 seater plus outdoor seating, so we can sit almost 300 people at a time, so the service is not at a high level.

But everyone was so nice to me out there. I thought there was a lot of floor staff.

And it is, it's a busy place and we want to provide good service but it is not table service. There is a communal area where you can get sparkling and still water on tap and where you get your own cutlery and serviettes and share plates. You can order on QR code which is a positive for some people and a negative for others. The reason I'm bringing it up is because when we go to those reviews, the problems they encounter with technology and QR codes, we draw a line at that one because that is the system we are using out there and it all comes down to the cost of things these days; food prices are going through the roof, finally staff are being paid correctly, but that comes at a cost, so our model is less waiters everywhere you look and a lot more systems in place to make sure it all works and the customer gets what they want but achieving that with a lower wage cost to make the business viable. If I gave you $3 million and you could invest it in an investment portfolio, you might make 10 to 12 % annually. If you gave it to me to open a restaurant, I could tell you 5% and it might be 8% but it wont be 10% for ten years. It's not a business you get into to make money. You get into this business when hospitality is at you heart.

And clearly it is with you. When I talked to you about Quarters, the way you talked about the food was so enthusiastic, which was so great. What made you get into being a chef in the first place? Sometimes chefs talk about coming from a background of food, but others say it was because their mothers weren't good cooks.

I have been quoted as saying this before and I'm not sure how much truth there is to it, but sometimes I think I became a great chef because my mother wasn't good at it. It was a little bit by accident. I don't mean to say I was a lazy kid, but I wasn't driven. I was in Year 9 and doing the two-week work placement and I hadnt done anything about it and my dad wasn't a drinker but from time to time bet on the horses and was in at the local pub that had a TAB and he put a bet on a horse and the publican who was a lovely guy got talking and my dad is a real talker and he started talking about me being lazy and not organising my work experience so I ended up in the kitchen there at the pub doing my two weeks work experience. I cleaned all the kitchen down, scrubbed the fridge doors and and washed a million dishes and peeled potatoes and carrots. It was just a local pub in Whittlesea which unfortunately isn't there anymore and at the end of it, I was on the second to last day and the kitchen were in the shit and I walked in with dishes and lifted up the fryers because the food was cooked. The chef asked me what I was doing and I said I thought they were cooked and that was it, I was stuck in the kitchen from that moment. The chef there was a Sri Lankan guy, one of the most humble and nicest chefs I have ever worked with and from that was where I saw how I feel a kitchen should be run with humility and caring for your team. Also teaching, he was a great teacher to me. Hope you're not listening Vijay but he wasn't the greatest chef I have ever worked for, although he was a great chef, but he had a heart of gold. From there he got me my next job in a hatted restaurant with a chef just like him. I did my whole apprenticeship at the pub, not knowing any better. I had worked there part time while I finished high school and VCE and then started my apprenticeship. The six years of working with genuinely nice chefs who were all about training. Managing a kitchen isn't about managing a kitchen, it's about managing your people. Everyone is different and as soon as you understand that, you start building relationships with people and you find how much more, and not in a nasty way, but how much more you can get out of people. You open them up to what they love and get excited by and staff improve and perform better. I have worked with people who aren't that nice over the years and the response they get from their staff and its a cold shoulder and walking out the door at the end of the day not caring, where I find the chefs I have worked with, so many of them will keep in touch and talk about maybe working together again soon. And it's what we can do, not what I can do.

That's hospitality, isn't it? You want it to permeate through everything. I like to think that when you are cooking from a place of happiness and the team is working together.

To your point before about the staff, there could be 1000 points that a customer could see how the business behaves and have an opinion on it, the hard part for the business is to make sure that all those points of contact have the same language and that people are feeling the warmth of hospitality so you have to have a no dickhead policy in your business when you start wanting to work on your culture, not just your food. Having great food and a great chef doesn't always come with a great culture which can be sad. Some of the best chefs in the world need a really solid head chef or senior sous chef who is all about culture who will hold the team together. I have seen that at a couple of places where the chef might be an absolute arse but he has a fantastic second and he brings his team together and they achieve. No names.

With all that in mind, what would be your advice for a young person who was thinking of becoming a chef now.

So many times, I've said, don't do it. And if you get discouraged and you still want to do it, then you are the one for it. I wouldn't discourage anyone. Anyone who had a love for food, I would tell them to start slower, and not saying to follow in my footsteps, but kinda like what I did where it wasn't such a fast-paced environment, somewhere where you can get in and understand the pressures of service. There are pressure points in the business once you get up to sous chef and head chef you are responsible for the financial outcomes, but the pressure points for a younger chef is being able to handle stress, being able to handle long hours standing up and in that pressured environment where you may be working by yourself and if you can't get out of your own head, it would be good to find that out earlier rather than later. Start slower and really make the decision after the first couple of years. I think there are some disgruntled chefs out there and they are probably disgruntled because they don't like what they do and they have ended up there because they think that you've wasted the time of your life where you can learn a trade. So many people have started being a chef later in their lives. A couple of close friends changed careers and gave up big salaries to become chefs. One of them has travelled the world with it and was the head chef of a couple of great restaurants in Melbourne and he only made it through because of his love for the food and his passion for what he was doing. For young people starting out, you have to get inside your head and make sure it is something you want to do and if it is yes to all the questions, then get in and start softer. Give yourself a chance. And get a mentor.

Hubert Estate

Cnr Maroondah Hwy and St Huberts Rd, Coldstream