Matt Lambert

Hi Matt, how are you? Are you in Brisbane at the moment?

Good thank you. Yes, I am. I've been here for three weeks and a couple of one-week trips as soon as New Zealand opened.

Right, yes, that has taken ages. I haven't been back to New Zealand since September 2019. I'm from Christchurch originally. Where did you start off?

I grew up in please don't judge me West Auckland, in a little old town called Henderson.

Nice. And did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

100% – one moment, I just have to get up these stairs and find a quieter room.

Are you at The Lodge now?

That's right.

It looks beautiful. I thought it looked like somewhere in Queenstown, actually, even although I know it's an old Queenslander original grocer's store. Is that James Street, in Brisbane?

That's right. The designer that we have, Nik Rush has done a really good job of that and has knitted through all the venues so that they are unique but at the same time are related to each other and are harmonious so when you are in one it might not feel so different to an experience you may have had in another one in Auckland or Queenstown. I think the main thing here is that it is that Queenslander style building, that's what gives it the Australian vibes.

Rodd & Gunn obviously appeals to Australians as well; that outdoorsy, country, luxe comfortable thing.

It's definitely geared towards the climate. We do have a lot of bi-folding windows and such and from an outsiders' perspective, James Street seems like a micro-climate where its a little bit different to other parts of the city of even Fortitude Valley that it's in.

I've only been to Brisbane once and it was quite a while ago. Is that an area where there are other hospitality venues or is it more retail?

There are a lot of restaurants around and bars and it has a great nightlife/community.

Ok, so just getting back to you and paving the way to how you got to where you are now. You were saying that you always knew you wanted to be a chef. Can you remember when that started?

I guess my earliest food memories are shucking peas outside with my mother or fetching strawberries or blackberries to make jam or preserving them. I have a lot of good memories of that and then baking with my mother and my grandmother. When you are a kid you enjoy things you can reap the benefits of, so at the end there is a cookie or a cake and you were always pretty happy. I think that deep-rooted the original passion. Then I deviated heavily from cookies and cake.

So you did an apprenticeship in New Zealand?

Yes that's right, in Henderson, in a restaurant that has gone now that was called Michael's Restaurant. I went to him when I was 11 to try and get an apprenticeship and he told me to come back when I was old enough to work. Because obviously you can't do that.

Are you for real? 11? That's pretty brave. As an 11 year old, what did you say?

I said, Gis a job. No. I would have said I wanted an apprenticeship because I wanted to be a chef. He ended up giving me a call when I was 14 and I started washing dishes there.

Ok. And you started washing dishes, which is a harder, dirty job.

Especially if you are 14.

That's right. So this is after school?

Yes, weekends predominantly; Friday, Saturday nights.

You're giving up your free time as a teenager to wash dishes, which is pretty dedicated. What was it about the kitchen that made you say, yes, I'm right, this is absolutely what I want to do?

I've always had a keen sense of urgency, which is one of the things I like about the kitchen. I wanted to get qualified and be a chef before my mates finished school. That was basically the main reason. I knew I wanted to do it, so I thought why muck around?

What sort of era are we talking?

1995 I would have started washing dishes and 1997 is when I would have started working full time as a chef.

I think food has changed a lot in New Zealand over the last 20 to 30 years. I was in France in 1993-94 and I remember thinking, oh we don't have any of this stuff at home.

It would have been well different.

You would have noticed a big change in the industry, but what sorts of things were you cooking in the nineties when you were learning?

It was very meat and potatoes geez there are a couple of dishes that still stick out to me and I think about and would love to eat. Gary, the guy that owned the place, made a really mean pate that was sealed with animal fat in the traditional way and was insanely delicious, I remember that. And when you're a kid and you haven't seen any of these techniques, it blows your mind. He had a pasta on that menu as well which was really good, but, service comes at you fast and I just kept trying to learn. I liked ice cream a lot too so that was good; there was heaps of ice cream.

Nice. So from there, what was the progression? You were in some pretty fancy places in New Zealand before you went away overseas.

Yes. I moved down to Wellington and I worked at a couple of places there and had a little venture going and realised I probably didn't know enough. Id had a goal at that time, that whole speed thing was part of my planning and I wanted to have my own restaurant by the time I was 21. Blind ambition was one thing but then I realised how little I knew. I moved back to Auckland to work in some of the better restaurants. There was a restaurant there that was called Red that was really good, I got myself in the door there. While I was working there I met Michael Meredith because he was working next door at Vinnies and when he left to open The Grove I went with him to do that. I was open-minded, I wanted to learn. He was in every magazine every month so I had the mentality that I really wanted to go and work for him to learn as much as I could.

Did you go to New York after that?

That's right. I met my wife working there and then went back to America with her, where I spent the first year working in Connecticut which was pretty good because I had real culture shock. I didn't understand real seasonal differentials. Auckland is just rainy or its hot. In the North-West, it can get to -12 degrees and at other times, 38 degrees. I was learning about the seasons and about a whole new country.

One day, my wife and I went to Perry Street, a place Jean-Georges (Vongerichten) had just opened and we had brunch. I said, right next month we have to do it; we have to move to the city, otherwise, what are we up to? Then we did and I got a job at a place called Public, which got a Michelin star about a year into being there.

What was your role there?

I started as a line cook and ended up as a sous chef pretty quickly and then head chef about a year after that. They had a couple of restaurants and I went and helped open Saxon + Parole and spent some time at one called Double Crown. It was great. Like you say, when you went to France you would have been pretty amazed, especially if you are passionate about food, so be being there and seeing all these foreign ingredients that I had never heard of, every day is new and it reignited that learning thing and we were very busy.

Was the dining public different? I imagine they would have been very different to New Zealand.

Well, you don't shut the kitchen at 9 o'clock. We were closing at 11 o'clock. We were doing big numbers. There wouldnt have been many restaurants when I left that were doing big numbers like that.

When does the idea come for your own place, The Musket Room?

I started working on Musket Room in 2010. I thought if I was going to be there and putting on all the effort, I wanted some credit for it, the classic chip on my shoulder thing. I worked on it for two years until completion. It was all done and then I went looking for investors and lucky me, I found one.

That's pretty ballsy. The concept was to take New Zealand to New York, is that right?

It was terrifying. Because at that time, too, everyone was just opening Italian restaurants and it was the cool thing at the time. They never go out of style, but a lot of really good chefs like Torrisi were going off at that time too, Bettony had just opened. There was a lot of stuff going on and a lot of people had their own big names or had worked for really big name chefs. The expectations were there and I feel as though I was lucky enough to just fly under the radar and I went with the New Zealand theme because I am from New Zealand and I thought it would be a point of difference, and it was. And then luckily my worries turned to joy when everything went screamingly well.

How did you get people through the door? How were you enticing them away from the Italian restaurants? People wouldn't have known much about New Zealand food.

There was a cool community in NoLIta, lots of foot traffic, so people would just stumble across it and that was important. We did have a small amount of PR but when we opened we were really slow. I remember a couple of Sundays where I was just standing there saying, maybe I am right and nobody wants us, oh no. But really early on we got approached by the PR for Michelin because they wanted interior shots and we have only been open for three or four weeks, so at least I knew we were kind of on their radar and that was a good push. The Daily News reviewed us and we got five out of five for that and I remember refreshing that a couple of times thinking it was an error. Then four months in was when we got the Michelin star and thats when everything picked up. If you think of the international travel into that city, particularly from Europe, it's very helpful.

That is wild; after four months to get a Michelin star is very impressive. What was on that first menu?

The format was a lot different. I had some cool things like a foie bon bon, venison with flavours of gin, which stayed around for a long time and ended up being a hallmark dish and a quail dish with a red sauce that changed seasonally and had cherries and berries and things like that; it ended up being one of the favourite dish I have ever cooked. A lot of stuff. We had the la carte menu and two tasting menus. I like cooking in that tasting menu format so I was trying to create a situation where I felt comfortable cooking like that. It is hard to come out of nowhere and expect people to just have what you have cooked. I wrestled with that too because it is not super hospitable. While it is really good and I do love it, it takes away from that hospitality thing where it is more about the food than the company. As I have got older, I realise that, but I do love it a lot.

That's interesting. I just like abdicating all responsibility for choosing things and giving that to the chef; just tell me what to eat.

Yeah, well, it's also cool because you can create the flow; the ups and downs, the peaks of flavour and things interluding into other things. It is a real experience. While it's less hospitable, so much effort goes into it and you never finish refining it and I do like that element a lot.

I just finished reading David Changs memoir, Eat a Peach, about starting up Momofuku and he talks about chefs have to be like lobsters in that you are constantly shedding your skin, being vulnerable and then toughening up again.

That's a good analogy.

It sounds to me as though you have a similar idea in that you like to keep learning and changing up and having new challenges.

Ultimately you are there to make people happy and f you are happiest when people arent happy, its not going to work out good. You have to be receptive. Sometimes people may make comments about food and they may be entirely wrong and you are entitled to your opinion, but a lot of times you have to take the feedback on board and give people what they want because ultimately without people wanting things, you won't be there to cook it.

Am I right in thinking Cameron Douglas who is doing the wine for The Lodge was also your sommelier in New York?

He was based in New Zealand but was writing our wine lists for us. I had approached him because of his stature and I knew about him from Auckland. He was working at Vinnies with Michael Meredith and I knew him from there. When Lodge Bar was coming together, it was a no-brainer to pick someone of that calibre. Ultimately it was someone else's call, but I suggested it.

What has happened to Musket Room now?

I'm not there any more.

How did you get involved with The Lodge Bar Group and Rodd & Gunn?

As I was saying, I took so long planning The Musket Room and kinda late in the game I grew up in Rodd & Gunn clothing, Id go to the Galleria down there in Auckland I had emailed Info to say, hey, my name is Matt. I'm from New Zealand. Im opening The Musket Room and it would be really great if you could do the uniforms, I think there is some synergy there with Rodd & Gunn and the place being called The Musket Room. Also I'm trying to champion New Zealand and Rodd & Gunn champion New Zealand, so there was synergy in my thought process pre-opening and I was just lucky enough that Mike and the team agreed.

Wow ok, so all of this does go way back and I do love this idea of synergy. That everything is woven in together.

That's a good line, isn't it? Because 'woven' is all about clothes.

It is. We're on fire, Matt.

I'd gone down to New Zealand one time on holiday in Queenstown and Mike (Beagley) flew down and he had the store where the Queenstown Lodge Bar is and he was saying that he thought he might do a bar here and I said, thats an amazing spot. He made it happen and I was happy to be part of it. I was consulting from the States and then there was Covid and a couple of other things and I thought it would be a really good opportunity to move my family because my boys are ten and five and I thought they could grow up in New Zealand and have that experience. I thought I could grow with the brand and see what becomes of this journey. The level up each time is very impressive and I enjoy that challenge. It circles back to that keeping enthused and all the rest of it. I'm also very lucky here because my sous chef from The Musket Room for six years, James Evangelinos, is here as head chef. He was in Sydney and he moved up here to help. There is no one in the world that I trust more than Jimbo so I am pretty happy. Obviously everyone on the team is incredibly talented as well, but I had someone that I really really trusted here all the time.

Do you know what, speaking of synergy, it really feels as though everything has just fallen into place but I know that you have to be really good and work really hard for things to fall into place and you have to make those good relationships and be a nice person and a good person to work with and for, but I also have this idea, there was that story, Like Water for Chocolate, where every time the woman made food, her emotions went into the food and the people who ate it experienced the emotion and I feel like what you are talking about and what you are creating would be really great for the diner. It seems like there is a lot of happiness going on around you.

There is some stress that goes into it; it's not all kisses and stars, but ultimately our whole goal is to go home knowing we have done the best we can. That's basically what it is all about. You don't want to go home and be all, I could have done that better or that needs to change. Although that IS good because you learn from that and make things better. But we really do have an environment where we have people on board who can make those things happen together. And that's the other thing, this is way more broad than just me in a basement, which gets old after a little while. It's really cool to be part of such a large talented team. Not just chefs or pastry chefs or Cam or the managers, but it's the servers and the really great kids in the kitchen. I'm really happy to be part of their career and that is important to me now. It's also really great for me to work with Nik who designs everything and our marketing team. I get to work with a really great photographer who has become a friend and who takes some of the best pictures of my food I have ever seen. It is really awesome to be a cog in this machine, so to speak.

What will people eat when they go to James Street?

Good question. We have an extensive menu. We have an a la carte menu that has that has mains and sides, but we also have a shells menu that is all-encompassing of crustaceans and oysters and a couple of eggs because I thought that would be funny and good to get a little bit of humour in there to lighten the mood. We also have a snacks menu so if you are just chilling upstairs and meeting some mates on your way through we have some cool snacks there. A couple of them have been with me for a while, like mince and cheese croquettes ate on the menu and are in every venue. I love it because I couldn't get any pies in New York, so I made a croquette and put smoked cheese in it and added it on the menu as the Servo croquette, which we had to explain, but that's part of the humour of it. Then also Im learning about all these amazing products from here. That will take time but there are already things that shine. Obviously the prawns are incredible. I didn't realise that I had only had average prawns until I got here. The prawns are outstanding, the cod is outstanding. All of the oysters I have tried have been great. It's great that there is such a wide variety. Cuttlefish here is really great; we are getting squid that has just come out of the water. The beef here is outstanding. It's a celebration of really great stuff.

It sounds it. You sound excited talking about it. I love that.

And caviar too, there will be caviar.

Now that you are Executive chef and you are overseeing places, where are you based?

Auckland.

Ok and there's a smaller one in Melbourne too?

That's right. Its a smaller bar in Chadstone, but the same amount of love goes into everything we do. It has more of a focus on cheese and also cheese toasties. We had to think of a smart way to utilise the space and deliver something to the standard we like and the other part is that we are here to make people happy and you can eat grilled cheese and be as happy as you would be if you had a caviar tart. That's pretty special. It was limiting in Covid times and New Zealand not being open but I was able to get down to Queenstown a lot and I am at Auckland a lot and now I have been here for three weeks and I will be here to make sure it is all good the I will be back frequently.

Is that easy? I feel as though you would have to give up some control. Obviously you trust James which is amazing.

That does make it easier, but it is not easy, no.

It's a big step. I think it is a big step from sous chef to head chef and thinking about food costs and leadership and talking to media and so on and then executive chef is a whole other ball game.

Yeah, but that's the progression, isn't it? I do get across everything and spend most services in the kitchen because that's where I like to be.

Just to finish, Matt, what would be your advice for young people thinking of becoming chefs. What would you tell them?

It's always a good question. Take your time, don't rush. It sounds weird after I just talked about my own sense of urgency, but make decisions based on where you want to get. It's hard when you are young to decipher where you want to end up with cuisine because it is a pretty massive book. Sometimes you find it by accident by travel or whatever, but figure out what you think you want to do and take the steps methodically to get there. Work for good chefs in great environments where you can use good equipment and a respectful area. Take your time and do it right because if you don't have time then, when do you have time to do it again? The other one I don't like that gets thrown around is around that perfection is unattainable but we have to try. I think, don't pay attention to that stuff because you will drive yourself crazy. Strive by all means, but keep it limited to you doing the best you can do.

The Lodge Bar and Dining

James Street, Brisbane

Photography: Benn Jae @bennjae