When I rang Darren Robertson, he was sitting out by the bins at the back of Three Blue Ducks at The Farm in Byron Bay, on a break before lunch service; a good reminder that being a celebrity chef is not all beer and skittles and you don’t get to be as well-loved as Darren is without doing the hard yards and putting in the time. He’s a busy man. Co-owner of the Three Blue Ducks group with venues in Byron, Bronte, Rosebery and Brisbane as well as Locura in Byron and Rocker in Bondi, Darren has also co-authored two cookbooks, appears regularly on cooking shows and events and he has a lovely little family. I watched a couple of videos on Instagram before we chatted and his love for what he does is palpable, whether it’s demonstrating baking a strawberry and almond tart with fennel jam or appearing in an ad with Kylie Minogue. Darren will be cooking with Will Meyrick who I spoke to last week at Tasting Australia Airlines, the Melbourne to McClaren Vale event part of Tasting Australia presented by RAA Travel in April.
Hi Darren, how are you? And where are you today?
I’m in Byron today on The Farm.
I’ve just been watching you make Strawberry and Almond Tart with fennel jam on Instagram. I looked at some of the other videos and you strike me as being very cool, calm and collected when you have so much going on. Are you mainly based in Byron now at The Farm?
I am. We have a few restaurants now amongst the six of us and three of us are chefs so we divvy up the restaurants and I am predominantly in Byron. But I’m on the road travelling a lot and do all sorts of stuff, but Byron is home now.
It looks amazing. I haven’t been to The Farm, but it does look like it’s a beautiful place and really encapsulates…from what I have read about you…all of the things that you love, like the simplicity of it and the natural aspects of cooking and hospitality.
Yeah, it’s pretty good. We were going to open it and only do a year there, but within two months we said, this is it, we’re staying here. We have a couple of kids now and it’s great. It’s an exciting place to be at the moment. A lot of people have moved up from the city and there are next gen brewers and farmers as well as the restaurants. It’s a nice little town.
I was reading a bit about you and how you had perhaps thought you might go to art school but you were washing dishes in a local restaurant in England and read Marco Pierre White’s book, White Heat, what was it about what he was saying that drew you into cooking?
To be honest, at the time, it was probably the images. It was black and white, grainy photos and a bit rock and roll and going back all that time everything was a bit polished and refined and squeaky clean, so as a 16 or 17 year old reading this book about throwing away the rule book and talking about extremes was quite appealing as well. But also, he was the stuff of legends. If you worked around kitchens in the UK, you’d hear stories about this chap Marco. And now he’s going to be in Adelaide at Tasting Australia.
I know! I saw that. Have you spoken to him in person before?
You know what, I have. My partner interviewed him on stage a couple of years ago and I met him backstage. He was lovely. I was incredibly nervous. He came up to me, shook my hand and said, Hello, chef, which absolutely made my year. He was very charming. It was fascinating. He can really hold a crowd. So to hear that he was coming back to town is pretty exciting.
It is exciting. But you’ve forged your own path in terms of making a name for yourself and, if we want to use the term, celebrity chef…
Crikey.
…which people do use these days, of course. But you’ve certainly done the hard yards. You worked in Michelin starred restaurants but how did it start? You were washing dishes, you read the book…I read that Mark Raffan was a big influence, but what were the steps before that?
I started working when I was around 17 or 18 in Sussex and Kent but really Gravetye Manor was the turning point for me, working in a Michelin starred country house with a chef who was an absolute gentleman. This was at a time when things were pretty grim; there was a lot of violence in kitchens and long hours, it was a tough environment. But he was of the understanding that shouting and screaming doesn’t make the food taste any nicer. He was from the line of the Roux brothers and Gavroche and Nico and Marco. I did three and a half years there. He told me that I would be able to work wherever I liked if I did a couple of years there with him, because it was a bit of a small industry. I worked with a lot of Australians so Tetsuya’s seemed like it was pretty happening at the time so I got on a plane and moved to Sydney.
I guess working in places like that you learn a lot of precision and fine dining techniques, do you think it’s important to master those before you throw them away for simplicity?
I really do. I see a lot now…people aren’t really deconstructing desserts anymore but when it was trendy to deconstruct things and make smears and soils and so on, I think it is so important to learn how to fillet a fish and roast a chicken. Whatever style you adopt later on in your career, those fundamentals and basics are really important. I think that in any trade; fashion or music, you have to learn your craft inside out and then you can take it wherever you go. That was important to me.
I guess it’s also about developing your palate and your repertoire of flavours to know what goes with what and what works and what doesn’t. That always really impresses me with chefs; how you can work out that fennel is going to be great in a dessert, for example.
That’s the fun stuff. I think you develop respect and even more enthusiasm and inspiration when you start to understand what it is. But even 23 or 25 years in, I still think that I ma just scratching the surface. The world of food is truly fascinating.
If you do things that make sense, for example, if you use the whole ingredient and minimalise waste and come up with ways to utilise your by-products, at the start it seems quite hard-basket and quite costly but in time you realise you are actually making a saving and it becomes financially sustainable as well as the right thing to do as far as looking after the land and the animals and people.
You certainly strike me as someone who is still very much in love with the industry and with what you do.
I do, honestly I do. It is tough but I never want to retire. I still want to be doing this when I’m 80 and 90, I certainly want to still be involved in the industry. I don’t know where it’s going to go.
And working where you do, you’re amongst that wave…I don’t want to say wave….what I mean is I was talking to a chef in Gippsland the other day and there was a smoke haze in the vineyard out the window and we talked about whether we have to now think about a different way of doing things where we think more about the environment and more about our footprint. I feel as though a lot of chefs are already doing that; thinking about sustainability, using everything, zero waste.
It’s interesting to see. To be honest, this has been a discussion at the ducks since we began and we are 10 years in now. We had a little kitchen garden and we tinkered with aquaponics and solar panels and composting. We eradicated single use plastic and got rid of plastic straws. The timing was almost a bit revolutionary; it upset customers and it was certainly seen as fringe. We weren’t the only restaurant doing it. Matt Stone was pushing it and there was Joost’s Greenhouse and there were other people around and it was bubbling away. Now it has become more mainstream in many industries but of course now it’s getting a bit bloody late, to be honest. But it is nice to be involved in an industry that is quite vocal about it and can make serious change by influencing consumers and enabling people do little things. We all feel overwhelmed and quite helpless sometimes but by doing little things in your own life, and owning restaurants, we have the opportunity to do things on a larger scale. We do have more of a responsibility to act ethically.
But I find it really interesting and it’s a huge source of motivation in running the business to see what changes you can make and a lot of them then start becoming profitable. If you do things that make sense, for example, if you use the whole ingredient and minimalise waste and come up with ways to utilise your by-products, at the start it seems quite hard-basket and quite costly but in time you realise you are actually making a saving and it becomes financially sustainable as well as the right thing to do as far as looking after the land and the animals and people. It’s great to see it snowball now with a lot more industries coming on board. That’s really exciting. Unfortunately the bloody country has to burn to the ground before many people will take true action. That’s really sad but a lot of good will come out of this. It has become even more of a conversation. Shit’s getting real. It really is.
Sometimes I feel for chefs and people at the forefront and you mentioned responsibility and it’s a lot on your shoulders. The public can be hard to convince sometimes. We always want to be able to have avocado on toast and eat asparagus and tomatoes. Maybe we just shouldn’t and you are up against that.
But it has changed. The public are becoming so much more knowledgeable. They are watching documentaries and there is more information on social media. There are definitely more conversations around food and sustainability and nutrition and all of that sort of stuff. Most people want to do the right thing. As a restaurateur, I’ve found that there has been a lot more interest and that justifies charging a little more money for something that’s more nutritious and ethically grown. That’s definitely a good thing.
Yes, and that desire of yours for sharing goes into your cookbooks as well. Was doing a cookbook a natural progression for you? I imagine it must be difficult to do a cookbook when you’ve been cooking in a commercial kitchen and then you have to translate it for the home cook.
I learned a lot doing the first book. I think it was important for us. We get asked to share recipes a lot and a lot of our base stuff. Writing the book was incredibly time consuming and it doesn’t make any money but it was nice for us to reflect on our food and where it had come from and where it is. It was an interesting exercise. I love tinkering around with recipes and changing things…I’m probably a really annoying chef because I always want to change stuff. I loved it. Because I love cookbooks. On my days off I usually take my kids down to the bookstore and just nerd out. I never leave without buying a couple.
And just to talk a bit about the Tasting Australia Airlines event at Star of Greeece and you’re working with Will Meyrick who I spoke to last week…
Did you? He’s a legend, isn’t he?
He’s amazing. He had so many stories to tell.
Yeah, so it’s 3rd of April, Melbourne to McLaren Vale. Their first stop is Yangarra Estate for some wine tasting and then lunch is at Star of Greece where myself and Will will be cooking up a whole bunch of stuff. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve known Will for a few years and he is an incredible chef; I love his food. So I’m racking my brains to think of what to cook to impress him. Then I think we leave the lunch and go down to the beach where there’s a DJ and local tastings. It will be an amazing event. We’re doing that on the 3rd and then on the 8th I’m cooking with Emma McCaskill who I used to cook with at Testsuya’s back in the day. It is so good to see her coming into her own now. She was incredibly talented back then and to see what she has achieved is amazing. We’re going to do that with Maggie and Sat Bains which will be cool. That’s at The Glasshouse.
A lot of my chefs are going to come down just to be around the event. Last year I brought down the family and it was one of the most enjoyable weeks. It was pretty cool.
It certainly sounds like a great event with an amazing array of people…including you. Australia has really adopted you as one of their own and you were even on the ad for Australia that showed after the Queen’s Christmas Day speech. That must have been pretty amazing for your family.
Honestly, I still pinch myself, I really do. My mum came for Christmas and she was always keeping little clippings and whatnot so when she saw the Kylie ad, it was pretty special.
It looked like it was a lot of fun to make but I’m sure it wasn’t as easy as that. You did all look as though you were having fun with Kylie pouring beers and so on.
It was hilarious. The stuff we get to do is a lot of fun and being involved with that was a bit of an honour. We are lucky to get to do what we do and travel around Australia cooking on beaches and in forests and in other peoples’ restaurants and we get to meet our heroes.
It’s a good life.
It’s not all glitz and glamour though. I’m just sat outside next to the bins. Just getting ready for lunch.
Well, I had better let you get ready for lunch. Thank you so much for your time, Darren, and your generosity in sharing what you have shared. All the best for the event in April.
B?yron Bay