C.S. Lewis was definitely onto something when he had children entering other worlds through a wardrobe. But Galah goes one step further with creating a bottle shop as an entrance to a super cool loft bar. Native Australian floral ingredients, feature bark hangings and retro Scandi-ish furniture is already a great start. Then there’s the food by Rory Greenwood-McNeair. Rory is humble and not willing to buy into the descriptions others have used of him. He wants to celebrate the seasons, the available ingredients and he wants to respect the ideas of the owners of the venues he works in. A genuinely lovely guy, Rory is cooking up crocodile and native bush herbs and just being awesome about it all. If I were you, I’d be slipping in through the bottle store, heading up the stairs and experiencing the loveliness for yourselves.
Rory, let’s start with the fact that every time I’ve read something about you, you are described as a young gun.
That’s nice.
I wondered how you felt about being described that way and I guess when you have had the sort of trajectory you’ve had and to have worked in the places you have worked and then you are young, I guess people do bandy around terms like ‘young gun’. So let’s start with how long you’ve been a chef.
A while now. Since I was 13 – 14 years old, so 13 years pretty much. It piqued my interest when I was younger. I was pretty bad at high school; I didn’t like the whole class system, so I just didn’t enjoy it. Then I found passion in the kitchen.
Was that a part-time job?
One of the co-ordinators had a brother-in-law who was a chef at Centro Ristorante Italiano on Clarendon Street in South Melbourne. He was the head chef there and I started working there for a bit.
What do you reckon it was about it that you liked?
I think I just liked it because it was different, to be honest. I liked being in the kitchen and working with the ingredients. The owner, Pietro, gave me one of the first jobs I ever did and it was cleaning some blue swimmer crabs then he got me to make a dressing and squeeze a whole lot of lemons and I had cuts all over my hands and I thought it sucked but when he asked me if I wanted to go back the next day, I did. And I did.
Did you do formal training as well?
Yes, when I was at the RACV Club, I did an apprenticeship with them. When I was still at high school, I did a competition and they got trainees to go through the club and I won the job at the RACV club to do an apprenticeship through them. They paid for training at William Angliss. They are very good at training people there.
I’ve spoken to a lot of chefs who have gone through William Angliss. I guess having that formal training gives you the rules that you can then break later on…you have technique behind you.
Definitely.
And you were at Attica?
Yes I did a stage there. It’s a really cool place. Incredible kitchen and they are all really cool.
I spent the day yesterday at Corner Inlet with Ben Shewry and Marr Boyle. There were chefs and fishers and the chefs went out on the boats and it was all about getting in touch with the product and having conversations and Ben was rushing around cooking fish over the fire. It was nice to see them action, away from the kitchen.
That’s cool.
Then where did you go after the RACV Club?
I went into cafes for a while. Feast of Merit. It was pretty amazing working for them and for YGAP and being part of what they were doing and their mission. It was a really rewarding job. Ravi Presser was the Executive chef there and he was a really good teacher and mentor.
Great. What did you learn from Ravi?
That there’s more to life than being in the kitchen. Work-life balance was probably one of the biggest things I learned from him; making sure you get what you deserve in a workplace and not getting taken advantage of. Pretty much that. Not just kitchen skills, but life skills.
It’s really important, isn’t it. At the moment I keep bringing this up but we talk a lot about the sustainability of the planet and ingredients, but I think it is also about people. To do the long haul as a chef, it can be physical and pressured or you can choose to be more sustainable about the way you do that.
Absolutely.
I try not to look through Instagram. I take inspiration from what’s around me more than what’s in the actual culinary scene. Rather than copying things and drawing inspiration from that, maybe trying to imagine things for myself. I think that’s the only way to describe it.
I was reading about you taking on the job at Hiatus and Kew and the owner had some ideas about mixing up our ideas of brunch and that when he talked to you, he knew you were the one for the job. Do you see yourself as someone who thinks outside the box in terms of food?
It’d be nice to think of myself like that, but it’s pretty weird to have those ideas about myself.
Young gun thinks outside the box…what’s your approach to food or even creating a menu.
I honestly just look at what is seasonal and available and go with the theme of what people want me to do for the venue I’m working in. Here it’s a modern Australiana theme with crocodile and kangaroo, so I look at what ingredients I can get and what they want me to work with and then work with the seasonality of those ingredients and become more inspired and work outside those boxes. I think about textures and ways I can cook it that will make it easy for service and then just play with that.
Some of those ideas of textures and flavours and what is in season, that's great…but then there’s knowing what to do with them and I know that comes from your training and experience, but I still think it’s amazing that you have the repertoire of all of that and then maybe some different ingredients…like, had you cooked with crocodile before?
No, definitely not. I only found out I was allergic to it from here.
That’s interesting. Are you allergic to anything else?
Pineapple and kiwifruit.
Right, so it’s not really related. That’s fascinating. My mother is allergic to kangaroo meat and nothing else. I wonder what it is about these meats.
I’m not too sure. I looked up a study about it and it is only recently that people have been discovering that allergy, but maybe it’s only recently that they have been eating crocodile meat.
Do you cook it in the same way you would cook chicken or fish?
You can. It’s just about the preparation beforehand.
Some of those other things like the native herbs and spices…how did you learn about them? Did you just experiment with them?
Yeah, I just experiment. They got popular a little while ago and that was cool. They’re really awesome to work with. It’s just about experimenting. There are lots of things you can see and read about because they are quite popular.
Are you someone who is new school in that you get ideas from Instagram or do you have cookbooks?
It’s a mixture of prior knowledge and what I can do better. I try not to look through Instagram. I take inspiration from what’s around me more than what’s in the actual culinary scene. Rather than copying things and drawing inspiration from that, maybe trying to imagine things for myself. I think that’s the only way to describe it.
When you have ideas, do you write them down or go straight to the kitchen?
I write things down an then see if they don’t and if they don’t…I’ve been pretty lucky they’ve been working…hopefully my luck doesn’t run out.
Do you read reviews people put up?
I have been.
They are probably all good reviews.
Some good, some bad. That’s how it goes.
Does it inform how you continue or do you just shrug and move on?
Yes, if they’re insightful. People write reviews for a reason. If people have suggestions and there are enough of those suggestions, then yeah, I’ll change. I don’t think we’re the best and we can definitely change things if they’re not working. At the end of the day, they are the ones buying the food.
I was speaking to a young chef yesterday and he thinks this could possible be the last generation of chefs because a young people aren’t coming through and there are no longer the “greats” there used to be. That was his perception. What do you think of that?
I think there are pretty cool chefs out there; heaps of young cool chefs. I think it’s our role to train people to be like that and to make sure they are doing the competitions and that they have the drive and that they really want to do it. I don’t think we can say that we are the last generation of good young chefs, that’s crap. There are definitely people out there who will train young guns to be the future.
Have you seen changes in the industry even over the 13, 14 years you have been working in it?
Yeah definitely.
For the good?
Mostly for the good. There have been changes in what people think mental health is and being more in tune with that. That’s probably one of the bigger changes; not just screaming at someone for the sake of it and instead talking to your colleagues.
That’s a good one and it’s important. So maybe it is about cultivating more of that, so the young ones do want to stay.
Exactly.
Great. So what’s on your menu at the moment?
We’ve just got a smaller menu put together for the summer. It’s inspired by spring barbecues. We’ve got lamb chops with umeboshi, steeped currants with boobialla though them which is like a native Australian juniper. We’ve got grilled Tiger prawns with vegemite and butter emulsion over the top of them…a kangaroo souvlaki mezzo plate…crocodile skewers brushed with house made tomato sauce…lots of vegetable dishes; asparagus and cauliflower. Some nice stuff.
216 High Street, Windsor