James Kummrow

James, I was reading your biography and there are so many things I want to ask you about. Number one, I live across the road from Fenix, in Richmond, where you started, and at the time you were there, you were working with really great people, was that where you did your apprenticeship?

Yes, the bulk of it. My first employment was at the Veneto Club in Bulleen, a three storeyed concrete monster. It was really there that I met a couple of amazing chefs, who were from the Fenix crew and they had taken roles where they could take a step back and do a lot of function work. We did functions up to 500 people; with two different levels, so a thousand people plus a bistro operating in the middle, quite high volume. I was there for ten months and then my very first head chef, Aldo, said, if you want to learn how to cook, you’ve got to go to Fenix.

You know, I’ve spoken to so many chefs who have spent time at Fenix and then gone on to do really great things. It sounds as though it was a really great training ground. 

It was. We had an incredible string of head chefs there who I was really lucky to work with; world class. They were well known for importing talent from overseas as well. I worked with one of Marco Pierre White’s protégés. Dan Hunter who had just finished as head chef at Mugaritz in Spain, Stuart McVeigh, who was a local talent, George Calombaris, Gary Mehigan, Raymond Capaldi. It was incredible. 

It does sound incredible. It’s like the nobility of Melbourne hospitality. 

Even the crew that went through there, seeing where they are now is amazing.

What do you think it was about Fenix that made it that incubator? What did it look like to learn there?

Really that restaurant was driven by Raymond Capaldi, who had a relentless pursuit of excellence and did not accept any substitute. And that’s what it was; not accepting anything other than exactly what was required, through all aspects of cooking. It was an intense three and a half years.

That’s a long time to be working at that level of intensity.

I don’t know if anyone else worked there that long. A lot of people had short life spans there. It was a tumultuous environment. 

How old were you when you were there?

In my early twenties. I started cooking quite late.

Did you think you might do something else and then discovered cooking? How did you get into it?

I finished high school and was destined to be an engineer. I was a maths science kid. I got into Monash Uni, doing Engineering. Into my second year I really had a desire to work with my hands and get my head out of the books. And through that time of living by myself, essentially and looking after myself and cooking, it was the rise of the TV chef. Shows like The Naked Chef…Jamie Oliver…little bits and pieces that I was really just doing to look after myself but I took a real interest in it. 

Right, so you obviously weren’t just doing baked beans on toast. It sounds as though it was an outlet for you.

I found that my life got better and better the more time I spent in the kitchen. I really thrived on the discipline and structure.

There are maybe some crossovers between maths, science, engineering and cooking, do you think? 

Certainly when you’re dealing with pastry when it is a science of cooking, which I love.

Maybe not so much from the point of view of creativity…

The creativity isn’t typically associated with the maths, science world, but I guess I was fortunate to have an interest in that as well.

Did you go to cooking school?

Yes. I studied at William Angliss and finished my apprenticeship at Fenix. From Fenix, I was pretty burnt out, to be honest. I took a little job…well, what I thought was going to be a quiet little job in the city at a place called Journal Canteen and there I was fortunate to meet Rosa Mitchell. It was part of the European group. My job was to provide soups and cookies and muffins for the café, Journal, downstairs in the morning and then once Rosa came in, my job was to turn her home cooking into an offer that we could sell in the canteen. Then she would work the floor once she had done all the cooking and recipes and then I would be cooking that with an assistant. I started there and it was lunch only, doing 10 people for lunch. By the time I left, we were doing 110, 120 people. We were churning it out. It was wild.

You must have felt pretty good about yourself in that situation. 

All credit to Rosa. It was her brainchild and Con, the owner.

Was that Italian?

Sicilian. Quite specific. Cooking with the seasons, handmade pasta, even the tarts were amazing. It was great and it was exactly what I needed to get my passion back.

You would have had a classic training and then it’s about marrying that with homestyle cooking. That’s interesting.

Even Fenix was so modern and pushing boundaries. To come back into home cooking and everything made by hand. It was soul food and incredible. From there, my taste for Italian food continued. I moved on to Church Street Enoteca. The General Manager of Church Street was the old restaurant manager of Fenix. He poached me to come across. they were putting together a team of chefs because they wanted to get a Chef’s Hat. The venue had never had a Chef’s Hat and they were pushing hard. They asked me to come in and write their dessert menu for them, as well as work the section. A great challenge was set. I also made the decision then that I would only be there 12 months and then set off for the UK to further my training. We were really lucky that year because we got the Chef’s Hat we were after.

How do you know what to do to get a Chef’s Hat?

It’s usually spending a shitload of money on amazing produce and being really loud about it; championing the produce and talking about what you are doing. If you are genuinely doing all the right things, people pay attention. Doing it consistently is what it takes. It’s easy to produce a menu that is worthy of a Chef’s Hat, but day in day out is the challenging part

It was an amazing team they put together. To get the Chef’s Hat and then have a ticket booked to the UK was incredibly satisfying.

The UK would have been another whole learning curve.

It’s another world. It was like starting form scratch again. I had already organised when I got there to do the winter season in the French Alps, in Chamonix, cooking with ex-Fenix alumni, three other guys. I was also traveling with my now wife. So we all worked together for the same company and stayed there for six months, all though the winter into the spring, cooking at luxury chalets. The company promotes that it only serves Michelin star food, so we were set a challenge to deliver something to corporate clients that would exceed whatever else was being served in the valley. But every now and then we’d get a family in who would just want a big lasagne on the table and a fresh salad. 

What an amazing experience. How beautiful.

It was life changing; snow-boarding all day, cooking all night for six months.

Living life like it’s golden. How wonderful. How’s your French?

General kitchen words and all the naughty stuff, that’s about it.

That’s usually what people say. Then you went to the UK?

Yes. I tried really hard to get my foot in the door of some restaurants, one of which was The Vineyard in Newbury, Stockcross, West of London, out past Oxford towards Ascot. There was a two Michelin star restaurant in the hotel. I went there and worked for free. They provided me with accommodation and I just had to feed myself on my days off. I was mainly at work anyway. I worked there until the Executive chef resigned. They were trying to change the restaurant to a more accessible offer. His name was John Campbell and he then introduced me to The Square, in Mayfair, through the chef, Philip Howard. I was lucky enough to do a trial and get a chef de partie position. I worked my way through the kitchen until the time I left London. I would have stayed there if I’d had the Visa.

So then you came back and took a sous chef position at The Royal Mail?

Yes. The hierarchy in the kitchen was Dan Hunter, myself and a newly qualified apprentice. We all just did everything together. It was pretty tight. I left just before they were awarded their third Chef’s Hat and even during that time even when they had two Chefs Hats, there was no staff. We were doing breakfast through to dinner. We never got out of the kitchen before 1am and if we were on breakfast, it was a 6am start. But it was an amazing experience. It’s incredible how quickly you can refine and progress in your field if you have zero distractions and you are thinking about it every waking minute. But 18 months of that was more than enough. At that time, my now wife was living in Melbourne, so I was alone, travelling back to Melbourne every second weekend and she would sometimes make the trip as well. We spent the entirety of our engagement separated over that period, just to pursue those skills that I really wanted to achieve. Then I only came back to Melbourne to get married and settle down.

That’s a real commitment to your career and it’s obviously a great testament to your relationship, I love stories like that. What do you think it is about you that keeps you going through all the almost burn out, all those long hard hours and then that challenge to romance as well?

I think it’s a genuine love for the industry as well, and not just cooking. I enjoy going to restaurants. I enjoy looking at the design of restaurants. I like reading other people’s menus. I like everything about it. I guess setting myself a goal to achieve a certain skill set that I would be happy with was a big thing as well, setting a target of working in a two Michelin star or two hat restaurant, I really thought it wasn’t going to be forever, so I might as well push while I was still learning, and as long as I felt my body would stand up to it, I kept going. It’s challenging.

It’s a different story now. There are venues that’s till work like that and then there are venues like the one I’m at now, at Fatto, that really champion work-life balance. But through that period, if you are cooking in a remote area and you are cooking with a team of guys you love, you all want to do it together and produce something you’re all really proud of, you just don’t really count the hours.

It can be tricky. I’ve spoken to a few chefs and of course you have to be careful what you say and no one should be exploited, but as you say, when you’re learning or you’re really passionate about it, you put the hours in because you want to.

With most things in life, you get out what you put in. I guess it was putting myself in a position where all that mattered was the training and trying to raise the level I was working at for an investment in myself at all cost.

So now Fatto, you have a work-life balance, but it sounds as though you have two really important jobs. You are Venue Manager as well as Head Chef. How does that work? Is that like being a complete control freak?

It’s the complete opposite. All it is, is an absolute credit to the team around me. They are the ones who make it happen and I couldn’t do it without them. Every single one in our management team have a role to play and I rely heavily on them; their opinions, the work they do contributing to the business. I make sure they have their work-life balance worked out so that when they hit the door and start their shift they’re in a great mood, are productive. All these things add up.

The front of house and kitchen staff all report to you?

Hundred per cent. I don’t think we could have made that happen unless there was that genuine love of the industry as a whole. I contribute to the playlist, the music, I do the writing on the walls, I talk about cocktail garnishes with the guys, I talk about table layouts.

Are you still on the pans?

Absolutely. Cooking the meat and the fish and doing the pass tonight.

That’s a lot.

It’s a big workload. But I love it. I love the venue and I want to see it do well.

How long have you been here?

Longer than it has been here. I’m in my seventh year. Before this, the same company had a different venue. I started as a sous chef here and worked my way up to head chef and venue manager.

You obviously believe in the place and it feels right for you. It is beautiful. Look at that view across the river.

I don’t get sick of coming to work, that’s for sure.

Now just talk me through “minimal intervention but bold flavours”.

Not everyone understands that they can be mutually exclusive. Italian food is really easy, in my mind. The produce is incredible and the less you do to it, the better it is. I remember one of my old chefs at Fenix testing us young guys. He’d ask us what we’d do with whatever vegetable was in season and he git us one day completely. He said, here’s this beautiful mango that has come in, what should we do with it? We were all, we could marinade it with kaffir lime or do a little sorbet. He told us we were all wrong and that we should do as little as possible to it because it was absolutely perfect. We should dice it up and serve it, that’s it. Something to accompany it, sure, but why mess with it when it’s perfect. I think that’s the real ethos behind the Italian food here. We buy the best quality mozzarella. You don’t need to do anything than use olive oil, salt and pepper and it’s perfect.

Is it Italian mozzarella?

But made locally. I think serving Italian-made products would be a dream, but when you look at it what it takes to bring that product to Australia, it’s not doing the product any justice. Most of the time, they’re freezing them, and you lose the structure in the cheese by the time you’ve defrosted it and it’s just not on. The producers here, particularly in Victoria are world class. I get a lot of flack for using Victorian olive oil, Mount Zero, when there are so many Italian olive oils on offer. But if anyone knows anything about Italian olive oil, they’ll know that you should be using up that season’s olive oil by the end of the season, ready for the next batch. The heat affects it, the light affects it, so putting it through transit, you have an inferior product straight away.

Well it’s more in keeping with the ethos of Italian cooking to be using local, seasonal.

A genuine respect of the produce is so important. At Fatto, it’s not trying to be all things Italian, it’s about that ethos and trying to do it our way, using my background and really respecting the produce. We’re picking up that ethos from Italy and dropping it in Southbank.

Do you make your own pasta?

Where possible. We don’t have an extruder, so we don’t make extruded pastas, but the guys are turning out all the classics. We go through so much gnocchi. All the flat pastas, we put through the machine. We have a really cool thing called a chitarra, which is like a guitar. You put a sheet down and roll it through the strings and it produces very fine pasta which mimics a spaghetti or linguine. The tagline of the restaurant is Italian by hand, so it would be criminal for us to try and blag it. We try and do as much as possible in-house. The guys make the pizza dough fresh in-house with a 48 hour ferment and then stretched by hand to order.

When diners come to Fatto, what is the best experience you want for them? How would that run?

We’re really lucky. This venue is broken down into bar and cantina, the cantina being the restaurant. I come here as a patron, I really love the venue. When I’m here, I’m either in the bar with my family having pizzas and snacks on the way to the footie or we’re sitting in the cantina having a feasting menu of four different courses; shared starters, pastas to share, a main course to share, maybe a dessert to finish, a bottle of wine and it’s great. Some people do both; start in the bar and work their way down.

Being part of the Art Centre, the pre-theatre crowd  is a huge part of what we do and we don’t ignore that. We try to make sure we satisfy what it means to go to the theatre. Everything we do is geared for speed and ease of service, which is great because you don’t have to do much to Italian food; a slice of prosciutto, grissini, oil and pepper and away you go. It does make it easy. 

We do a lot of events here. An ideal scenario for December is that we are booked out for venue exclusives; weddings, parties…the dining room turns into a dance floor, we put long tables all the way down the terrace.

Just to finish with, I don’t want to talk about individual places, but I’ve just noticed a lot of restaurant closures lately. Big boom places that opened to much hype and have now closed. What do you think the secret to success is for a restaurant in Melbourne? 

That’s a tough one. If I had the answer, I’d probably have my own venue. I think Melbourne is a really unique place in the hospitality world where the quality is far higher than we think it is. It’s world class. We have cafes selling restaurant-quality food. We are al buying $5 coffees. At the same time, we are seeing stripped back interiors with polished concrete floors and bare timber tables. It’s a unique environment. For me a successful place starts with an offer that’s really honest and you believe in it. You have to believe in it and love it to put it out to market. But just because someone has a dream of opening an Italian restaurant and selling handmade pasta, the reality of what that means is often far from where they think it is. The ability to consistently turn out a product of high quality, using high quality produce obviously comes with a price tag as well. A combination of a quality product you believe in and an affordable price point really is where the market is sitting. We are seeing a rise in venues that are offering substantial discounted offers because that is where the economy is sitting. We are spending less but more often. A lot of people are going out for lunch three or four days a week, no problem, but they are looking for a bargain every time. 

As time goes on, while the markets are quite volatile, we are going to continue to see people looking for offers that suit their budget, so I think the future is there. You have to sit somewhere where the owner and the operator are putting out an offer they believe in and it’s well priced. Avoid the trends. 

Fatto Bar & Cantina

100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne