Jo Ward

How was Friday, Jo?

Friday was awesome. We had a really good night. I always really love doing that kind of thing. I used to work with Zac (Cribbes) years and years ago and working with other people in the industry is always heaps of fun.

I've chatted to Zac and also Nick Mahlook, so when I saw the photo of the three of you, it made me so happy. It looks as though you do a lot of collaborations.

Yeah, we have done a few. As I said, I always like to do it. It’s much better to get out of your own environment and do things with other chefs. It’s good for building your profile as well. I did an event with Nick a few weeks ago; the Apollo Bay Seafood festival. We went down there and did a big dinner. That was really cool. I did a big edible fish tank sort of thing. 

I saw some photos of that.

We played the song from the Little Mermaid and had bubbles and stuff. It was really cool.

I’ve been reading about you and I feel as though I have so many possible points of interest to enter into a conversation with you. I thought that it was interesting that he grew up on the coast, fishing and you also grew up on the coast and had a seafood interest early on and now you’re doing more pastry chef, dessert things. How do you feel about savoury? 

I qualified as a chef and then had a high passion for pastry, so I went and did pastry and I am qualified in both, but I have pretty much done pastry my whole career. I came here as a pastry chef and then I got promoted to Executive chef. I use a lot of savoury ingredients in my food, in the pastry. With the savoury, I’ve flipped that, and we do a lot of sweet things, for example, raspberry aioli and vanilla salted fries, so that makes it interesting. I use the techniques I learned in pastry in savoury so it’s a little bit different.

I saw that someone had compared you to Heston in the way that you create such fanciful desserts…you mentioned the aquarium and it seems as though there are a lot of interesting things you can do with desserts and it feels as though you can’t do as interesting things with savoury, but I know that’s rubbish and coming from a non-chef!

You can get a lot more creative with pastry because it’s mainly cold. With the hot you have to move fast. But you can definitely get creative with presentations and so on, you just have to think a little bit differently. That’s what I like to do. My brain sometimes gets a little overwhelmed with ideas.

How do you sort through those? If you have an idea do you write it down, or what’s your process?

I’ve got so many bits of paper and so many little books. Anything that comes into my head, I’ll write it down and sometimes it doesn’t go any further than that. Sometimes I’ll work it and we’ll start playing with it and I’ll taste it and it comes together. Sometimes I go back and look through my books and I’ve written ideas from years ago that I had forgotten about and then I rework that. I get a lot of inspiration from anywhere. The ‘Autumn in Japan,’ I got inspired by the maple leaf and it became a dish. 

I got sent to Japan for a chocolate school and I incorporated what I learned over there with Valrhona. Then I came up with Autumn in Japan. Originally I was really unhappy with the dish, I really hated it. But everyone loves it, it’s one of our favourites.

Which one is that?

It’s on a base of peanut dacquoise, then it’s got a dulce powder, I make a popcorn and dulce parfait and serve it with a mandarin yuzu sorbet. Then we pour a miso caramel at the table and it has pocky sticks and stuff like that, so there’s a real Japanese influence.

So when you’re having these ideas and you get that feeling or sensation of autumn in Japan, do you get a sense of flavours or textures or a look…where do you start?

Flavour for me. I’m always tasting things in the kitchen and wondering what that might taste like with that and that’s sometimes how a dish is created, from that flavour combination. Then I have to try and figure out how I’m going to put that flavour into something cool. 

The cigar box was inspired by looking on eBay and seeing old retro cigar boxes and I thought about how I could make that into a dessert. It depends. I definitely can’t just sit down and make a menu. It has to happen naturally. Sometimes I’ll be put on the spot and they want a menu by a deadline and I hate that. Then sometimes I’m manic with ideas.

Is it different with sweet in that you are less produce driven, in terms of being bound by seasons?

Seasons aren’t a huge issue for me. We try and keep to seasonal fruit in pastry but it doesn’t really hold you back too much.

Some of those magical things that are almost like science experiments, how do you work out how to do those? Is that from reading up about it? Or do you just work it out?

There’s a lot of playing around. I was lucky enough to work with George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan at Fenix when they were just starting and that’s where I learned a lot of modern techniques. I was trained under very classic French chefs and learned how to do everything perfectly but then I wanted to learn modern stuff; how to use dry ice and stuff like that. A lot of that is just playing around. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet these days and there never really used to be as much information so there was a lot of trial and error. 

One time I nearly blew my face off with liquid nitrogen in a thing like a nutribullet, it didn’t have anywhere for the gas to go. I stupidly didn’t think and I had my hand on it and it just blew and cut my hand, cut my face and the blade went up into the roof and put a hole in the roof. It was terrifying.

Whoa. That could have taken your eye out.

I was really lucky. It actually cut me above my eye. It could have quite easily gone through my eye. You just have to be careful. 

I was thinking about education and how as a teacher we are told that how people learn is going to change and what we know as schools will have to change. Nowadays when people want to learn something, they can access that through the internet or other means. What are your thoughts in terms of learning to be a chef? Is it still important to know some of those basic, classical things?

I think you need to learn the basics. You get some chefs who have worked in amazing Michelin star restaurants but they can’t do the simple things. I think it’s important to have your training and then go on to study more and learn different techniques. I think a classical training is important.

Where did it start for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

No, actually I really wanted to be an architect. I’m quite creative and I like drawing but I started washing dishes at the hotel near my house. I actually got my mum to get me the job and she said I’d never make it and next minute I did really well and I was helping the chefs and really enjoying it. I helped them decorate the buffets and so on and they said I had a talent and that’s how it started.

Did you do an apprenticeship here?

I started my apprenticeship in New South Wales and finished it on Hayman Island because I wanted to go somewhere where everything was made there We had a bakery and made all our chocolates in casts. There were a few different restaurants we could work in and I thought it was good for my training to be there. I got there and they put me in cold larder. I said I wanted to be in pastry. I pushed and went there on my days off and kept popping my head in and putting it out there and then I got a job in pastry. Then that was it.

Did you go from there to London?

No I moved from there to Melbourne and that’s when I worked at Fenix with George and Gary. The I went to Taxi and then I went to London, then I came back and went back to Taxi.

It’s a good pedigree. Great places to work. When you worked in London, how different was it to what you had been doing here?

It was pretty full on. I was in a two Michelin star place. It was good for me because I learned such a high standard. Everything had to be perfect and if it wasn’t, it went into the bin. It was a very disciplined and regimented kitchen and a lot different to Australia. Techniques-wise I probably didn’t learn as much as I thought I was going to over there. It was many years ago and it was very old school retro-style food. I think I learned a lot more in Australia.

That’s interesting. Was it old school brigades and shouting chefs?

Yeah.

So many people I have spoken to have had to go through that. Nowadays it’s not the same.

Nowadays it is so different. Back then it was just normal. Working at Fenix too, was probably the hardest kitchen I’ve worked in. That was a very aggressive kitchen. It’s just how it was. It made me who I am now, so I’m not complaining about it, but you definitely can’t be like that any more.

I have two sides to this next bit; I’ve had Philippa Sibley saying, don’t ask me what it’s like to be a woman chef because I am a woman and I am a chef, and then Shannon Martinez who thinks the conversation around being a woman chef is an important discussion to have and do you have to fight a bit harder. Conversation with a chef came about from talking to my good friend, Nicky, who was a head chef and had worked in those kitchens in London a few years back and then in Australia and New Zealand and she said as a woman head chef starting in a kitchen, you had to earn respect whereas a male chef had to do something pretty drastic to lose respect. What is your experience?

I haven’t really noticed any issues as a woman chef. My kitchen at the moment is 90 female. I’ve always worked with guys and often a full team of guys and just me, but here it is a lot different. I don’t know whether I am attracting female chefs but I’ve never had any issues.

That’s great and then I wonder about the flip side of that. I talked to Maria Kabal at Anada in Fitzroy and she said she has a majority female kitchen and it can be hard for guys to come into that.

Actually, it is. I have had guys come in and feel a bit overwhelmed. We’ve never made a thing of that, it’s just how it is. But I have had a couple of guys leave because they can’t handle taking direction from a girl. They don’t like girls being in a higher position from them, but that’s pretty rare.

So Om Nom seems to be mainly dessert-based.

It’s a weird kind of mix. Most restaurants have most people going for savoury and then 30 per cent go for dessert, but here it’s 100 per cent dessert. Savoury has got a lot busier but we it’s basically a dessert bar. The hotel is a dessert themed hotel; the light shades reference black cherries and the stools look like liquorice allsorts, so it is heavily dessert based, but Dion wants to be more savoury. On this street (Flinders Lane) we have to keep up.

There’s a lot going on down here.

There sure is.

Is there a community down here?

Yeah, it’s really awesome. We have Ezard under us and we borrow stuff form each other all the time, which is really handy.

Ha ha, the old cup of sugar.

Yeah, one of the chefs from there knows where everything is and she just comes in and helps herself. It’s cool like that. We like to have a relationship with them all and if anyone wants to borrow equipment or whatever.

Is your kitchen calmer because a lot of it is pre-prepared? Is there less hustle?

Absolutely there is a lot pf prep involved; it is very heavily prep-based. Service is pretty busy. It’s a small restaurant but we turn the tables over every hour and a half. It’s a lot more about plating it than banging it out. You might spend five to eight minutes on one plate so it is a lot different to other restaurants.

I came to High Tea with my nephew who just turned 11 and he loves plating up and decorating desserts. His eyes were wide open here. He had never had duck before and he had the duck and foie gras cone and he loved it.

He’s going to be a little food critic or something.

Yes and it was interesting seeing it through his eyes. But it is full on, that whole High Tea scenario with the whole restaurant being seated at the same time.

Yeah…High Tea is one of those things, you know you have to do it, but people come in and there are so many dietaries these days; people can’t eat this and don’t want to eat that. It’s a set menu so when someone comes in with a dietary, you really have to work out how to make it work across 14 items, it gets a bit complicated. The weekends here are pretty full on. Everyone seems to love it.

It’s great. There’s something celebratory about High Tea. It’s fancy, a treat. It seems like cheffing is one of those jobs where you are constantly learning and always being challenged. As you said, you’re thinking about it all the time, there’s no down time. It’s 24/7.

It is. I’m constantly getting messages from suppliers and staff and there is a lot to think about. But I love it and it doesn’t really seem like work to me. Sometimes I just come in and have a play. I have a really good environment in the kitchen. We try and keep it relaxed, we listen to really good music and try and have a really good atmosphere in there. It’s cool.

So you’re definitely glad you’re not an architect?

I hated school so I didn’t want to do Uni for eight years, so I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. But I’m definitely glad I fell into this. It’s worked out pretty well for me. I had a high school teacher, a cooking teacher, who told me that I would never make it as a chef because I didn’t have the right attitude. And I would just really love to run into her again. I really would love it. 

Maybe tag her in an Instagram post. 'Here I am.' Because, Jo, well done.

Om Nom

187 Flinders Lane, Melbourne