Russel Hall grew up in a small town where going down to the local pub was where his family went out for dinner. Now with a string of different experiences under his belt, Russell is making breakfast at Park St. Dining, one of the restaurants in the , , group. Russell has a matter of fact love for cooking and talking to him, I get the impression that he embraces all opportunities and is always ready to learn new things and master them. I reckon that's pretty cool.
Hi Russell. How long have you been a chef?
I started part-time when I was about 15. I did work experience through school and then picked up a job at a motel doing filet mignon and garlic bread. I was there for six months or so and then the owner decided to open a pizza shop and I decided I didn’t want to sling pizzas. There was a new place opening in town doing food I’d never seen before because mum and dad just took us out to the local pub. That was our local. This new place was doing food like duck consommé and dumplings and different styles of smoked duck breast.
Where was that?
Nagambie. It was a little place called Kirwan’s Bridge Restaurant and the chef there was from Jacques Reymond’s restaurant. Being a 15 year old, that didn’t really mean much. I was there part time. Mum and dad wouldn’t let me leave school so I finished school while working nights at this restaurant. When I finished school, there was an apprenticeship going at Oscar W’s Wharfside restaurant in Echuca. I snatched that up. By the time I was a second year apprentice I thought I’d learned all I could from the guys there and then I moved down to Melbourne and worked at Jacques Reymond’s.
Oh great. What was it that appealed to you about cooking?
I don’t know what drew me to it. But it has always been fun. I’ve always enjoyed it. I figure people are always going to eat. Why not make a career out of it? Mum and dad tried to talk me out of it. They said I’d never have a social life, and I’d never really be able to enjoy myself, I’d be working when everyone else was enjoying themselves. But I don’t mind it that much and then you get to the top and you can pick your own hours and you can have weekends off and you write your own roster.
Was Jacques still in the kitchen when you were at Jacques Reymond?
It was when he was still cooking, yes. I was there for 18 months. It was a hard time, but a great time. I learned a lot.
Was it hard because there was so much learning involved or because of the hierarchy in the kitchen?
You could say the hierarchy of the kitchen. After that I took a sous chef job back at Oscar W in Echuca and realised I wasn’t ready for it.
What was the part you didn’t feel ready for?
The management side of things; how to manage people and get them to do what I needed them to do. I didn’t want to manipulate them, but get the best out of them. All I knew from how I’d been managed was to yell and scream at them. I realised that was making my life harder and more stressful than it needed to be. It was there that I changed my style.
Maria (Añada) said a similar thing. You want to motivate people to want to do it themselves, without yelling at them. So how did you cope with that realisation you weren’t ready?
I feel I had a good knowledge of making stuff, so if I took my time to teach them how to make stuff, they would then be more excited about making food and they’d want to work harder and push themselves and then there’d be free time to learn something new and different.
From there, I came back to Melbourne. I was at The Kent Hotel for a bit for a change of scenery. After that, my girlfriend at the time was working at Taxi Dining Room and they had just had a mass exodus of three chefs de partie and a couple of apprentices, so there were a few openings and it was a two chefs hats and such a great dining experience in Melbourne. We’d worked together before, that’s how we had met, so I asked if she would mind if I applied for a job there. She was ok with it, so I started working with Michael Lambie, Tony Twitchett and Perry Schagen, a great group of boys and such a calm kitchen for the amount of people they feed. There wasn’t a moment where there was yelling or screaming. There was no belittling of staff. Everyone got on with their job and did it well.
Jimmy (Bomba) spoke highly of his time at Taxi as well.
I think I missed Jimmy at Taxi by about three weeks.
How funny. Is working at Taxi might have been a prerequisite for working for this group?
[laughs] It’s either working at Taxi, or working for Andrew McConnell. But after Taxi I went over to London for two years. We wanted to travel and I just wanted a job to cook. I applied for a few places and didn’t like some of them. Then I applied for a sous chef position and my entre trial was to pick 20 cases of kale. I stood there for 4 hours and cleaned 20 cases of kale and blanched it and chopped it and then they realised they only needed about 4. But I got the job.
I was there for two months and had already booked a holiday to Egypt, so I went to Egypt fro two weeks. I came back and the first day in, they told me that the head chef had given notice the day I went on holiday, that he had walked out the day before I got back and did I want the head chef position? I was 26 and the head chef of a restaurant in London.
What sort of food was it?
Well there was one dish I wasn’t allowed to take of the menu and that was crispy fried prawn tails with garlic, chilli and coriander, so that one stayed, but otherwise I did smoked pigeon breast and smoked duck and different styles of pasta. I did a house made nettle tofu and played around with some stuff. As long as the food budget came in they were happy.
You were really thrown in the deep end because you would have had to work out suppliers and what people wanted.
Yes and not being from the area, it was hard. It was right in the middle of London, it was the London Ice Bar.
Wow. So you’d have a high volume of people coming through.
Yes, there was an 120 seater restaurant underground. It was a basement venue and then on ground floor was where they had the big ice bar which seated about 70 people. It was by the Ice Hotel Group; the guys who build the big ice palace in Sweden every year. They were another great group. It was run by a Kiwi, an Aussie and three pommy blokes and they did well. As soon as they knew I was Australian, the job was mine because they know you’re a hard worker. Of the 78 staff they had there, there were two English people who worked on the floor and the three English bosses. Everyone else was a foreign traveller.
You would have learned a lot quite quickly.
Yes but they gave me good support. After two years, I came back. I wasn’t ready to come back to Melbourne. We tried our hand at running a restaurant in Shepparton which wasn’t really for us, so it was back to Melbourne.
I liked the food they were doing at The Aylesbury and I knew a couple of guys from Taxi were working there so I applied there and then the next day Kelly (OLoghlen) rang me up and told me to come down for a trial to Bomba which is where The Aylesbury used to be. So I came down for a trial, started the next day and then eight months later I was running Añada.
It’s a good industry to learn, it gives you great life skills in dealing with any kind of situation. But you definitely have to love it.
Did you have much experience with Spanish food?
I had never cooked Spanish food before.
Ok So when you are faced with all these challenges, what’s your recourse? Do you go online, or read books or talk to people? How do you find out what you need to know?
I use all of those. Jesse was always knowledgeable and always a phone call away to give me advice. While we were in London, we went to Spain for six weeks. We hadn’t focussed on eating, more on sightseeing but I had got an idea of the food. I bought a heap of books and read them and spoke to the guys a lot. It helped because there was a bit of a shake up at Añada and the restaurant manager I ended up with was from Spain, Felipe, and he was always there to have a good chat to.
Now you’re here.
Yes. I’ve stuck myself into the breakfast scene here.
So you’ve gone away from the Spanish to more Melbourne breakfast dishes?
Again, I hadn’t done breakfast before.
You are learning all the time.
Never a dull moment. I’ve flicked through a few books. But Melbourne has nice cafes around so whenever I have a morning off, I go and eat out somewhere and see what other people are doing and get a feel for it that way, then change it and make it my own.
Now you’ve been a chef for a while, what would be your advice for young chefs entering the industry?
Firstly, you have to love it. If you find yourself umming and ahhing and you’re not really into it, then it’s not for you. You make great friends out of it. It’s a good industry to learn, it gives you great life skills in dealing with any kind of situation. But you definitely have to love it.
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