Sam Pinzone and his food kept popping up in my Instagram feed and piqued my interest. Reading more about him, I was even more fascinated. At 29, having worked with the likes of Neil Perry, Jacques Reymond, received two chef hats and starting up his own consulting company, you've got to hand it to him, he's pretty much nailing it. He has also been involved with some important conversations around mental health amongst chefs, a topic I think needs a lot more discussion.
I’ve been reading a bit about you and it seems that you have been on a soaring trajectory as a chef. People describe you as one of Australia’s youngest Executive chefs, which makes your achievements even more impressive. How long have you been cooking?
I left school in Year 8. I knew I wanted to be a chef. There were two things I could have done and they were acting and becoming a chef. Cheffing was where my true passion was. I watched Neil Perry when I was growing up and he has been one of my constants throughout my career. I’m 29 now so I’ve been cooking for around 15 years.
29. I don’t want to be ageist, but it is a significant achievement to have done so much already and to be doing all the things you’re doing and consulting with other chefs and businesses. When you started off at that very young age, where did you work?
The very first place I worked was the Dava Hotel in Mornington Peninsula.
The Dava! I’ve been out on the deck at the Dava.
My uncle used to manage that and when I was a kid, probably not even 10, I used to peel carrots at the Royal Hotel in Mornington as well because my uncle was there. From there I went to the Bridge Hotel in Richmond and worked with a chef called Jacky Frenot who was quite a famous chef in France. I spent some time with him and then I spent more time back in Mornington with another chef called Cameron Fuller at The Bay Hotel. I spent about a year with him. He has worked with Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road.
Then the opportunity came in 2006 from Neil Perry to go and work at Rock Pool when he opened the bar and grill. I was only 17 at the time. I was probably a month away from getting my licence and I did the wrong thing and drove to get there for that month. Rock Pool is one of the best places I ever went to work. I learned everything there. There has been a lot in the paper about them not paying and so on but if you worked at Rock Pool, you learned so many things that other places wouldn’t teach you like dry ageing, fish butchery, really good produce. No one works with produce like Neil Perry.
It’s interesting that you mention pay because it’s something that keeps coming up in conversations and I just had a chat to at Etta and he made the point that you can’t be good at what you do if you don’t put in the hours. I know there have been some discrepancies between pay and hours worked and it’s a tricky one, but as he said, when you love something and you want to do well at it, then you do need to put in a lot of hours. mentioned that a lot of those techniques that you mentioned are being lost because people just want to do their 40 hours and there is no time or money to train people beyond that. I think it’s a real shame.
It’s very true. You need to put in the time. When I was at Rock Pool, I used to work up to 80 or 90 hours a week, and yeah, I wasn’t paid for all of those, but I learned so much. The culture in kitchens has changed a lot. There’s no more yelling and screaming. I spent some time at Jacques Reymond’s and it was still a bit like that there and the same with Paul Wilson and there was a little bit of that at Rock Pool. But you kind of need the discipline. If you don’t have the discipline then you never become a good chef. Any new chefs who come up through the ranks who haven’t had it a little bit hard or been disciplined in a certain way, they just don’t have the basic foundation of cooking.
I’m not saying that we need to yell and scream. I’ve changed my ways because I used to be a yeller and a screamer as well. But since I’ve started consulting, I’ve completely changed my ways. But there does need to be some sort of discipline When you have to explain something three times to someone, you assume they’re not listening and you have to be a bit more firm.
Guys like Donovan Cooke…if I could cook like him, or even half as good as he can cook, I’d be very happy. Chefs like Donovan and Paul Wilson, Jacques Reymond, Neil Perry, Geoff Lindsay, those guys…they just don’t breed them like that any more.
I see you’re involved with the RUOK campaign and I think it all fits with what we are talking about because there has been a lot of talk lately about the hospitality industry and stress, depression and the misuse of drugs and alcohol perhaps as self-medication. Where do you stand on all of that?
There is a lot of alcohol and drug abuse. I’d have to put my hand up and say I’ve done that, chasing chef’s hats and so on. I guess too it comes down to how chefs see other chefs. They might admire certain chefs and follow in their footsteps. My involvement with RUOK is because as I was growing up and I’d left school early and got into working and you become the new kid at school in a way and I went through a bit of depression and thought about suicide, which was full on. So for me, the RUOK campaign is about wanting to give back and try and come up with a solution to what has caused us to lose a lot of chefs to suicide this year.
It does need to be talked about because back in the day people would be told to suck it up and get on with it. Now I’m more inclined to ask people in my kitchen whether they are ok.
Is that something that’s happening in most kitchens or not very many kitchens? It’s difficult isn’t it when as a chef you’re trained to produce menus and produce food, you don’t always know about counselling or having those hard conversations. It’s the same in a lot of industries that we’re required to do extra things or call on skills that people wouldn’t necessarily have considered. Is there training or information for head chefs or people leading kitchens so that they can learn how to deal with their staff? Is that available?
A few years ago Gault Millau wanted to make a school here and they asked me for my opinion on some things and I told them that chefs need to not only learn how to cook, but they need to learn business aspects and how to handle staff and situations. There’s no training for that. You only learn about that as you get older and, I guess, as you fuck up. You learn the hard way. It’s hard in kitchens. If I had told my head chefs that I was feeling a bit depressed or mentally drained, they might have offered me time off, but if I had taken time off, someone else would have taken my place. Then there’s a stigma around having something wrong with your mental situation. It’s hard to talk about.
I wonder too whether the fact that often, and I would say, unfortunately kitchens are very masculine places and in Australia there is even more of that masculine idea of getting on with it and coping. Kitchens must be very difficult places for those who are struggling.
They are. I went through a tough period where I couldn’t step back inside a kitchen and I took myself out for six months. I went through what I went through. It is very hard for someone dealing with any sort of mental illness to deal with the pressure of getting meals out because you are thinking about so much else.
It would be debilitating. I usually spend a lot of my conversations which chefs celebrating their creativity and passion and I think that’s important, but lately I have been thinking a lot about that flip side. I think we’ll leave that now though and move to the creative, passionate side. You certainly have that. I was looking at your book, , and you obviously want people to love cooking the way you do. You say it’s a way of life for you and that you cook with love and care. How did you go conveying that in a book?
I actually wrote that book when I was about 21. I had publishing issues and I put it down for a while and then I got a publisher from London who wanted to publish it and I thought, why not. I was an obsessed Neil Perry fan and back then I wanted to be like Neil Perry. The original book had close to 500 recipes in it so now I have another book in the works with an Australian publisher. I have probably another 600 recipes I haven’t used yet.
But that first book is about the foundations of really simple cooking at home. It is all about how important it is to get really good produce and cook within the season.
Nice. The consulting aspect of your work also reflects that desire to share your knowledge with others. When you’re consulting, are you still on the pans? Do you go in and work in the kitchens?
I like to go in and show the step by step how to cook every dish. I want to work the pass and be hands on and create the menu with the chef rather than giving them a menu I have created. It’s very important for consultants not to go in with the big chef bravado that says I’m the one and you have to do it my way. That won’t work. The consultant isn’t there forever. I’m only there for a few months or however long they want me. It should be all about what the head chef wants. We create the menu together and I put a few of my little twists in but I’ll make sure he is able to execute it all to the best of his ability. He knows his team already and knows what they can do.
Do you miss having your own team and your own place?
At the moment I’m at Dandelion for the next four or five years. I look after it for Geoff Lindsay and I have a few other things I’m working on with Geoff. I’m the kind of person who gets bored easily so I need new things and challenges. I’ve taken some time out from Dandelion just now to work with the Heide team and then I’ll go back to Dandelion. Cooking one cuisine and having a routine is not creative enough for me. Often in the big kitchens, there is no room for creativity and that’s the difference I want to make.
Do you have to be creative in the first place do you think? Or can you teach people to be creative?
I think you can teach people to be creative. I think if you allow people to think outside the box and allow them to try different techniques, that allows them to be creative. I often go into places and tell the guys that I won’t put the specials on, they can do that. I’ll taste them and give them my opinion and we go from there.
Even the apprentice should have a go. Even if he comes up with a salad for one of the dishes. It could just be a herb salad and he might try out a different dressing for it. It's important to have a go.
Are you still able to be surprised by flavour and by other people’s food or produce or do you know the back-story too much?
Definitely not. There are so many things out there that I’ve never tried before. I can work with someone who has never worked in a hatted restaurant or any of those Michelin star restaurants and learn something. You learn something every day.
Then there are guys like Donovan Cooke…if I could cook like him, or even half as good as he can cook, I’d be very happy. Chefs like Donovan and Paul Wilson, Jacques Reymond, Neil Perry, Geoff Lindsay, those guys…they just don’t breed them like that any more. Their flavours are more melded together. I really respect the old way of cooking.
Are we going to lose that? Is the industry heading away from old school ways?
We sort of are but industry trends can change so quickly. I don’t think we’ll lose it. I have the feeling it will come back. The way those guys make sauces compared to the sauces you can taste today, it’s not the same; the full-bodied thyme and stock that’s used. I make jus at home and add various things but it’s not like a Paul Wilson jus. I would say that nobody makes jus like Paul Wilson or Donovan Cooke. They have it down pat. They are masters of cooking.
It’s good to hear such appreciation. What would your advice be to young people getting in to the industry?
Work hard. Learn as much as you can. Start young because I think you get more opportunities when you’re young. And it is a young person’s game now. You can burn out pretty quick. Even though I just mentioned I’d rather eat at an older chef’s place, the hours are huge and you can’t do it forever. People these days watch MasterChef and think they can quit their jobs and start at 40 but they don’t realise what it does to your knees.
But if you're getting into it, you have to work hard and don’t expect to have anything handed to you. That’s what I’d say.