Jack Stuart

It’s nice to meet you Jack. I’ve read a teensy bit about you, but I don’t know a lot about you.

I haven’t been in Melbourne long. I’ve been here for two years and I’m from Brisbane originally. I spent a lot of time in the UK as well.

Yes, that’s what I read about you; working in a Michelin star restaurant. 

I’ve been around a few places, but Melbourne is now home.

That’s good. Let’s start from the beginning now…did you always want to be a chef?

Yes. From early days when I was 16, one day instead of going to school, I went to a local Croatian café, Micho’s and we used to cook packet pasta and instant mash gnocchi and I thought that was great back then. That was my first job, so long ago. It started from there.

That’s pretty interesting having a Croatian café in Brisbane. I guess there was a Croatian community there.

To be honest, it was a unique restaurant and it was the best food in that area. It was all that I knew. I would go there and learn the basics and from there it spurred me on to want to go to a better bistro and then to a restaurant. We all start somewhere and it was a good start.

What do you think it is about cooking and working in a restaurant that made you think, yes, this is definitely what I want to do?

I think the fast pace of the kitchen and the creative element, it was something that I thought would be a sustainable career and it was definitely a good choice. I went to University when I was 18 and studied Human Movements because all my friends were going partying at the weekends and I saw the kitchen as…well you had to work every Saturday and Sunday and you didn’t get much of a social life and I was jealous of my friends. But I did it for six months and then one day I was in the university carpark and I thought, I’ve got to go back to the kitchen and that’s when I started my apprenticeship.

What is Human Movements?

You can study physiotherapy or be a physio teacher, a sports teacher at school.

I thought maybe it was migrations of people moving across the world. Such an Arts student perception.

No. It wasn’t even that interesting, I don’t think I passed one course.

Obviously food and hospitality was calling you. 

Yeah, it was a quick choice. It actually caught up with me recently with the fees. Ten years later.

You can never go unnoticed. Where did you do your apprenticeship?

In Brisbane, at Olivetto’s. It was run by an English guy who had worked for Marco Pierre White back in the day and had worked in a lot of great places in the UK and he had come over and he was the local bistro. So from Misho’s I went to there and I stayed there for two years. It was really really good. He was a lovely guy. He was the nicest chef I have ever worked with to date. If you think of chefs as crazy and shouting, he was the opposite because he had had that really bad and he wanted to change that.

I think all the chefs I speak to don’t seem like shouty types. I think there has been a change in the way things are done.

There has been a massive change. 

We don’t have the brigades and the shouting and it’s nice you had that experience early on because a lot of younger chefs were still getting the tail end of that.

I experienced it after and it’s definitely not a sustainable approach any more and it’s something we absolutely do not do at Congress.

I don’t even think it’s sustainable for the people doing it, let alone for the people receiving it. I feel like when you’re in that constant state of anger and negativity, it must be so toxic.

It’s unique because there are a lot of professions, where…if you were a lawyer and di that in a legal office, then you’d be sacked. Somehow this industry got away with it for a while.

I was talking to Amber Kaba in Sydney who has this year set up The White Jacket Effect to combat mental health issues amongst chefs. I talked with her about the fact that for a long time no one talked about mental health or the issues of stress of anger and I wondered whether it was male dominated as an industry, and I don’t want to dump on men, but how did that come about. It’s a creative industry and it’s about looking after people because it’s hospitality, yet behind the scenes, there was this angsty thing going on.

I think it stemmed from that creative side. Artists and painters are on their own and they do their own work but when you’re a chef, you’re relying on other people to do that food and produce what you have created and when you’re at those high levels, two star, or two hat, three hat, when your food is so precise and you’re at the top level and other chefs are preparing your food, I think that’s why it’s so stressful.

That’s true and you’re dealing with heat and the pressure of time and then giving up the power to other chefs and making sure it all goes on the plate right.

So I think that’s what it stems from and I think it’s an attitude, like any kind of thing; if you had a bad childhood, you might go on to be a bad father. If you’ve experienced it, you go on to repeat it. It’s a pattern of behaviour that gets passed on, I guess.

At what point did you go over to the UK?

I worked in a lot of places in Brisbane; I’d go and work in a good place, then I’d go in a café, then I’d go to Europe…my father lives in Spain, so I’d visit him a lot…and my career wasn’t really going where I wanted it to be. I was in a relationship for five years, we broke up and I said, this is it I have to go over and work and focus. I found a place in the North of the UK in Cumbria, the Lakes District. There was an amazing chef, Simon Rogan, who is probably the best chef in the UK at the moment. It was in the middle of nowhere. I packed my bags, said goodbye to my friends and family and got a one way ticket over and got a train to the North of England and stayed on a blow-up mattress for six months and worked 80 hours a week for £3 an hour and it was amazing. I loved it.

When was that?

That was when I first went over, so four years ago.

£3 an hour!

I had an amazing time. It was so much fun and it was probably the best thing I ever did.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, because I talked to someone who went out and worked at the Royal Mail and he was saying how great it was to have that bubble of being out of the city and you didn’t have anything to do but work…

My closest neighbour was a herd of sheep. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Cumbria, but it’s very rural. It’s right on the border of Scotland and the closest city would be Manchester or Liverpool. It’s an amazing landscape but very very quiet. Basically rich Londoners go up there to escape for the weekend.

What kind of food was Simon doing?

He was very hyper-local. He wouldn’t use anything outside of Britain. His sous-chef, Kevin Tickle, who I went on to work with at Forest Side as sous chef. That’s where we got the Michelin star, he would be going foraging and making things like, making his own birch sap from tapping birch trees, so the equivalent of maple syrup but with birch. You’d get a big hose and fill up a big tank of 50 litres of birch sap and then reduce it down to 500 millilitres.

Goodness. Did it taste like maple syrup? 

It had its own unique flavour but it was similar. And we’d do all the preserving. We couldn’t use chocolate because it wasn’t from the UK. Simon even said we couldn’t use lemons but we caught him with a stash of lemons in the fridge, so it’s probably not true. But that was the style of food as well as very refined and very modern as well. There would be 20 to 25 courses. It was a very serious place.

How long are people sitting for when they’re eating 25 courses?

4 hours. But you’ve driven all that way and you’re staying in the local accommodation. It was amazing.

It would have been a great place to learn. So you had six months there?

Yes, and then I went to work at Forest Side for a year and a half with Kevin. We won the Michelin star in the first year and he did a very similar style of food with lots of foraging and using lamb from the man up the road. It was a really successful place and that’s where I learned a lot of techniques that I use at Congress now, but I apply them in a different format.

Could you maybe talk about that?

Yes. We did a venison pastrami in the UK and I thought when I got back that it would be lovely to do that with local kangaroo and it worked really well. It’s one of the signature dishes. The pig’s head sanga that we’re famous for, we did something similar with squirrel in the UK.

Ugh.

Yes, I thought that possibly wouldn’t go so well…I’m not going to do a possum equivalent here. But I use the base technique and now it’s one of the most famous dishes here. When you’re learning as a sous chef or a chef de partie and then you become a head chef, all these techniques bank up and it’s your responsibility to do them in your own way and come up with your own techniques to pass on to people.

Did you come in on Congress when it opened?

Yes. I came back to Melbourne. It was a funny time because I thought I was going to come back and it was going to happen for me and everything was going to fall into place. It didn’t and no one really cared and I had to start all over again. I went to work in a café that was abut an hour away in Highett and I was looking at Seek every day and I couldn’t find anything I wanted or that suited me, so it took a while. It was a pretty sad time actually.

Is that because you have to know people?

I had this expectation that coming from that environment…but it doesn’t always work like that and you have to prove yourself again, coming back to another city.

It’s interesting that you say that because I spoke to an Iranian chef who has just opened a café in Sunshine and he came over as a refugee but had had his own restaurant in Tehran, but when he came here and got his right to work, he went around 70 to 80 places and heard nothing and he assumed it was because he was a refugee, but it might just be that it’s really hard if you don’t know people. 

I read a similar thing about Dan Hunter from Brae. When he came back from Mugaritz, he couldn’t find anything.

From Mugaritz? You’d think that would be a shoe in.

His experience clicked with me. He wrote about it in his book and he came back thinking it was going to happen and you have to prove yourself and push on. Luckily Congress came up in Seek and I applied and did a MasterChef cook off kind of audition to get the job and went from there. Luckily the café I was working in has now closed and the company behind it all has completely gone. They were a huge company and they were opening huge restaurants all over the place and it just dissolved recently so it was a good move.

Totally. What did you cook at the audition?

I actually prepped it at the café which was a bit naughty of me. I did simple food which resonates with what we do at Congress. Simple gnocchi with wild mushrooms, a ham hock terrine and burrata with citrus and guanciale; simple food and it did the job.

Nice. Is this your first head chef role?

Y?es.

You were talking about stepping up and making the techniques you’ve learned your own, what are some other things that you’ve had to step up into in this role?

Lots of staff management. The big thing now are hours and chefs working too many hours. That was an alien concept for me, coming from the UK where there are zero workplace laws; you go to London and you’re doing 90 hours and getting paid £20,000 a year. That’s the reality. Coming here, there’s a big movement and rightly so, that every hour should be paid for. It was hard at the start for me to manage chef’s hours, especially doing food that requires everything being made here, which is what we do at Congress. That was a bit of a learning curve for me, probably the biggest learning curve. And now with a ten month old baby at home…

So many chefs I speak to have these tiny new babies.

I need to look at my life and say, I’m doing too many hours and I need to pull back.

I see how hard it is for chefs because it is potentially long hours and lots of hours and we mentioned sustainability at the start and I think you have to look after that and make sure that it’s sustainable into the future. It’s a physical job as well.

It is very physical and it’s not something you can do forever.

No. When you were putting together your first menu and you had all these ideas and techniques and so on, how did you distil that into a menu?

Although it is a very creative role, there was an outline that I had to adhere to; no dish over $40, do it’s good value, the food has to be honest. Utilitarian was the word, so nothing on the plate that doesn’t belong there, so definitely no flowers. Which I agree with because a lot of flowers look pretty but they don’t taste of anything. They were the boundaries that I had to work with. The first thing I did with the first menu was to look at what was in season at the time, which we are very strict about at Congress. We don’t use anything out of season. You can get avocados from Mexico if you want or strawberries from all over the world at any time of you really want to and a lot of kitchens come up with a menu and then they’ll get it somehow but we do it the other way. We call up the supplier and see what they have and then base a menu on that. We had parsnips on yesterday and then they weren’t good quality so they have completely gone. To confine yourself like that makes it easier really.

So you are basing yourself on what the supplier has that week?

Absolutely, especially fruit and vegetables. A lot of farmers’ markets we use now, we just get one thing, so we have someone who supplies our asparagus, one person just does potatoes, one person just does the herbs that we garnish with. Ideally I would do that with every supplier because the person who is just growing asparagus is going to have much better asparagus than the person growing 20 different things.

What’s your process then? Something comes in and then what happens?

Me and my sous chef get the ingredient and I think the first thing we do is think, how can we do this in a different way? Like the parsnips we were doing hassleback style, which is an old technique, a retro technique that we applied to a parsnip.

Wouldn’t that be quite hard because of its shape? 

Yes, it was quite labour intensive and that has gone. We rely on a lot of techniques that we apply differently. At the moment we have a dish coming on with Spanner crab. That comes in live, we kill them humanely and pick the meat. We’ve made a consommé with celeriac but it has a really sweet flavour. We juice celeriac and then we clarify the juice so it becomes very clear and we chill that with lemon juice and a little salt and serve the Spanner crab with that. It’s very simple but there’s a lot of technique.

It’s so fascinating to me that chefs have these ideas? Do you have a lot of cookbooks or look through Instagram?

Less and less, I think. I think Instagram is good and bad because you can see everything, everywhere and it’s overwhelming. I think to do something truly unique and your own, the less and less you look at things, the better. Back when I was younger and first cooking, there was no Instagram. 

And the repertoire of flavour combinations you must have as well.

Absolutely. We do certain twists on things and there are a lot of classic foundations that can be played with.

Yes, and you know what you might twist it with, which is so interesting.

Absolutely. Crab and tomato works really well, and tomato has a quite sweet flower and the juice of celeriac is similar, so that’s where that came from. And pea and ham is a great combination, so we have a pasta at the moment which has guanciale, cured pork cheek, so that’s the ham element and the pea is a broad bean pesto, so broad beans, mint and the broad bean leaves, which have an amazing flavour. Pea and ham is turned into broad bean pesto and guanciale, which is a classic revisited. A lot of those dishes because of those worked flavours.

And I guess you have to be willing to think creatively and be open minded to these things. Just to finish, what would our advice be to a young person who was thinking of getting into the industry?

I think if you really love it, then it’s the best career in the world, but if you’re unsure then it’s not for you because you just have to know. If you’re doubting it…I’ve never doubted it. It hasn’t been amazing every day, absolutely not, so if you are umming and ahhing, then it’s probably the reason it’s not going to work, but if you’re passionate about it and you know it’s for you, then go for it, absolutely.

Congress

49 Peel Street, Collingwood