When I spoke to Will, it was 7 o’clock in the morning in London. He was eating a peanut butter sandwich and drinking Lapsang Souchong tea and I could hear his children running around in the background. Will Meyrick has a lot going on. He has seven restaurants under his belt in Indonesia, produces a riveting travel vlog on YouTube where he delves into the history and culture of the country he’s in and tells the story in a completely gripping way, he’s a photographer, a consultant and he looks a bit like Ewan McGregor. But that might be just me and the fact I know he’s Scottish…He is also part of RAA Travel’s Tasting Australia Event, Tasting Australia Airlines, a two-day event bringing people from Melbourne to McLaren Vale in April. Will joins Darren Robertson from Three Blue Ducks to cook lunch at Star of Greece overlooking the ocean in Port Willunga.
Hi Will, thank you for being available so early in the morning. Jess from the South Australian Tourism Commission suggested I speak to you because you are coming over as part of the Tasting Australian Airlines event in April. I’ve been doing some reading about you and it looks like you have an incredible life. I wondered whether I could ask you about your journey and story as a chef and then we can have a chat about the Tasting Australia event as well.
Sure.
Firstly, what a fantastic website and vlog and photography. And all the things you seem to do. I think you have children as well.
I have three kids as well. It’s hard work and my wife is very good at looking after them.
It looks as though you have been having an amazing time in Turkey recently and there seems to be a lot of travel, but on the food side of things, how did you become a chef? Did you always know that was what you wanted to be?
No, I was never going to be a chef, I never planned to be a chef. But unfortunately I was not very academic. I wasn’t very interested in academic things even though my mum sent me to the best schools in Scotland, private schools, but it didn’t really sit with me. I left school at 16 and went to Art College. I did Graphic Design in Manchester very temporarily for about six or seven months and then back up to Edinburgh. I still didn’t really know what I was doing and so my mum said, why don’t you do cooking? Everyone needs to eat. So I thought I’d give it a go.
What I found in the kitchen at that age was that it gave me structure and that’s what I needed. I didn’t know that until I was about 37 or 38 and I looked at other kids. I realised that a lot of people in kitchens generally have some sort of addiction whether that’s a drug addiction or an alcohol addiction or a social problem that they have become dependent on the kitchen because they haven’t come from a great background; perhaps they had problems with their parent or problems with poverty. The kitchen seems to solve a lot of social problems. As I say, I didn’t realise until my late thirties what kitchens do for me and what they do for other people. All of a sudden you’re cooking and you’ve been told you’re not good at this and you’re not good at that, but in the kitchen you have gratification every 10 minutes when you make a meal and a guest comes back with a compliment. It gives confidence to people who perhaps lack that confidence or the possibility of being gratified. There are a lot of deprived kids on the poverty line who have never been told thank you or well done, that’s a god job. Kitchens gave that to those youth. And it definitely gave it to me.
For me it was structure I needed. I have a very good and happy childhood, but I needed structure because my parents had divorced. Other people need love or appreciation. Other people need support. In kitchens you work so long, for so many hours, you become dependent on the people around you and they become your family. If they weren’t in work and out on the street and someone swore at them or hit them, there’d be a massive fight. But in the kitchen, they would listen to the head chef even though he shouts and screams at them because they never had a father figure. Kitchens provided a father figure role as well. That’s why I look at kitchens in a completely different way. I’m not going to give some story that I love organic produce. The social side and the deeper element to it are interesting to me.
That’s young chefs. Then you look at chefs as they get older. They get more and more successful and then they have success then they court an addiction to success and then that’s the next failure for a chef. They want their name in the papers, they want one more restaurant; it’s like a drug. That’s where so many restaurateurs fail…or learn after the fact because you can’t have success after success, it eventually catches up with you. It’s interesting to see some of the chefs who haven’t been able to handle failure after success. It’ like going into recovery. How do you recruit your money back after that failure or how do you manipulate that failure back into success?
How do you manage that side of things?
I look at things in a different way and keep a business afloat whether it’s making money or not and I can keep staff employed and I find another option. I close that restaurant and open another one and transfer the assets and staff. If I can come out with minimal damage then I’ve succeeded. Not every restaurant hits the right location. Whether you’ve had Mt Agung, the volcano, or a tsunami or earthquakes and that’s where Indonesia is really interesting because it has been such a place of turmoil of the past there or four years, as Australia is today with the fires. You could never predict that. People have lost their businesses, people have stopped going out. It’s not because you’ve been a bad businessman or entrepreneur or chef, it’s a natural disaster and it’s been taken from you and it is a very sad thing.
Is that why perhaps you have a few strings to your bow so that you have a richer life experience and you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket, not in terms of money-making, but in terms of your happiness and success in life? Is that how you counteract potential vulnerability?
The whole YouTube thing I do, basically I was tired of working for Asian Food channels and Discovery, Top Chef and so on. I have quite an extensive tv background and I was tired of doing those kinds of shows and doing commercials within those shows and also you’re flavour of the month for about four years and then you have the next wave of mini masterchefs coming through who they will lock into two year contracts, whizz them around the country and make loads of money out of them and then they are left not being able to move forward after being used for marketing. So that’s why I thought I’d get out while I could and create my own shows. I’ve got a very cool little in-house digital team who do all the videography; a bunch of young kids who I’ve sent on courses and training in bigger companies to learn how to do audio, editing, post-editing as well. So that’s why I do that.
As for why I do so many restaurants and styles of restaurants, for me, you come to a certain point in your life when you reflect on where you’re going. It normally hits around 40. Some people call it a mid-life crisis, but I try and keep my head cool and look at exactly where I’m going and what I’m doing and I suppose looking back on it and now moving forward on it, the restaurants are like a diary or a notebook and cooking is like a pen and basically I’m doing journalistic food writing through my cooking to share other peoples’ stories.
I love that.
Whether the story is in Assam or India or Sri Lanka, it’s about relating other peoples’ stories though the food. And I do the restaurants according to those themes as well.
The restaurants are like a diary or a notebook and cooking is like a pen and basically I’m doing journalistic food writing through my cooking to share other peoples’ stories.
I read one of the quotes on your website, that you are, “in love with travelling and finding recipes rather than creating dishes.” To me, I sensed that was what it was about for you; the storytelling aspect and finding out the background to things.
For me, the whole reason why I have done Morocco and Turkey and I’ve also done the hill tribes of Assam which I haven’t uploaded yet, and what is interesting out of all that genre, looking at where the market is today. Before you could do stories about food but now millennials don’t really care, they just want to Instagram it. They’re not interested in the history behind it, so you have to find a cuisine that hits every palate and every genre. When people so restaurants now in Australia and London…your menu has to cater for everyone. It can’t be niche anymore. You have to create a concept that ticks all the boxes: fresh, Instagrammable, fun…and when I say fresh, I don’t mean produce, I mean concepts.
I looked at the Gunpowder Empires. In London people look at Gunpowder Empires, they always do Indian but I have researched it from the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire and the Mughal Empire from the 1400s to the 1700s when they were trading gunpowder between all those countries and they were fierce enemies. What kept them together was through the trade of gunpowder. The Spice Route comes into it as well, because that was the road they were taking, but it’s not the Spice Route itself that is interesting, it’s the villages and tribes that were along the Spice Route that adopted the spices and brought them into their culture, which is what you see today. If you look at North African cuisine or if you look at Northern Indian cuisine, whether it’s the tandoori or the kebab or the pilaf rice, or the biryani, they are all the same, the genre is the same. We are creating a concept at the moment called Honey and Smoke, which is very much about getting the best of Farsi food and the Ottoman Empire and mixing it in with the Indian; it all flows into one genre that is trendy, hip, millennial and hits every note on the menu I think. And the story is interesting and also the textiles and fabrics are very interesting from a design point of view.
Wow. Ok…
That’s how deep I go into it and why I travel.
We talked about you entering the trade at 16. What’s the step from that to becoming a celebrity chef?
I’m not sure. My manager, Natalie manages a lot of other restaurants and brands and someone asked why Will was always in the media and not them? She said because it’s not about him, it’s always about someone else and their story. Whether it’s cooking classes or cooking in schools or street food, there’s always an added value where you can share a story and when you can add value to your brand that’s not just about straight cooking on the plate then that’s when you become more entrepreneurial and maybe more accessible to people, which makes you more of a celebrity. I think being a celebrity is when you become more accessible. That’s the way I look at it, for sure.
I looked at David Thompson and I didn’t want to make, well, I wouldn’t say mistake, but I didn’t want the connotations he had as a Thai chef cooking Thai food but Thais not believing it was real Thai. I didn’t want to have that stigma. I have Thai restaurants and I have people saying it’s not Thai because it should be pad Thai or whatever. That’s why I had my own cooking show where I travelled around Indonesia and speaking in Indonesian and cooking with old ladies to understand their cuisine. That’s when you become accessible. People see a guy who can cook Indonesian but can’t speak Indonesian. Your mistakes on tv become funny and become part of who you are and that’s part of becoming a celebrity. Some people might say it’s your ratings or Instagram, but for me it’s more about personal accessibility.
Right. Now you already have a relationship or a knowledge of Australia because you worked in Sydney for a while. When was that?
I worked in Sydney from 1998 to 2004.
You’d been working in London and you came across to Sydney, was that for more experience?
Yes. I ran Longrain for four years and then I opened up Jimmy Liks afterwards and ran it for three years, well I owned it, I sold that because I wanted to cook Asian food with Asian people in Asia.
I guess that’s why you have been invited to be part of the Tasting Australia event on the 3rd of April and it sounds as though it is going to be an amazing day. Can you tell me a bit about your contribution to the lunch at Star of Greece?
What it is, is that it will definitely be from MamaSan Sarong and what I’d like to do is use some of the photography and travel journeys we have done and bringing those into the menu, not only in the dish, but visually. I have to get back from London and when I do I’m going to be head into it and design the menu, but I would say just to wrap it up that I’ll be taking inspiration from my media travels over the last nine months.
That makes sense. Often when I ask chefs where they get their ideas and it does come from a repertoire of life and what else you have cooked and who you have been talking to so naturally that’s what you’ll be doing. What else does 2020 hold for you?
I’m opening this new concept, Honey and Smoke. I have a couple of hotel projects that I’m on the cusp of and they are the main things basically. I’m in London doing a bigger High Street brand which is why I’m here now.
What I think is interesting going forward…what I have realised is that it’s not so much about owing anything anymore. It’s very hard for a name chef to sell his brand which is why I’m looking at things slightly differently now and doing consultancy or a licence. Especially looking at 2020 and looking at how uncertain things are in the world. 2020 has started with World War 3 and Australia on fire, it makes chefs, well, me a little more wary of what I’m going into and what I’m putting my money into. Perhaps there’s a better way of doing it where it’s not about ownership anymore. You can own the brand but not the assets because that can clog you down.
Right, well it sounds as though you are someone who is always going to be busy so I should probably let you get into your day. I do love that I’m speaking to a celebrity chef who is eating a peanut butter sandwich, that’s the best. Thank you for your time and your generosity in sharing so much with me. Have a great day and a great year.