Aaron Schembri

Conversation with a chef: Hi, Aaron. It’s lovely to meet you. We’re in Kadota in Daylesford, and it’s such a sunny day. I was just saying to you off mic that I walked down one side of Vincent Street and then back down the other side, and it’s super busy here. It’s a lovely place to come to. It’s such an easy drive from Melbourne as well. Do you get lots of people coming up from Melbourne to eat here?

Aaron Schembri: Definitely. Melbourne, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Ballarat are probably our biggest.

I saw that you open on a Tuesday. That’s interesting. What was the reasoning behind that?

We just wanted to be able to open at a time when a lot of businesses were closed in the town, especially for the hospitality guys coming up from the city. We have a lot of guys working in the industry who come up and visit us on the Tuesday. It was also a good day for us to refresh the menu and reset our ikebana and our flowers and stuff in the restaurant. Then we open Friday, Saturday, lunch and dinner on the weekend.

Wow. That must be so busy. It’s quite big, bigger than I expected. Is it a 30 or 40-seater?

We can seat 50, but we only 25 to 30 max per service. A huge day for us would be 50, 20 for lunch and 30 for dinner.

It does seem huge because of the particular food that you’re doing.

It’s a lot of prep.

I imagine that really high fine-dining Japanese to be eight or ten seats, but that’s more omakase, isn’t it? And you’re doing kaiseki?

Kaiseki is a very traditional form of Japanese-style cooking, and it was traditionally based around a tea ceremony. The food was paired with the tea, and then later on became sake, when that became more popular. In the traditional tea service, kaiseki is very structured in terms of each course has to be maybe one course is a soup, then it’s a steamed course, then a grilled course. I find, personally, as a chef, the more structure around me, the more difficult it is for me to be creative and make food that I truly connect to, and original combinations. The same as just being Japanese is difficult as well. When you think of costings and all these other things that you have to consider when you’re running a business, it just takes away from that creative side. So I try to block everything out and just work with what I have. I naturally create the dish and then bring it into the form of kaiseki or Japanese. We try to lean on both Australian, being my background, and Japanese, Risa’s background. We’re not too strict on being kaiseki, but we’re definitely, I would say, an Australian kaiseki, if that was such a thing.

I feel as though, from what I’ve read about you, you’ve been really intentional in getting to this point. I did read that when you started out pretty young cooking, you didn’t think it would maybe be your lifetime career.

No, it wasn’t the plan.

Tell me about that. You grew up in Daylesford?

I grew up in Hepburn Springs with my mother. My mother and father separated when we were young. Dad was 15 minutes away, so quite close, but we saw him sort of once a week. It was really unstructured, pretty wild, I’d say. Like a free-range chicken in Daylesford. We had the opportunity to do what we wanted after school and things like that, because Mum would get home at, say, 9 or 10pm. She would be doing singing teaching in Maryborough. We would be able to run free, and in the mornings we could get up ourselves and make what we wanted for breakfast and head to school and would see Mum that evening.

I think I was 15 years old, and I just wasn’t getting on with my teachers at school. I didn’t have the structure or the support around me to help me through that stuff at that time. I ended up leaving school. I was actually 14 when I left school. It was Year 9, first term of Year 9. I just made the decision myself to walk out, because I was very cheeky and I thought I could do those sorts of things. My dad picked me up and took me to work. He was a concreter. It was super difficult, and he just said to me, “If you don’t get a job, you’re doing this with me, or you have to go back to school.”

I took a job in a pizza shop in town. It was fun. It was exciting. I felt like I could be mature. I was hanging around mature people. I was making money. I could make my own decisions. I had a girlfriend who lived in Creswick, and I really wanted to be around her more. To be able to do that, her mother said to me, if you don’t get an apprenticeship or sort your life out in some sort of way, that’s not happening, which was genius. She helped me, or at least convinced me, into getting an apprenticeship at the time. I moved to Creswick, which was 25 or 30 minutes from home, when I was 15, and started my apprenticeship at the Novotel Forest Resort when they opened up.

That would be quite different to the pizza shop.

Yes. Each step was different. From there, I went to The Press Club in the city, I didn’t know it was two hats. I didn’t know it was fine dining. I didn’t know who George Calombaris was, surprisingly. I didn’t know anything at that time. I just took the job, went for the trial, and I had moved to my uncle’s house at that point. I remember him saying when I got home, he was a bit worried, because I was gone for 15 hours. My trial was 14 hours, and I had no idea what I was in for. I just went in there and got the job done, and they gave me the job, luckily.

Each time, a lot of luck got me into the right spot to keep learning, until I finally sat down and looked at my life and thought, what do I know? What do I want to do? What do I like about what I do?

Cooking’s an excellent career. It’s such a wonderful thing. You’re always learning. I’ve always eaten very healthy at home. We never had takeaway. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so it was what was in the garden. It was always fresh salad, pasta or risotto and salad and those sorts of things. I loved food. I love making food. I cooked food as a kid at home. My mum was working, so it just made sense.

Cooking’s an excellent career. It’s such a wonderful thing. You’re always learning. I’ve always eaten very healthy at home. We never had takeaway. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so it was what was in the garden. It was always fresh salad, pasta or risotto and salad and those sorts of things. I loved food. I love making food. I cooked food as a kid at home. My mum was working, so it just made sense.

Aaron Schembri, Kadota

I read that you went up to Queensland a little bit as well. Was that just to get a bit more experience in the places you wanted to go up there?

Exactly. I was still so unhinged in terms of what I was doing in life, but what I thought I knew was that in Melbourne, I could learn how to cook really well from excellent operators. Then it was very difficult, especially in kitchens like The Press Club. People would fight to get into a great position there, and they would stay in that position for as long as possible. So to move up the ranks, or to get a better position, or to learn how to manage people, or any other things besides how to run that section, was super difficult. So I’d go to Queensland. I’d have these new skills. I’d know how to make maybe different styles of food than what they were serving up there, and it was easier for me to level up on the management side. I’d come back to Melbourne and go to a great restaurant again and learn some more things, and sort of bunny hop. I moved up there five times in total. On the last time going up, I met Risa, my partner.

Was she just here on holiday, or was she working here?

She’d been living in Canada for a year, and she had a French Canadian and a Canadian girl with her. They were travelling through Australia to go to New Zealand after Australia. I met her in Cairns. I travelled up there with some friends of mine. We ran out of money. We were completely broke when we got up there. We were living on the beach and showering in the public toilets. It was rough. I ended up doing a deal with a restaurant that was on the Esplanade there. I was happy to work there if they could provide us some sort of accommodation, and they ended up housing all of my friends in the backpackers next door if I took the job. I took the job there, and Risa ended up coming to that backpackers a couple of weeks later. She was cleaning in the backpackers as a means of paying rent. We just became a real family at that backpackers there for quite a long time, and we blossomed. She ended up staying with me, and her friends came down for a month, and then they moved on to continue with their travels.

Did she ever get to New Zealand?

No, she never got there. I feel terrible about it because I actually signed her up for a lot of work. We’ve just been trying to get up that mountain to where we want to be, and it’s taken a long time. Obviously, that’s what she wanted to do as well.

It sounds so romantic and actually like a film. I love it. So then you both came down here to Daylesford? Or Melbourne?

We came to Daylesford. Moved into my father’s house in Glenlyon. We had a property in Glenlyon that he purchased when we were younger. It was full on. Like a farmhouse, straw bale, no electricity, just a tank for water, which we ran out of all the time. It was really, really rough. There were all sorts of animals coming into the house. We had a big tiger snake come in. It was like moving into a jungle in that house. It was more of a shed, I would say.

And did you have a plan?

I always had a plan. Yes, definitely.

So the plan was to have your own restaurant?

Without a doubt. The day I met Risa, I said, “This is what I want to do. This is my plan.” She thought I was joking at the beginning, and then after a couple of years she realised I was serious, and she got on board as well. When Risa came to Australia, and after we started living together, she started working through cafes, to wine bars, to fine-dining restaurants, to steakhouses, and started on her path. I went on my path, and we met in the early hours every morning, at 2am or something, in bed, and go on and do our thing again the next day.

You were both really determined. That’s incredible to share a plan like that and to work on it together. I think that’s so important, and it makes it more achievable, but so good for your relationship, I think, to have a project to work on as well. It really binds you, doesn’t it?

It’s really special and it binds us, I feel, in a way that’s more than the relationship. We share this same dream, and we tirelessly work for it, and we fight for it individually and together. If we have any issues in our relationship, it doesn’t come close, because we’re both trying to achieve this thing for ourselves and together. It’s very interesting.

What did you know about Japanese food before you met Risa?

Absolutely nothing. When I was young, Dad would go up to the beach and he would buy a salmon fillet and chop it up, definitely not slice it up, and we’d eat raw salmon with soy. I was definitely open to lots of different food types when I was young, lots of different cuisines. But Japanese food, I had no understanding of Japan, the food, the culture, anything. That was a huge opening and awakening for me, going over there and seeing what they do and how they do it. It just blew my mind.

Where does Risa’s family live?

She’s in Kojima, which is in Okayama, so sort of three hours from Osaka by train if you take the speed train. It’s very rural, but it’s not rural like Australian rural. The houses are stacked together, but it’s on the mountainside as well as the ocean.

Can you remember what your first meal was, or even the first one you remember that struck you about that food?

I don’t think it was a particular meal. I think being introduced to Risa’s family, they are very food-driven as a family. They love quality food. They knew I was a chef, and we couldn’t speak the same language, but when I went there, her grandfather could take me to food places and see my reaction and introduce me to different foods. Whether it was going to Kagawa to have traditional udon noodles made by a 90-year-old lady who had been doing it her whole life, or going to a Michelin-star restaurant in Tokyo, they were taking me everywhere they could to show me their beautiful country and what they are proud of. That was our way to connect to each other as well. It definitely wasn’t a particular meal I can remember. I can pretty much remember every time I tried sukiyaki or shabu-shabu for the first time, sashimi, or any of those standard things.

But for me, what really struck me was the respect that not just Risa’s family, but everyone in Japan seems to have towards food, towards cooking, as well as the farmers towards their own product, and growing it in a specific way to give to the restaurant in a specific way, so the restaurant can serve it in the best way possible. It’s like the whole community is focused on the same thing, just doing their best in what they’re doing.

They have masters of tofu and masters of sushi and the rice and sashimi and all of those things.

That’s what took me more, how they could dedicate their life. In Australia, growing up as a young kid, I wanted to learn something and move on to the next thing, learn that, move on to the next thing and tick those boxes. Whereas in Japan, they really want to master what they want to be great at. That was a revelation for me. It was totally different to my mindset and something that I grew up around. I was in awe, and I wanted to see if I could do that myself. I went on my own journey from that point.

Before then, what sort of restaurant did you imagine you might have?

Along the way, it changed. When I was 16, I wanted to open a pizza shop. At 17, I wanted to open an Italian-style restaurant. Then it was like a Korean barbecue shop. They all just changed along the way. It was just a business in the end.

I had a great connection with Risa’s grandfather. He was getting old, and he was getting quite ill, and I just appreciated everything he’d done for me. I wanted to name our restaurant Nobuya, which was his name, but Nobuya is very close to another famous restaurant, so that wasn’t happening. That’s really where this idea came from. It was just an ode to Japan and everything that it gave me as a person. Not just professionally, personally, in their thoughtfulness, the way they live, the way they respect people, and listen to other people’s opinions, even if it’s completely different to their own. They respect that opinion instead of shutting it down, or finding a way to look at a negative. I just really felt so humbled by the way that they live and think, and the way they treated me.

When you embark on the journey of learning about Japanese food, where do you start?

I try to attack many things at once, so it’s not such a formula like that. I just get fully immersed in the culture and everything.

Was that when you were over there, or when you were over here, researching?

When I’m over here. Looking at books, looking at restaurants, seeing what they do, how they make their menu, the theatre in the restaurant, how they serve things.

I fully immerse myself into following restaurants that I loved over there, and the cuisine from classical to modern fine dining. Their techniques, traditional techniques, modern techniques, their flavour pairings, their ingredients that they have over there. It’s a bit difficult to answer. I just think about it all the time. Any time I could grab some information about food in any way, whether it’s a book, or a restaurant in Australia, or when I’m over there, I would fully try to take every bit from that experience.

I know that you spent a year corresponding with an incredible chef in Japan, Hajime. Did you work with him?

That was my favourite restaurant in the world. It was because of the style of food that he serves and the way that he presents his menu, and the concept behind his food. The fact that it had such a strong concept is what drew me to his food and the story. I find, as a chef, there are so many different avenues you can go down. At a point in my career, I felt a bit lost. I knew how to cook, but I didn’t know why I should be cooking that thing.

You can serve duck with carrots, duck with beetroot, duck with orange and kumquat, duck with charred broccoli, anything, essentially. It got to the point where I was like, but why am I serving the duck with beetroot? Obviously, I’ve worked here and they do that, but why am I doing that? Why do they do that? Just to cook seasonally, for me, felt a bit not inauthentic, but it wasn’t mine. There was no concept or reason to it.

At Hajime’s restaurant, his concept is based around art, definitely, but also the earth and the flow of the earth, and a beautiful story of life. It might be the ingredients on the plate, or the way it’s presented, that brings that concept to life. I fell in love with that. I wanted to learn that and understand that more. It wasn’t so much the food itself.

I contacted Hajime when I was in Japan, and we emailed back and forth for probably around a year. I was a head chef at Silky Oaks in Queensland at that time, so I’d send him the dishes that we were making on our menu, and really explain to him why I wanted to work there. Back and forth, back and forth. Finally he said, “If you’d like to, you can come and work with us.” That was incredible. That was a whole different world of pain, and then success at the end.

Tell me about the pain.

Risa took me to Osaka. We were staying with her family, and we stayed at a hotel just down the road from the restaurant. We did the walk about 15 times the day before, so I knew exactly where to go, and I wasn’t late. I turned up to Hajime, went to the office, signed in, and I just didn’t know what to expect. I’m the person that bites off more than I can chew and learns to chew later. I just turned up and I had no idea what I was in for. It’s a three-Michelin-star restaurant. There are only eight chefs in the kitchen, so it’s not like in some other restaurants where I might just be picking herbs, or I’ll be in the background and not expected to do much. I was on a section. They were depending on me.

We’d start the day and I wouldn’t know what the dietaries were. I wouldn’t know anything, because I can’t speak the language. I felt that they didn’t really like me, and they didn’t really want me there. It was really difficult, because if I made a mistake, I couldn’t apologise for the mistake, or explain that I was trying to fix it, or why that mistake happened. I was just communicating with myself for 17, 18, 19 hours a day. I had no sleep, and I was in a super emotional state. It was horrible. Horrible.

You must have really questioned your decision.

I remember calling Risa and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not who I said I was.” I thought I was a chef. I thought I could do this. There’s no chance I can do this. This is impossible. I was nearly crying every night, and it got to a point probably two or three months in where Risa flew to the city I was in, in Osaka.

You were just by yourself this whole time?

Risa came home, so she could get a job over here and make money so I could be over there. But she knew that I was in real trouble, and I was prepared to run away in the middle of the night, pack up my things and go. Risa just said, “You have to stay. We’ve sacrificed everything for you to be there. You must see this through.” I was really intending to leave. She came, organised with the kitchen team to have a dinner together. We went to dinner together, and they were so impressed by the amount of knowledge I had on Hajime and the restaurant. Some of them had worked for him for 10, 12, 14 years, and they were like, “You know more about him than we do. We will help you from now.” It was like, hello, let’s start from now. After that day, it was a completely different feeling. I felt welcomed. I felt accepted, and I could work on any section. Any questions that I needed to ask, they were happy for me to ask them. Their whole environment was so foreign to me. It was scary in a lot of ways. It was very structured. At the end of each service, we would stand in a circle and apologise for something that we did that day. We’d have a sleep. Twenty minutes of our shift was sleep time, so we’d put our head on the table together and go to sleep, and wake up with the alarm. It was very regimented. You cannot step a foot out of line. But to go through that and to work with those guys, I respect them so much for what they do every day.

Was there a point later on where things got easier for you and you got into the flow of it?

Without a doubt. I remember when I started my job, my tasks were to dice a set of vegetables. Celery, carrot, fennel, all different vegetables, and maybe five-millimetre dice of this, and three-millimetre dice of this. Everything was very specific. That used to take me, I think, one and a half hours to do at the beginning. It was taking me so long, and I knew it was such an easy task, but because they’re so small, and if you get something wrong it gets thrown back on the desk and you do it again, and you let the whole team down. By the end, it was taking me 15 minutes to get through that. I was smashing it out at the end, and I had time for a lunch break, and I could help the team out more, and just be more valuable to them.

How do you get better at that?

For me, I think a lot of it was nerves. I was just so nervous, and I wanted to do the right thing by them. I wanted to do the right thing by Risa, and I had so much pressure. When I could get rid of that, I felt like I sort of had to be someone I wasn’t at the beginning to make it work. In the end, I just was myself, and that was the key.

Were you there for a year?

Probably around 10 months. But at that time, to work there, I wanted to take a job there, and I spoke to the head manager in the kitchen. He said, “It’s three to five years if you want to come and actually work here with us, and I can talk to Hajime if you like.” At that point, me and Risa were well and truly in our relationship. You’re working 16 hours a day at the absolute minimum, usually 19 hours a day, 20 hours a day, six days a week. I didn’t speak to Risa at all when I was there, besides when I was in trouble. I just knew for five years, for the value of what I would take from learning that experience, it wasn’t worth it for me at that point. But what that did give me was incredible support. Hajime has flown over to Melbourne, met me in Melbourne with his wife. We’ve gone to dinner. I went back to Japan last year. They invited me to the staff party, and we can email him any time of the day, and he’ll email us back and give us answers. It’s incredible. Super, super lucky.

He obviously sees something in you as well, otherwise he wouldn’t do any of that.

I guess so.

Then you came back here. It’s interesting you say that you like to bite things off and then you have to chew them later. At what point did you buy this place? I feel like it wasn’t quite what you wanted in the beginning, but you just had to dive in. Tell me about that.

I came back from Hajime and I spent probably a good couple of years just being quite depressed. Because after working at Hajime and getting all these ideas, and basically succeeding in my role at Hajime, I had all these ideas and I was like, yep, this is exactly what I want to do for my restaurant. I had a solid plan in my brain. I came back to Australia and realised that it’s just not going to happen. They really dedicate themselves to their career, and they don’t seem to do that so much in Australia. With the wage costs and all the other aspects, there’s no chance that I’ll be able to do this. So that was quite upsetting for me, because I’d gone over there, I had this plan, and I came back and was like, yep, that’s not going to work.

It took me a couple of years to come back around to how we were going to do it or what we were going to do. We just started saving money. We knew in Daylesford there were a couple of locations that we would take if they ever became available. This was one of the locations. It was just before COVID. We were working in Port Fairy. We had been saving money, and this business came up for sale. We jumped on the phone and started negotiating. We had not enough money, not enough anything, but we just jumped in and, yes, yes, yes, please.

Then my solicitor called me and said, “You cannot sign the contract.” We were at the point of signing. We agreed with everything. He said, “Do not sign.” I said, “There’s no way I’m not signing. I’m signing this contract.” He said, “You can’t sign. I can’t tell you why, I’m not sure what’s going on, but please do not sign the contract.” I was ready to fire him. That was my mindset. I said to my partner, he has to go. He’s my lawyer, he’s meant to be doing what I ask him to do. I remember having the conversation with him, and he said to me, “Yes, I’m your lawyer, and I will do what you want me to do, but my job is to protect you. I’m trying to risk assess your situation, and I’m telling you, it’s far too risky.” It was a week later, COVID got announced, and that all went crazy.

We were in Daylesford without jobs. We’d left everything. We planned to buy this. We were living at my father’s house, and then COVID came. Me and Risa, without telling the lawyer, were still buying this business, so we started buying hundreds of kilos of rice and all sorts of stuff for this restaurant we might have to open. COVID’s coming and suppliers are getting cut short everywhere. It was just like, what are we going to do? Then we had that 11-month lockdown, that first big lockdown. We were lucky enough to be at Dad’s house at that point because he had a big acreage and we felt really free out there.

For our whole relationship, Risa and I were on odd shifts, so we never spent much time together besides when we were on holidays. This 11 months was fully 24 hours a day, seven days a week, together, cooking, cleaning, and it was wonderful. We never fought. We had a great time. After 11 months, we were ready to stop that and get back to work. We rang our lawyer after that 11 months and said, “We’ve decided that if COVID is going to kill us, or we’re going to die, we want to be doing what we have set out to do and what we love to do.” Regardless of what happens, we want to be in that restaurant. He wasn’t happy, but he said, “OK. Let’s see.”

Was this still available?

Yeah. They were negotiating with other people. They ended up selling it to someone else, but it fell through at the last minute, and then we came in and said, “OK, we’re still interested.” They came back and negotiated with us, and we got in here. We operated as they had, a pan-Asian sort of restaurant with dumplings and bao buns and all sorts of stuff here. We operated under their name for a couple of months, and then we slowly, slowly started changing into what we want this to be. It’s still not what we want it to be. We’re still on the road. We’re still nowhere near complete. We’re still running every day. We don’t have any time off. We still feel like we’re on the mission to get here.

Will you know when you get there, or will that goalpost always change?

That’s something I ask myself, but I think we will definitely know when we get there. I don’t think that’s a never-ending goal. There will be other goals that will come after that, but I think hopefully in five or 10 years we will complete this goal.

I find it interesting to say that you feel like you’re not there, because you’ve got two hats, and you’re very well recognised, and people appreciate what you’re doing within hospitality. So what do you mean when you say you’re not there?

That’s 100 per cent our mindset. We wouldn’t have even said cheers to each other, like, great job, at all. We don’t feel like we are there. We’re still working towards our goal.

Even when you got the two hats?

Yeah. Some people say you’ve got to sit down and enjoy and celebrate these times. It’s so important. But yeah, we could, but it would also change our mindset to feel like we’ve completed something that we know we haven’t. To be two hats in this day and age, with wage costs as they are, and everything going on, we have to work so hard to maintain what we’ve done here so far.

I think you have to get to a point where you can have a management team and have a sommelier and a larger team to help you. At this point, we are filling in every single gap every day of the week. We don’t have days off. When we have a day off, it’s because we’re exhausted and we can’t get out of bed, so we stay in bed. We’re still on that relentless hunt to achieve our goal.

When you said to the lawyer, you really wanted to do what you loved, can you still love what you’re doing in the midst of all that exhaustion?

Without a doubt. For me, it’s not just the food. We’re working on every aspect. It’s front of house, it’s service, it’s the brand. I was saying to Risa yesterday, it’s like we’ve got levels in our mind. We might get the food up to a certain level, and the service up to a certain level, and we’re just trying to level up everything. There are so many aspects and elements, not even including the financial side of running a business or financial targets or anything like that. Without including any of them, there are still a lot of aspects that we want to get to the level that we’re happy with. We’re always excited and motivated because there’s always something to improve and something to level up. It never ends.

Talk to me about the food. I saw you’ve got a few different menus. There’s the shorter, the standard and the wagyu, and vegetarian options with those. If I was coming here for dinner or lunch, what should I expect?

I think you can expect a really thoughtful menu, a well-thought-out menu, beautiful service. Definitely in season. You can expect it to be an experience in terms of, we dedicate our whole lives to this, so you can expect to have our experience given to you.

Give me an idea of actual ingredients and things, because I’ve read some things where even the tips of the chopsticks have got chive oil and so on. I know that you’re really a chef not just with tweezers, but a microscope. That’s something I read about you. They obviously mean that meticulousness.

It’s just detail, detail, detail. If I make a new dish, I’m still working on that dish a week before I take it off the menu. It’s never-ending. I make a dish, and I taste it again a couple of weeks later, and I think, well, maybe if I add this aspect, or if I cook it in a certain way, or change this aspect to that dish, is it going to improve it? I’m constantly overlooking everything, and really looking at it, and reconfiguring it, and trying to make it better until I feel like I’ve made it the best it can be.

How many different courses are there?

It changes. Some courses might have two or three or four different dishes. Some might have one dish. It changes from season to season. There is no structure or no reason to it. It’s how I feel personally. I literally wake up in the morning, and it might be sunny like this, and I might think that it should be a consommé instead of a broth. It might be the temperature, or I might be walking through the forest and see pine needles everywhere, and think, geez, it smells beautiful this time of year, and hear the birds, and think I’d really like to bring that into the restaurant.

I might meet a farmer at the market, and he might have a special vegetable, and I want to challenge myself and work with that vegetable, and try to make it to a point where I’m really happy with it.

There is no structure. So many chefs are so organised and they’ve got all these plans and ways to do things. I don’t have any of those things. As I was as a child, like a free-range chicken with no structure, I try to keep that in my life today, with some structure around it, because that forces the creativity out of me, and it forces me to be myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I take inspiration from chefs, from anything I can. I’m like a sponge. I’ll try to take it and use it, and give my experience. Whether it’s something I see on TV, or a flavour I’ve tasted in a restaurant, or anything. My cousin’s wife made beetroot barszcz two years ago, and I just loved that flavour. I was like, wow, I want to use that with beef. We’ve had that pretty much on the menu for the last year. We’ve used it in lots of different elements on the menu. It’s really a life’s work coming to the plate. We love it.

There’d be some sashimi and things as well, or does that depend?

It’s traditional for us. We’ve always had a sashimi course, but I don’t think that will always be the case in the future. It might be, for example, in spring and summer, certain species as sashimi, and then in winter, it could be emu or kangaroo or something like that in the future. I’m more leaning towards that Japanese-Australian.

It is interesting here, isn’t it? I was just talking to someone about the seasons. We talk about seasonality, but here, I’ve been more inclined to reflect on the First Nation seasons, because that’s who we are. You can’t just put those classic European delineations onto where we are.

Without a doubt. I don’t think those classic spring-summer seasons make sense. They don’t reflect what’s happening in nature and in the garden. We’ll have guests come in and say, “It’s spring today, so why are we still having the same menu as before?” It’s because we’ve still got things in the garden that are still growing, and our farmers are still producing these things, and we’ve still got them on the menu. We work like that. I’ll be talking to my farmers. When are the daikons going to finish? I think we’ve got two more weeks, or I think we’ve got one more week, or we’ve got a month, and then we’ll swap it out.

You must come across some really interesting and beautifully fresh produce out this way as well.

Unbelievable. The farmers out here, just similar to Japan, they dedicate themselves to their product. We’re so fortunate to be in this region, because not just the food, but the wine, the people, the support is incredible. I think when we’ve had hard times in this business, and me personally, when I was young in this town, I was very cheeky and I got in lots of trouble with the police, with the teachers, with everybody. I was hanging around with older kids, and it all got off the rails a little bit. To come back to this community and to open a business here, I was a bit nervous about how people would see me. When I left here, I didn’t keep contact with anyone. I just went on my journey. We have had so much support from everyone in the community. I’ve had so many friends from school who have said, “We’re so proud of you,” and things like that. That moment is the moment I feel like, yeah, we’ve made success, or we’re really doing what we would like to do. It’s just those little moments, and then we go on with the day. We’re lucky.

Kadota, 1 Camp Street, Daylesford