Andrew Ballard

Hello, how are you?

Good. Im just getting ready for the Good Food and Wine Show next week.

I've just been reading all the things you do. Do you sleep?

Not a lot at the moment. We just picked up Vivid in Sydney as well.

Congratulations.

We will finish Good Food in a week. Then we drive straight to Sydney. We're there for 23 days, it's a big gig there.

Is everything on the ground there? Or do you take stuff?

We take it. It has been a crazy, crazy, month. Or three months, actually.

I was reading too, that you usually spend about 20 weeks of the year on the road.

This next three months is a really good example. Good Food and Wine Show next week. Then I come back here. We've got three days to pack all the equipment, get it into the truck, and drive it to Sydney. We will set up Vivid down in Darling Harbour, live out of an Airbnb for 23 days while we run that. It is a completely new feature for us. It's a fire pit thing. Weve got chefs and butchers coming along to do demonstrations, all cooked over fire for two days a week and then we'll run it for the other five days a week between myself and my brother who's coming from Whakatane. Then we pack that up and we've got the Sydney Good Food and Wine Show. Then my brother will drive all the shit back to Melbourne. I fly to Auckland for a Global Chef competition for two days, then fly back to Melbourne. Thats on the the Sunday, Monday. And then on the Tuesday we start set up for Cakebake and Sweet Show Melbourne. Then we finish that and we go into Olympic practices in Perth. It's just fucking crazy.

Do you have to tender for these events?

They come for me. It was really weird. I had a friend who was doing it and he did it because he wanted to be a famous chef. But it wasn't going the way he wanted. We came in as a support group for him and then they just came to me and said, do you want to run it? I thought Id give it a year. You know, it's something fun to do. That was for the Good Food and Wine show. We thought, we'll give it a go. It was interesting. It was fun. It was different. It took about a year for us to get the, buy-in from the celebrity chefs. That was the year that Gordon Ramsey was there. And he had that thing with Tracy Grimshaw. So that made it a really interesting year for me, being my first year. We took it, ran it for a year. The guy had worked for me, who was an amazing chef who was working for me. He loved it too. So we just jumped into it. It just grew. We started off with just the theatre and now, for example, we've got the Celebrity Chef's Theatre, we've got the VIP kitchen, which is actually running under my name, which I'm quite stoked with and that serves up to 300 people a day VIPs. They get a meal, and then they get alcohol as well. The we've got the wine theatre, which is just a massive undertaking. I've got three chefs down there who'll run that; there are four rooms, five sessions a day, four wines and four matched foods to go with each wine. So you do them as tastes, but that's massive planning. It's all in the planning.

Well, I was just thinking then you must be so well organized.

It all runs off in Excel spreadsheet. It's one massive Excel spreadsheet, which is famous for shutting downs people's computers when I send it to them. I get told, oh, my computer shut down when I tried to open it, because there's so much information on it. It's got 10,000 ingredients that when you change the cost of this ingredient, it recalculates the whole spreadsheet. You can buy systems to do it, but Ive customized the system to run these specific type of events. Then the guys turn up and I format all those sheets and say, here's your prep list.

So you come up with the concept for everything?

No, not always. It's a mix. Theyll come to me and they'll say, we want to do this, this and this. What do you think? I'll say, right, so here's your costs and here's the labour we need. We provide them with those costs. Sometimes I'll say, hey, we're looking at doing this. Is it going to be viable? I'll let them know the costs. I have a bit of a unique system with these. I don't charge on anything other than a management fee. I charge a management fee and then I just do everything. It doesn't matter what. The Good Food and Wine show is a massive beast. We love it. It's good. As long as it's organized properly. On site, it's just going through the motions. A lot of my guys don't need to actually even look at what they're doing before they get on site. They just have to pick up the sheets and follow the breadcrumbs.

How many staff do you have?

Well, this one I'm just working on that. We've got 16 going to Melbourne. Itll be the same going to Sydney and Perth gets real expensive as you can imagine, flying. We fly them from all over Australia because my guys are good guys. Rohan, who's one of my main guys, he used to be head chef for Jacques Reymond. We've just got some amazing guys who work for me, just stunning.

Are they just on call for you or are they doing other jobs?

No, they come on their holidays. They take holidays to come do it. Because they love it. Some of the, and Ill mention Rohan again, he does agency work and I'm pretty sure it's because he just loves to do the shows. In this day and age, a lot more people are doing that. Have you heard of Supp? It's like a task finder. A lot of the guys are permanently on Supp. Its like Uber. It's like Uber; a job comes up. You go, oh, that looks good. I'll take that. You can set your own rates, you apply for it. They accept you or don't accept you, whichever way. You accept their offer and then you turn up to the job and you get paid when you finish a job, which is great. A lot of chefs are starting to go to doing things like Supp.

What's the advantage of that, is it that you make your own hours?

Yes. You make your own hours. I go on there as an employee when I'm not busy. Atthe beginning of the year, I didn't have something, I didn't have much for February when I got back from France. And the cool thing is you turn up and you don't take the work home with you. I get up at 6.00 am every morning. I work until three or two in the morning sometimes, or at least midnight because I own the business. Whereas with that stuff, its cool. I get up at six, get there, work, leave, finish, done. It frees the guys up to be able to go do the shows. Next year's looking massive. We have a few more big projects in the pipelines. Once we get back from the Culinary Olympics, next year is looking to be ginormous for Simmer Culinary.

As the senior national team, we have to do two spots. Its very exciting, because in two days time, there's a big announcement, which is what kitchen we are in and what days we're competing. Its like an event that runs over like a week. The first set is you do what's called a restaurant, which six chefs in the kitchen, one dishwasher, two helpers outside, which call the pass and sort of the managers. You have to serve 110 people entre, main, dessert. Usually the only stipulation they make is they'll tell you what the protein is. That's a hard enough task already, because we are coming from the bottom of the world. I'm the team captain for Australia and this is what this kitchen is about. This kitchen is for the purposes of practicing for that, and for competitions in general. So I'm the captain of the Australian team for the Olympics, it's the Australian culinary squad, not just the Olympics. We're also doing the Asian culinary cup. We did the Luxembourg Culinary World Cup last year in November. Then I'm also doing the Global chef, which is in Auckland, the Pacific finals, which is a bit different. And then the winner of that will go to Singapore to compete at the end of 2024.

Wow. There are a lot of culinary competitions. I was listening at the Bocuse d'Or evening where they were saying these competitions are not well supported by government and I can't think of a bit, there's a better way of phrasing this question, but what's the point of competitions? What does Australia get out of if you've got a national team?

Two things. First of all, it's, like the America's Cup, right? You remember in New Zealand, do you remember the America's Cup before New Zealand won it?

No.

Exactly, that's my point. Until we get on the podium, no one in Australia will give two flying shits about the culinary World Cup or the Culinary Olympics. Forget about your MasterChefs and your amateur competitions. The local competitions are great because they foster people into it. But this is the pros. Once we get on the podium, like you saw with the America's Cup or any of these big events, it'll be massive.

The problem is Australia has in the past achieved really good results in the Olympics. If you look at somewhere like Denmark and those Scandinavian countries where they've really come into their own and when you think Denmark, what restaurants come to mind besides Noma?

Geranium?

Bingo. So where does, where does Rasmus Kofoed, who runs Geranium come from? He won the Bocuse D'Or, bronze, silver, gold. Not many people would know that, but they do know Geranium. And what he does is very much Bocuse d'Or style food. If you look at premier individual competitions worldwide, you've got the Bocuse d'Or, which as you can see by my wall, I'm absolutely just fucking crazy about and I've been involved in it in for 20 odd years. I just love it. I love the format and what it's about. Then you've got Global Chef, which is the one that I said I'm going to New Zealand to do. That's the other one, which is Run by WACS, the World Association of Cooks Societies.

Is it held in different places and it just happens to be in New Zealand this time?

New Zealand's the Pacific Final. It's held in different places. And then the final of that one always coincides with the WACS general conference, which happens every four years. So Then for the teams, there's the Olympics, and then the Culinary World Cup, which is what we just did, it is like the Commonwealth games and they run every two years. Just like the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games do. You have to be invited to enter the Olympics. It's four years older than the Sporting Olympics. It's been running longer than the sporting Olympics.

What we get out of it as a country is me and the team are doing something with it every day. I'm on phone calls with the guys every day. We are planning every day we're cooking or trialling something. We've got message boards that are just like abuzz all the time with backwards and forwards. And the idea is that we are working concepts to get them absolutely perfect. The Olympics is a team event, which makes it very different. You've gotthe restaurant challenge, which I talked about, which is 110 people. Then you've also got a thing called the Chef's Table, which is a lot more elaborate. So the chef's table is only 14 people you're serving. They usually invite the VIPs to dine, whereas the other one, the public can purchase tickets to eat. That one's a little harder. You've got 14 people and you have to do these massive platters, which are kind of reminiscent of the Bocuse d'Or platters. The same six chefs have to be in both kitchens. This is two days after you've done the first one.

So you've already been through this marathon. You've got your cold platter, they call it, which is an old-school centrepiece with your garnishes, and then you have to serve 14 canapes, two hot styles, two cold styles. Then you have to serve a vegan dish when they sit down. Then you have to serve your main course and then dessert which is all plated.Then four different types of petit fours. And then as well, before we even start, the pastry chef has to develop and put onto the table this really elaborate chocolate centrepiece. You've got five and a half hours to do it all. It's a massive amount of work, even for six chefs.

Is the communication the same as it would be in a kitchen under pressure during service? Or do you need different kinds of coding to communicate what you're doing?

It's like a dance. You're getting marked on everything. When I say everything, I mean a hundred per cent everything. How you work is as important to what you put in front of the judges. As the captain. I'm being marked on my management skills. We are marked on our paperwork that we've done prior. And some of these countries put a massive amount into their booklets and recipes and menus and that sort of thing.

Will you be cooking as well?

Yes. But it'll operate like a normal restaurant kitchen. I will bounce around the kitchen. It is predetermined. I'm not just bouncing around willy-nilly. So this person at this particular moment in time, I know they're doing this job. I'm on that job with them. And then three of us come together to do another job. So it's very complex. Youve got five and a half hours and every second is accounted for. And if you've got one second you haven't used, then you need to fill it.The Bocuse d'Or is no different. Global Chef is no different.

You'd have to be so match fit. How many hours of preparation do you need?

You have to 30 hours a week for two years.

That's like a full-time job.

Yeah, it is. All the jobs I do is to fund this, if I'm being honest. We are working on opening a restaurant as well. But I've paused that as long as I can because this is a priority. The restaurant piece will happen. And it was supposed to happen at the beginning of this year. And it was supposed to happen at the beginning of the previous year. But because of all this, I've stalled it because A, you don't get any better marketing than saying you've just come back from the Olympics as the captain and my marketing people will push that angle, but B, the development you go through as a chef and the professional development you go through as a chef and the concepts you come up with; we might put this on the plate, but we will have a backlog of a hundred other ideas that we've worked that either haven't quite worked the way we wanted or didn't work within the menu. They're brilliant, but they just didn't work way after creating perfect dishes and a perfect menu or meal from the beginning to the end as well. You think about that chef's table I talked about with all those elements we're prepping, those all have to look like they belong. You've got six different chefs working in six different states or five different states, you know, that still must look like a cohesive unit.

When do you find out what the protein is?

Probably not till September, but we can still work all the elements. It'll usually be rabbit, duck, lamb, beef, chicken. And then when they announce that, we'll get all our garnishes and all our flavour profiles and tweak them. At the moment it's technically based training to have elements that are going to be harmonious, textually and things. You can do all that. You know what I mean? As much as possible, the garnishes have to be something where with a few ingredient tweaks they could be used on duck, quail, chicken rabbit. We know you have to do two cuts. So no matter what it is, you have to do a long cook and a quick cook. We've got a lot we can work with. Bocuse d'Or is the same. Bocuse d'Or quite often won't announce the final protein until a month before. And it's to even in the field. The Scandinavians, they've got teams that are fulltime, they don't have to work to support themselves. They've got massive government funding. I don't think that's an excuse for not succeeding. I think that's where Australians thrive. Put under the pump and having to fend for ourselves. I've created akitchen. I've created the means to be able to do it but the funding would be nice.

I'm going to take Australian citizenship in July. I think it's important that I'm an Australian. The back story is I was supposed to do Bocuse d'Or. I was in New Zealand. We were ready to fly to France and New Zealand got locked down and I got stuck in a hotel room for three months. All by myself. No family. New Zealand lockdown was no joke. I was in Auckland. The supermarket was the only thing that was open. I couldn't even go and get a coffee. And you're only allowed out for I think an hour a day. It was ridiculous. The whole time I was just trying to get home. I had a staff member here who used to be a chef on private yachts. He was trying to get me on a yacht that was being built in Auckland, going to Fiji from to Bali to Darwin. And then I was going to drive from Darwin to Melbourne. That was the lengths I was going to go to, to try and just get home to my family and to my kitchen. When I finally did get home, I remember, I drove over the Bolte Bridge and looking out, I went, there's my city. Melbourne's home. I've been here so long. Melbourne is now in my core. Im wearing a Swanndri but Im more Australian than New Zealand.

When did you come over?

2002. My youngest son was born here. My other two kids have only ever known here. My business is here, my home is here, my friends are here.I dont fit in in New Zealand unfortunately anymore. Australians and New Zealanders have a different mentality. Neither, is better or worse. And for a chef, there's no life for a chef in New Zealand. Not when I was there anyway. That's why so many New Zealand chefs come to Australia and New Zealand loses their labour base.

I was running a hotel there. We had umpteen venues inside the hotel. I was the executive chef and I was doing a hundred hours a week and I was making $50,000 a year. That's bullshit.

Look, there are some cool things happening there though. Some of those really passionate, smaller little places. But you are right. I mean, it's probably hard to make a good living if youve got family.

I was running a fine dining restaurant. My wife was using and I'm not joking – my wife was using food stamps to get food for the family. That was what we had to do. And that was with me doing almost a hundred hours. You know, that was just crazy. It was actually ludicrous.

So tell me about – I was going to say little Andrew, but I can't imagine you ever being little – but little Andrew and growing up in Hamilton. Did you ever imagine this? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

No. I wanted it to be all sorts of things. My older brother's a chef. I used to work with him now and then. My dad cooked all the food in our household. He's an amazing cook, but he doesn't particularly enjoy cooking. We've got a large family. He's very good at making a little bit of food go a long way. The things that man can do with potatoes and mince is unbelievable. I didn't realize at the time, but we had a really diverse menu. I think it was through necessity more than anything else. My wife's family always had meat and three veg. We had kedgeree and we'd have curries and we'd have meatloaf and then we'd have burger night and we'd have like stir fries and fried rice. But it was just because those were ways, like fried rice, you can take a little bit of meat and vege and put it with the rice and make it go along way and feed a lot of people. We definitely did not go without at all. There was always ice cream, a small ice cream cone after dinner. But it wasn't particularly fancy food. It wasn't like the chefs who say they were hanging off their mums aprons. I think my older brother became a chef because he was told wrongly and most chefs at that time were told, you're too useless to do anything else, so go and fucking cook. That's what I was told. You're such a loser at school. You might as well fuck off and go and become a chef.

I find that so difficult. And it's often a throwaway line that chefs will say to me, oh, I wasn't any good at school, so I became a chef. I don't get that because what you are doing, I cannot even get my head around it. There's no way I could do the job you do.

I think that a lot of chefs I know my age or around my age, were undiagnosed numerous things; ADD or dyslexia or whatever and at the time at school in New Zealand and probably Australia as well, they're on rote learning systems. Nowadays there's ways they can deal with kids who are suffering with these. Then you were just labelled as a naughty little kid. Now, we now know that having ADD and those things doesn't make you a naughty little kid. It just means you think in a different way. And I do think in a very different way as you're probably picking up. But I've made it work very well for me of course, because I jump around. I sit there on the computer and I can jump from show to show and it's all happening all at once. Whereas most people, they look at me and they go, how the fuck are you doing that? But it works for me. I think that the chefs who are told you're useless, go and become a chef are the ones who are the most successful because they've made it work for them. It is not because they were dumb. It's not because they were useless. It's because they just didn't think in the way that their teachers thought. Unfortunately the sad thing with Covid is we've lost a few of those people, because they've gone onto other things. It's my generation that's moved on.

It is different now. My son has just started his apprenticeship and I couldn't be happier. I think the good thing to come out of Covid is that the pay has markedly improved. We are now getting what I think is a fair rate. It is important to get the work-life balance and you're going to have to make it worthwhile if there's no work-life balance. It has changed a lot of things for the good as well.

I was going to ask you about that. I went to an event las well that really impressed me. It was run by Movember and it was called Mo Hospo. It was mainly about men's mental health in hospitality. I think mental health is a concern across the board, not just in hospitality, but I think that it's obviously very pressured in hospo and historically people have burnt out and there are drugs and alcohol and all of those things. How do you prevent burnout? You are going full bore.

But I'm the business owner. First of all, I'd say, anyone who's been in the industry as long as I have, has been guilty of both overworking themselves and asking other people to be overworked. That was what we thought the industry had to be. I know that in the past 10 to 15 years, I've been trying to make a real solid effort myself to change the mentality that that's the way it was for us, so that's the way it has to be. That's the way it was. But if you were given the choice, would you have kept it that way? No, of course you wouldn't have. If I had been given the choice. There is no way I would've done a hundred hours when I had young kids. My wife calls it her single mum days. What we need to do is make those positive changes. I think that we, for a few years we were going, how do we make it happen? Then, like I said, COVID came along and then there was the big debacle with a lot of the industry leaders being put under the microscope just before Covid. It has forced those changes. Now it's a matter of convincing the dining public that they're going to have to pay for those changes because we need to be able to charge realistic cost of production. I make no apologies whatsoever for the costs. I don't overcharge people. I charge people a fair equitable amount for what I produce. Im lucky that the people who run the shows, when I say, Hey look, I think the crew needs extra money because this is what they would get paid if they weren't with me, if they were in a restaurant, they say, no problem. Whereas I think asking the dining public is probably a little harder. Food's getting so much more expensive in restaurants and rightfully so. We are paying chefs more. We are paying waiters more. We're paying more for the food, so therefore we need to charge you more.

If you're a chef and you finish work in a restaurant, the only person who should not switch off should be the owner. Everyone else should be able to go, ah, forget about it. I'm leaving work.

But you obviously love it.

I wouldn't have any other way. It'll probably send me to an early grave, but, you know.

Just to go back to you as a kid when you wanted to do several things, how did you start working in kitchens?

Me and my wife have been together since she was 14. And I had just turned 16, so we have been together since we were very young. I was actually homeless between couch surfing and living under a bridge and just generally being a bum. I had done some work when I got kicked out of school. I got forced into the kitchens and done some work and got fired from that job and whatever else. I was washing windows with a mate of mine and then my wife went job hunting for me. And the job she found happened to be a guy I had washed windows for a few times. I went in and literally from the first night it was a different kitchen. It was a lot more professional. It was Metropolis Cafe. I landed there as the dishwasher, like you can imagine, smelly bum of a pot smoking twit. I remember the first night I was just going, man, these guys, like, the best example was like, well, Anthony Bourdain talks about the pirate crew and stuff. That's what it was like for me. I thought the guys were rock stars. I remember it was Alice on the front, there was Rob on the back. My push then became right, that's what I wanted to be. There were bumps along the way. I probably wasn't the best employee for the first couple of years. I remember Rob pulled me aside and basically said, if you don't go to TAFE or Polytech, then you can't work here next year. I think that was a tough love thing from this perspective. And I ended up running his kitchensand we ended up winning the Cafe of the Year. It was a funky place too. At the time, including myself, I know you can't see it, but including myself, we all had dreadlocks. Every single staff member except for the owner did, had dreadlocks.

When was this? The nineties?

Sometime around 1994. It would've been something like that that, I was there until 98. We all had dreadlocks and it was all about the coffee culture. Hamilton at the time actually had some really good restaurants when in hindsight, I think there were some really passionate chefs. The first menu I ever wrote myself, which I was so uber proud of, I can still remember all the things that were on that menu and it was the one that we won the cafe of the year with. At the time I was 20 years old I think. I look at myself now and I go, you're a dick. No, I wouldn't, but I'd look at myself now. If it was me, I'd say, you don't even know where things can go yet.

But it has worked for me. My trajectory was bumpy, but I've had a lot of people who've helped me and I've been very, very lucky to just have a lot of people who have helped me along the way and are still helping me. I think if I was to say I have one skill, it's surrounding myself with good people. I dont know why these people like to hang out with me, but they do.Hey, I'll take it. At the moment my team, they're just amazing. The guys for the Olympic team, they're all just amazing. If you've got good people around you, everything else you're doing, and as busy as I am in the next three months, it makes that a lot more easier. You can go to someone, Hey, I haven't got time for this, do you reckon you can pick this up? And people go, yeah, no problem. Easy.

So with all that in mind, what would your advice be – well what do you tell your son who is wanting to become a chef? What's your advice?

Don't put up with the shit. Times have changed. Either be part of the change or fuck off out of the industry. The industry doesn't need bullies anymore. There's nothing wrong with working hard, but as soon as you expect people to do things that you wouldn't do yourself, then you are in the wrong. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't asked people in the past to do that. Because I thought that was just the way it was and everyone did. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't change. So for my son, I want him to follow his own path first and foremost because he's really passionate about it. He loves cooking, he loves food. He always has. And the thing is, he's only ever known me as a chef. That's a bit hard cause you think when you've got kids you forget that they haven't been there for half your life. He came in here the other day and I was only practicing something. He goes, oh, now that I'm working I realize how cool this kitchen is. I told him, well, yes, I've got every toy I could ever want. I can cook. You know, I've got all the resources.

I want a lot of good things for my son. I love cooking competitions. And he's decided he wants to do a cooking competition. He got asked by Holmesglen to do it? And so I dropped him off at the practice the other day and I sat out in the car, while he did his practice with the TAFE teachers. And then on the way home I said to him, oh, you know you don't have to feel like you have to do this just because it's something that I love to do. He said he'd give it a go and if he likes it, he might do it again. At the current time he's working in an RSL, which I actually think is a really good place to do an apprenticeship. The Aussie RSLs have nice menus. It's a lot of stuff that's been cooked from scratch from what he talks about. We have dinner there once every couple of weeks and it's tasty, basic food. Its a great place to learn how to cook the fundamentals of how to cook, from an apprentice point of view. I can absolutely see why someone would love to cook in an RSL for a career. And if that's what he wants to do, I think that's amazing. There are many facets to where you might want to cook. And if he wants to cook in a retirement home, that is also amazing. I can absolutely see that provides one of the best work-life balances you could possibly have. You can plan your whole month because they run a cyclic menu. So I can see the benefit of doing that. I can see why you'd want to do events. I can see why you'd want to do fine dining. Everyone wants to do fine dining when they say they want to be a chef, right? But they don't realize that in a fine dining restaurant, there's only one chef, maybe two, if you include the sous chef and everyone else is just working really hard to get to that position. Whereas if you work in an RSL, you get to crumb your own Schnitzel and learn a bit of butchery. From an apprentice point of view, I think it's good. Not to say you don't get a good apprenticeship in the other places, but it's local. It's just down the road.