Newly appointed Executive Chef of Andy Harmer's eyes light up when he talks about ideas for dishes, his rooftop garden, and sustainable cooking. Harmer initially trained at Paul Heathcote Lancashire in England, before working at wonderful restaurants around the world, such as Les Crayerers in France – a two Michelin Star restaurant; and more notably, at D.O.M with Alex Atala, a Brazilian chef whose restaurant is rated no.16 by The S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Once in Melbourne, Andy started as Chef de Partie at Vue de Monde and seven years later was the Executive Chef working alongside Shannon Bennett before taking the helm at The Point in Albert Park.
Hi Andy, let’s start with how long you’ve been a chef.
About 22 years, I think.
Wow. You look way too young for that be the case…Did you always know that you wanted to be a chef?
Yes. My mum had a bed and breakfast guest house when I was growing up and she did a lot of home cooking. We had big gardens and we grew all our own vegetables. Always in that hospitality environment from a young age definitely affected me later on. We did a school placement and my placement was in a five-star hotel, so I got to spend two weeks there and saw the environment and just thought, this is bloody amazing. I started working on weekends from then on.
Then I think I moved out of home when I was 15 to go and work there.
Ah, so you were young after all! What was it like when you started? Things have changed now but I’ve heard lots of tales of kitchens in the past.
I was very intimidated when I started. It has completely changed now which is probably for the better. There was no real longevity in it, considering how people were treated. It was quite a scary environment at times, the things you’d see, but I’m not going to go into that too much.
But even through that time, you must have a real passion that has kept you going, despite the difficulties and challenges.
Definitely. Regardless of what else is going on, you see people who have heavily invested in their passion. They love what they’re doing and you can see it in them. I think that’s one of the things that drove me forward, to see how those people got really excited about the food and doing the amount of covers that you’re doing. That’s what drives you regardless of how hard the work was, you wanted to get the job done, to achieve a great service, I think more than anything else. There is a lot of camaraderie within a kitchen. It was a very big brigade, I think there were about 30 chefs in the kitchen when I started, it was a big five star hotel. You see that and you see how everyone pulls together under pressure to achieve the final goal. It was really good to see that and that taught me in the early stages about team work and about how you need to work together.
It’s nice to do really good, tasty food and if it looks good in a picture as well, take a picture. Go for your life. It’s all very well eating a dish with your eyes but if it doesn’t taste good, then there’s not a lot of good doing it. At the end of the day, we’re here to eat the food. You can’t just sit there and look at it.
As you go up through the ranks and get to where you are now, you have to have a high level of creativity and be able to see outside the square and think about new dishes and menus. Is that easy for you?
It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of the job, I think. As soon as you put a new dish on the menu, because you’ve spent a good two to three months developing it in your mind before you even start doing it, you’ve spent that long doing it, by the time it gets on the plate you think, right I’ve executed it and you start moving on and start thinking about the next project, the next thing.
I’ll come across a product and think, I really want to use that, it’s really great, how am I going to utilise it and what will I put with it? So it will sit on the back burner for a couple of months and then all of a sudden you’ll see another element that will go with it or another technique you could use and you start piecing it together. This could be a process of two to three months or it could happen in one night. It all depends what your mindset is the time, what you’re thinking and where you get your inspiration.
Where do you get your inspiration from, apart from seeing a product you want to use? Are you a asocial media follower or a book person?
I do social media, I’ve got a nice collection of books from all over the world; it’s not just fine dining. You’ve go to look everywhere you go and get a broad stroke of all kinds of cuisine. You can take inspiration from anywhere and anywhere. You don’t have to pigeonhole yourself into saying you only do a certain kind of food or techniques. There are elements and ingredients everywhere. You take this from here and a bit of that from there and you bring it together and combine it. I think that works really well.
What do you think of trends? Melbourne gets very caught up with what’s trendy and what looks good on Instagram. Do you have to be involved with that?
I wouldn’t say I drive myself to make it look good for Instagram. First and foremost it has to taste good [laughs]. There are a lot of guys who do go a bit over the top with these things and try too hard. You have to let the product speak for itself rather than arty farting around with it too much and overworking it. Simplicity is often the best way to go.
It’s nice to do really good, tasty food and if it looks good in a picture as well, take a picture. Go for your life. It’s all very well eating a dish with your eyes but if it doesn’t taste good, then there’s not a lot of good doing it. At the end of the day, we’re here to eat the food. You can’t just sit there and look at it.
The new menu sounds delicious. I missed the launch because I was at my nephew’s 10th birthday. Tell me about some of the dishes on the menu.
We’ve developed it using what we have here. When I walked into the building, I looked at what there is and there is some fantastic equipment in the kitchen. I wanted to try and utilise that equipment. We’ve got a rotisserie, there’s a Josper oven, a rooftop garden.
A rooftop garden!
Yes, we have an incredible garden. We didn’t announce it until the dinner and then we took everyone up there for dessert. That was a little pet project that I’ve kept quiet. I came in, we got that going, but we’ve got it to a point where the garden is sustainable, rather than having tons and tons of stuff in there that you can only use a small amount of. For the desserts we have alpine strawberries, green strawberries and wild strawberries up there which all come together to build the dessert. And that’s only one half of the garden. The other half is being developed now for winter. We’ve been working on that for the last couple of months so when summer dies down, we’ll move over to the other side and we start harvesting winter produce from the other side. Then when summer comes back around again, we’re ready for that.
What sort of space are we talking about?
We have a lot of space. We are very fortunate. So that’s how I built the dessert, especially. The duck that we do for a main…when I came here I saw we have these beautiful cast iron pots so I thought we could fill them with hay and lavender and do duck crowns in there; glaze them up with caramelized honey and Szechuan. We roast them in the pots and then we take them out and put the blowtorch on them and they smoke up and we bring them out to the table, take the lid off and get those beautiful flavours coming out.
We do a Marron in the Josper with pecan wood, so you have that really nice nutty flavoured wood coming through which goes really well with the sweetness of the marron. We do a cured kingfish dish and use the green strawberries from upstairs. We had honeysuckle growing, so we took the flowers from that, cured kingfish, and stracciatella, some scampi caviar and kombu oil.
We use the elements that are around us and it’s not that we make it as simple as possible, but made it as tasty as possible and it reflects what we are doing here now. We’re not overworking anything, we’re letting flavours speak for themselves.
Has having the garden upstairs changed the way your team is cooking? I think when you have that direct contact with how the vegetables are grown, it can make you respect them more.
Definitely. We didn’t let any of the guys up there for quite a while because we wanted to let everything grow. Then we said right, and we took them up there and showed them and explained how everything works. The guys were taken aback by it. You could see inspiration coming through with them. And respect. You have so many guys and the vege just turns up at the back door and you put it in the fridge. Some people even get the fish in already filleted and ready to go. That takes away from the skill and respect that goes hand in hand when you’re creating and cooking food for people. It has been really good for that. You can see how they’re developing as chefs through using these products.
Does it change the way you approach wastage?
Most definitely. When you only have a certain amount of something, it’s not a case of hacking at it and chucking away the rest. We’ve also got a worm farm on the roof and any of the offcuts we put n there and then use to fertilise the garden again. There’s a full cycle of life happening up there. It’s really really good.
What else would you want young chefs or people getting into the industry to know? That idea of getting people in touch with the food they are cooking us great. How else can chefs be sustainable in terms of how they cook but also in terms of their own longevity?
You need to have passion, dedication, love for the job. Put your head down and be willing to take on any criticism. People above you will always teach you as much as possible and you can only become a better person and a better chef because of that. It’s not people being horrible; it’s about a learning curve. The first ten years are a massive learning curve. Even the rest of your career is a learning curve; you learn something every day. I learn stuff from guys who come and work in the kitchen for me. They come from a different environment and they bring new things, new techniques so you have to open your eyes and be wiling to listen to what other people have to say. You can learn something every day from them.
You meet too many guys who develop an attitude because they think they know everything and they’re only three or four years into the industry and it’s very narrow-minded to think like that. You have to be open. That’s what I’d say.
133 Russell Street, Melbourne