Apoorva Kunte is the Executive Chef at The Westin Melbourne. Apoorva loves food and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a chef. He worked in hotels in India and the Middle East before coming to Sydney and now, luckily for us, he is here in Melbourne. Wherever he goes, he likes to discover and then showcase regional local produce. So it is no surprise that he has an extensive knowledge of the world's finest delicacies and that he and his team have distilled this for us in The Westin's High SocieTea, an opulent high tea running in the Lobby Lounge until October and inspired by the three C's caviar, chocolate and cheese. Apoorva talked to me about his favourite cuisine, how essential wellbeing is for himself and his team and the importance of getting the basics right as a chef, knowing and understanding your ingredients and realising that it's not at all what you see on television cooking shows.You can also listen here.
Hi Apoorva. It's so lovely to meet you. How long have you been here at The Westin in Melbourne?
I've been here 10 months. I am fairly new to the city. I was working in Sydney prior to moving to Melbourne. I came down to the hotel some four years back when I was very new to Australia and I loved the place. This was a sought after property and I have had my eye on it. As soon as they opened, I applied.
I saw from your CV that you have been in lots of great places and you have done a lot of study an receive lots of accolades, but what made you become a chef in the first place?
I think my love for food. There is a bit of a story to it. I was in school around 7thor 8thgrade and I used to love eating a ricotta cheese dish back In India and we would often visit this restaurant to eat it. Once I asked my father, rather than coming here every time, can you ask someone to take me into the kitchen and show it to me so I can make it at home. My father had been a member of that club for a while so he called someone and they took me in. I stood there next to the chef and watched him cook it and that was my first venture into the kitchen and I have not looked back since. I started cooking it at home and I would see my family members enjoying it and the joy that it brought to them. Plus I would get to eat as well and that was good. That's what got me into cooking and I knew in 7thor 8thgrade that was what I wanted to do in life.
I love that.
My parents were a bit hesitant, like every other patent in India who would like to see their child become a doctor, an engineer or lawyer, these were the sought after professions. But I insisted. I told them it was what I loved doing and that I would be good at it based on the feedback that I had received from the family. So they let me do what I wanted and I thanked them for it.
I saw that you worked in New Delhi. Is that where you trained as well?
Yes. I was recruited on campus from my hotel school by the Taj group of hotels as a management trainee, which is a two year training program. It is very intensive, going through pastry and all the restaurants they have with all different cuisines and finally coming out after two years and choosing a cuisine that you excelled in. Then you pretty much take over the restaurant or be part of the management team of the restaurant and leading a team of chefs who had trained you over the last two years.
How does that work? It must be hard flipping the roles and telling them what to do.
It was extremely difficult for the first few months after I graduated out of the program. They kept seeing me as a trainee student. But what I did during the course of my training I would keep notes on things we could improve on and some of the techniques were very old or the ingredients we were using were very rich as they are in Indian food but I could see the trend of people changing to a more healthy lifestyle and newer techniques including sous vide being introduced so as soon as I took over I stared introducing these techniques slowly. It took a bit of time to work with the chefs because there was a lot of hesitation. They had been doing that for fifteen or twenty years. Some of them had experience as old as I was at that time but when they saw the pluses, it made their job easier and it made the food equally delectable and delicious and they switched over.
That's so good. You came into the industry and obviously really loved hospitality but then you also had a vision beyond what you were being told. I see that you have worked in a few different countries. Could you tell me where you have worked.
I started with four different cities in India; New Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and then Hyderabad which is where I finished my hotel school. Then I moved to Dhaka in Bangladesh then to Muscat in Oman before moving to Sydney. Each country gave me a lot of exposure to the cuisine and the regional cuisine. In India I had exposure to what people in India call Western cuisine, that's the European part of it and I had a lot of training from Italian and French chefs which is what I wanted to learn. I come from a very multicultural family who spans across the country so I learned a lot of dishes growing up, or I ate a lot of dishes!! I had a fair bit of knowledge, but I wanted to get more knowledge about cuisines that were different to my homeland.
The Middle East and Bangladesh were eye-opening experiences and I think one of the best times of my career was in Bangladesh where the hotel was not doing as well as it should have. It was a Westin Hotel. When I took over the restaurant it had a lot of negative feedback coming its way and my primary goal was to turn it around. I think a year into the operations the restaurant was awarded the number one restaurant in the country, which was hats off to the team that I worked with. That was a very good phase of my career, and it got my role in the Middle East, in Oman. I had always wanted to learn Mediterranean food and Middle Eastern food. In India it would be done based on recipes that were passed on from chefs who might have worked overseas and had returned home, but learning first hand is always good.
I had a dream that no cookbooks can show you how to work with an ingredient unless you work with it in reality, you hold it in your hand and you experiment with it. I would go into supermarkets or souks in the Middle East while I was living there and pick up ingredients I had never seen before and come back and do some research, and the books did help on that front, but then using them with ingredients I had worked with before to come up with recipes.
My advice, if you are already studying hospitality or to be a chef: brush up on your basics. The basic techniques and the knowledge of ingredients are things you have to be across. The basics that I learned when I was studying are still being used in the menus I design and every technique we work with in the kitchen. But you also need to know that it is hard work and it is not what is shown on televisions; what is shown on television is a much edited version of what happens. You have to put a lot of hours in to hone your skills. These hours are not put in to penalise someone or people saying that unless you peel 350 kilos of onions, you won’t really learn anything, but to give you patience.
Out of all of those places and you mentioned you had a few cuisines you wanted to learn, do you have a favourite?
I love Middle Eastern food for the flavours it has that are different to any other cuisine in the world. It uses spices but still makes sure the produce itself is highlighted and doesn't take away from that, unlike Indian food which masks a lot of the flavour of the produce by a heavy use of spices and chili. I do love Indian food, it is my go-to comfort food, but if you asked me which restaurant I would pick any time of the day, it would be Thai. I love Thai cuisine and its flavours. It has a mix of spice and freshness and it is very healthy as well, when the spring rolls aren't deep fried!
Obviously you have worked in hotel kitchens your whole career but I speak to a lot of restaurant chefs and I think they are two quite different realms. Am I right to think that?
You are absolutely right. They are very different realms. I have a great deal of respect for restaurant chefs and their approach. Being a restaurant chef you know what you are supposed to be doing and that is the cuisine you focus on, unlike hotels. In India a five star hotel would have five or six restaurants, each serving a different cuisine. Restaurant chefs tend to stick to one cuisine, whereas hotel chefs have an all-rounder approach to cuisine. I opened a Chinese restaurant and I opened an all-day dining restaurant, I opened a restaurant in the Middle east which was a seafood restaurant, so if I had to compare, a restaurant chef has in-depth knowledge of the cuisine he is focussing on whereas a hotel chef is more of a jack of all trades. We also do events and breakfast buffets and room service. The restaurant does the same numbers as a hotel would do but I would look at a hotel as a place which has five different restaurants at the same time.
How do you manage that? Does that mean there are a lot of staff as well?
Yes and no. Asian hotels would have a lot of manpower in five-star properties and that is the reason that hospitality in the Middle East and Asia is seen as luxury top tier because of the manpower they have; not just front of house but back of house as well. In Bangladesh I had a team of 105 chefs working with me. In Sydney and here, I have a team of 14 chefs. The knowledge and experience I gained in Asia helped me develop menus and strategies that have helped me here in Australia to make the work life of the team easier so that they are not as stressed when they are doing the same numbers we were doing in Asia or India and the quality that we put on the plate is on a par with any other country in the world.
You mentioned before that when you first started cooking and you cooked for your family and you enjoyed seeing how happy it made them, are you able to see the diners in the hotel and see their enjoyment or are you a bit more removed?
No, we make a point of coming out to see our guests. We start with breakfast service. That is the most integral part of a five-star dining experience. Interacting with them over breakfast helps us understand them better and it also gives us knowledge of what they are looking for going into lunch or dinner and that can help inform our menus because we change our menus seasonally. We do come out and speak our guests when they are having High Teas and when they are having their a la carte dinner. The five-star experience involves the chefs coming out and interacting with guests so that they come back and perhaps hold events with us as well.
That's interesting. I have been thinking a lot lately about wellbeing in hospitality and we talk about sustainability and of course that means produce, but I also think it means sustainability of people. You have been in the industry a while, how do you maintain your wellbeing and your staffs wellbeing?
My first focus is to train the team in a way wherein they don't feel stressed at any point during service or when they are cooking. It is also letting them know that if you cook with love, and I think that is my secret ingredient, cooking with love, the guests can feel that and you will be happy as well. Working in a stress free environment could be about letting them go home on time, making sure there are enough people on and that the menu is worked around their knowledge of ingredients and slowly enhance that knowledge to build up the menu and the techniques involved. If I go to a new hotel, I would never pressure the team right away and tell them what we are going to do, I would see what they are good at, take that strength and work towards building a menu from there. I like to play from their strengths instead of it being about what I want. I work with the team. That's a way to excel. If your team is happy, ultimately the guests are happy.
In terms of my own wellbeing, I love to go for a run. I went on a lot of runs in Sydney but I haven't been able to do as many here because the weather is a spoil sport. Long walks. I would walk 20 to 30 kilometres over the weekend. On an average I am on my feet and cover around 10 to 12 kilometres a day in the hotel during my shift so that is good but after work I try and go out for a walk and destress that way, or a run or a cycle. I sometimes go to watch a movie, whatever takes my mind off work. I think that is really importance for every one of us at this juncture where business was expected to go from zero to twenty or zero to thirty after Covid but it has gone from zero to a hundred. So that is very different.
It's good in some ways but as you say, it's a lot to take on board.
Especially when they have not been used to doing big numbers of guests.
I'm coming in on Wednesday for High Tea and the menu looks incredible. It looks as though you have a lot of treats on there from all over the world, so caviar and amazing cheese and chocolate. With your knowledge of all of those amazing products, how do you choose what you will use?
I have always thought that my palate is a very foodie palate and I have always thought that if I like it then I can produce it and share it with a small group of chefs or a small group of people and see what their feedback is and go from there. Using the knowledge that I have gained from traveling around the world or working in these different countries. The ingredients are more or less similar in their flavour profile. A cashew nut up in the north of India is used to thicken the gravy whereas in the Middle East they would use melon seeds. I do read a lot of books and read online to do my research, even shows like MasterChef or MKR in Australia. I grew up watching MasterChef and Chef Kylie Kwong on tv and that was one of my inspirations. When I travelled I discovered things and brought back flavours but I also had memories from my childhood and eating adventures. If you asked me what my best style of cooking is, I would say that it depends on what you have in your cupboard or pantry. I pride myself on going in to a kitchen or pantry and seeing what they have and cooking something out of that. Working with what you have gives you so much knowledge and innovation. If you keep tasting the food as you go, I am sure your guests will like it.
I just had a great idea for a television program. It has probably already been done, but you go in to peoples houses and then look in their pantry and then just cook stuff.
I would love to do that.
Every week a new house. Just to finish with, what would your advice be to young people who are thinking of becoming chefs and getting in to hospitality?
My advice, if you are already studying hospitality or to be a chef: brush up on your basics. The basic techniques and the knowledge of ingredients are things you have to be across. The basics that I learned when I was studying are still being used in the menus I design and every technique we work with in the kitchen. But you also need to know that it is hard work and it is not what is shown on televisions; what is shown on television is a much edited version of what happens. You have to put a lot of hours in to hone your skills. These hours are not put in to penalise someone or people saying that unless you peel 350 kilos of onions, you won't really learn anything, but to give you patience. You have to be able to deal with a lot of stress in the kitchen and on the operational side of it when you are meeting and interacting with the guests and taking feedback which might be the opposite of what you want to receive and how you handle all of those things is very important. So, putting your head down, having patience and knowing that you have to work hard will really help. A bit of sacrificing on family time and knowing youll be working holidays and birthdays and occasions, basically having that in the back of your mind will also help so that you don't feel sad. If you do these things right at the beginning, you will have a wonderful career ahead of you.
205 Collins Sreet