Barry drove in to the city from his home on the Mornington Peninsula to talk to me and we sat outside in the sun at Frankie Says in Abbotsford. Talking to Barry was such a good time. He pretty much started talking as soon as he arrived and at some point I thought to push record. Barry has been a chef for a number of years and speaks highly of the chefs he has worked with along the way, especially his mentor and colleague, Philippe Mouchel. Barry is perhaps best known for the long stint he did at Montalto Winery and now he brings all that experience to his students at Le Cordon Bleu. As well as imparting huge swathes of culinary knowledge, Barry has got into puppetry with his best mate and that will definitely be a watch this YouTube space for when those antics go live. We covered all sorts of topics and were only vaguely distracted by coffee orders, an emergency evacuation practice, cute French bulldogs and children precariously negotiating the large rock feature behind us. To the listener, bear all that in mind as you follow the thread of this truly remarkable conversation. Mental health featured a fair bit and I really want to acknowledge how generous Barry was with what he shared with me. You can also listen to this chat on Spotify or Apple podcasts.
It sounds to me as tough you are one of those creative people who just keep bringing in more challenges for yourself. The number of chefs I speak to who are opening new restaurants and also having babies.
We love stress. I know that sounds silly, but we do. We compound ourselves, oh let's have some more. But that was the same with us when me and Rach were having our first one I was doing ridiculous hours at Montalto then. I see it in us, we love that stress, we almost thrive on it. I know a lot of guys, myself included, when we have to take holidays, we are lost, completely lost.
That is interesting. Is that about the role you have and then not knowing what your role is when you have downtime?
Completely. You have nailed it on the head. We don't know who we are when we are not in the kitchen. And also we just need to be doing something. We are do-ers. If you say, relax, we dont know what that means. But the great thing is to watch us all grow. I take a step back and watch everybody grow and mature. We have all come from Philippe Mouchel and cheffo has trained so many wonderful chefs and we all have that thing where if you put us all back in a room with cheffo, although we have all been chefs in our own right, we would all be, yes chef, no worries chef. Have you met Philippe Mouchel?
No I haven't. I almost feel too in awe of him.
You must meet him. He is a gentleman I can't say enough about him. He is a beautiful man. I once called him dad in the kitchen.
That's good to hear. Some of the older generation chefs are quite hard.
That's the thing. I reckon I had 13 years with cheffo and in that time I probably heard him yell three times. Maybe before when he was at Bocuse, he might have been a bit more like that but he changed as well. This is where a lot of chefs are going to, they are maturing because that old school way, and I was part of that, but we have matured and thought, you know what? Lets train people first. That's why I became a teacher.
I was going to ask you about that because as a head chef you teach; part of the job is to train and show your team how to do things, how different is that to what you are doing now at Le Cordon Bleu.
Chalk and cheese. Put it this way, when I got into teaching, I thought, this is going to be great, I'm going to have a break and relax. I thought I'd just do this teaching gig for a little while and then get back int the kitchen. I thought it was a short-term solution to allow me to have more time with my family. But I got there, and I was surprisingly good at it. I know that sounds a bit whatever but I was just a natural at it. I had to calm some of myself down in the way I was instructing the kids, but then some of them responded to being shown and to me being a quite strict with them. We have a lot of international kids and some of them have never had to do anything, but I have never met such a wonderful batch of kids.
How long have you been at Le Cordon Bleu?
Six years and it has gone like that.
When I went to the degustation dinner, which, by the way was incredible,
On our side of things there was a lot of, put that down, what are you doing?
Of course. And I loved when they all came out and were standing there meekly and theyve just been through that huge service. It was interesting because they told me that most of the enrolments are international students. Is that because Australians don't want to be chefs?
There are a lot of different reasons. One is the fees, they are very expensive, and that would deter a lot of Australians. But I have taught at Holmesglen and taught Australian kids and they are just not as interested and they just don't see the value of it. When you were un France, chefs were treated on the same level as doctors, nurses, professionals.
And waitstaff as well.
That's true. Because a good waiter is great. My wife is a chef as well and we used to be all, bloody waiters, front of house vs back of house, but then when you sit down and have a meal and you are getting good service, you realise that they are what people say, they are our show, our front. If something is going wrong in the kitchen or on the floor and there are good staff there, thats what you see and it makes the whole experience chalk and cheese. We were at 400 Gradi in Mornington and they were just young kids but there were young kids who were trained well.
And that's all it is. You really can't blame the front of house staff if things are going wrong, because it is about the training. And the young people you are teaching, they need boundaries and they need to know that at the end of today or by the end of this lesson, what they are going to learn and what they will walk away with. I think it's a good thing, as teachers we are reminded that we might know the subject matter but we need to be able to convey what it is they need to know and how they are going to do that.
That's what my wife said to me, she said that they don't know what you know, and the penny dropped. I like to teach the basics and the basics are that you have to walk around with a fire hydrant and bubble wrap. You literally have to stop them from killing themselves when they are waving knives around or pointing using a knife. The first couple of lessons with me in basic is like the Matrix, dodging knives. But over time you start ot see and that is the wonderful thing, I have had a tiny portion of their life and I have had an impact on them and helped them.
I have always cooked. When I was little, my grandmother would cook and my grandfather was a market gardener. My hero at 10 years old was Gabriel Gat and now I am mates with him. ~ Barry Davis
Do Le Cordon Bleu tell you what to teach?
You get their course and their recipes and it is all very mapped out. So say today is poaching chicken, but what I do is show them the way they say to poach chicken but also tell them about what we do in the industry or the way that I would do it. I am very much like, yes there is a base recipe, and this is the base method but there are other ways to skin a rabbit. I am Phillipe Mouchel, Paul Bocuse trained and so I know the method we used to use but now we have other methods, we can use sous vide, we can put this here. What I love is that you can watch some kids and I will do a demo and their faces are blank, but then you see the penny drop. That is a really lovely moment.
Exactly. And perhaps it is when they understand how food works. I think for non-chefs, we can sometimes being afraid of not doing things right or not really knowing why things go the way they go. I look at the way chefs do things and I feel as though you have really got inside that food and you understand what different ingredients do and how different temperatures work. It must be like that for your students as well when they take hold of things for themselves rather than just following what you are saying.
For me, I don't like that molecular stuff, but I do try and explain to the students what the chemical reaction is. Why does it happen, and even for the pastry chefs. If you saw my bookshelves, I have a serious cookbook addiction.
Do you still go back and look at them?
Yes. Apart from the puppets, I don't have any other interests.
So it's food, 24/7?
It is all I have ever done. When I first started cooking and I was 14 years old and nine months, the chef said to me and I was kitchen handing and he would get me to do things and I could do it even then because I had watched everything that was going on. And that's another thing, learners have different ways of learning. I'm a visual learner, so if you are doing something in front of me, I will replicate it, no problem but if you write it in an email or in a letter, I just won't take it in. I have always cooked. When I was little, my grandmother would cook and my grandfather was a market gardener. My hero at 10 years old was Gabriel Gat and now I am mates with him.
What was it you loved about it?
Whenever I made something, people would say it was delicious. At the time, my mum was going through depression, and she stopped cooking and so at 10, 11, 12, I had to cook, not only for myself but for my brothers and sisters because my mother was always in bed. At the time I was probably resentful, but now that I have had my own depression, I understand and that time actually helped me in a way and I loved it. If I was ever at home in the day time, I'd watch Days of our Lives and Gabriel Gat. I loved the whole French thing and the way they devote themselves to one thing. Its like they say I make bread and I don't just make it, I make the best bread. I love that devotion to one thing rather than being Jack of all trades and King of none. Because I wasn't scholastically intelligent, I wasn't extremely good at school, this was something I could do that I was good at. I was naturally talented; every competition I went in, I won.
And you were 14 when you were working as a kitchen hand?
14 and nine months.
So as soon as you could?
Yes, as soon as I could. I would go from school to work, then finish work at 12 o'clock at night and then go back to school in the morning.
Did you do an apprenticeship?
I started that at Dandenong with Nick who was also a teacher at the trade school as well as my boss. I started my apprenticeship on the day I turned 15, on December 9th. I finished Year 11, I didn't do well, let's just say that I participated. I loved it as soon as I started. Nick fired me after a year and a bit and it was the best thing he could have done. The reason was that he couldn't keep two apprentices on so he kept the other one because I would be fine getting out there. So I went and got a job at Sheraton Towers, now it is the Langford. I had never wanted to go to a hotel, I only wanted to work in restaurants, but then I stayed there for a while and finished off my apprenticeship there and it was great for an apprentice to finish off there because hotels look after their apprentices. I was upstairs in fine dining and they don't let apprentices work too many hours I say that but I was there for hours because I loved it. That's where I met my wife Rachel as well. I was 20 at the time and she was 24 and had just got back from overseas. I may not have mentioned my age. I left the Sheraton and I went to Langton's and I was there for seven years. In between those places, I went and opened up a place as a head chef because I thought I was so awesome and I realised that I wasn't very awesome as one does find out very fast. I thought, oh crap, I dont know anything. Then when I went to Langton's with chef, and I realised how much I had to learn. I was in the kitchen with all these boys; Joe Vargetto, Scott Pickett, Stuart Bell, they were a bit older than me and they really pushed it. I thought I wouldnt be able to keep up that pace. I was about 21 and once again the penny dropped, because up until then I had thought cooking was just something I do, I'm alright at it. And I literally had to make a conscious decision that this is who I am and this is what I do. And that got me though the 18 hour days. It is all about changing your mind set and saying to yourself, I can do this, I can stand here for 48 hours, I'm not tired, even though you are physically tired and people, not chef, are yelling about why things arent wrapped or jobs done. And you are doing it six days a week. At the end of the night, you are scrubbing the kitchen down and polishing the oven so that it gleams.
Then I went to London, that was another gear up. You walk into this kitchen and you start at 7 in the morning and you do not walk out until 1 in the morning. I don't want to say it is for everyone because some people get burned out and some people become discouraged by working so hard. But that's what we did.
Back when it drew you in, it was about pleasing people and then I guess you had that epiphany about it being who you are, is that what keeps you there now?
In the cooking, yes. What keeps me going in the teaching is watching the students who are struggling, produce something beautiful.
I often ask chefs what their advice would be to young people wanting to be chefs, and I guess you are working with those chefs. You giving them all that cooking advice, are you also teaching them how to survive in that world?
The first thing is your physical health; making sure you are physically able to do the job and for me, knowledge, always be reading a book. I hand out books to students so that they read more. Keep reading, keep looking at Pinterest, Instagram and see what the trends are. I remember east meets West and what I called, Confusion, where everything had ginger, lemongrass and chilli in it, then we went through everything being rustic, then we went to Nouvelle Cuisine, things go around in circles and come back and now we are back at rustic. I have seen so many different things come through. But a big thing now is mental health. Because I have had my own struggles and the problem with me was that before that, I thought people were being sooks if they came and said they were having a hard time. But now I see there is a lot more. Kids are coming through with a lot of anxiety and mental health issues and we have to remember that we are dealing with people who are essentially still kids and they are away from home. They might be struggling to get work and there can be language barriers for some for them and someone might say something and they just crack. We have to nurture these kids.
Yes, it is all well and good to say, we did it hard and we got through, but often 'we', later in life are confronted with our issues. It has to come out somewhere. I think it is good to deal with it at the root, when it occurs. It is good that young people are now recognising where they are at with their mental health and dealing with it, whereas, I think that our generation did not.
That's why you see a lot of chefs get to a certain age and they leave the industry or they crack. I know so many other chefs who will never go back to the stress. This generation is a lot better than we were.
My best friend has become a vegan. And because I love him and we have been mates since Year 7 and the way he talks about veganism and being able to use vegetable and grains is going to become more and more. Will I become vegan? Probably not, but I want to cut back on the amount if meat I eat. I now drink oat milk, which I would never have done that before. And supplementing oat or soy milk for cow milk in ice cream and desserts, for us chefs if we can eliminate lactose and gluten, it is a good thing because everyone has allergies these days.
Tasting is so important. Your tongue is your biggest asset. All your senses. It might sound silly, but listening is really important. I might be chopping over here, but I am always listening to my pot because my pot is always talking to me. You can hear the difference in the sizzle, are they caramelising, is the moisture coming out of them. We are odd, us chefs. But it is true, if you have spent your life under fluorescent lights, you start to hear all these different sounds. ~ Barry Davis
How long were you at Montalto?
13 years.
It was obviously a lovely place to work.
So what happened was I was working with Philippe at The Brasserie at Crown and it was great, I loved the work, it was very busy. And it was really good because I had come from a fine dining restaurant where you would only do 90 covers and have 15 staff in the kitchen to doing 300 covers with six staff in the kitchen. And that was the wonderful thing. You had to learn how to be very fast and totally prepped and still put up a good product. At the time we were living in Toorak and trying to start a family and my father passed away. It was in 2005 and my father had been a mortician so I was always around death, but I had never experienced it close to me and it broke me. I was devastated by it. I remember standing at the stove one night and I everything I put in my mouth tasted like coal. My passion, my enthusiasm had just gone. I felt stagnant. I needed a change. Chef opened Montalto years prior and I would go and work with him sometimes to make some extra money and I loved the boss, John Mitchell, and got along well with him. And the chef at that time was James Redfern and I got along well with him and went and worked with him on different nights. James rang me and asked how I was going with work and I told him I needed to get out and have a change and he said he was leaving and we should have a chat so I went and had a chat with him and with John and I was very lucky to have the opportunity to go there. At the time they had lost their chef's hat and my goal was to regain their hat for them and it was quite funny because when I first started there, it was just the restaurant, I had three staff in the kitchen six days a week and I had to try and get the chef's hat with that and we got it in my first year there. Then it was about maintaining that and building the restaurant. We started just with the restaurant and doing some picnics, then we opened up the piazza area, pantry door and pantry range and it kept on climbing. And I don't know whether you know but it is very hard to get staff on the peninsula and, as I said, for your first head chef role, I was trying to make a name for myself, I was hungry for it. And unfortunately I probably walked over people to get what I wanted. I learned very quickly, six years later, that the best way to run a place is to retain staff and the best way to retain staff is to train them. I started to calm down and I had wonderful staff over my time there. One boy, he is now in Queensland but he went and worked at The Square in London after me and he is did phenomenal things. It is lovely top see that I had a small part in his growth and he is such a better cook than I will ever be. He was in London for three or four years and he is phenomenal. I had another young sous chef who was fantastic. It really is about training; show people how to do something and how to do it properly and then let them go. Dont micro manage them and then you get the best out of them.
Montalto was wonderful. I absolutely loved my time there. And people queried me working six or seven days there and when the sun came out in October, I would not have a day off until March and you do start to go a bit loopy, but then you have done that whole summer and you are happy, you have succeeded and you have watched the business go. I remember when I first got to Montalto, we would have been serving six people on a Monday and we got it to about 80 people on a Monday. I don't know how it is going now because I haven't been back for a very long time. I am a very loyal person and if I like my boss, I am very loyal to them and I will do everything I can to make the business successful.
When I left Montalto, going back to the mental health thing, their daughter took her own life, and I was extremely good friends with her. She would talk to me and I would tell her, no youre not going to do that. And then she rang me and she sounded fantastic and I thought she was back on the mend, and I realise now that it was her way of saying she had made her mind up. It broke me. Even to this day I still find it difficult to talk about. I went through a stage where I was in auto-pilot and just did what I had to and then it got to the end of summer and I knew I couldn't be there anymore and I left. I had no job to go to. As I said, I created a lovely network of people around there as well, wonderful chefs: the Long Table, Paringa, Flinders and you know chefs can have a whinge about each other but there is still that level of respect towards each other. And the Mornington Peninsula has blossomed. People say Montalto was the flagship and it was for a very long time, but now there are so many wonderful venues up there, Jackalope and Pt. Leo Estate, which is just amazing and Polperro, which is fantastic. And there are great small producers down there as well. There are people down there who want to produce smaller and better.
Actually speaking of people producing great things, I really loved that Vimeo video where you are asked about your favourite ingredient and you say pork belly, I love pork belly, but also snapper, and I also love duck. I love it all. I thought that was great. Where are you at with favourite ingredients now?
I still love pork trotters. I am a big fan of offal and the reason why I am a big fan of offal is not many people can cook it right, but learning with chef, we did all that.
Have you been to Lyon? That is heartland offal.
Yes. I love it. That is where cheffo is from.
I think the concept of eating offal is correct, so that we are not wasting bits and waiting the whole animal.
My best friend has become vegan. And because I love him and we have been mates since Year 7 and the way he talks about veganism and being able to use vegetable and grains is going to become more and more. Will I become vegan? Probably not, but I want to cut back on the amount if meat I eat. I now drink oat milk, which I would never have done that before. And supplementing oat or soy milk for cow milk in ice cream and desserts, for us chefs if we can eliminate lactose and gluten, it is a good thing because everyone has allergies these days.
That's interesting. I was talking to Vaishali who graduated from pastry at Le Cordon Bleu, and she had done other cooking courses, but as soon as she left those courses she couldn't replicated the dishes, but what she learned at Le Cordon Bleu was how to supplement ingredients and really get inside a recipe and understand how it all works.
A lot of courses will just teach you how to make that dish and that is not what it is about. If you just teach someone how to make a dish, they can only make that dish, but instead you should be teaching them to poach, how do I poach, why do I poach? Why do I bring the water to a boil and why do I add this? With that knowledge of why you do things, that allows you to be experimental. And tasting is so important. Your tongue is your biggest asset. All your senses. It might sound silly, but listening is really important. I might be chopping over here, but I am always listening to my pot because my pot is always talking to me. You can hear the difference in the sizzle, are they caramelising, is the moisture coming out of them. We are odd, us chefs. But it is true, if you have spent your life under fluorescent lights, you start to hear all these different sounds.
I love that. No one has ever said that to me before.
When I first started teaching at Le Cordon Bleu, students would come out with hairy questions like, what temperature is medium rare? I would be like, medium rare has a temperature? For me it is about squeezing it.
How long does it take you to get to that?
It took me about a week, nah, I'm joking. Look, it is a gradual process and I was extremely lucky not just with the chef I worked with but the others, the chefs de partie and the others, Joe, Scottie. They would always get me to try things and squeeze things and I was constantly being quizzed. You had to learn very quickly because you might have to step in at any time. I tell the kids, the best way to learn is to be put into the trouble and you learn very quickly.
Oh yeah. It is the same with learning a language; necessity is the greatest teacher.
You know I lived in London, and I went to Europe but what I love about Melbourne is that it is such a great melting pot. If I feel like having a good Indian meal or French meal, it is all there and it is a beautiful place to be.