Chanon Boriharnvanakhet

It's a hive of industry here. I love it. I like that feeling of everything being set up and anticipating service.

It's my favourite time of the day.

Do you work out here in the open kitchen or are you behind the scenes?

I'm in the open kitchen. I usually run services, so if I'm on the pass, it's just in the centre of that whole bench there, sort of the conductor of everything. I think it's something that's overlooked a lot, running a pass. People think it's pretty easy. There are a few articles about expediting and that's a massive thing because the timing out here and the timing in there has to match. People think it's just sending food and calling dockets, but it's all about timing and knowing your dining room as well, understanding how long it should take to eat things or if customers have a certain set of time, figuring out what's the best way to send food, how long food takes to get onto a plate and to the table.

That's interesting. I guess I might have thought that maybe front of house was overseeing that, but you are like the gatekeeper then.

Pretty much, yeah. A lot of place places have a maitre d' as well, so you'll have one person in the kitchen and one person from front of house controlling what's going on out here. And both stay on the pass on either side of the pass, communicating with each other. That generally happens here as well, not as much though. The person on the floor, who's also on the pass is more of a runner, so they'll take care of most of running the food to the table while everyone else here who's putting through orders and, filling waters, getting drinks.

I think when I saw you, you'd been here two and a half months, is it now three and a half months?

I think so, yes.

Is there a feeling that you need to change things, what are the changes that are happening?

The bones of the place are, are quite strong. Tonka and Coda, their identity is set in stone, I think in Melbourne. Theyre known for what they are. Its more of just logistical things. There was a long time after Kay-Lene left, and even while Kay-Lene was here actually, because she had her way of running the kitchen. Everyone's got their own style, whatever's comfortable, however we've been trainedand how we came up in kitchens is quite different. Usually people assume that every chef is trained the same and once you get to a sous chef or a head chef level, it's only run one way and there's only one way to do things. But I think it depends on how the individual wants the kitchen to perform, what kind of food they want to do. Everything has to be readjusted. The kitchen here is designed a certain way and there are physical parts of it that I can't change the way it's built, the way the sections are, but what I can do is create food and then adjust where the food comes from, based on what utilities we have in there. So for this kitchen, it's a little bit of a weird design. It's very long, so all the sections are very separated, so it's hard sometimes. For example, I've just moved one section all the way over here as larder. It used to be over with the fryer, but there are a lot of items now that I'd like to bring together on this side in relation with grill. There are a few items on entrees for larder to do, but they're starting from the grill. Also, most of, most of the kitchens I've worked as a chef de partie or a commis chef, pastry and larder were always joined together. Whereas when Kay-Lene was here, she was a very strong pastry chef, so she focused very much on that. She is doing incredible things. And larder was all the way on the other side of the kitchen, which I'm not used to. It feels like when I came in, it felt like pastry was quite glorified, which of course, that's her style. But for me, I think there's a certain finesse and attention to detail when it comes to larder chefs and pastry chefs that work very well together, because everything's so intricate and small; all the small appetizers and snacks and entrees, they are very pretty things. I think that skill can be translated across pastry on larder very well. A lot of pastries are very small, and they look beautiful. There's a lot of components that are prepared separately and then brought together. And in my mind, that's how larder should perform as well. Things like the betel leaf, it's just one leaf.It's such a tiny thing, but there's so much you can do to it. I think also because it's the first thing that comes to the table. All these entrees from larder should be a nice introduction to the meal. Something that's visually exciting as well. Whereas mains, not that it shouldn't look good, but it's not as, how would I say it, delicate. Our mains are curries. Curries are staples of Tonka. There's not much that I want to do to change that concept because we need curry, I think. Its part of Tonka. We do gorgeous curries. They are really tasty. I will add a few mains, and a few in between, such as something more the size of the trout that's not really a maine, it's not an entree, it's in between. I really want to play around with that quite a bit, but there's only so much we can do to a larger dish to make it pretty. Whereas the smaller things, it's really fun to have little fun bits and pieces that build it up.

When I spoke to you, you were talking also about playing a bit more with native ingredients or Australian produce and bringing that a bit more into the menu as well.

Absolutely. I'm trying to run that across all sections as well. I'm slowly starting with larder. It's easy to start with larder. Well, it's fun actually. It's not easy. It's more fun because there are so many little components to things that I can rely on, all of these different ingredients. And then going onto pastry. We are working on a wattle dessert, a wattle cream. Steph, our pastry chef is doing a lemon verbena milk sorbet. We tried it with a classic creme anglaise, like an ice cream. But it takes away from the verbena. There's a lot of subtleties in native ingredients. It's weird because it feels like there's flavours of native ingredients that are really strong and overpowering, but the moment you put them with something more traditional, they tend to fizzle out. With the verbena ice cream, you get to taste the egg and the cream from the crme anglaise and it overpowers the verbena, which is interesting because verbena is such a strong flavour. Its super floral and a citrusy, citronella sort of vibe. We do a milk sorbet on the kulfi lamington, I think we use a similar recipe and I feel like that would be more subtle and easy to bring the verbena up to the front.

Then we're doing some things with paper bark. We're going to smoke some mussels. I love paper bark. I used to do Murray cod with paper bark with chef Eric at Trawool Estate. We would serve the cod on a piece of paper bark and light it so the smoke would hit the cod and as it got to the table, there were embers still going a little bit. When you get that paper bark, it feels like you're walking through a forest with maybe a little fire nearby or something like that, or someone just had a bonfire. I really like that idea. We are going to smoke and pickle some mussels and then serve it on idli, the batter is similar to Dosa. It is like a fermented white dahl with idli rice. We'll make a little pastry out of that and deep fry it, so it's like a little crispy, but soft in the middle pastry. And then a chickpea mousse, and then a little bit of the smoked pickled mussel smoked with paper bark. We are going native, but also still with a classical Indian technique, which I'm still digging into quite a bit.

And how are you digging into that? Where are you researching or discovering?

As much as I can, I read a lot. But mostly I think the best information I get is from my Indian staff. They were born with this, they grew up with it. I'm lucky to have a few guys in there who are from different parts of India as well. We have south, one of one of my larder chefs is from an area near Goa, so there are more coastal flavours and they tend to argue about how things should be, which is really good for me because I get a different perspective on things. There will be a dish that everybody has as a staple in India, but everybody does it differently, just slightly, theyll say, no you have to steam the chickpea, or no, you want to boil it or fry it, whatever it is. And then we test it all and see what's the best, not the best, but what I think is the best in the end. But I bounce off of them a lot. I think it keeps them excited about being here as well. If somebody asks me about Thai food or where I grew up, I get really excited to tell them about these things. I think it's the same feeling for them.

Absolutely, and they feel invested. They feel appreciated and, and obviously as you say, they're the ones that know, they've got that inside information. Is this your first head chef role?

It is. It's nerve-racking. Its a bit of a project as well. I asked some of my past head chefs, is it normal to be dealing with this kind of thing? A lot of parts of this is, like changing staff and dealing with a restaurant that was in a little bit of turmoil in terms of staff and covid and all that. They said, no, so just relax, it's not normal. But it's good that you recognize that, because otherwise I would've looked more inwards and thought, of course I'm not capable and I'm not ready for this. But I think it's a very particular situation.

Well, absolutely. And I think too, in a normal context, stepping up to head chef is a big one as well, because it's not just about loving the food and knowing what to do with food. Obviously it's food costs, it's staffing, it's leadership, it's all of those things.

I didn't have a sous chef as well, so there was a big gap. I have one now, but there was a big gap in the structure of the kitchen. I found myself doing what I used to do as a sous chef and really managing people's emotions and stuff, as well as trying to do my head chef duties. It was a little bit over cumbersome. But now I have a sous chef in there, he is someone I used to work with, and I could finally pass on a lot of the weight, which is nice.

You talked about growing up with Thai cuisine. Is working with food something you always knew you wanted to do?

No. Well, it was 50/50. I was heavily invested in music. I was a musician most of my schooling. But at home, because there was nothing to offer with cooking in school, at home, I would focus on that a lot. And it was always one or the other.

What kind of musician?

Well, mostly I played classical guitar. Then I went my own way. I produced some electronic stuff, very experimental. I came back to Australia after high school, and it seemed like a path that was written. I went to university here for audio engineering. I didn't know what I wanted to do, so my parents said why don't you just do this? I had graduated as a musician, so they said I should continue with that. I spent one year in SAE and didn't like it at all. But in the meantime, while I was going to university, I had to support myself. I got into kitchens as a kitchen hand. And then my attention leaned over very much over to the kitchen, even though I was a kitchen hand for four years, a dishwasher. But it still felt comfortable. Everything that I was doing in the kitchen felt natural to me. Even though I was putting dishes away, getting yelled at and cutting onions or lifting way too many bags of potatoes. I worked at a fish and chip place in South Yarra, it's called Hooked. And they had the kitchen hand do the chips, so they had hand cut chips, but it was a mountain of chips. It was a ton of chips every day. I felt good doing it. I felt grounded. I was doing hard work and seeing the result, even though it probably didn't mean much to somebody sitting down having chips, but for me, I felt fulfilled when I did my tasks. Since then I've just kept going.

I don't think I ever had an ambition to be a head chef. I think just the way I worked, I let things take its force. I never strived to move up too much. It just seemed natural. I would work hard in a few places. And then the next place they offered me a higher position and so on, and I just kept going like that. I had a lot of good people around me as well, so people like Eric and Hendri as well. They recognized when I was working at Coda that I was a little overqualified. Especially Eric. He kept pushing me up. He would say, I think you should go for the sous chef job. Chefs in the past as well, close friends, they would throw me counteroffers. I'd work for them and then I'd say, I think I want to try something else. And they would say, why don't I pay you more and you can be a sous chef here. But I wasnt ready for that. I wanted to try somewhere where it was less busy, less pressure just in case I did a bad job of it. I was a CDP at Panama Dining Room for two years, and a friend of mine offered me sous chef at Rice Queen, which seemed more my style and a little less high end. It's more hawker style food. I thought, ok, if I want to try my first sous chef job, maybe I can try it somewhere where there's not so much pressure on the quality, its just mass and getting food out. But then the Panama Dining Room head chef said hed give me $10,000 more to be his sous. And I thought, Im going to mess it up. He appreciated that. But I think because of that, I made really good connections with people and they're still in touch. He just opened up Nazar wine bar, and he's still asking me how I'm going. Especially now, I think now that everyone knows I've taken a head chef role over there. There is a monthly message from all of them. Are you okay?

That's so good. So it sounds like you're a very reflective and self-aware chef. It's a job where possibly a lot of that goes on, and you can see it on diners' faces, you're aware of it in your staff. So how do you manage that for yourself?

I go home and cry. No, no. I think a lot of the time I tell myself what's important to me. And one of the most important things, which I think these guys are happy about, is that I do care about how they feel. Physically, mentally. I've worked in a lot of kitchens where that's not the case because the focus is on getting the food right, regardless of how many hours you do, regardless of your mental state or your physical state, which I understand. And these places have been great then gone uphill. I feel like I trained very hard and well in those places, but I think I'm trying to approach things differently here because of that. I didn't feel good leaving those places. I felt like an angry person. I feel like everything bleeds out the same attitude. And I was really concerned that if I ever got to this stage, that I would be someone that people are afraid of, as someone that people weren't happy being around, but rather just wanting to be in a good kitchen and put it on their resume. I think also, especially after, after Covid, I feel like I focus a lot on staff retention. It's a major thing now. Chefs are free. They can go wherever they like. You don't have to be in a place for more than six months. In my position, from a business perspective, it's difficult if people are in and out. There's a lot of training involved and getting people comfortable with the team and the place. So I try my best. They understand here that I do my best to cater to their needs, but at the same time, I think the return is much better because they want to give more. Some people don't work that way, and that's fine. I'm not here to force anyone to do what they don't want to do.

It's a big discussion point in the industry, isn't it, wellbeing and staff retention. I think those things probably go hand in hand, don't they?

Absolutely. I think that's how I deal with it, and that's how I feel better about doing what I do when I go home. I think they were happy today. It was a hard day. This guy's done overtime, but he knows that I'm going to give him time out next week, because I can. I'll put in a little bit of extra work, cover somebody if I need to. I think it's important that I do that too. I need to stay grounded if I forget how to cook, Im not a chef. I need to keep my hands touching food.

So maybe it's too early to say, because there are lots of things in the air at the moment, but are you still loving it? You love being a chef and wouldn't have it any other way, despite the challenges.

Absolutely. There have definitely been thoughts to go a different direction. Sometimes when it's hard, I wonder if I could have done something else, but it comes back to this.

What would your advice be for a person, who was considering becoming a chef?

Ah, really think about it. Try it out. I think the best thing you can do is go and try. If you finish your trial or your shift in one place – because the great thing about kitchens, and the great thing about the industry is it's not hard to get into, even if you come in as a dishie or something. For me, like I said, I felt comfortable doing the hard work. I think it's important for people who are thinking about getting into it, to just try. If you want to do your studies in culinary or commercial cookery, that's fine. But you don't really know until you're in a real kitchen how you'll feel; the rush, how hot it is, that's when you know. There are no barriers. Put your resume out everywhere. I used to walk in the door of a lot of places and just hand my resume and it had nothing on it. But places will take you in, especially right now. Its rough and it's busy. I don't think it's necessarily that people are rude or mean, it's more that the job's hard, so it might seem that way. But the most important thing is whether you feel comfortable. If you feel happy with being uncomfortable, then it might be for you. I've seen a lot of younger chefs finish their schooling and they have this great ambition. And then the moment they're in a real kitchen, they turn around. So I think it's important to do it the other way around. Give it a go first and then see how you go.

Tonka, 20 Duckboard Place Melbourne.