I’m a big fan of Scott Pickett’s restaurants and, in fact, my very first Conversation with a chef was with Joe Grbac who, at the time, was co-owner of Saint Crispin With Scott. Having had a chat to two of Scott’s chefs already, Tim from Matilda and Valentin from Estelle, I was not about to miss out on talking to Charlie at newly opened Lupo, especially having tasted some of Charlie’s food at the opening night this week. Talking to Charlie, I was reminded about the greater loveliness of these chats I get to have; the insight I get into the bigger picture of hospitality and community, not only in Melbourne, but across the world.
Hi Charlie. I came to the opening the other night and really loved the feel of Lupo; the lighting and cosiness made it really feel like a neighbourhood Italian restaurant.
It’s starting to feel like a little Italian restaurant, which is exactly what we want.
I really liked Scott talking about all the connections and how he had worked with Phil Howard at The Square, in London, and you were working with Phil and he got in touch with Scott when you were coming over.
It’s a hugely important part of our cheffing community and also how you progress as a chef. Obviously, you have to work bloody hard and have to be noticed by those people. It’s all about who you know, but you make your own luck by working hard for those people. I came over in December and had a look at a few places, and they were great places, but they didn’t have that drive that I wanted. Then I spoke to Phil and I knew about Scott and I asked to be put into contact with him. Phil sent an email saying he had a great chef looking for a place and Scott made me feel so welcome, which was great and now I have that same relationship that I had with Phil. Obviously he’s my boss, but we have a great relationship at the same time, and I’m starting to have that with Scott, which is great and good fun.
I do like the idea that there is a community because for so long, we kept hearing about the competitiveness and chef burnout and it all sounded very hard. Now I’m hearing all these really great stories about people helping each other out and working together.
100%. It’s still hard. It’s hard graft if you want to get to where you want to be. If you want to be in a place and just flip burgers, that’s fine, and there is no shame in that because I go out and I eat burgers and I enjoy them. But if you want to get to the level you want to be at, then you have to work bloody hard.
But, with Matilda, Estelle, and now Lupo and we also have the Deli, yesterday we were so busy that I forgot to feed my bread starter, for example, but the guys from Estelle came up today with a bread starter to add to it. We are always helping each other out. That made me feel really good this morning. I was on my way into work thinking about how I would fix it and these guys were straight up here with fresh starter.
I spoke to Valentin at Estelle and he mentioned you as being something to do with the pastry there.
I wasn’t the pastry chef at Estelle, but the pastry menu was mainly designed between me and Scott. I did pastry for about six years of my career. I worked at The Square for about three years and when I went there, it was through a friend who knew the head pastry chef. I hadn’t done any pastry then, so it was only natural I started on pastry. Apart from maybe about eight months that I did in the kitchen, the rest of that was all spent on pastry. He left when I was in the kitchen and I saw my opportunity and jumped back in and started heading up the pastry.
Then I went to Eleven Madison Park and did pastry there as a chef de partie, which was amazing. At this point in my career, I was completely involved in pastry. I had something I thought I was really good at. I wanted to work somewhere else, in one of the best restaurants in the world and being good at pastry allowed me to do that. Then I went back as head pastry chef at The Square and did that for another two years. Then eventually I started to miss the savoury kitchen.
It’s quite different, isn’t it? Pastry you’re doing ahead of time, but it’s very precise and then savoury is a lot more heat and pressure in the moment.
100%. During prep time, you’re busy when you’re in pastry because there is never a dull moment. You’ve always got something to do to stay ahead. You’re always chasing your tail. I’ve obviously had some hairy services on pastry as well, but it’s a bit more stop, start. Service in the kitchen starts and you just go for three hours or five hours of pumping it out. There’s a great difference between the two and I enjoy both.
Eleven Madison Park. I’ve seen the Netflix show, Seven Days Out, where they feature the restaurant right before it was reopened. Just the precision in the lighting, the sound, the set-up…I’m sure there was precision at The Square as well…is it stressful working in that environment?
I guess working in any kitchen is always going to be stressful. It’s all relative, but there were some days I thought it wasn’t too hard and then some days which were really hard. It had a good balance. I think there are a lot of three stars in the world which are very precise and there are lots of people doing the same job. Eleven Madison Park had a good medium where you could still be…
Human?
Exactly. You could still have a laugh with the people next to you on the section. It wasn’t a silent kitchen. There were times when we didn’t have enough staff, or someone would call in sick or instead of doing a dinner service for 105 people in six hours, we were doing a lunch service on Thursday, Friday, Saturday for 60 people in about one hour. It depended on the day. I really enjoyed that. It was a great step on from The Square. The Square was very much cooking on the edge of your seat.
It’s interesting for me, now that I’ve spoken to a lot of chefs, there are always themes, but I’ve noticed lately that The Square has come up quite a lot. I spoke to James Kummrow at Fatto in the city and he also worked with Phil at The Square.
I don’t know him, but I do know the name.
[?at this point, Charlie has to dash into the kitchen to check the focaccia]
Before I started really becoming passionate about the food, I was passionate about the atmosphere I was in; the drive, the camaraderie, the laughing and joking we do in the kitchen daily…just the community thing. Then I got a lot of training from really good chefs and then being good at something creative makes you passionate about it. It’s like, what came first, the chicken or the egg? The passion keeps building as you learn more.
Just to go right back to the start for you, did you always know you wanted to be a chef?
No. All the women in my family, and there are a lot of them, I have six aunties, they are all chefs or cooks in some way, and great cooks. When I was 13 or 14, I was afraid of going to work. I had jobs from when I was very young, but I used to hate it. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. My dad said I had to get a trade and do something with my hands, then my next door neighbour who I hung out with a lot said, why didn’t I go and do cooking in college with him. I said, yeah sure, why not? At that point my mum and all my aunties said, You know it’s going to be really hard work. Do you realise the hours you’ll be working? But then something great came out of it and I really started enjoying it.
Within the first year, I was very lucky, the first place I worked was for a guy who was a sous chef at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant in London and he had come back from London and opened a little restaurant in my hometown. I was very lucky to spend my first year of cooking with him. He was a great guy with a lot of knowledge.
Where did you grow up?
In a place called Portishead, just outside of Bristol in England.
I remember the band, Portishead.
They were actually from Cleveland, which is round the corner from us, but my cousins used to go to school with them.
That’s cool. I saw them live in London and I loved it. And how long have you been a chef?
Twelve years.
What do you think it is that got you at the start, has pulled you through and has allowed you to be accepted into the really great places?
I think it’s a number of things. Before I started really becoming passionate about the food, I was passionate about the atmosphere I was in; the drive, the camaraderie, the laughing and joking we do in the kitchen daily…just the community thing. Then I got a lot of training from really good chefs and then being good at something creative makes you passionate about it. It’s like, what came first, the chicken or the egg? The passion keeps building as you learn more.
Where do you get your ideas? Are you a reader, do you look at Instagram, or what’s around you?
To be honest, I don’t read many cookbooks. I have a lot of cookbooks. I am probably guilty like other chefs in having a lot of cookbooks I don’t read, but flip through when I need a recipe. They are nice things to have. But I would say half of it comes from things I’ve seen whilst I’ve been a chef and then a lot of stuff comes from my imagination. My brain is always working over-time. As you build your career, you have more experience, your knowledge builds and it allows you to create more.
There are so many young chefs, and I think it’s wrong, they go straight to these three star or high end restaurants and I think you really need to do the dirty work first. I remember working in a pub with just one other guy in the kitchen for a little bit and just doing those jobs. It’s all experience. You have to start somewhere. You can’t go from learning how to drive to being a Formula One driver. It’s all about the journey. Through that you have the knowledge and through that, I think you become more creative.
When you came here…we talk about Melbourne as being the city of gastronomy, how different was it for you from where you had been?
A lot different. London is great. It’s a great place to learn how to cook and there are some amazing restaurants there. There is so much competition and so many restaurants who are doing similar things whether that’s good or bad, and sometimes be a little bit afraid of trying new things. Whereas Melbourne is so new and people are so open to everything that there’s not as much holding them back. Again, Phil is an amazing chef, but only really uses European techniques and ingredients, which is fair enough. If you start using something Japanese, people would ask if he was cooking fusion now. But when I came here and I worked at Estelle, we had a whole baked flounder on the menu with XO sauce and it was one of the best things I’ve had. A lot of the cooking there was European cooking, but we weren’t afraid to use unusual ingredients of Asian techniques to make things better. It’s about being smart. If something is delicious, why not use it? That’s one great thing about Melbourne; lots of people are doing cool and interesting stuff. There is a great standard of food here, lots of great restaurants.
Had you done much Italian before?
At The Square, we used a lot of Italian ingredients and did a lot of Italian things. We used to make gnocchi every single day. I don’t know how many gnocchi I made.
The gnocchi I had the other night was so delicious…melt in your mouth.
It’s good, right? But now that’s a completely different method to what I’m used to. It’s one that Stuart (McVeigh) does. He worked at The Square too and at other places and his gnocchi was perfect for what we wanted to do with it that night. But if we were doing, for example, some kind of seared off gnocchi in an emulsion with something under a piece of fish, we would use a different recipe because otherwise they would soak up all the juice. But it’s having experience as a chef to be able to say, we’ll use this for that thing and something else for another dish. It’s all about the learning.
I can’t wait to come back and eat properly, but I’ll let you get back to prepping for service now.
Listen here.
Lupo, 300 Smith Street, Collingwood