Dan Hawkins

Hi Dan, lovely to meet you; another Dan in the Prince family.

There are many of us but there are only two main ones. 

It’s nice to hear another New Zealand accent. Where are you from?

I’m from Christchurch.

Oh so am I.

I’ve been in Melbourne for 15 years.

Did you do your training in New Zealand and then move?

Yes, I did my training in New Zealand and then what was supposed to be the little six month stopover to check it out, first time away from home, 15 years later, we are still here. 

15 years ago…it would have been a jump from Christchurch to here, but the food scene would even have changed here in that time.

Dramatically. I didn’t really know. I chose Melbourne because I didn’t really know anyone here…kiwis are dotted across the country, but I just decided Melbourne was the place I didn’t know anyone and I could have a fresh start and have a little look. I came out of the hotel scene. I was working for Crowne Plaza, the Intercontinental Hotel Group, so from a really structured environment into, I guess, really cut-throat hat-chasing high intensity kitchens. It was quite a shock.

Where did you come to first?

My first job in Melbourne was at Stokehouse. 

You had obviously really proved your mettle before you came.

I just picked up a few places and tried Stokehouse, Longrain, the kinds of places on my radar at the time. I ended up accepting the job at Longrain but then also getting a job at Stokehouse, but chose Stokehouse and really rocked that.

What position did you go in at?

Chef de partie. We were all chefs de partie and then there were sous chefs and head chefs.

Now you’re here and Executive chef. Do you have to do a lot of travelling?

I do travel a lot. Our hospitality base is spread across Victoria as far north as Nagambie and around St Kilda, Bayside. I split my time between Mitchelton Winery in Nagambie and the Nagambie Brewery and Distillery and the Prince Hotel. I live in Melbourne; my wife and kids are all here, but it’s a good drive.

It must be pretty nice to have a taste of regional Victoria as well.

It’s really good to have that diversity in the job.

There are head chefs in place and then you oversee them, so how are your days made up? Are you on the pans still?

I refer to it as more keyboard than chopping board these days, but I am certainly still passionate about food and spending time in the kitchen with the teams. I still work with the food and the guys and cooking is still a core part of the job.

Are you coming up with menus with them?

Absolutely. Let’s just take Dan Cooper, for example, the head chef here at The Prince Hotel. He is such a solid cook and a real creative mind as well. He is really quite educated in the space and style of food we are trying to achieve here. I think Dan might have mentioned this last time, but we work a little bit backwards from the way kitchens used to run. It used to be that the chef would come up with a menu idea and want to run that dish so you’d find that produce or order that lamb or whatever it may be to make it. Whereas we work a lot more closely with the suppliers, or the producers, the farmers and they say hey, we’ve got great carrots, so we come up with a carrot dish or lamb’s really good right now, it’s the best time of the year to be eating lamb, so how about you guys run some lamb dishes. So, we run a bit backwards in that regard. Working with the head chefs in that style, they take the lead with a lot of the food creativity, then we have a taste and a tweak and adjust and make sure it’s on our line, our brand standard.

I think it’s really interesting. Dan and I did talk about that and how some of the newer Parisian bistros are changing their style. It’s the way to go though, isn’t it?

100 per cent. When you think about it logically and the way things used to be done and now the modern way, it just makes so much more sense.

Winery menus would have to be different to city menus.

Definitely. We have the same core fundamentals. We like to keep things local where possible, both in the city and in the country. We look towards Victoria first then if we can’t find it in Victoria then we look at the southern states; Tasmania, South Australia for produce. It’s very much the same thing with the winery, but hyper-locally. It may be working directly with the farmer that’s growing vegetables up the road or talking to the butcher who knows the farmer who takes the animals to the abattoir; it’s all hyper-local and hyper-seasonal. It’s exactly what we do in the city, but intensified.

I really like that idea. I always like eating seafood when I’m by the sea. There’s something about eating good produce when you’re out in the countryside. 

Being here at The Prince we used to be able to take the seafood that was caught right here in Port Phillip Bay and cook it and serve it the next day or that afternoon, but the government put a stop to that.

It’s pretty difficult to do that. I often think of Fleur’s Place in Moeraki in the South Island and she was one of the only restaurateurs in the country to be able to get a licence to get the fish directly from the fishing boats on her jetty. That freshness is incredible.

I hate being an on the fence kind of person. I’m a massive recreational fisherman, I love my time outdoors so the ban in the bay, I see the value it brings to tourism, but I also see the impact it has on restaurants and fish suppliers. I don’t like sitting on the fence but on this occasion, I sat there for a while. It has been nearly 18 months now, I think why can’t there be the best of both worlds? Couldn’t we manage the quotas better? Or manage the expectations of the fishermen. You can have both, it just needs to better looked after. But it’s a huge other story.

Did you always want to be a chef?

No. I’ve done many things. I spent some time in the New Zealand Army. Straight out of school, I made cardboard boxes for Carter Holt Harvey. I did a lot of different odds and ends until I landed in the kitchen. 

It is a bit of a classic tale. I went to the Christchurch Polytech and I walked around on an information day and grabbed all the information, be that to be a chippie, a tradie, a mechanic. I left with stacks of bookwork to find a course. I walked past a building I hadn’t been into and I stuck my head in and there was a lady at the desk and she said, Hi this is U Block; Cooking. And I thought, Nah. As I turned to walk away, she had got up from behind the desk to greet me, so I felt obligated to have a conversation with her and I actually left there, signed up to a course that started yesterday. And here I am.

That’s full hospitality; she welcomed you in.

When she said cooking, I’d spent all day looking at being a builder, a mechanic, a tradie of some description but I guess I have always had an interest in food. I did home economics at school and spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my nana. We had a small garden and we cooked the vegies, but I never thought I would do something with that. 

What is it about food and cooking that has kept you doing it for this length of time?

The immediate attraction was the kitchen lifestyle; the environment is high energy, high intensity. It’s quite aggressive, not in an angry way, but you have to work hard, move hard and that really kept me wanting more of that. Then trying to take the food and do your job under those extreme pressures…in those days, 15 years ago, hatted restaurants were different places to how they are today. That kind of environment and mateship and almost military style, having been in the army, appealed to me. The food came second to that. I fell in love with the culture of the kitchen and when I started understanding more about the food and what I was doing with it, and how to create flavour and to take the food and put it all together in that environment and put it all together and I felt extreme pleasure at the end of the day that I had survived these huge services and had been able to create food that ultimately was going out and being paid for. The puzzle pieces fell into place for me and it was something really good.

That was the early days, the foundations days then that hunger to learn more and cook a bit more and cook a bit more and better myself. In my early days, I had that mentality to work for the best, with the best, to be the best. I was jumping around hatted kitchens to work with these really well known chefs to get a baseline understanding of other peoples’  cuisines and then here we are today, forming my style based on my own experiences and where I’ve come from.

When did you get to the point where you were head chef somewhere?

My first head chef job was … I was working at Longrain as a sous chef, and I left Longrain and had a conversation with Paul Wilson who was opening Newmarket Hotel with what was then Melbourne Pub Group and is our group now, we’ve dropped all the names and brands. I worked at Newmarket as a sous chef for around 12 months and through that position I was offered my first head chef role at the Albert Park Hotel in the same group under Paul Wilson. That was my first real step up to run a kitchen and it was a great kitchen for me in those foundation years of being a head chef. It was a really creative kitchen. Paul Wilson at the time was doing food that he called Asia to Cuba and it blurred the lines between Mexican and Roy Choi style, Korean streetfood. Having spent time at Longrain and Newmarket with the Asian and Latin American influence, it was food that I related to really well and could reproduce or do my own version of it really well. That was the first introduction.

From there I got a few more head chef positions within the group, then I was overseeing two kitchens, to three, to multiple outlets which is where I am today.

It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it. Good on you to get to the point where you are responsible for other people. I liked talking to Dan Cooper about some of the initiatives you have in this group in terms of mental health such as doing yoga and having access to the St Kilda salt baths. He spoke really warmly of his team and getting ideas from them. How would you describe yourself as a leader? 

That’s a really good question and I’m glad we get to bring some light to the topic. Mental health in hospitality has really been under the spotlight in the last two years. I guess for me, as a leader and trying to encourage mental health and wellbeing in the kitchens, when people are going on days off, I tell them to hang out with people who make you smile, eat food that makes you feel happy and do something that makes you feel good. For Dan Cooper that’s whacking a little white ball around green grass for hours, golf. I couldn’t think of anything worse. For me, it’s climbing up hills in pursuit of wild food, as in deer and hunting. For some people that’s not their idea of fun, but I do that and I always encourage our staff to do something that makes them feel alive. And when they come back to work, we want to know about it. It’s not just asking, I really care and want to hear what they did. Time outside work is immensely important. That’s one way we encourage work-life balance and a healthy state of mind. 

Like Dan said, our Prince Hotel team does engage in yoga classes and go down to the salt baths down at St Kilda. For about six months I had the entire team of Acland Street Cantina…our knock off involved going to the 24-hour gym. At midnight, there were six or seven chefs having a workout, letting it all out and knock offs were a protein shake. That was really encouraged. We would still enjoy a froth at the end of a big day but tt was about being mindful of limitations. We managed to keep that going for about six months before that summer period kicked in and we got rolled. 

I guess that’s another thing; we’re about to hit summer trading so we are having the conversations with the teams: do something to put things in place. It’ll be full restaurants, empty mis en place fridges, early starts, late finishes. We know it’s coming, so whether rit’s getting a little more exercise in your day, changing your diet to include more fruit and vegetables, anything you can do health wise that will improve you physically and mentally, we encourage that as well. We lead the way by making sure our staff meals are healthful, that we’re looking out for one another and noticing if someone is a bit flat. It may even be as simple as having a multi-vitamin or a berocca in the afternoon, noticing someone and saying, take 30 minutes, grab a coffee and have a sit down, catch you back for dinner and being ok about saying, take a break. Lots of chefs think they can’t take a break because there is so much to do, but we try and make that acceptable; we’ll get through it together.

I think it’s really important to have those discussions and be really meta about it. People know what they need to do to be helpful and I’m sure chefs realise it’ll be busy, but if you don’t have that discussion and reiterate that you have their best interests at heart, it is hard for people to come up with that. It’s easy when you’re working so hard, to fall into that trap of not exercising, grabbing the wrong stuff to eat, drinking as a means of relaxation. It’s enlightening that’s what you’re doing here.

Thank you. It’s not just a once off. We’ll start the conversation now and then we will say it again in two weeks and again in four weeks. 

Who brought that to the team? Is that something you’ve brought or was it already in place?

I guess collectively there is that sort of feeling here but a lot of it stems from when we were doing the knock off gym sessions. So instead of sitting around the bar drinking beers and doing tequila shots, we were actively making the decision not to do that and to do something else. When I saw the benefits of that, I thought we really needed to send the message home even more. 

It started at the Stokehouse 14 years ago, just before summer, they used to run a boot camp session with a PT for front of house, admin, kitchen, the whole building upstairs and downstairs, everyone was invited to these sessions down on the beach in October. It was a 4 week boot camp to get everyone ready for summer. It was so great as an initiative to see beyond the now, that the people I work for are investing in us as a team to be able to do summer better.

It’s a full on industry and an intense job and there does need to be those sorts of things in place.

Chefs like Dan Cooper and I, we have to lead the way. Our junior chefs and apprentices are the head chefs of tomorrow and the future of hospitality in Australia and if they don’t have the right foundations, then the future of hospitality is right now quite dire in terms of quality and commitment. Chefs are fuelled by the MasterChef dream, but the ones we see potential in, there’s no doubt they are the future of hospitality in Australia. So if we are not taking the right steps to coach and guide them and train them in a way that will benefit the industry as a whole, it will continue to stay troubled.

I think I said this to Dan as well, it suddenly struck me that we talk about sustainability in terms of food, but it’s about people as well.

It is, absolutely.

Now, what do you cook at home. I love the idea of you climbing up hills and finding deer and herbs. 

I have to admit, I’m a terrible home cook. I don’t think I’m alone there; I think a lot of chefs are the same. I’m a father of two and my wife is exceptional. She will have dinner on the table in 20 minutes. I take twice as long, I take twice as many pans. I put my tongs on the oven door. I’m really bad. If I feel like treating my wife, I might cook something that she really likes. She’s another kiwi girl as well. She was really rural and was brought up eating wild pig and venison. Now that she’s old enough to not have to eat it, she won’t eat it. I enjoy cooking wild meat. A lot of it has to do with the story behind it. If you think that it’s one set of hands; my hands, that have hunted, harvested, butchered, processed, cooked and eaten that animal, there is nothing that compares with it. It’s the same as catching a fish. There is no comparison. My kids really enjoy wild meat. I make venison salami sandwiches for my son’s school lunch and he asks for more, more, more. It’s great to be able to introduce that tot the family as well.

Where do you go to hunt?

There are a lot of places in Victoria. Pretty much any state forest east of the Hume all the way out to the new South Wales coast you’ll find deer. They are everywhere.

My uncle lives in Queenstown and my cousin and uncle go tarh hunting.

Lucky man. 

I remember someone saying to me that they were basically vegetarian unless they hunted the meat themselves because of the one hands idea and you know where it comes from. A lot of the time what we see in the supermarket or butcher no longer resembles the animal it came from, so we are disconnected from it.

Completely disconnected. And that’s just our society. I don’t say, oh you’re so disconnected from the real world.

No, we can’t help it, can we? We live in a city. We don’t all have access or means to go hunting. It might be a different world if we did. Thanks, Dan, for your story.  I really appreciate you sharing so much with me.

Prince Dining Room

2 Acland Street, St. Kilda

M?use at Mitchelton

4?70 Mitchellstown Road, Nagambie

Na?gambie Brewery and Distillery,

295 H?igh Street, Nagambie

P?hoto credit: Gareth Sobey