Daniel Hilton & Luke Tomuri

Conversation with a chef: Hi Daniel. I discovered Baba's the other day when I was walking past and I started looking through the Instagram account, and I read about you and Luke and thought it would be really great to chat.

Daniel: Me and Luke have been friends for a long time. So it's cool to just come and take the stress out of it a little bit and just do something a bit more fun. Sometimes it's just too stressful.

And it kills the love, doesn't it?Hi Luke, as well. Thanks so much for your time today. We were saying before, it's been really nice for you, Daniel, to come here, and it's a bit more relaxed than what you've been doing before. So what happens at Baba's? Can you tell me a little bit about what you do here?

Daniel: Max, who's the owner, he set up this concept. I've been in hospitality for over 20 years and I wish that I could have opened up something like this or gone and done it. Someone with no food background's gone and managed to make this happen. We were out for a bit of a walk one day and this had just opened up. It used to be Balderdash Cafe previously. We came in and Max was just so personable. Luke had just moved down from Queensland, was looking for a job, and it just managed to work out that he'd come in here and then I was working at the Graham and then it happened to work that both me and Luke could work together.It's simple sandwiches. There are so many sandwiches around Melbourne, whether it's Hector's and Sauls and Dan's Deli and all these places, but I think it's just doing something that's easy, that's fun for us to do, quick service. Lunches around here for office people are just mental in the orders that come in and it's just fun to come to work.We have music going. Max is probably the best boss I've ever worked with.

Luke: One of for sure.

Daniel: Anything you need, he just does it. He helps you, and it has put the love back into to what we do. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're not trying to be the best sandwich in the world. We're just doing something that's approachable. It's easy for us as chefs to maintain it and do it with fun and some love. I've said it every day in the last 6 weeks I've worked here, every day when we are walking home I say, we just make sandwiches and it's fun. And then we get to go home, have a social life at nighttime, which I have never done in in 20 years. I've worked every weekend, every night, and now I finish at 3 o'clock every day and I have time to hang out with my friends. So that's what's drawn me in. And then people like Max. There are no politics in this business. There are not massive amounts of staff working in this business where there's egos and people going behind people's backs to try to get ahead. We just come in, make some sandwiches, people love them, and we get to go home and just do it again. So it's pretty awesome. Im pretty happy.

But it feels like the essence of hospitality, right? It sounds like Max has nailed that; give people good food, but have it come from a place where you're all happy as well. I'm a really big believer in what's happening out the back comes through the food in some form. So is it focaccia that you're making?

Daniel: We don't make the bread in house at the moment. We have a supplier that I probably won't mention because he's inundated at the moment with supply. We're going through upwards of 200 loaves of focaccia, and we get six to seven sandwiches out of each of them. He's found a really good guy who's passionate about what he's doing there's a couple places he's supplying to, but to be one of those only places that are getting it, it just sets it up really well because the sandwich starts and ends with the bread.

Are they big sandwiches? Are they the ones that are really hard to eat?

Luke: The bread's soft enough that you're not ripping your gums and teeth out. There's been such a sourdough craze over the past few years. You bite into sourdough and you've got bleeding gums the next day or while you're eating. I personally don't really like it.

I'm the same, and I love crusty French bread, but sometimes it's detrimental.

Luke: That's right. They are big. They're decent sized, and I can't often get through a full one. But that's fine. I can take it home and have it for dinner. But it's good, man. It's a really good niche. It's just quick, fun, easy, good bread.

Obviously, if you're making so many and they're going out the door, you're doing the right thing.

Daniel: Well, that's it. We've played around with a few things. When Max first took over and Luke wanted to come and get a job, I remember we came in after we had lunch and Luke asked him if he needed any workers and told him he was a chef. Max said he didnt need chefs, he needed people who can make sandwiches. And then the funny thing was that Luke's then gone and got the job here, and then I've gone and got a job here doing this as a chef. One of my other chefs left the last restaurant I was at to come work with me here. And now we've got four qualified chefs in the kitchen when he thought he just needed some people to come in and just slap together some food. But I think the way that we've managed to take what we've learned over the last 30-odd years combined was to be able to come in and just simplify things and just get it done quicker. And then Max has now found that this may cost more money to have chefs compared to casual staff, but there's love, there's passion behind it, but then there's also just some thinking in what you do.

And probably efficiency and some of thosethings.

Luke: Absolutely. We expedite things. When I came in, we were putting each loaf in the oven to pre-cook it and then taking them out. But if you run out of bread, you get a bit of a rush, you run out of bread, you're waiting for bread to come out of the oven. But now we just put it on a flat grill. It takes 30 seconds, because it's charred. So it's just expediting things that I could do. When I brought Dan on, he just simplified that a little bit even more, and now we are pumping out sandwiches. We did 269 sandwiches. That's the biggest one, a month ago. Which is massive.

Daniel: Max thought that he'd probably peak at 150 sandwiches for a day. And now we're doing that and we're expecting to do days at 300 and onwards. We were approached recently to cater at the Formula 1, which has been really, really cool. We've been going through the logistics of that because, again, Max doesn't have that hospitality background of going into it. Bit of a Debbie Downer, but Ive said there are the things that can go wrong and these are the things you have to look at that, but it's all fun. There's going to be a lot of money involved with it, but there's also some stuff that you have to always think off the top of your head that you need this and it could fall apart really easy. You don't want to go to the Formula 1 and do amazing stuff here and then sacrifice what you're doing at the shop. But that's another thing we get to go and hopefully do, which is awesome. We're massive motorsports fans.

Luke: And that's the thing, they approached us as well. They heard from around the street that they needed to brand with us. That was their words, which is fantastic for a shop that's been open since June. It's not even December yet, and there's so much traction.

That's actually amazing. It says a lot. Going back to what you're saying about chefs making sandwiches. I think some of the simplest things can be the hardest. And if you're doing them well, to get something that's really delicious that's also quite simple, there's more that goes into it than we than we think. How did you choose what goes on the menu. What is Mama's Vodka, for example?

Daniel: Max did the menu before we had even started. Now that we're both on board, we get to do a menu change at the end of Christmas. We're looking forward to me and Luke being able to collab the full menu and change it up a little bit. I find a quite a few of the sandwich places, you get what you get. I love Hector's Deli, that's the higher end of sandwiches in Melbourne. But the menu is the menu. I'd really love to bring that restaurant quality in where we just change the sandwiches up seasonally. It's a bit more fun for us, but Mama's Vodka is the biggest selling one. Its Vodka sauce, chicken schnitzel, lemon, rocket, stracciatella, the focaccia, and it's the one we sell the most of.But again, there are four ingredients on most of the sandwiches and that's all they are, but they're massive. He has named a lot of it after his family. Max's mum makes the falafel at home and brings it in for us. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that she makes it at home, but she brings it in, and Max doesn't even know the recipe.

And the pizza by the slice?

Daniel: It's the same guy that does the focaccia. Basically, he does focaccia-style pizza bases that we use, and then we bring them in, we cook them, we top them, and we just change them out daily with what we want to do. It alleviates a little bit of pressure from the kitchen when we're in the weeds. That goes off as well. And again, the bread and the pizza base is what he does. It's pretty spot on. So that'll be a tough one if there's ever a time where that changes or if we get too big and they can't keep up with the volume, then there's other questions to ask about whether or not we go into another shop at some point that has the capabilities to do baking, that's another story as well.

It's always nice to say we make the bread as well, but that is another whole thing, isn't it? You do you need more space.

Luke: I'm not a baker. I don't want to be a baker.

Daniel: It's a specialty sort of thing, but we're looking currently at other shops as well at the moment, and we got to go out for breakfast yesterday, me, Luke, and Max, and drive the streets and look for some current venues that are up at the moment. Max straightaway, as soon as we started, just wanted to get me and Luke involved in ownership for the next ones. For us as chefs, it's never been an easy way in, to get into ownership in hospitality. I think hospitality is only now just getting to a spot where I think we're getting the wages that I think justifies the hours that we've done. And then for someone like Max to come and say we want to get you involved and giving us a way to thats feasible for us to do is next level because the hours that we do and the commitment that we put in as full time staff for someone else, I'd love to do that for my own restaurant.

Luke: You almost feel as a chef, you get to the top with all the experience and everything that comes with it, but you plateau. You get to a head chef, or exec chef, and then what's next? I'm going to look for another head exec chef. And so to have this in with Baba who says to us, we think of it as our shop collectively. That's crazy to me anyway. That's nuts.

It's also about sustainability, isn't it? In terms of yourselves, not the planet. To think about that as well. It's a really hard job to just keep going and being on your feet and cooking and doing stuff in the kitchen, but this is a good way of having that extra challenge, branching out into different things, and it's a little sustainability pathway as well.

Luke: It's a different way for us to grow as chefs and business owners now. Obviously, we're not used to this. We haven't done this before, we can progress our career further, which is amazing too. I've never thought of being an owner, although you always want to.

Daniel: I think the sustainability thing is the biggest part and the reason why I even made the change was I was completely burnt out. I probably lost the flame and had to reignite it two or three times over my career to try to find that love again. Luke explains it as my metamorphosis that I've gone through, which was the clarity to be that it's not about where I worked. I had so much pride, the last 2 years being the head chef at The Graham, it was an awesome place to work, and I absolutely loved the whole team there. But then it got to a point where it was just not fun to go to work and I was trying to bring the energy when I didn't even have it some days, and then it just got exhausting to the point where it's like I left there without a job to go to, because I just needed to find out what was next and luckily this happened to work out. And again, the sustainability of just being able to say yes to plans any night time. I can go get a membership to watch my football team play next year and know that I can go to every night game there is. I've never been able to have a social life or meeting partners or having girlfriends. It's just so hard in the industry we work in.

That's so true, and I think it's something that if you don't if you're not in the industry, you take that for granted. How crazy that you cannot even go and see a footy match.

Luke: Or go to your mate's birthday.

We talk about it and we hear it, but the reality of that for 20 years, it's full on.

Daniel: My family doesn't even ask me anymore to come to Christmases or to their birthdays, or we're doing this on a Saturday. I've always just been in love with hospitality and my job. It's always just what you need to do. We want to get to that point where we can retire and own some shops and do that stuff, but it doesn't come without the pushing now and the hard work.

When did it all begin for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

Daniel: I didn't. I was 14 and got expelled well, I got suspended from school, and my mum actually told me don't come home until you find a job, in a in a very mum way. I got a job at a, um, Laura Street Seafood in in Aspendale from a Greek family there that I still am in love with today and they're the biggest supporters. I moved to Perth. I got bullied a lot during school and I found it really tough and I found a refuge in a kitchen that was swearing and loud and fire and fast paced and just a complete bunch of misfits in a kitchen that just were there for the same added goal, which was just to get through work, do it, and whether they're in their fifties, their forties. I was 15 when I started in kitchens and it's been 21 years now this year doing this. Sometimes I think about even talking on a podcast and then doing these sort of things, I don't feel like I'm worthy enough to speak in the same breath as some of the people who've done what they've done in this city, but then to have given up well over half my life in this job there are different aspects that we get to see. I was in Perth and dropped out of school, worked in another seafood restaurant over there and came back over here and ran a few pubs. I was at the Leveson Hotel. I went to Canada for a few years in Toronto, and I got to exec chef a few restaurants over there at the time, which was amazing. I ran quite a few restaurants at Mount Buller, did some seasonal work up in Byron Bay. It's just been a fun ride. I've worked three or four venues now in Port Melbourne. Luke and I have been head chef and sous chef together. After I did five years at the Leveson as an apprentice, about 5 years later, I went back as the head chef, did another 6 years, and that was like a love story to like go back to where it really started for me in a proper commercial kitchen to run. Luke came on as my sous chef there and we got broken up because of COVID and he moved back up to Queensland and then I've just finished at the Graham and Luke had moved down from Queensland to come get a role with me there and then I went through my period of just being burnt out and then him working at a sandwich place and him saying, come make sandwiches. Here we are.

So Luke, you're originally from Queensland?

Luke: No. I'm from Wellington.

Oh, I was going to say I thought I heard an accent there.

Luke: I'm from Wellington. I actually I finished school, and I wanted to act. And then my ex-girlfriend went to the acting school in Wellington. So I was like, alright. I'll do something else. I decided to cook, threw my hand in that.

I have never heard that story before.

Luke: I moved to London at 20 years old, started cooking over there. All different aspects: fine dining, catering, a bunch of different things. And then I found that for me, the best way was to challenge myself, and I liked to bounce around and move around and have a fresh start, do a new mindset because to me, that was how I grew, individually and career wise. I've just continuously bounced around, basically. Ive worked with some great chefs, worked with some offered me a role out here, and I thought, sweet, why not? Queensland was getting stagnant. I had gone back to the same job three or four times because it paid well. I knew what to do. I could fit right in. So I took the opportunity to come down here. Obviously, I didn't end up working at the Graham with Dan. But I found a job just down the road. I hated it. So I was walking past here and asked Baba for a job, and said, I need a sandwich maker. But two weeks later I heard back from him, and he said to come in. And I was like, sweet. Here we are again.Fresh start, fresh mindset. Now all I'm doing isfun again. But that's how I grew my career. Just bouncing around London, Portugal, Canada, America, a bunch of places.

Is there a different culture in each country? Do you have to adapt, or once you step foot inside a kitchen, it's all the same?

Daniel: I think kitchens are kitchens.

Luke: Generically, it's the same. It depends who you work with. I worked with some terrible people, and I worked with some great people. You have to take that on board. Going into this job, going into this industry, you're not always going to have the best slice of pie.

What about the dining public? Is that different in different places?

Daniel: I think so. I think when I was in Canada and had restaurants, I think the people over there were a lot morereceiving than here. I think Melbourne is such an elite city for food, and I think that over the years with different TV shows that have come out and all that, it's made the general public very opinionated, which everyone's allowed to be. But it has made the job very difficult to do because I feel like you just you're not going to be able to please everyone no matter what you do. I do think in different places that I've been to, the general public can be slightly different.

I often ask chefs and it might have changed for you now doing what you're doing, but do you think about food 24/7?

Daniel: My entire algorithm on my phone is nothing but chefs and restaurants that I follow. I've always been a nerd about hospitality. When the 50 best chefs awards were on in Melbourne, I found out where the party was down in Saint Kilda and found a way to get in to meet Massimo Bottura and Heston Blumenthal. I just ran around and I just wanted to do that sort of stuff. I'm always looking through my cookbooks. I'm always watching whatever food stuff I can watch. I constantly think about food, but I think this last 6 weeks for me, I tried to set myself up some personal boundaries and work boundaries, which I've never done, which was to even say to Max, there's certain times I won't accept phone calls and, and I do that because I just found myself being constantly days off with phone calls and having to worry about this and that. It's part of the job, but I think for right now, it's not as much as it was in the past, but I'll always be a nerd about wanting to eat at places and know what people are doing and all that sort of stuff. It's slightly changed, but I think I'll always just be that that kid in the candy store when it comes to this industry.

Luke: Yeah. No. Not really for me. It's pretty easy for me to just shut off. I don't necessarily think about it unless I have to. Or I'm getting paid to.

If you do need to be putting together a menu or working on something or contributing to a specials board in the past, where would you have gone for that inspiration?

Luke: I would type generic things in Google and see what other chefs have done, look at photos, just get inspiration from that, have conversations with other people, friends in the industry. That's how I get a feel for my menu curating.

Daniel: I think I would just go to restaurants, but it's always so hard. Again, I've never come from a hatted background. I've never worked with some of the most amazing chefs who, but for me, it's going to restaurants to see what people are doing. I've always loved pubs and pubs have always been where I've loved working at and it's what I love going to do. I love going to pubs for a pint, watching the footy there, going for a good parma. But it really depends what you're doing. Inspiration's a tough one because it's so hard to emulate. If you go to a restaurant to see what they're doing, I can't go to Amaru and take what they've done and emulate it. They have got to that level for a certain reason. I can only read so many cookbooks or scroll through so many YouTube videos. But me and Luke will sit down and we've done a couple of specials here, and we're going to do another sandwich special this week, and it's different than doing plated food and trying to think of all these different elements, but we'll just sit at home and have a beer in the backyard and talk about what we want to run this week? And then we'll tell Max.

He's like, okay, let's do it.

Luke: It takes five minutes between the two of us.

I have to say though, we moved into Port Melbourne in July last year, and I've eaten at The Graham maybe two or three times with friends and so on. It was a great menu. I've heard you say a couple of times now about your level of I wouldn't even be saying things like that. I think you have definitely earned your stripes and you know what you're doing, Its different if you want to be chasing hats and those things that those guys are doing. It was an excellent menu and the food was super good every time I went there.

Daniel: I was super proud of what we did. Me and Luke have had many conversations. I've always had impostor syndrome in this business, and I think that there's a lot of people that would feel the same, and I think that's the hardest thing for me. I think I've never given myself any credit for what I've done because I haven't worked at this place or with that chef, but it's not what it's about. Even after 20 years of doing this, I still get caught up with not thinking I'm good enough to even come make sandwiches sometimes, but that's just a mental thing to try to overcome.

Luke: I worked in the mines in Queensland for a little stint, and that was a debacle. But after I finished that, my brother had opened a cocktail bar and they got a chef from Canberra. He teaches in Canberra, Paul Macnish. He's from England, and he has cooked for the royal family a couple of times. He's world renowned. He's amazing. He created a menu for the cocktail bar, very refined stuff, five or six things on the menu, but they were absolutely stunning. I learned that menu in a week, and then he was gone. And he said, mate, you have got it, I would encourage you not to stop. And hearing things like that when I don't necessarily consider myself in that way, like, I'm making sandwiches. But to hear things like that is really, really inspiring.

And possibly and probably and maybe even absolutely, in your industry, you don't get enough of that. I think it's a really hard industry for all the white noise of people who aren't chefs, who haven't done the years, as Ben Shewry would say, haven't done the years of training in actual food preparation to comment on what you're doing. We can all have opinions, and food can be subjective, but at the end of the day, I think there needs to be more uplifting and praise than there is.

Luke: To hear that, to hear uplifting and praise from him was amazing, really validifying,

For sure. And then I was just thinking too, having said all that, I spoke Philippa Sibley years ago. She said to me, at the end of the day, Jo, we have to eat to shit. If you don't shit, you die, lets not glorify it. But then there's levels of the goodness of the process.

Daniel: I think sometimes, we're not saving lives. We're not doing that. But I think there isn't enough praise in this industry, and I think some people just do rip us down even online with reviews. You can have your opinion. But if you're not a fan of the restaurant, you can also just not go back if it's not your cup of tea.

I absolutely agree. I think we need to stop giving ratings because this top-down critique that happens. I don't get it.

Luke: You have to compare. You know what I mean? People give you a rating, and then you think oh, but that place got a higher rating.

Daniel: I'm going to say, comparison is the thief of joy. Stop comparing yourself to everything else. If I can only do the standard of food that I can get to, which again, I think the menu at the Graham and other places were great, I can cook certain food, but my level has a pinnacle. Theres a point that I've reached and that's what I can do. And then the steps for the chefs that can go to other levels or below, we all set the stone for what the better restaurants are to have this restaurant here and this on a ladder. It's disheartening when you read something.

But then look at the counterpoint to that. I was just hearing that Heston spent a long time in hospital and rehab for a mental illness because of the toll it took to get to that point.

Daniel: I heard the same thing. I was just listening to his interview. He was doing 120 hours a week, and he said he was sleeping 20 hours a week when they were doing what they were doing. And it's just it's crazy that's what was expected of us to do.That's the thing, you put these hours in and then someone does this and it's like, well, why did I only sleep for two hours today, and I've still put everything into this and then I still get chopped down. You can't please everyone. I know we're not going to, and I know some people are going to even come here and have a sandwich, and they're going to compare it to going to Hector's or going to Saul's. But it's like, I hope all those venues do just as well as we do. There are sandwich places in the area that have had said negative things about us because they think that their place is better. But I respect all of what you guys do because if you post a special on your Instagram, I'm like, hell yeah, let's step up. Let's do something else now. Let's not compete or compare. Let's just lift everyone else up because everyone in this area is doing wicked food. This whole area thrives.

Luke: If we win, the whole community wins.

With all that in mind then, what would your advice be to a young person starting out in the industry?

Luke: Do it with everything you've got. That's not to say that you're not going to make it otherwise, but just put everything into it. Don't drain yourself, don't do a 120 hours and sleep 2 hours a day, but if you're going to do something, I think give it everything you've got. You never know what can come up or how good you can be.

Daniel: It's a tough one. I've had people ask me this question over the years and my answer has changed and there's always going to be that cliche answer of, don't get into this industry because from what I've gone through and being in the era, like the early 2000s and like I said, not going to birthday parties, not going to weddings. It was brutal. But then the people that I've met, from Luke to my best friend as well, Paddy, who's a head chef, hospo people that Ive worked with, I've made the best friendship group out of people that I've worked with in hospo.

Luke: There's a lot of sacrifice.

Daniel: There's a lot of sacrifice, but I do think it's worth it. And I do think this is the best industry in the world and I love what we get to do because even just coming out here and the customers that you meet and then all of a sudden you become friends with them because they resonate with what you do. I think that's the best. I think be prepared to work hard, and it is a very hard job, and it can get very stressful, but you get home at the end of the day and you just think, let's do it again.

Luke: The sense of achievement is big in this industry. You need to reap the rewards. Take a step back and enjoy what you've done, because otherwise you're going to kill yourself.

Thank you. I'll be back for Mama's vodka.

Baba's Deli, 295 Bay Street, Port Melbourne