Daniel welcomed me into the 'red room' at Bang Bang's newest venue in St Kilda. Although it's only been open a few weeks, Bang Bang St Kilda already has a following. As executive chef and now a full partner in the Bang Bang group, Daniel oversees three restaurants and two additional kitchens across Melbourne's southeast. His chef career has come full circle, as he met his wife in St Kilda and they travelled to London to work for two years before coming back to Melbourne and moving to the Mornington Peninsula with their young family. Daniel still loves spending time in the kitchen, but his focus is now on maintaining consistency across the venues. Bang Bang's menu is Pan-Asian, drawing from Japan, Thailand, and India. Inspired by his travels, Daniel refines the menu while keeping beloved staples intact, striking a balance between authenticity and modern execution.
Conversation with a chef: Hi Daniel, Thanks for your time.
No worries at all. Come and sit in the red room.Have you been in here before?
No, not yet, you've only been open two weeks, haven't you?
Yes. Two to three weeks.
You live down on the Peninsula, don't you?
Yes, I live on the Peninsula, in Mount Eliza.We've slowly worked our way down. I met my wife here in St. Kilda. We decided we wanted to buy a house and we ended up in Mordialloc and then Covid hit and we thought, we may as all just scoot on down the peninsula like everyone else. We've got a couple of young kids, so we like the idea of country living, but not it's still connected to the city.
There's a lot happening on the peninsula.
Heaps.
And you're executive chef over three venues?
Yes. This is our latest. Our original was Mordialloc. Then we opened Hampton last year around this time, but we also have a couple of kitchens that we lease as well. We're in the Hop Shop in Frankston, which is a tap house. They're friends of the legacy partners of the business. They said they didnt want to run the kitchen, and did we want to do that? Its basically Bang Bang at the Hop Shop. We just operate the food. It's just a nice little plug-in for us. It's easy to run. You just put a couple of chefs in, write a menu and you don't have all the semantics of service. So two kitchens, and three restaurants at the moment.
Have you overseen that many venues before?
No. I've been around that mark. Again, the legacy partners had a cafe in Mordialloc, Main Street Cafe. They had Sunny Boy Beach Club. We had another one called Mama Francas, which are all either sold or closed now. I've come on as a full partner now, and we are just concentrating on Bang Bang.
Of course, I was stalking you online to find out about you.
There's not a lot there.
No, there's not a lot there. Did you step away from Bang Bang for a while and were you at Audrey's in Sorrento? And now you've come back in as a partner?
I was always a partner at Mordialloc, 5%. A small partner. Then I got an opportunity to go down and relaunch the Conti, which I thought was going to be really exciting. It was like the shiny new toy on the peninsula. I never really cut ties with the partners to the Bang bang business. I did six months of that and then went back to the partners and we decided to focus more on Bang Bang, and that's better for my work life balance.
It feels like you have an affiliation with the ethos of Bang Bang and you've invested in it, which is great. As Executive chef, are you still on the tools?
Not as much as I used to be. But I still get in, especially in every new shop we open, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen training and week in, week out I spend one or two shifts across all the venues just making sure that things have been sort of done my way. Because otherwise things slowly slip a little bit. I need to be there, to an extent, but a whole lot less than I used to be.
You never stop learning it because our industry’s so transient. People come in and out of kitchens, and rarely are they in the same kitchen or the same job for more than five or six years. People are grabbing those skills and, and moving them around. Someone might come into my kitchen as an apprentice and go, oh, what’s that? Okay, cool. That’s a great technique. I’m always learning as well. You never stop learning, I don’t think. ~ Daniel Poyner, Bang Bang
The food at Bang Bang, how are we describing it?
Pan Asian. When we opened Mordialloc eight years ago it got the Asian fusion label, which really never sat well with me. So when I came back on and we decided to really market ourselves as Pan Asian because I'm not doing French Asian fusion stuff. I call that confusion. It's more I'm trying to do authentic flavours and authentic dishes in a modern way.
So it's from a range of regions across Asia?
We've got India, we've got Japan, we've got Thailand, we've got a little bit of everything. Notmixed together, but elements of them throughout the menu.
It's a cool fit out. It feels Pan Asian. What was here before?
It was called Chicha Cevicheria. Before that it was Luxembourg. The marble bar was original and the kitchen, all the bare bones are original, but we've fitted it out with all new shelves and lighting and we've completely roofed it.
The backlit bar is beautiful.
It's gorgeous. It's a real feature. We really pride ourselves on our fit-outs to complement our offering.
Does each venue have the same menu?
Yes they do. We toyed with maybe mixing it up a bit, but for the sake of simplicity and training and running multiple operations, it just made more sense to keep it the same. And then it helps us get buying power.
How did you get into Pan-Asian flavours and ingredients? Were you at Ms. Collins?
Years ago.
During my Googling I saw there was some kind of competition in 2015 and bloggers wrote about it. It was you against Daniel Wilson.
Daniel Wilson from Huxtable. And then he did Huxtaburger.
But you won.
Yes. It was a good night actually. Daniel Wilson's an unbelievable chef and he wasn't so much the inspiration, but his menus really showed me what you can do with Asian cuisine. He was a pioneer of that sort of Modern Asian deal. He's such a good chef and a good bloke.
I saw him fleetingly when I was at Maison Batard recently because he consulted on the cheese burger there.
Is he the executive chef for Kisume?
Yes. You were inspired by Daniel, but how do you then explore the cuisine? It's a vast array of cuisines.
Me and my wife have done heaps and heaps of traveling. We've been all over Asia, in South America, Europe, but, but Asian food is where our passion, well mine and my wife's passion, lies for the most part. Its the best. Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, it's unbelievable. Its so complex. European food is fantastic, but it's built on fat and it's heavy cream and butter, which is unbelievable, don't get me wrong, but I've always found with Asian food, it's just so much more complex. You're working with the sweet, salty and spicy and the ways to layer that up, there are a million possibilities. Everyone does all the Asian cuisines differently. I've always loved it.
I like to do cooking classes when I go to other countries and I was in Rajasthan and I did this amazing class. I felt like it went on for hours and we totally our money's worth from this wonderful woman called Shashi who was in Udaipur. But also having done a class in Vietnam, there's a lot of similar spices as you say and ingredients, but what they do with those is so different.
It can change the flavour profiles vastly.
So then as a chef, if you are travelling and you're tasting all these different foods, do you reckon you collect that data differently to non-chefs?
Absolutely.
Do you take notes?
No, I'm not a notes guy.
You have a palate memory?
Completely. I'll find something that I really love and then I'll be like, wow, what was that? I'll go and study up on it. I might buy a couple of cookbooks or consult or find something online and just work out how to make it. I'll then try and master that and then turn it into something. Then I have to try and put a lens over that and go, oh, how could I take that and drop it into Bang Bang. Because it doesn't always work.
That's right. And then that's also the thing too, isn't it, to be able to explain to your staff how to replicate that en masse and to time. This is why I do this podcast because I just find chefs so fascinating. I love cooking, but then when my mind goes to what you do in the kitchen to make things come out consistently, multiple times consistently, and then all at different times. Actually my mind is blown.
That's the hard bit. It can be really easy at home, in the kitchen when you control everything to make something amazing, but then to replicate it and then consistently make it amazing. That's the hard bit. Then you fold that over three kitchens and then you have to really think about what you're trying to do.
That's why I guess you're saying that you need to go around the kitchens because people need reminders, don't they? This is a really bad comparison, but I'm a French teacher and my students at the moment are learning a French poem, and, and they go off on their own and they memorise, and then they start bringing in their own pronunciation. And we have to go back to basics. I guess you've have to go around and go, okay, you've been cooking this dish, just remember the original,
Correct.
Does that happen?
Absolutely. As you know, you speak to chefs all the time, it's high pressure. There's always time constraints. You have to get this done, this done, this, done. Then chefs cut corners. They'll always try and work out a quicker, faster way to do it. Sometimes it's commendable and you'll go, okay, that's a great way of doing that. Let's change the recipe, it might not be a bad point to cut, but sometimes you go, okay, nah, pull it back. Let's remember what Ive showed you, I've showed you that for a reason. Sometimes it's, it's innovation and sometimes it's detrimental.
I think it's amazing because I feel like I'm not very practical. A few years ago, I volunteered at Fare Share where they make meals for people who can't easily access food. We had actual chefs showing us how to do the recipes. But even just with the chopping of vegetables, there are so many hacks that chefs have that are so impressive and really practical. It'd be great if we could all know that, but we can't all be chefs.
You never stop learning it because our industry's so transient. People come in and out of kitchens, and rarely are they in the same kitchen or the same job for more than five or six years. People are grabbing those skills and, and moving them around. Someone might come into my kitchen as an apprentice and go, oh, what's that? Okay, cool. That's a great technique. I'm always learning as well. You never stop learning, I don't think.
Do you think, and this is a controversial subject, and I'm all for people being paid what they deserve to be paid, but do you think some of those wage costs and the limit on hours and so on has stunted some of that learning? You don't have to answer that. I just imagine that it must be harder these days to learn a lot of those skills like filleting or butchering, all those kinds of things when you don't have time.
It's a hard one. It's definitely a hard one. I am all for chefs getting paid fairly. And I'm probably not an advocate for the hundred-hour weeks that we all used to do. But that wasn't just a badge of honour that you wore as a younger chef, you did do all that training. You stayed through your breaks to learn. So yeah, there's a bit of an element of that.
I wonder these days, some of the shortcuts are watching YouTube videos but then you have to be discerning with those, don't you? It's a whole new world, isn't it?
Well there's also the innovation as an executive chef, putting the menus together, I have to think of ways to minimise relying on skill and still delivering a quality product. So instead of getting whole fish in, I might get a fillet as an example. That saves me time. Back in the day, you used to get a whole fish in and someone might be just filleting fish all morning, but I just don't have the time or the skill anymore to do that. So that's one example of a heap of ways that we minimise that reliance on cheap labour that we used to have.
Just to go back to the menu, how do you choose a menu if it's Pan-Asian? We've got all of these regions to choose from. How do you decide on your menu?
Its actually getting harder. There's only maybe a third that I'll change. We change twice a year. We do an autumn winter, and we do a spring summer.
Is that because people know what you do and they come back? So you have to keep it the same.
Yeah, there's only a certain amount of dishes that'll change now and we've probably got a half a dozen to a dozen on here that don't ever come off because we've tried to take them off and we get backlash. You're never going to please everyone, but I try not to upset our loyal customers. But we try and keep it fresh enough for everyone to be still motivated and excited about delivering the food. But we've got regular customers that are coming in for the pork belly and we dont want to upset them. It's getting harder and harder and deciphering what, what changes and where it comes from. But I try and get overseas at least once every two years somewhere to an Asian country, and then at least come back with one or two dishes from that trip. I'll try and eat as much street food usually as I can wherever I am to try and find something cool.
Is there anything you wouldn't eat sometimes, you see these pictures of street food and I'm moderately adventurous, but I see pictures of spiders and things.
That's not for me. My wife would be pissing herself laughing right now because I am actually really picky. I don't really eat offal, spiders, bugs. Generally, if I can see the food that's being cooked, I'm happy with it, as far as freshness goes. The thing is street food's usually really fresh. Because they don't have the refrigeration if it doesn't get used on the day, it generally goes out. So I'll try most things, but not offal. No bugs, Im not a pate guy. And I'm not a blue cheese guy. My partner gives me so much shit over it. She's like, you're a chef, you're supposed to love all this stuff.
I'm just surprised by how many different vegetables there are possible vegetables that we never see in Coles or Woolworths. There is no variety of vegetables to the common consumer. Do you like to use a few different vegetables, Asian vegetables?
I love going to the markets in Asian countries and seeing the weird and wonderful, not just veggies, but so many fruits. There's heaps of unreal veggies out there. A lot of it you still can't even get here. I'll come back from Asia, I'll look at a recipe and ask my fruit guy, can you get me this? And he's like, it's not in the market. If it's not mass marketed in Melbourne or this country, no one grows it.
The Footscray market and Preston Market are pretty impressive markets in terms of what they offer. I need to make a much bigger effort to go to those markets. This cooking class I did in Hoi An, we walked around the market first and it had rained, so we were wading in water. There were whole pig carcasses, and I wondered whether that was ok, but it is. I did a cooking class here at Brunswick Kitchen and Tracy Lister, who runs those, lived in Vietnam for 13 years. She said, that the thing is in those markets that beast has been killed that morning and there's a fresh batch in the afternoon and it all goes. So we have these big things like the meat's out, and it's not refrigerated, but it's a whole different concept of how they buy and consume and cook and everything.
We hold our meat and fish a lot longer than the countries that haven't got all the refrigeration, it's in and out in one day.
Cooking just feels natural for me. I’m in my zone when I’m in the kitchen. I even feel like I spend a lot of time on the computer and admin these days, but I’m the happiest when I’m standing in the kitchen in front of a chopping board and cooking. It feels like home to me. ~ Daniel Poyner, Bang Bang
Where did it all start for you? I read that you grew up in Merimbula.
Good work. I grew up in Marimbula, born in Pambula Hospital. I grew up in and around kitchens. My mum worked in kitchens a bit when I was a kid. I'd kick around out the back. I was always interested in what was going on in kitchens and I always thought it was like the dark arts. It seemed like the chefs were pirates, and I thought, wow, this is cool with knives and flames.
Tattoos.
Tattoos. If you think about Kitchen Confidential and Anthony Bourdain, he talks about a bunch of nearly criminals working in there. Thats what I thought it sounded like when I was a kid. I started washing dishes at 12 after school and on weekends and I'd see the chefs and thought these guys are cool and I just got it stuck in my head that I wanted to be a chef. I came to Melbourne at 17, worked at a couple of places on Fitzroy Street and it didn't quite work out for me. I was just a bit young to be living away from home by myself. So I went back to Merimbula and completed my apprenticeship at a cafe there. I took a year off to work on a fishing boat for some adventure. Then I came back to Melbourne and kept cooking. I met my wife working at Riva. Riva was cool and hip-hop and happening, Then we spent a fair few years travelling, worked in London for a bit and ended back up in Melbourne town.
Amazing. What do you love about being a chef and working in hospitality?
Cooking just feels natural for me. I'm in my zone when I'm in the kitchen. I even feel like I spend a lot of time on the computer and admin these days, but I'm the happiest when I'm standing in the kitchen in front of a chopping board and cooking. It feels like home to me. I can't do the twelve-hour days anymore on my feet. My back packs it in and it'll take me two days to recover.
I think that's an area that I think's really important to recognise is the sustainability of a chef role means you do have to look for other ways of still maintaining your passion for cooking. It's always concrete floors. We say, oh chefs are on their feet, but you are literally on your feet all day. I'm a teacher and I would say I'm on my feet a lot, but I'm not on my feet all day and I don't even know how you manage as chefs. I think it's astounding.
I always said when I came back from a holiday, it really hurt for the first week, its sort of like training, you just get used to it. But I think as I got older, my back starts to pack in a bit, but in my early-twenties easy you could do fourteen-hour days back-to-back, no problem.
You do rise up with the ranks and youve done the time, it's your privilege to now not have to do 12 hours on your feet and to pass on the knowledge and to still have some time cooking, which is great. Do you cook on your days off?
Yeah. Love it. If I'm home, I cook. Only because, and my wife's a really good cook as well, but I'm more efficient and cleaner. My wife is a great cook. She just makes so much mess.
It's really interesting isn't, I just spoke to Cameron Tay-Yap at Pebble at La Roca. He was talking about working at a place overseas where twice a day they cleaned everything. My experience is watching The Bear and where they cleaned crevices and the wheels on the bottom of work benches and that everything was completely cleaned. It's such a discipline, isn't it, that we just don't really understand as home cooks. That level of cleanliness is astounding.
We did the same thing when I worked at Circa. I worked at Circa for six months. I did a stint there Ashley Hicks, but that was a twice a day. We cleaned down, hosed down after each service. Really clean kitchen. Really regimented. I think a lot of those fine dining places, have more staff and more cleaning. It becomes innate after a while.
You probably clean as you go.
It's all about working tidy and neat. So if a chef's got off-cuts all around him and it's messy, it gives me anxiety. I would be like, tidy up your section.
Can you still be surprised by flavour?
Absolutely.
You have a young family, but do you get to get eat out very much?
Not as much as I used to. I think that'll change a little bit more. I've got two young kids, so our last eight years have been pretty much just at home. So, not as much as I'd like to.
Do you still look at cookbooks to be inspired, or do you tend to go online?
Cookbooks online, and like I said, when we travel, I draw a lot of inspiration from that. We take our staff out for inspiration dinners and that sort of thing. I try and nab an idea here or there. But hopefully it'll change a bit more now our kids are getting a bit older and we can start taking them out.
Are they good eaters?
One is just, we've just got him eating him everything we eat. Yeah. My daughter is fussy as hell. It's funny, my son was really, really picky for ages and then all of a sudden, I think about five or six, something just clicked and he just started eating everything. It just means you only have to cook one thing instead of multiple meals.
So maybe with all that in mind and the span of your career and what you're doing now, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?
Stay inspired. And even in today's climate, I think hard work always beats talent. There are a lot of people out there with a lot of talent, but the people who just put their heads down and work the hardest will get recognised and it'll open up doors for you. The other one I think is, you have to try and leave your ego at the door when you're a young chef. You learn more when you're open to getting advice. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, but I think if you can just leave your ego at the door and just be happy to learn from people, then you'll become more successful later in life. You have to pay your dues. Unfortunately that's with every trade and job in the world. Your dues shouldn't be bullying and 80 hour weeks, but there's dues to be paid still.
Bang Bang St Kilda, 2/157 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda