Jason Lear

Hi Jason, nice to see you again. What have you been up to today?

We are closed today but I came in to do a few little things to get ahead, you know; get some sauces on. It makes life a lot easier if you can get some of those things sorted out for the week.

That's really interesting because I don't think any other chef has talked to me about sauces and they are one of the most important things in cooking, aren't they?

Absolutely and obviously all our pastas and our ragus start from, right now, a basic white chicken stock and then it goes through to maybe a brown stock. The duck will be braised in something like that. When you are eating the dish, it takes 15 or 20 hours of that liquid being cooked and intensified.

I used to work in a suburban pizza place in Christchurch. They did food other than pizzas and I remember, as front of house, walking out the back door to take rubbish out or something and my apron caught on the stock ladle that was in the pot and I pulled the whole pot of stock over and the chefs were not worried about me and I was fine, they were worried about their stock because it had taken so long to get it to that point. It is burned into my memory.

But you came out unscathed?

I was unscathed, but not the sauces. I also had a Mexican friend who denies he said this and I don't know why because it is brilliant: sauces are like mothers, they bring everything together.

Absolutely. We have about four different animal stocks that we run through the restaurant so we constantly have something cooking on the stove for that and it spreads out through the whole menu.

You have worked in a lot of Italian restaurants but where did it all start for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

No. I'd love to be able to tell you the story of being under the table while my nonna was making tortellini and all that but no, I grew up on bangers and mash in country Victoria. It was just by luck that I fell into an Italian restaurant when I was younger. I purely had to work so I got in there washing dishes and it grew from there. For certain types of people it can be really contagious, the excitement of what goes on in the kitchen. I started there washing dishes and then I decided I wanted to do it as a career. So of all places I ended up at Caf di Stasio in St Kilda.

That's a pretty good place to be.

Absolutely and I had no idea either. I didn't know where I was for about a month, the institution that it is. It was pure luck that I got in there. All I knew was of course you make the pasta fresh and of course you get the whole lambs in and bone them all out. That was just the norm for me at the time.

Did you do an apprenticeship?

Yes. A couple of years washing dishes and working around and then finally got signed off at Di Stasio.

How amazing to start at a place where the norm is so incredible, they were probably filleting their own fish too.

We know now that not everyone does that. It was a really great place to start off. It is really rustic, really simple food, but everything is done, at least back then and I am sure it is today, everything is done from scratch. You learn the absolute basics of baking bread, making pasta, making a pie, butchering an animal, really fundamentals that in hindsight I was really lucky to be in that situation because most places don't do it from absolute scratch.

I know lots of places still do everything from scratch and I think these days it is about labour cost, can you afford to pay people in the kitchen to do all those things on top of cooking and plating up when you can get them in already filleted etc. It's a tough one.

It is a tough one.

I was just thinking about high end Italian, and yours is fancy Italian, can you go wrong with Italian food?

Absolutely. I'm sure you have heard people say that the simpler the food, the harder it is to pull off. There is nowhere to hide. The key with all old cuisine all started as rustic peasant food and it is a bit of a clich these days but the key is just phenomenal produce. Its not a secret. If you source that great produce and I am fortunate enough that the guys here at Luci let me do that, dont play around with it too much. Phenomenal produce really quickly translates to phenomenal food. It doesn't need to be over-handled and it makes our job so much easier.

How many different places have you worked in?

I just came from Grossi and before that I was at Pilu in Sydney. That was a really great experience.

So, that was a choice to go to Sydney and try something else out apart from Melbourne?

Yes. Its a nice life living down there on Manly, walking along the beach every day. It is a phenomenal restaurant. Have you been there?

I haven't.

The dining room is just big glass walls and you are looking out over the beach.

That sounds amazing. What is the food culture like in Sydney? Is it different to Melbourne?

I think so. Sydney people would say Sydney food is better and Melbourne people would say that Melbournes food is better, but we are really lucky in Australia that we have great food in all our big cities. I think it depends on the little pockets you are in in Sydney. You've got Ormeggio and some really great restaurants in that area there so I really didnt leave there. And youve got great produce in all those areas and I am lucky to work in these places. I think that division between Melbourne and Sydney has sort of gone now with the Internet. It is a smaller world with social media. I'd like to say most places work side by side these days.

That's a nice thing to say.

When I was at Florentino, Guy would go up to Sydney and do dinners with my old boss at Pilu so it is a small world. It's a nice life up there but I am really happy to be back home. I grew up in Victoria so this is my home.

And hotels, is that a different kind of beast to working in a restaurant?

Absolutely. I have been doing this nearly 20 years and I have always steered away from hotels.

What lured you here?

I saw the ad and it didn't say the Hilton, it said Luci, so I thought, great. Then I saw it was the Hilton and I didnt feel ready for that and I didn't want 'that' life. And they quickly calmed me down and told me they wanted Luci to run like a restaurant. So, there are two teams in there. One team takes care of the buffet breakfast and all that sort of stuff and then I have my own team that purely focuses on Luci. I'm not trained as an Executive Hotel chef and it doesn't really interest me. The world needs it of course but that is taken care of by a completely different team so it is really great. We do get the benefits of the Hilton but we are not bogged down by some things hotels can get stuck in the mud with.

I have spoken to Adian Li and Danny Natoli at La Madonna at Next Hotel and they also have Rina's at Armadale and there has been a spate of restaurant chefs going into hotel restaurants because it brings a different perspective and way of dealing with things.

It frees us up a lot because there are so many components to the Hilton and different food concepts so what we have been able to at Luci is to use the best cut of meat and trim it down to look beautiful and there is no wastage because we can send it off into other parts of the hotel, so all of the food gets recycled.

I am getting a funny image in my head.

Well, not recycled like that. We have a beautiful pressed lamb belly and we can trim that up to make it look really nice and all that trim can be used in a beautiful ragu with onions and that stock we were talking about before and absolutely nothing goes to waste. We were fortunate at Florentino that we could do similar things because we had so many venues inside Florentino, but most restaurants don't have that luxury so we are actually really lucky here.

How many on your team?

We finally have our chefs back up so I have nine right now.

That feels like a luxury right now.

Absolutely A couple of weeks ago I was running with four in there. It is hard to find the right people and be the right place for certain people as well. Everyone is looking for different things. We have managed to build a good team now and it is exciting for what we can do.

How do you go about deciding what to put on your menu out of all the possibilities from you repertoire?

Again, it comes back to that cliche of seasonality. I feel a bit lame saying that but it is just that simple. I am working on the summer menu right now and it might sound strange to some people, but I am just so excited about tomatoes. You will never see them in my kitchen in winter. A bad tomato is really bad. It starts there with the produce and then I look back a lot at traditional dishes, especially with having done my apprenticeship at Di Stasio, these classic dishes are classic for a reason. The cacio e pepe that is all around town these days is a great dish, but it goes back to Roman times. It is that old. It is pretty amazing when you think about it like that. And there is a reason for that.

It's so good. It is really comforting and delicious. Ok, so then you are putting a little bit of a twist on them, is that what happens?

I guess so. Once you do it for so many years, a lot of it gets bundled up in your brain and you almost run out of ideas because you have done so many things in the past. Some things I like to keep really simple. I am going to put a panzanella on the next menu and it is such a traditional and classic dish and I was wondering whether I should make a terrine, or how could I present it in a new or exciting way but I just want to throw it on the plate. Ill place it on the plate.

With tweezers?

Haha. But sometimes that is the best way to eat it.

So you have all those ideas in your head but do you look at cookbooks as well, or do you get inspired by Instagram or other things?

Absolutely. The resources out there are just crazy. I'm not 60 years old, but when I started my apprenticeship I was buying DVDs, I was buying books to try and gain knowledge, but now there is so much on the internet you dont even have to go to trade school almost. We are really fortunate. It is a constant evolution how you approach it. There are always things to do.

That's exciting, right? You were saying that what draws people in to being a chef sometimes is the excitement and the buzz of the kitchen, but obviously you must have a love of food as well. Is that what has kept you here for 20 years?

Yeah. I didn't eat a mushroom until I was 16 years old, or an eggplant. I didn't eat a capsicum. It just wasn't in my house growing up, so the initial thing was the buzz, the excitement that really got me and I thought, wow, this is really great. Then the food naturally starts to come into it and then I started to gain a real love for the food. I think everyone loves food, right? You just have to push that button.

Well yes. I never understand those people who profess to eating to live and not really being interested by food.

After a while, what I really love now is the craft, as far as making fresh pasta. I mean, that is a rabbit hole you can go down for your whole life, the different shapes, the different doughs and so forth, the different ways to handle it. Or a sushi master. These things take a lifetime to do. I have worked next to an old lady who has been making tortellini for 50 years and she can do it in 1.1 second. It was ridiculously fast. She leaves me in the dust.

It's the same when you walk down through China Town and see the women making the dumplings and the won tons and how they do that so nimbly. Have you been to Italy?

Yes. I spent a bit of time there a few years ago. That was really great. I think everyone should travel at some point.

Do you have a region you like in particular.

I spent a bit of time in Bologna and around Rome. Obviously with Covid I haven't travelled in a few years and I cant wait to get back there. To see the culture is really great and it is something you bring back home as well, even if it is subconsciously.

I'm a French teacher as well as a writer and I was talking yesterday with my Year 11s aboutle repas gastronomique, so the fact that the French meal is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list which really speaks to how integral food is to their culture.

I guess it is over time, they have been doing it for thousands more years than we have. We are building it now and it is from everywhere. I think thats a great thing.

Hopefully we are taking the best things from everywhere.

We are getting there. Australia really has great food in general, when you compare it to a lot of countries. We are a lucy country because we are a rich country. People can start to reach their goals. If they are not worried about famine, then you start to see greatness coming out. I think we are catching up really quickly.

I think you are right. Things have come a long way. We are on the world stage with everyone else.

I remember when I started cooking, you couldn't get black truffles grown in Australia and now they are everywhere. Some of our truffles are some of the best. A lot of things like morels and porcinis, they didnt grow before.

And what would your advice be to young people who are thinking about becoming chefs?

Well, our industry is a real spectrum. You've got someone who drives a plane and someone who drives a plane, you both take people from A to B but it's not really the same job. I think first of all, you have to work out what you want from the industry because there are jobs for everyone, whether you are at school and you need to wait some tables, whether you want to own a cafe in the future or whether you want to be the best chef in the world. All these are possibilities, so first of all you have to work out what you want to take from it and then I would say, if you want to succeed in those top fine dining restaurants, then obsession is really beneficial, to get obsessed. Choose what you want to do and then get obsessed with it, whether it is making pies, whether it is a baker, or a pasta maker, because the cuisine is too big to master all of it. I would suggest being laser focussed on it and also be the hardest worker in the room. That is really helpful. What we do in the kitchen, there are no magic powers. Anybody can do this, it is just about being a hard worker and all of these other things, they come along.

And can you balance wellbeing with being a hard worker?

It depends how hard you want to work and what you want to do. Really what I have found, to be at the top in any job

You have to put the hours in. But I guess these days we talk about wellbeing and achieving a balance. Can you be obsessed and achieve a balance? You can be obsessed for the right amount of hours a day and then have an outlet.

Absolutely. It is super important to have that outlet because it is not healthy for anybody to be working 60 hour weeks. Sometimes it is a necessity, it depends on your drive. But if you are working 60 hour weeks, make that time through the week to decompress, turn off your phone and it will prolong your career as well.

That's that whole sustainability thing. Its not just about sustainability of the ingredients you are using, it is sustainability of you as a person as well so you can keep going.

Really it's about repetition. Everything we do and you could probably say this about all industries, it is repetition; morning, noon and night.

When is the summer menu coming out?

December 1st.

Ok, so we still have time for the spring menu. What is your favourite thing on that menu?

One of the best things about spring is obviously the peas, the broad beans the asparagus. Hard labour, but they are so worth it to use them fresh. We have a crab asparagus custard at the moment which is selling really well with spanner crab, with fresh asparagus and snow peas. But then who doesnt love a good steak? We have the bistecca alla fiorentina. We are trying to spread it out there and keep everyone happy.

It was so good, the meal we had here, just dish after dish was so good.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. That's when we only had four chefs in the kitchen.

Really?

That was actually a tough week.

I was thinking when you were talking about that, and going back to my French class, we were reading about Alain Ducasse and he has the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower amongst others and he likes to make sure that everyone no matter where they are sitting in the restaurant, get their meals at exactly the same temperature so he has all these calculations for different timings to make that happen. That's obsessed, right? Its too much. Is it necessary? Do the diners even know?

That's it.

But he knows.

Exactly. And thats what it comes down to a lot of the time We nit-pick a lot in the kitchen and I think thats good. But we nit-pick at things that a lot of the time the customer wont realise. The risk there is that if you don't nit-pick, the customer will start to realise and holding ourselves to that standard is one of the hardest things to do in a kitchen. It is all well and good to come in for three days and make everything perfect, but if you can do it for three months, thats tough.

But thats like the layers of your stock, isnt it? It is putting in all the different layers so that the end product is a really delicious sauce and people dont know that it has taken 15 hours to get there, they just appreciate the goodness of the sauce. You need all the steps and the various pieces to produce the end product.

And when something goes wrong in a process like that, it can bring several dishes down. Thats the importance of that.

And I guess if something is going wrong with one person in the kitchen, that could bring the whole thing down as well.

It is a great job and a great industry and I am so grateful every day that I have found it, because not everybody loves their jobs so I just got lucky I guess.

Luci

472 Bourke Street, Melbourne