Julian Summer

Hi Julian. It was lovely to meet you on Saturday and it was such a lovely day getting the ferry across there and having mussels. I hadn't been to Portarlington before. Im really interested in getting a background of you as a chef. You told me that you had travelled around a little bit, so maybe we could start at the beginning. I think you said you were originally from over that way? Where did you grow up?

I was born in Melbourne but moved down to Torquay when I was four or five years old to start primary school and basically spent the next 15 years down that way. I worked in Anglesea. My first kitchen job was in a caf above the surf club there.

Nice. Did you always know you wanted to work in hospitality?

I can't say yes to that. I feel like its something I almost fell into. My first job when I was 15 was at McDonald's in Torquay.

And do you know what, a lot of chefs say they worked at McDonalds when they were younger, and it is good for the discipline and cleaning up as you go. I don't think its a bad thing to have worked at McDonalds.

Not at all. They really drill into you some good life skills; especially working in kitchens. Front of house, I guess as well. But that was a good steppingstone into proper kitchen work. I was there for about two and a half years and after that I picked up work in a caf in Anglesea. I was doing that for summertimes. For two winter seasons, I worked up at Falls Creek in 2013 and 2014. At the time, I was still just a kitchen hand, doing some cooking.

Was that to facilitate your lifestyle, so you could snowboard? Was it a means to an end at that stage?

Exactly. I think it was in my second season when I worked in the more fine dining restaurant of the company I was working for and meeting a bunch of chefs that had done the whole travel thing with work. I realised how good an opportunity you can have a chef; wherever you go, it's not too hard to pick up work. That led me to working towards my apprenticeship. So after a few years of being a kitchenhandand I was also doing a little bit of work on the side as a sur instructor and that is obviously very seasonal in Victoria and not something to rely on.

Where did you do your apprenticeship?

I ended up in a few places. I started in The Beach Hotel in Jan Juc in the pub there and after six months I scored a job up in Melbourne at a Spanish restaurant called Chato in Thornbury. I ended up there for roughly about a year and moved on to another caf and stuck around there for a few months. I wasn't really enjoying my time there and was looking around for more work and ended up stumbling on Noir with Pete and Ebony and basically finished my apprenticeship there.

Was it quite a shift to go from a Spanish restaurant and then a caf into somewhere like Noir?

I guess everywhere you go is different in one way or another. I guess it was a little more of a shift. Noir is fine dining; it was a nice change up. That was my first experience into the whole fine dining, degustation menus. The Spanish place did absolutely amazing food. The chef there, Maria [Echevarria-Lang] is absolutely amazing and what they are doing is very traditional Spanish fare. Noir was great and what inspired me to go and further my fine dining skills.

After I qualified at Noir, I moved to Perth and initially jumped into FIFO work in the mines. That was definitely something different. I lasted about two months there. Going from something like Noir to cooking food for the masses wasn't really something I was into and I ended up scouting around and scored a job at the top of my list of places I wanted to work at over there called Wildflower.

What's their speciality?

Their speciality is native Australian ingredients. They base their menus not around the standard four seasons of the year but around the aboriginal six seasons of the year. That was a great experience working with all these ingredients a lot of people have no idea exist in our own country.

I love the sound of that. Could you tell me about some of those ingredients?

Yeah sure; herbs-wise we used a lot of things like Geraldton Wax, which is a flower but off the stems they have a bunch of pine needles that are edible. We used that for a lot of things like making oils, using it to flavour sauces. Also river mint which is a very strong, pungent, almost spearminty kind of flavour; native thyme, native basil, sea parsley which grows all over the coast.

Were you foraging for these or was there a supplier?

We did forage for a few of those ingredients and some came from a supplier.

How great. I'm all for that and I do think it is so important when we talk about seasonal eating to recognise that whatever land you are on might have different seasons and I think that's a great thing to have done.

For sure. There was an la carte menu, but most people came in to dine on our tasting menu. that was definitely another step up. The kitchen was full of professional chefs and there were a lot of great mentors there.

It sounds as though you've had some really great experiences in kitchens where you've had some good mentors and worked with good head chefs and owners and I dont think that is always the case for chefs.

That was my goal; once I figured out that this is what I wanted to be doing, I just wanted to be working in the best places I could get into.

How long were you there?

I was there for just over a year.

What level in the kitchen did you get to there?

I was basically another drone in the kitchen, but I worked my way through every section in the kitchen. That kitchen was based around different sections on entres, so one section would be based around only one or two dishes. That was because of the intricacy of a lot of the mise en place, or prep that had to be done for each dish. It needed that extra amount of labour and hands on to get it done. There were three sections in larder, and I worked my way through there, I went to the pass, I was on the grill for a while. We didn't have a standard grill in there and so part of the job was lighting the fire in the morning and keeping it going all day.

Wow. Ive heard thats a real art in itself; you have to watch the coals and move them around and get a new hotspot and all that.

Exactly, making sure you have the hot coals under the chargrill because if i's not hot enough, you're not going to be able to cook food. It was just another thing to worry about.

And after Perth did you come back to Melbourne?

After Perth I got a job in Japan and worked a snow season over there. I wasn't really doing anything special. I moved on to doing breakfasts for in-house guests in a hotel. It was almost like a little holiday for me after working at Wildflower.

Do you like Japanese food?

Oh yeah of course, I love Japanese food.

So you got to snowboard as well as make breakfast.

Yes. My day consisted of getting up, starting my shift, doing service from 7.30 until 9am and then moving on to cooking the staff lunch and then about 10 or 11 o'clock, I was done for the day and I had every day to go out riding. I was really lucky to pick up a role like that in a place like that.

I think more and more we are seeing that chefs are not just workhorses that can work 16 hour days all these days and I think its really important to treat it like any other job and you doa really great job when you are there but you also have your down time and that just sounds like you absolutely maximised that. And, as you say when you talked to those other chefs previously, they showed you how you can travel with your job and have a good lifestyle and I think it's important to have a lifestyle as a chef so that what you bring to the plate when you are rested and feeling good is all the better.

Definitely. It can be quite hard to have a lifestyle outside of cooking. It's very hard to have a social life because it generally takes up a lot of your time. Finding a place like that, even if it's for the short term, it almost felt like a little holiday.

So what happened after Japan?

I was there until Covid hit. At the start of March I broke my heel and so I came back on the 17thof March and was picked up from the airport and went straight to the airport, which was 11 days after I broke it, by the way. I went to the medical centre in Japan and they wanted me to get surgery over there but that didn't end up happening because my insurance company wanted me to get the surgery done back here. So by the time I got back, they decided not to operate so up until Pier St. re-opened, I was basically recovering from my injury.

How did you get involved with Pier St. Obviously you already knew Peter and Ebony from Noir, but what happened to get you on board with Pier St.?

I got a message from Pete when I was in Japan asking what I was up to and if I was looking for work down this way he would be happy to bring me on. In between the first and second lockdown in Melbourne, we met up and had a coffeeand a chat about things and he offered me the position and I took him up on it.

It's a position with a bit of responsibility?

Yeah, it is a bit. When we sat down for that coffee, one of the things he said was that it's still his food, which is the same for Noir. He has a head chef in there that does Petes food because Pete is the man with all the experience and knows whats going on. But I'm slowly picking up more of the role as time progresses. It has been good because I haven't had a position like this before and it's a great learning experience.

Absolutely and within a context where you are really well supported and obviously they trust you and think you can do the job which is always good backing.

Definitely. I was really flattered to have been asked because I have a lot of respect for both of them. It meant a lot to be able to take this on.

And what an amazing part of the world to be working in.

Its beautiful, isn't it?

It's a cute town and those Portarlington mussels we had were delicious and it was hard to go to anything else on the menu, but do you have other favourites you like cooking on the menu?

The other two mussel dishes; the Thai mussels and the mussel chowder, I'd say are winners. On our breakfast menu we have a best seller. It's an avocado and feta with poached eggs. It's kinda like a smashed avocado without smashing the avocado. It has a saltbush pesto and a whipped feta. It's definitely a best seller and if I was to come in for breakfast, that would be my choice.

Nice. And now that we're out of lockdown and people are moving around a bit more have you been really busy?

Yes. We are kinda weather dependent. Since Melbourne opened up, weekends have been really busy. When I came out and saw you, it was probably the quietest Saturday we had had for a few weeks (it was overcast and a bit rainy). But usually from Friday night through to Sunday it is busy. We have already had days bigger than pre-Covid.

Amazing. During the week is it more locals coming down?

We do have some regulars. A lot of people would be coming from Geelong and other parts of regional Victoria There's a noticeable difference between weekends and weekdays. This weekend the ferry started running from Thursday to Sunday so we might see more of an influx on Thursday and Friday daytimes. Once Summer hits; Boxing Day onwards, it gets quite hectic down the coast.

You fell into being a chef and now you have had all these great and quite varied experiences. What is it now that keeps you wanting to be a chef? What is it about cooking that appeals to you?

That's a tough question. It feels like you get to a certain level and you just want to keep pushing yourself and seeing how far you can go. The knowledge is endless. We are still learning how things can be done, prepared, cooked. There's a never-ending hunt for knowledge in this industry. You can never know it all.

That's right. That makes it exciting.

Exactly. Its very exciting.

How do you get your knowledge? I know you've worked with really great people, but are you someone who flicks through Instagram or have you got cookbooks, or do you watch tv shows about food? Where are you getting your input?

The majority of it comes from chefs I have worked with; that would be my main source. I just recently picked up Noma's Art of fermentation and I really want to play around with fermentation. We used quite a bit at Wildflower. I guess cookbooks, not so much tv showsI don't really watch a lot of tv. Most of my knowledge and inspiration comes from chefs I've worked with or just looking at nice restaurants or cafs and looking at what they're doing and whats going on and what's popular at the moment and what can be done.

Thank you, Julian. I'll let you go and finish what you were doing and all the best for summer and for your heel recovery.

No worries, thank you, Jo.

Pier St.

Portarlington