Martin Goffin

Hi Martin, nice to meet you again.

We've spoken before.

We have. Both for the podcast and also for Concrete Playground. It was January 2019. A lot has happened since then.

So, what are we talking about today?

We are talking about what's happened in the intervening years. I think it's always nice to revisit. You've got a whole product range now and you are opening a new place and it's Red Gums 10thbirthday. So all of that. I was also really interested to see that you've retained and re-certified the B Corp accreditation. When we spoke last, you were the only restaurant in Australia to have that accreditation and that is still the case.

Yeah, that's a big deal. We are the only restaurant in Australia because it is to hard.

For sure. I was speaking to the executive chef at Stokehouse and it sounds like they're doing lots of great initiatives in terms of minimising their impact on the environment. But that next step is to do all that paperwork and jump through the hoops. It's massive.

Yeah, it's huge. It's taken us about six months to renew the accreditation.

Why is the B Corp certification important for you?

It's something you can hang your hat on, isn't it? We talk the talk and anyone can talk the talk, but when it gets independently verified that you are doing the things you're saying, then you can hang your hat on it and say, yes, we actually do do it. A lot of people talk a lot about doing wonderful things, but where's the evidence?

I hadn't realized that it was all the way through to the way that you handle staff as well.

Waste, staff, water, food miles, grass fed instead of grain fed, everything. Not many people do it. We compost everything. In an industrial sense, we don't have a big compost heap. The last time we checked, it was only us and Port Leo doing that. The food waste is significant. It's what gets left on the plate, rather than waste from the kitchen. You go to chef school and you have to use everything, even broccoli stems get used. So it's not waste from the kitchen per se. It's literally what's been left on the plate.

Wasn't there a chef who made everyone take away their scraps with them? You couldn't go to her restaurant unless you brought a container for leftover food.

That's still only just saving them money. Because they're going to put it in the bin anyway. So you're really just moving the problem. You're saving yourself cash, kicking the can down the road.

I was just listening to a podcast this morning Kevin Bacon and Mark Ruffalo. Mark Ruffalo does lots of work with community and the environment. And they were saying that the two things are linked because even if we can cancel all carbon emissions, it comes down to people's values and that if you still have all those xenophobic, racist, not treating people correctly or valuing what we have, it doesn't really matter if we've got zero carbon emissions. You need to deal with that root value system. And I think people coming out for lunch or dinner and ordering up large and then not eating it all. That's a value, isn't it? So, what has been happening for you, I mean, we had that whole intervening period.

The Covid break? We were lucky I think because we came out of it. It was really difficult and it was much more difficult for Melissa than it was for me because she really steered the ship during Covid. She was the one who made the big push to doing delivered boxes, which was huge. On Father's Day, we had 700 go out during one of the covid years. It's a lot. Imagine the restaurant with every single table full of boxes. Then we had trucks come and pick them up.

Did you put a cut off on it?

We had to.

But 700! Even that seems like it would've been a really big challenge.

It was huge.

Did you imagine you'd get that response?

No, not really. You put these things out there expecting to get some sort of response, but that was enormous. But Father's Day is always enormous for Red Gum. It's the biggest day of the year, really. A lot of planning goes into it.

I suppose what Covid did allow us to do though was to develop the processes around doing delivery boxes and we've continued to do those. Even post Covid. They've evolved into a subscription box where every month we go to a different southern state. We cook famous barbecue dishes from those states. All the way from Kansas City, Missouri, to Virginia, to Georgia, to Texas. We'd stop off in each one each month. Having the ability to do that was developed through Covid. We didn't have those skill sets prior. But we navigated well. To be honest with you, it was really tough. A lot of staff went missing and reopening has been difficult because there's no chefs anymore. They all got sent back to their other countries where they're from. It continues to be a difficulty, that kind of legacy of Covid in terms of employment and getting employees. Its hard, really hard. But I feel like we've come out the other side. And not many people did. So we feel very fortunate that people connect to the business in a really significant way. We had people totally supporting us. Every week they were ordering stuff, you see the same names. Id look on the order sheet, and so-and-so had ordered again. You're really thankful for that because it was scary there for a minute. I didnt know if the business was going to survive that huge moment in time, but it has and it's great. And it's still great. Especially on a sunny day like this.

Absolutely. What was the decision behind deciding to make retail products?

They're nice. We'd been making them for years. As barbecue has exploded I remember cooking barbecue and making rubs in the early 2000s where people didn't know what pulled pork was, let alone brisket. Brisket wasn't even on the radar. We've had these rubs and sauces for a very long time. What that moment of Covid did for us was also about diversification. We had t think about what we could make or produce that people didn't need to come to the restaurant. They could buy rubs and sauces and then go and try and recreate it at home. As I said, barbecue has exploded. That's how it came about. Other people have entered the market doing the same thing. It's about making it happen. But I suppose what we've done differently to other businesses who have launched sauces and rubs is that we're building the facility to create them ourselves instead of getting another business to create them and label them and make them on your behalf. That's what a lot of other barbecue businesses do.

Do you do that here?

Currently we do it here at the restaurant, but we're moving to Seaford. Seaford's really about food production.

Oh, I see. But will there be a restaurant aspect to it?

Takeaway and retail. It'll be very much centred around the people who work in that area, which is huge. It's like a little city down in Carrum Downs, Seaford way. It's massive. So it's really going to cater for that crowd. It'll also have retail things there. You'll be able to come and buy whole briskets or sliced brisket or smoked turkey or smoked ham.

You have smokers there as well?

Yeah and we are getting a big one shipped from the US.

When you say, 'big one', I remember being here last time and I was reading through what, what we talked about and I remember being impressed at how big the ones you have here are.

It's a bit different. I bought an old Hickory, which is a lot less labour intensive than those ones. They run off logs, this smoker. But it's really time and temperature and away you go. I originally never wanted to buy one. But we decided to make life easier because I don't really need to prove that I can cook barbecue anymore. I've kind of proven that. And if you want to see the whole spectacle of cooking barbecue, you can come up to Red Hill. Seaford's much more production focused, making sure that life's a lot easier. This this is about theatre here and people seeing the meat being cooked and the fire and the smell and all that sort of stuff. It's all about theatre. Seaford's more about production, I suppose. Its coming along beautifully. Hopefully we launch in about three weeks time. It's big, 700 metres2. Red Hill is 900m2. So it's a similar size. But it's just an evolution. It's growth.

And Nick, the executive chef, he's overseeing both venues?

He will be.

How long has he been with you?

Maybe three months, four months. It feels like ages. He hasn't been with us that long. But he's great. Really good.

Is it easy, well, it seems like it's easy for you to be collaborative and share the load with your staff. But I was just thinking it's your baby and you did a lot of research and training to be able to open this, going to the States and all that. Is it easy to give over the reins to someone else?

Not really. No. Emotionally, it's difficult. I suppose you always want things created to the standard that you create them and when other people are involved what's the famous thing where you give a bunch of different chefs the same recipe and each dish will be completely different, regardless of there being a recipe. There's a little bit of that, but at the same time, if you train them well and you let them know what the standards are and you continually monitor what's going on, you can be pretty happy with what's being produced. But at the same time you've got to let it go to a certain extent. I've got so much other stuff that I need to do. I need to develop new recipes with the executive chef. We need to build a new place down in Seaford. You have to let it go. As long as you feel confident with the human beings youve got around you. But the first thing you should do is train other people to do your job. There's only one of me. If I get sick or I need to run away to do something, you need people to be able to take over. That's just the nature of it. You've got to always train people and if you don't train people and get them doing stuff, people get bored. You have to keep folks in interested in their jobs and continuing to learn themselves.

And I guess too with the subscription boxes, and focusing on a different state, you are also continuing to learn. How do you know about those different things you do? How do you research for those kinds of things?

I've spent a lot of time in the States. A lot of the dishes I already know and the places. You just jump online and figure it out. What's the most famous barbecue dish in Virginia? It's a Shenandoah chicken. You just figure these things out. It was epic doing that, to be honest with you. It was really epic to try and create dishes from every single state for a 12-month period and then write all the copy for it and then put it all together. When we finished doing it, there were high fives all round. It was a mammoth task.

Well, that's right because you can't really just make it up as you go along, can you?

No. And it's funny, you research each state, then you research the history of barbecue in that state because it's all different.

Yes. I can imagine you could go into a bit of a deep dive about some of those things and then fact checking.

Yes.There are books out there about the history of barbecue. There's plenty of literature.

How many subscribers do you have?

Oh, I dont know off the top of head.

It's a cool idea.

It's a monthly thing. We don't have a million subscribers. We'd like a lot more, I suppose when we ramp up. Because everything's getting done here in Red Hill I suppose we've got a finite capacity between the restaurant sales and making sauces and boxes and all that sort of stuff. I'd like to see it really ramp up when we open down in Seaford. Thats Seafords job to do all those things that we currently do in the restaurant that are non-restaurant related.Like making sauce or rubs or subscription boxes or smoking things for retail and wholesale and all that sort of good stuff. I'd like to see those things explode, but you can only start flogging them when you can actually fulfill the orders. That's the trick. We're not quite there yet, but we will be. That's the whole point in investing in it. We see a market for it. People are interested.

Do you think the French will ever really get into this American style barbecue?

Do you know what's really interested about French food is that southern food and French food are very similar. It's all roux based kind of dishes. Traditional or proper southern food is definitely French based in essence. If you look at Louisiana food, Creole food, its just spicy French food.

I hadn't thought of that. But that whole Acadia/Cajun, that was a French colony.

A hundred per cent. All the dishes from the south are somewhat French in essence.utbarbecue wise, I don't know, maybe.

You're not going to be empire building while you're over there?

I don't know if it would go down well in France, but I suppose it would.

Well, who knows? They're still fiercely proud of their own things. But it's interesting because of that flavour and technique link.

They're into the heavy cream in France.

Not so much in the south, that's more vegetables, more Mediterranean, I guess more olive oil.

But definitely all the stuff you learn at culinary school, it's all the foundation stuff and southern US food is as well. Interesting one. Maybe I'll have to open up a restaurant. I won't. I won't.

Nice. Well, congratulations on surviving and thriving.

We're super proud of it. It's gone from strength to strength really. We are employing really great people and keeping people in jobs. People are still turning up, which is amazing, especially with the interest rates and everything biting. You'd think that we'd see some sort of significant drop off, but we really haven't, which we really grateful for. I know lots of folks have. We need to be mindful that we're certainly privileged that people want to spend their money with us. It's a bit hard for folks at the minute.

I don't know if other chefs have this, but I've got this imposter syndrome thing going on where I dont know how it's all happened to me. And I struggle with it. Being British, you never expect good things to happen to you. It's always a bit rainy and cloudy. But it's really quite amazing. I'm traveling around talking about barbecue now as well. I do different events and speak about it. And I still have the pit master classes. People come to those and I often tell those people that I feel very humbled that they've come and listened to me ramble on about barbecue for three hours. It's quite amazing really. It's very good.

Red Gum BBQ, 87 Arthurs Seat Road, Red Hill