Matilda Smith

Matilda: You're a bit of a Francophile, I seem to remember.

Conversation with a chef: That's absolutely right. I was reading that your mum is a Francophile.

She is. One of mum's high points of her whole life was when she got all three of her adult children in Paris to celebrate a white Christmas together. It's probably about eight years ago now or something. It was amazing. We were all living in different spots at the time.

Where does that come from? Does she speak French?

She learned French in high school and then I think she forgot about it for a lot of her life. And then we kids learned French at high school and I think it just reignited something in her and she remembered it and she really took it and ran with it. She joined the Alliance Franais and she goes to France quite often. She's one of those women that's very all or nothing. She's definitely all in with the French.

And it was your mum that suggested you go to the Cordon Bleu?

It was, yes. I was living in Sydney and I was studying at Uni. I was studying Arts. I was pretty much doing a I don't know what I want to do with my life degree. Academia just wasn't for me, but I was just there because I didn't know what else to do. I had a part-time job waitressing, and I was always cooking in my spare time. I've done that since I was a little kid. I wasn't having an existential crisis or anything, but I was probably just drifting a bit and floating. Mum said, figure out what you like; you love cooking, you could actually do that as a job. At school we were never asked are you going to go to Uni, it was more, what are you going to do at Uni?

Yes. I think it's good to recognize that kids all have different things that they're into and not everyone should go to Uni.

Absolutely. Coming back to France, I feel like in France trades and professions like that are really valued, like a chef or a baker. I remember when I was there, you know how we have MasterChef, they had

'France's Best', and they had France's Best Hairdresser when I was there. They had competitions, it was televised and I thought it was great that trades like that are not looked down on. Here if you tell your parents you are going to become a hairdresser, I'm sure parents would be asking, don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer?

There are a lot of artisanal trades over there as well that are really heroed.

I hope that keeps going. I hear that a lot of patisseries over there with wages and ingredient costs and all that, even local bakeries are now apparently buying in par baked frozen croissants because they can't compete and there are staff shortages and all that sort of

thing.

They did pass a law on that, so it can only be called a boulangerie if the bread is baked on the premises. It's a Viennoiserie if it's brought in from elsewhere, so you do know when you're going in. I've spoken to a few people that have gone through the Cordon Bleu course and a couple of them went to Paris to do it. Mariana Chedid from Brulee in Port Melbourne and Jonathan Camillieri at JC Patisserie Boulangerie in Abbotsford. It astounds me how much you learn in a short time. Nine months doesn't sound very long to come out and be so proficient.

No, it's not. I was a mature age student. I think I went there when I was 27, so I was very deliberately fast tracking myself because I didnt want to be a mature age apprentice for three years. I wasn't getting any younger. I think really the most valuable part of it, and where I learned the most was the six months of industry placement that you have to do at the end.

So is that after the nine months?

Yes. There's a Basic, Intermediate and Superior course, where you go to class, you do all your theory, which is like the Australian government TAFE courses where you do your Food Safety and O, H & S and then you do a theory class and then a practical. You learn the history and the science behind puff pastry or whatever it is. Then you go and watch the chef make it, they do the full demo, and then you go to class and you spend your four hour lesson or whatever making the item that you've just seen. It gives you a really great base knowledge of how to make these things and the science behind it. It's a pretty good course, but one of the things they don't teach you is working with a sense of urgency, how to scale things, how to multitask. In the real world, obviously you are never going to spend four hours making one Galette des Rois. We have placement students who come here and I always say to them, you've done a really great basic foundation on how to do your puff pastry folds and how to technically do all these things, but one of the things we're going to teach you is how to work in a busy environment where you've got a few things on the boil and how to set up your workflow so that you can work in an efficient way and how to be a good employee. Its not just about making cakes and things, but it's how to be a professional in the environment as well, how to respect the team around you and take it seriously. Bring a notebook and have a certain level of polish, all those things. I think the industry placement is where you really get the value.

Pastry is so precise and you can't just be throwing in things as you do with cooking savoury dishes.

What do they say? Cooking's an art and baking's a science.

Yes! What made you go the way of pastry rather than general chef?

I enjoy cooking. I like cooking meals for the family and playing around with savoury as well. But, growing up pastry was always my go-to. I'm not sure if it's just because my whole family has a bit of a sweet tooth, but we always had the Women's Weekly cookbook and you could always tell which recipe we liked because the page had smatterings of chocolate sauce. One particular tray that mum used to make chocolate slice for every school fete had hundreds of indentations and cuts and slices from six years of school fetes. Baking was a my sister and I used to do together. I guess that's probably part of it. And also I'm vegetarian, so maybe that has something to do with it. Theres a butchery section if you do the cuisine course.

That would be hard if you are vegetarian.

A hundred per cent. Now I eat dairy, but when I started at Le Cordon Bleu, I quite consciously didn't eat gelatine, but I've since become more relaxed on that just because of necessity from what we make and what we produce.

So you were in Sydney and you were with the Merivale Group?

I studied at Le Cordon Bleu and did my industry placement at Merivale in their 'Meetings and Events,' they called it. They did everything from corporate lunches and breakfast meetings through to weddings in the Ivy Ballroom and food festivals that had 5,000 people, a whole range of things. I got a really varied experience there, I suppose. There were little bespoke dinners where you did a plate-up dessert for 12 people, and then there were big catering gigs. I definitely learned a lot. It was a pretty crazy company to work for at a pretty crazy time. I think coming from that, I'm very conscious of how much the industry has changed for the better generally in terms of hours and what's expected. At the time I probably didn't realize just how crazy it was. We had our little crew and we were pumping out some serious product and volumes and there were four key pastry chefs in that section. It was like a little family, like war buddies who came out the other side together. We've discussed it in the years since, and a couple of them have started their own business. But looking back on it now, you think, oh my God, how was that the norm? How did we do those hours? I think the industry's changed a lot for the better. It was unsustainable to expect people to do that.

It is crazy what people have had to go through. Some of the older chefs I have spoken to express the idea that to get good at anything you have to put in the hours. But there is, as you say, the sustainability side of things as well. You can put in the hours, but you need to be paid for them.

Absolutely. I don't think any business would be sustainable paying overtime rates that youd have to pay if you are going to make chefs do shifts like that. These days people keep an eye on things a bit more. The industry has been through a funny few years with all of the wage things that have happened and crackdowns on all that, and with Covid and so much happening. It's really been through a rough few years. A lot of people wanted to get out. We have been running our bakery section for just shy of two years now and there were heaps of people who wanted to be bakers, and then there was absolutely nobody for about a period of six months when everybody had got out. I feel like people are returning to it now and we've got a really great little core team at the moment.

Was it always your idea to have your own place?

I think everybody romanticizes it a little bit. I'm sure if you spoke to any chef who was studying at Le Cordon Bleu, most people would say, oh, I'd love to have my own thing one day. Had I sat down and nutted out a business plan and figured out exactly what that would look like, absolutely not. I remember when I was working at a cafe in Sydney when I was putting myself through school and started talking about the idea loosely, one of the chefs who was working there at the time said, you're crazy. Why would you buy yourself a job? Why would you do that? I thought, wow, okay. I definitely wouldn't have started anything if it wasn't for my partner Ben. He is definitely the business one. He did a Bachelor of Business at Uni. He's managed restaurants before. We are a little bit yin and yang. He's like the general manager and I'm like the head chef. But no, I definitely wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for him. He's been absolutely instrumental and I think he's the one with a bit of vision as well. When we got into hospitality, wages were low, hours were crazy for a woman if you wanted to start a family or anything. There was just no way to really progress your career or make it work or have any sort of growth if you wanted to take some time off and have a family. I think starting our own thing was a bit of a gamble and work-life balance is a term that's thrown around a fair bit. I'm not saying that I have it right now, but I think to be able to take some time off, figure out what hours you want to work, figure out what's important to you with two little kids, starting our own thing – and we're still getting there – but it has allowed us to be a bit flexible with that. I can make my own hours. If Friday morning is swimming lessons, Ben and I can both be there. I sort of always have to be here, but we can control it a little bit at the same time, if that makes sense.

You are really successful. You've got these three places, this is a massive place and you are doing wholesale as well as having customers come into the cafe. I haven't been to the Camberwell shop but I imagine it is as busy as Richmond.

Camberwell has a similar vibe to Richmond. There is pastries, bread, toasted sambos coffee, a few little tables and no dining menu. This is definitely our flagship and now our headquarters, where all the pastries are made.

Lots of places pop up. Lots of people do croissant on and lots of people do bread. Why are you so successful?

I don't know. That's a tricky word as well, because this is a beautiful space and we love it, but I think you can definitely have the illusion of success as well. We are getting there, but we've got huge debts to pay for the bill of this. We are making it work, but it's a hard grind. Ben and I have both learned through running this thing for the last seven years and through Covid and through growing pains, as a chef, but as an owner, you have to be comfortable making some really tricky decisions. Just because a place has a big beautiful big cafe, there's lots of layers to success as well. We've made some real sacrifices if I'm being brutally honest.We wouldn't have been able to do this if we weren't so just violently stubborn in the first three or four years of running this thing and literally doing everything that we had to do to make it work.

Maybe what I mean is that you do have a following. People really love your pastries and bread. Richmond's always really busy. I guess that's what I mean.

Richmond was our original home. Ben and I are both 'people people' to a certain extent. We've got a lot of customers who have been with us since the start. It sounds cheesy, but those people have seen us grow up, theyve seen me rolling pastries while I was eight months pregnant with my first daughter and Ben behind the counter. They've literally seen us grow up as a family, as a business. You pop something up on Instagram or something, and they're always the first ones to comment and say, we'll pop in. We do have a really loyal group of pastry lovers and it's something that we really appreciate. I don't know if it's just from being there and being present in the business.

Good product though as well, and I think the fact that you do keep innovating, but you've got your consistency with the croissants and those base products that you do. I'm always fascinated by the laminating thing with pastry. When I spoke to Mariana at Brulee, she was talking about needing a certain kind of butter. I guess that must change with different weather conditions. I suppose it must be temperature controlled in that room.

I would say we have the most over spec-ed air conditioning in the whole city.

The weather is so crazy out there at the moment and so humid. You'd need to be aware of all that.

We've got some great air con in there and obviously we work with temperatures, but also the textures of things. I think sometimes people think you have to keep your dough as cold as possible and your butter as cold as possible, but really it's not about the temperatures being the same, it's about the textures being the same. With lamination you essentially want to encase your butter in your dough and then roll it out, so it needs to be uniform. So rather than temperatures being the same, the texture and consistency of the two products needs to be the same. If I'm teaching somebody how to laminate for the first time, we always say the butter needs to be malleable. I grab a sheet of the butter and we bend it over the side of the bench, and if it can bend over the side of the bench, that's how we check that. As a newbie, that's how you would check, or how our team would check that the butter's malleable and able to be rolled out without cracking. Thats my little tip for teaching them to laminate.

I guess it must be different in France as opposed to here because of different flour and so on. People make really great bread and baguettes here, but it's never the same as a French baguette in France. It might be about the water as well.

You're probably right. With three ingredients: flour, water, salt. But even speaking about butter, apparently the cow's diet can change what the butter and the cream is like. We use Australian milled flour. We don't get our flour from France, we use Australian flour. With the change in seasons, you have different amounts of protein and gluten. It gets quite scientific. You can really nerd out about it. They send you a sheet, which has a full breakdown of sugars and gluten and all of the things that as a baker you would need to know to be able to get as consistent a result as possible across the change of seasons. It can get very sciencey,

I hadn't even thought about that and I've thought about measuring things precisely. But I hadn't thought about it to that extent. That's quite fascinating.

When you're thinking of your different seasonal or even different monthly menus, where do you get your inspiration? Is it books, is it online? Is it just from your knowledge of how things work?

I usually like to try to think about the customer and have a little bit of something for everybody. If we're designing a new menu, we usually like to have, what is it my old head chef used to say? Something for him, something for her and something for Nan, I think it was. I would usually have something a little bit chocolatey and decadent and then I'd have something fruity and lighter and then something a bit classic and really accessible. It is the idea of thinking about everybody who might come in. We try to be a family friendly place. We like to be inclusive, so something for everybody. I usually work on that. I would definitely start with seasonal fruit. Then something a little bit decadent. We've been trading for seven years now, so I have an idea of the sort of style of things that our customers like. People really like classic flavours done well or a modern version of something that they're really familiar with. They love it if you take a candy bar or a classic dessert or something like that and put a bit of a spin on it. They're always super popular flavours. We are creatures of habit. People like something familiar that's done in a different way. Also staff and customer recommendations as well, what they've liked in the past or if somebody sees something, they went out for dessert somewhere.

Do you have notebooks where you write ideas?

I have thousands of things scrolled and drafted and little sketches and drawings. They are fun to look back on.

Do you reckon you'd do a book one day?

Oh, I don't know. Maybe. Why not? I would love to do that. I do quite like teaching. I like teaching new staff members. We've talked about doing classes in the past, which we haven't finalised, but it's something I would like to do. I like explaining how and why and going through things quite methodically. So maybe a cookbook would be a good idea.

With all that in mind, and from the point of view that, as you said, you were a mature age student when you started, so you had a bit more life experience, what would be your advice to a young person – or a mature age person – who is thinking about becoming a chef?

Gosh, that's a good question. For anybody who's starting out in my kitchen, I always tell them that they're going to get out of it what they put in. Especially to the students that we have, or any apprentices, to take it seriously. I tell everybody to bring a notebook. In the kitchen and probably everywhere in life, people will invest in you if you return the favour.I like to think we've always got our staffs backs because they've got ours. I'd say you'll get out of it what you, what you put in.

Penny for Pound

7

Inside Morris Moor precinct

Monday to Friday 7AM – 4PM Saturday & Sunday 8AM – 4 PM

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CAMBERWELL

387 Camberwell Rd, Camberwell

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Saturday – Sunday 8AM – 3PM

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RICHMOND 418 Bridge Road, Richmond

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Saturday – Sunday 8AM – 3PM