Mia Coady-Plumb

Conversation with a chef: Hi Mia, thank you for your time. It's lovely to be back here. I came a couple of weeks ago with a friend and we sat exactly in the spot that we're in now. I love sitting up at the bar and seeing kitchen teams at work. It's really lovely to be able to do that here. And otherwise it's a very beautiful, cosy dining room setting here. Does it seat 35?

Mia Coady-Plumb: Inside, yes. We seat 42, including outside.

You opened Magnolia in 2023.

Yes our second birthday is coming up on Bastille Day.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Magnolia and the food you're doing, so I thought it was so incredible, all just the flavours were so delicious and layered and kind of surprising as well because they're quite classic French dishes. And I don't like that thing with a twist but I guess with a different soupon of something.

I always call it irreverent French food. I have such a long and storied history with French food, but I think, especially in Australia, Australians as French food consumers expect it to always be really classic stuff and I can't tell you the number of times someone's walked in here and we haven't had a steak on the menu and they say, where is the steak frites or the duck a l'orange? I have lost count of how many times people have asked me for French onion soup, which is funny because we have that little gougere with the caramelised onion and the comte cheese and to me, that tastes like a nice little French soup. It's a selling point for my staff as well. Where's the French onion soup? Not on the menu, because Chef doesn't make it. But eat that, it'll hit the spot.

I can't even believe that people would come in and ask you for something when it's totally your decision what you have on the menu.

Exactly. But I think there's that expectation that all French restaurants will have the same things. There are plenty of places in Melbourne you can go to have really classic traditional French food. Sorry, that this is not it, but also not sorry because it is still French food. If you look at all of the gastronomy wine bars in Paris that are so trendy, so ahead of the curve. They're not doing classic French food. You can definitely go to small regional places around France and eat that sort of thing, and that's a beautiful thing, just like in Australia. You wouldn't travel to the middle of Australia and ask for fresh seafood, would you? There is certainly that expectation that things should always be the same. That's not how food works. That's not how cuisine works. That's not how culture works. You should always be interested in the history of something. You can certainly play homage to it, but doing the same thing all the time is really boring.

It's interesting you say that about France. I was in France last year and I stayed in Paris in the 10th arrondissement, near the Canal Saint Martin, and there were so many of those little wine bars where they were run by young people who were really bucking the norm and the food was amazing. I had a delicious dinner at Les Vinaigriers, and I just. I went by myself, and I just sat there and I think I just had this stupid smile on my face the whole way through because the food was so interesting and they were doing some natural wines and things as well. I thought that it was great because France has led gastronomy, but at the same time has been quite traditional for a long time as well. So it's great seeing some of those new places coming through.

Last time I was in Paris, which I think was about eight years ago now, I went with my mum, and we stayed in the Marais, but just spent every day going to a new place, trying a new thing. That looks interesting, let's go in there. That's how we found Le Verre Vole in the 14th. I had some chef friends that I'd work with in Australia that we visited and they gave us lists, and we ended up at Le Baratin and I had a sweet bread the size of a steak. My mum had started that trip as a vegetarian, and by the end of it, we had eaten sweetbreads three days in a row because she could not get enough of them. She said it was one of the best things she had ever eaten. I told her she was the worst vegetarian ever, but I loved it. It meant we could eat everything on the menu. I had the most glorious time. I remember when I lived in Sydney, almost 15 years ago, and they had that small bar movement going in the CBD and lots of places like that popped up. It is actually one of the most fun ways to dine. Tiny space, intimate, the stuff are really well knowledgeable. The chef's cooking interesting things. There's interesting things on the drinks list, the wine list, and they just want to show you a good time of the things that they know and love. That was quite formative in what is now this year, a 20-year career. A lot of that you can see in the DNA of this business. When I'm not working and I have the time, I love throwing really silly dinner parties at home. I have a giant 10-person dinner table. And it always ends up like a dinner party. That was very much in the basis of this place. We want it to feel like you are at a really good house party, a really good dinner party. You were having a good time, and it was hospitality. People were being hospitable and taking care of you and making sure you were having a good time.

And certainly that was what I experienced when I was here the other night. I was interested to see it was a slightly older crowd.

We definitely have that. And some of them have come in going, where's the French onion soup? I want a steak frites. I normally pick a more secondary cut and serve it a bit bigger, so it could be shared between two people, because the sauces are always really rich. We get some older customers that are like, "No, I will have a half kilo ribeye covered in bone marrow by myself. I'm like, "Okay, sure, you can. You're probably going to feel a bit ill, but sure, alright." But then they've been really great regulars. They love it, which is really nice.

Some of these ideas that you have, I mean, it's a silly question in many respects when you talked about a 20-year career, but where do you get your inspiration? Where do those ideas come from?

Partly from my training. I worked in a lot of fine dining in Sydney two and three-hatted restaurants. Partly from my mum's side of the family, which is the French part of the family, from little town called Gensac in Nouvelle Aquitaine and going back through the family history because it was all a little bit of a mystery as we decoded that side of the family tree. A lot of it is just research. Those eight cookbooks on the shelf over there are eight of probably about three or four, maybe five hundred cookbooks. I don't know, there's eight bookshelves as big as that, that take up one whole wall of my house. And then Im blessed; all my friends know, and family and theyll say: Here's another cookbook, I found this in a vintage shop, look at this. I just spend a lot of time researching and trying things, things Ive cooked before. It hasn't always been exclusively Western food I've cooked. I've cooked South Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, and obviously there's colonial ties with Western Europe and a lot of those cultures, but then there's also a lot of crossovers where they've adapted, especially Vietnam and France and Vietnam and in South India. They've adapted a lot of recipes that colonists brought with them, and it's really been interesting to learn that. I think that's also helped with the way my palate has developed. In a lot of Western style cooking, add seasoning, add acid, it's not just that in those other styles of booking. It's add spice, add heat, add, sour, add umami, add freshness of herbs, add all these different components. And that's absolutely available in Western style cooking. I just don't think people realise as much that you can add all these elements and create something that's more nuanced and balanced that is not there in a lot of recipes.

So when you're looking through the books and doing your research, are you a note taker or do you file it away in your head or how do you process?

It's a bit of both. Of course I've got a whole stack of notebooks and there's probably about 20 different lists going on my phone of various recipe ideas. Sometimes it'll come out of nowhere, sometimes I'll see something or an ingredient. We work with a lot of small producers, farmers, fishermen, small butchers. Theyll say, Ive got this thing this week. Do you want some? Yes, I do. I'll think about all the different things that I like all the different ways that will relate. There are a million scrawled chicken scratch notes, lists on my phone, all sorts of things. Sometimes it does just get filed away. It might be a good idea, but it's not in season for another four months. It's not a neatly organised system, but it definitely works. And a lot of it as well is that I have some really talented and experienced chefs working with me in the kitchen. And I'll say something, out of nowhere and they'll say, yes, this one time I did it like this, and we should try a combination of this or, I'll order one of those in tomorrow and let's play around with it. I get really good feedback and really good criticism from these women that work with me, who have also had their own experiences and very long careers. It's really nice because I've worked in a lot of kitchens where if you have an idea, it's shut down immediately or it's stolen or it's stupid or whatever. It's nice that I've got these really supportive people around me, as well as my business partner. I can say, I think I'm going to put this on the menu next week and it's going to be annoying because it means you have to carry four things over to the table and pour sauce on top. And he'll say, "Go for it. Sure, yes, that sounds great. If that's the way you want it, go for it."

That's great as well. It's so interactive when that's what's happening at your table. I love that.

Absolutely. Everyone loves a bit of theatre, and that's why the open kitchen works. Everyone likes watching.

Do you make everything here, apart from the bread?

Yes, unfortunately, those two ovens are the only ovens we have. And they obviously get used quite a lot. I'd love to have the time and energy to make my own bread, but also, Iris the bakery is down the road. Tom makes baguette just as good, if not better than the stuff I had while I was in France. We love to support another small local business. We do that as much as we can. And then some of the cheeses we get from incredible cheesemakers from both France and Australia. There are some things that I'm absolutely capable of making of but don't have the time or space to. But we'll go out of our way to seek the things that we think are the best. We wouldn't ever put anything on the menu here if we didn't have faith in it. But yes, apart from that, everything's made from scratch.

That mackerel tartare we had was so delicious, and I think I was imagining mackerel as an oily fish.

There's actually quite a number of fish species in the mackerel family. The one you had was Spanish mackerel and it's still an incredibly oily fish, but it's more akin in texture to kingfish or cobia or even a really big snapper. I know a lot of people are really frightened of oily fish. I love them. I could eat anchovies and sardines and mackerel all day. Bonito, delicious, but I think people are quite afraid of fish tasting like fish. And I can understand because it does get pretty stinky when it starts to turn. And people equate that to it being bad fish. We've had a lot of really good feedback about that dish. I had a man on Saturday night sitting in our back dining room after one of the staff cleared his plate, who said, can you ask Chef if she can make me a bathtub full of that, and I can just get in it with the chips and eat it? That is the most glorious response. It's only going to be on the menu for another week or two here before I change it. But I might have some kickback about that.

Was this always the goal? When you were starting out, did you always think you wanted to have your own place?

About 10 years in, yes. Just after I moved down here from Sydney, Id just left Aria, and I moved down here. Almost instantly I got a job helping to open Town Mouse, which was a real learning curve. Id just come from a restaurant that had 180 seats and sometimes fed 1000 people a day and I think there were 40 chefs on the roster at Aria, and all of a sudden, it was me and Dave Verheul and two other chefs, and that place was meteoric in the first six months. It was incredible. We were so busy all the time. I was the one cooking that famous cabbage dish that he used to do that was stuffed with the prunes and the apples and it was so much work every night. And so much work every day. I got it. It was a delicious dish. I was really off red cabbage for a while. I loved it, but it was a lot of work. I saw Christian and his sister Amber and her partner Jay were there every day, the owners in the business. Everyone was in there every day, working hard, making it work. The team really believed in it, and I thought, I reckon I could do this. But opening a restaurant also costs a lot of money and you need a lot of time. You need to do all the boring negotiating and finding the lease and the place and sourcing the equipment.

I think I'd been subconsciously waiting for the moment and my house was looking like a restaurant store at one point; collecting crockery, plates, equipment, gastro pans, buying strange things off marketplace, and having to make an hour and a half drive if something was 20 bucks, but it was worth it. It was always the plan. It just took longer than I thought it would. But I'm glad, because I think I was more ready. It also happened very quickly when it did. I'd done a pop up at Theodore's, which is now where Bar Spontana is, and my now business partner, Lawrence, was running the floor there. I took over four days and thought, if I break even, that'll be fine, and the break even point was feed 100 guests over four days, and we ended up feeding 250 instead. I thought, OK, great, this is really nice. Lawrence and I got chatting over a bottle of wine. He said hed really like to open a restaurant, but at least maybe we could do some more pop ups together, he really enjoyed working with me. I did a couple more Sundays at Theodore's and the pop up was August, September. By November, this site had become available. and the guy was trying to get rid of it quite quickly. He didn't want to be here anymore. He wasn't interested in running it. It was a cafe, and he wanted to get rid of it quite cheaply, and we looked at it. We went and chatted with him in December, and then by January 16th, we had the keys. So it was less than three months, and then all of a sudden, we were gutting a restaurant and still working and coming here at 8 o'clock at night after I'd finished a day shift somewhere else and painting a ceiling or tiling a wall or something. We did one more pop up the June before we opened. We were still waiting for the liquor license to be transferred over and we'd finished 90% of the renovations, and we did a pop up at Abbotsford Convent for two days. The day after we loaded out, one of my housemates fell on my foot and broke it. Right after my foot broke, I got an email saying, "Congratulations. Your liquor license has been approved." I had to spend two weeks at home while, Lawrence and my partner, Jack, did the finishing touches. We still had the tiling to do on the kitchen wall and the two of them didn't know how to tile. I did. So I came in here after two weeks of sitting at home, bored out of my mind, and made them wrap my moon boot in a garbage bag. I sat on an office chair with my foot propped up and tiled the wall. Then we opened in at the start of July, but just very casually as a wine bar, my foot was still in the boot, and then Bastille Day was our first service when I'd had the boot just taken off. It was all a strangely organic process. It just happened., but it was always what we wanted. We just didn't expect it to happen so fast.

And the name Magnolia, where does that come from?

After six months of going through a list of names, it just popped out of nowhere. It's one of my favourite flowers. It's the name of a number of my favourite songsAt the time, the top of the name list was Bar Colere, which means tantrum, which was funny. I was sitting at home and listening to a Mark Lanagan song, and there's a line about being underneath a magnolia tree, and it must have been 11.30 at night, I texted Lawrence, and said, How about the name Magnolia? He said, I love it. Next minute, we've registered the business name, and that was it. Beyond that, we've since found out, there's a very famous '70s French Disco song that's called Magnolias are forever. A French guy walked in and told us about it and asked if we named it after the Disco song? We didn't know it existed, but we're adding it to the playlist.

And by the way, that playlist was so great. I heard Cash Savage, there was so much great music.

That was that was the other thing. We didn't want it to be stuffy French jazz with accordion or the same shit, bloody music you always hear in restaurants that's somewhere between bad house music and bad techno. It's an expression of who Lawrence and I are. We're both really love music, and we've both got a lot of crossover with our musical tests, so there'll be a lot of Cash Savage, postpunk, Nick Cave, sometimes some Type O Negative that'll slip in there. It's definitely an expression of who we are. We do get a lot of comments with people saying, "This is amazing. It's what I listen to at home. Weve had the occasional stuffy one. We got one this weekend, someone who told us that we were listening to hyper hippie disco pop and it was stressing her out and we needed to change it. We put some of the calmer songs on the playlist and turned it down a bit, and she left us a really scathing review on Google, but it's not for everyone. That's fine. If it's upsetting you that much, you don't have to come back here.

Speaking of reviews. Because everyone's a reviewer these days, do you try not to look at the reviews? Or do you intentionally look at the reviews? How do you manage that?

I check them once a week. Because when you have a Google business profile, you get emails every time someone sends you a review. I think we've got about 140 or 150 and the majority of them are five stars. I do check because as a business owner, it's my responsibility to take feedback like that. If something has gone wrong, it's obviously on me to rein that in and correct it in whatever way I can. But I do think a lot of the time, people complain because they're looking for attention, because they want something back out of it, they want something for free. It has been a rare thing that someone has made a genuine complaint because they have had something genuinely go wrong. That's fine. Everyone is allowed to be a reviewer, because we all have opinions, just like you're allowed to love or hate an artwork. That's fine, that's on you. But it's been almost always really positive feedback and for all the bitching and moaning, it's fine. I'm still doing what I love, and people are still coming in and we're still almost fully booked every week, and busy, and for a restaurant that's only open three days a week, I can't ask for more, you know?

I don't think I noticed that you were only open three days a week.

We only do Thursday and Friday night dinner from five, and then Saturday, we open for lunch from one, and then we shop for about an hour in the afternoon, between 4 and 5, so we can clean and reset and have something to eat, and then we open again at 5.00pm. That was a conscious choice. Lawrence is a winemaker. He makes Dirty Black Denim and Street Walken Cheetah wines, and he's also very good at it, and he sells a lot of wine, but obviously making wine is a lot of physical work. It was a conscious choice also because I hate working on Sundays. I like having one day of the weekend to be a regular human being and see my friends who work day jobs and he needs to obviously also do that and be able to have time for the winery, deliveries, winemaking. It also actually takes a lot of work to do the amount of food that we do in three days. So Tuesday, I'm normally here anyway, doing all the other things, payroll, ordering, organising, responding to emails, and Wednesday, my chefs and I get in here at 10.00 am and start cooking till about six o'clock at night. The kitchen is two ovens, one French top stove, two sinks. There's a couple of fridges and a freezer out the back and a storeroom, but that's it. We do cook somewhat irreverent French food, but there is a lot of basis in traditional cooking, so all of the jus take three days and 60 kilos of bones that gets reduced down to four or five litres. We do stuff quite traditionally, because there are no shortcuts to a lot of that classic cuisine and getting that flavour and that depth of flavour, it does take a lot of time. Wednesday is still a full day of work for us and then we roll straight into Thursday, Friday, Saturday. It does mean as well I get to give myself work life balance. If you only have to work four days a week and you get three days off, it is pretty good. None of them work over 38 hours, but they still work really hard. But it means they also get to have a long weekend away or I get to knock one of them off early on a Saturday night and they get to go and party with their friends. It keeps everyone happy. It's great, except for people who are like, why aren't you open on a Wednesday? But really, you can come on a Thursday or Friday or Saturday. Sorry.

Where did it all start for you? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

No. but I think there were some formative things in my childhood that definitely helped. I grew up on a farm that had beef cattle up in New South Wales inland from the central coast, on the edge of the Watagan Mountains, really, really lush, beautiful. We were on the side of the mountain as well. Our farm went down the hill and we had Hereford and Angus cattle. I grew up eating that beef. Both my grandmothers were very, very good cooks and my maternal grandfather owned a food business called Chefs Pride and Creative Gourmet, selling a lot of frozen food products to the hospitality industry, but was very involved in the industry as well. They would go to trade shows, mad friends that were chefs and sommeliers, when we would go to visit them, we'd always go and eat in really interesting places. I think a lot of that was very formative, and then my uncle, my mum's brother, was a chef, and we'd go and visit him in restaurants and pubs that he was running and I very distinctly remember sitting on the bench and he'd made me a bacon sandwich, and then I was standing there helping his sous chef roll pasta. Food was always very central to family, community, friends. Every year at Christmas, either side of the family, half a dozen other people who were Christmas orphans, stray friends, they would just all rock up, and that's something that has definitely continued throughout my life. I throw really big Christmas parties and I once had 100 people in my backyard.

I dropped out of school when I was 14. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and thought for a bit that I wanted to be a butcher. I just remember this butcher came in, I asked for a job, and he went, "Oh, sweetheart, I've got pigs out the back that are bigger than you, but you can stand behind the counter and sell sausages if you want. And I remember complaining to my uncle about what a misogynistic thing that was. And he said, "Be a chef. There's still butchery involved, but also there's fire, and you get to eat. So I found the best restaurant in the town that we were living in on the Central Coast, in Terrigal and walked in with my resume and said, "I'd like a job, please." The owner sat down, had a chat with me, and said they were actually looking for an apprentice and to come to the kitchen to meet the chef, a really lovely man called Adam Woods, who had worked in Sydney and moved north, because he had kids. He looked me up and down and asked, "What kind of music do you listen to?" I said, metal. And he said, "Alright, see you at 10 am tomorrow." And the next day I had a job. The second I turned 18, moved to Sydney, kept going in fine dining, and just knew that I wanted to be a chef and a really good chef because it felt right.

I'm hesitating about this question you mentioned the misogynistic attitude of the butcher and I actually never usually ask this question or talk about women chefs, because in the early days of this podcast, I spoke to Philippa Sibley and she said at the end of the conversation, I'm glad you didn't ask me about being a female chef because I'm a chef and I'm a woman.

I know what you're talking about. Those illustrations on the wall are Philippa Sibley. She's a friend.

She's amazing. Since then, I've never said to women, What's it like being a female chef? That's not what I want to ask you. What I did want to talk about was the fact you've had a lot of great women chefs as your boss or mentor chefs. I was looking at some of the places you've been, Shannon Martinz, Lune, Thi Le at Anchovy.

I helped her open that and she actually worked under me at Town Mouse. I taught her how to butcher. She didn't know when she started at Town Mouse, and it was her and I in the little back kitchen boning out a million lamb shoulders every night after service. Definitely at the start of my career, I worked under a lot of men and worked in a lot of kitchens where that very old school yell. swear, say inappropriate things happened. I think it was just a natural gravitation towards working with women who one, could cook really, really well. And two were also sick of that shit and didn't want that in their business, didn't want that in their life, didn't want to be around or associated with chefs like that. It's been the same for me. My entire kitchen team is made up of women, my kitchen hand, my two chefs. There's always been one to three women on the floor here. There's been a definite shift in the last decade with the way women are treated and the attitude towards it. But I still think there's bias in a lot of the media where a lot more male chefs will be championed. I find that frustrating. It's not to say that they can't cook, or that they aren't doing a really good job, but if there's a big event and they've put the billboard of chefs up, one, maybe two of them, out of eight or ten, will be female. It's pretty wild when a lot of food media is made up of women writers as well, that there's this bias towards male chefs.

I also ask the question because this podcast came about because one of my really good friends in Christchurch was a head chef and I would sit down with her and she had worked in London and whenever we were chatting, she'd talk about the industry, or she'd show me how to properly cut a chicken or how to season at base and I always thought this would be really great. People should be listening to this; it is so good. But she said as a head chef, who's a woman, you had to walk into a new kitchen and earn the respect of the men or even, I suppose, the team, but a man walking in had to do something pretty bad to lose it. That really stuck with me.

There were places that I worked in where I'd been there for six months or a year, with a decade long career, with more two and three hat restaurants on it than I can count, and someone would walk in, less qualified, less experienced, and with a lesser skill set, and immediately get put onto a section of the kitchen that required that instead of me being moved up. Then you'd be watching them hack up a fish or break down an animal wrong or burn stuff. Had I been me doing that, I would have copped it. Then they'd say oh its alright but I would say, youre throwing a $100 steak in the bin because you've just burnt it. You can't cook and you're always hung over and what is this? Why? Why do I have to work so much harder to even get a look in for that position? I found that frustrating for a long time and then just discovered that if I kept my mouth shut, my head down and worked my arse off I'd make them look stupid because I'm doing their job better than them. But I think that probably still exists in quite a lot of kitchens, whether it's spoken out loud or not. I definitely saw a lot of women get bullied out of the kitchen by male head chefs. Even though they were doing an excellent job, theyd just cop this strange, sexist attitude.

I think a lot about Gabrielle Hamilton's book, Blood, Bones and Butter, where she talks about being in Prune, her restaurant and being nine months pregnant and her waters breaking towards the end of service and her laughing, and telling her partner that her waters had broken, but she finished service and got down on hands and knees and scrubbed out the fridge and then took herself to hospital. I thought, I've seen men get the tiniest little cuts and freak out, and demand to go home and here's a woman, going into full blown labour who is far more capable. If you look at some of the best run kitchens in the country and around the world, there is a woman in charge.

Can you still be surprised by flavour? I was surprised by your flavours. I thought they were so intricate but not overcomplicated so that I didn't know what was going on, which can be the case with some things. They were just beautiful layers of deliciousness. Can you go somewhere and eat something that surprises you still?

Yes. I remember once going to Osteria Ilaria not long after Lucy Whitlow had started working there, and she had an incredible black olive and chocolate dessert on the menu. I love olives, I love liquorice flavoured things, anise, anything. I wasnt sure about it when I saw it on the menu; black olives, Kalamata, maybe, chocolate and liquorice work, I had it and was blown away. It was delicious. We ordered a second one. I needed to eat it again. I trained as a pastry chef, but I don't really have a sweet tooth, which is why a lot of our desserts are quite savoury or balanced or have sour elements to them. I was like, "Fuck, Lucy, this is delicious. Fuck. This is great." I definitely will always pick something unusual in a menu if I go out to eat and I think what we were saying earlier about having layers and nuance and complexity in the food without it being too much. I think a lot of chefs forget that you don't really need to fuck with it. If you have gone out of your way to source really high quality produce, made by people or grown by people who give a fuck about it, then you don't really need to do much more. It's on you then as the chef to have the skills to treat it with respect. Something has died, whether it's an animal or a plant, in order for you to eat, you should have the skills to not fuck with it so much. It doesn't need to be blended into a gel or made into an agar sheet or a foam, and that was definitely happening while I was coming up in fine dining and El Bulli and whilst I absolutely understand that, it's cool that you can fuck with food that much and make it that exciting, but at the end of the day, you don't eat like that every day. You don't need to do all that stuff to fuck with it. It's on you as a chef to maybe play around with it at home and fuck it up at home, but then go, what have I learnt from this? You can cook something that long and rest it that long and it'll stop being tough and be tender again, or you can combine these two flavours in this way, and it's actually more delicious, and I think there's been a real decline of that in the industry over the last 20 years, especially post that sort of modernist cuisine style.

So many young chefs, and I definitely got caught up in it, and they get so excited in the technique the newness of those trends, that the base of, can you cut something properly? Can you make a classic Hollandaise? Do you have this base level of fundamentals of cooking before we start trying to do it with different flavours or different things. I've been hiring and firing people and training people for the last 10 years. There are so many new chefs come into the industry and they've watched too much Heston Blumenthal or watched too much modernist cuisine on YouTube. They haven't actually sat down and read a cookbook. They haven't actually made a proper omelette. They don't know those things, because they've got caught up in all of this stuff that makes for really exciting television and exciting things and things that photograph beautifully, but doesn't actually help them to be better cooks, to be better chefs. I have a question in the list of interview questions that I ask my chefs: who's your three favourite chefs? A lot of the time it's Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal, someone that's on MasterChef. I'll ask, "Why do you admire them? They'll say: Heston Blumenthal does really creative stuff. And Gordon's really cool. Then I ask, what are your three favourite cookbooks? Oh, I don't own any cookbooks. Why not? I just watch stuff on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or on the TV. That's cool, but, how do you find the video again and try and transcribe the recipe. There's something to be said about the old school way of having a cookbook. If I want to make a souffle, I know it's in that cookbook. I'll go and get that recipe and have a look at it and play around with it and say what I need to adjust or how I can make it my own. That's part of the reason why I have these two really experienced women in the kitchen because they both know that and they came up like that and they have that skill set whereas I've had a really difficult time with more junior chefs who can barely hold a knife and don't know how to sharpen it. Then they want to make a foam. What does that do? How does that make the dish better? There doesnt need to be so many components and so many tricks on a plate. Put the base flavours together and add what it needs and take one thing off. Like clothing. look at yourself in the mirror and take one thing off if you think you're overdressed. It's the same with the plate. Everything needs to be on the plate for a reason. You need to balance flavour: acidity, seasoning, texture, freshness. It's interesting the way the culture has changed over the 20 years of my career nationally and internationally.

As you said, it's about that connection to the food. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would never consider the fact that something has died for you to put on the plate, whether it's a plant or an animal, I think it's a really important basis to start from, to understand that and to know what you're actually working with and why things react the way they do when you do different things for them rather than watching those kinds of TikToks where its from the opposite side, isn't it? This is the end product but what's behind that?

Exactly. That definitely came from growing up on a farm and seeing things die and knowing that animal there that you've named and watched grow up for the last 12 months is at some point in the next couple of months going to be in your belly. Same with the chickens that we raised, and the eggs that we ate. Planting stuff in the veggie patch behind the house, watching it grow from seed to full blown plant, but the rest of the plant dies, and you've got to do it again next year. And all the work that goes into it and there's a massive disconnect between people who go to a supermarket and get the little pre-packaged portioned, cooked and already peeled things, and do you understand the amount of work that has gone from that starting to exist to this going in your mouth?

Well, that's right, and I remember when I spoke to Annie Smithers back in the day and she said that when you grow things yourself, you have a lot more respect for that vegetable and you're less likely to waste it. You want to use all of it and do and I think that's true. Having grown corn on the cob.

They are a labour of love and a lot of water.

You might get one or two ears of corn per plant plant.

And if you've forgotten to water it for two weeks and it gets a bit sad, it ends up that the corn is not nearly as juicy as what you want.

Then there's the other side of this. You've mentioned running a small business, and I was speaking the other day with Guillaume Zika, who has the software Chef Notepad. He started off in Michelin restaurants Michelin star restaurants in France and his first job was working for someone who was very particular about food costs and wastage and not wasting and he thought that was a really great start. He also made the point that when you are striving to be a head chef, it's all about cooking, it's all about thinking of menus and coming up with flavours and food and then suddenly you get to that head chef position or head chef owner, and owner's probably another whole layer, then you have to know about how to run a business and know about spreadsheets or food costs and wage costs. I saw a little video today where he was saying, if I make this dish, which was a ceviche kind of dish with cucumber and different things on it, he said, there's a lot of waste in this dish. You've got the fish bones, you've got the cucumber seeds, you've got all of this. You might think it only costs you $3.45 to make this dish, but you've got to count in the wastage.

And then on top of that, you've got to count the utilities for all the equipment that you need, the dishwasher, the stove, the exhaust, the air conditioning, the lights being on, and then on top of that, you've got to count the labour cost of who is prepping and how much do they cost me an hour, plus how much tax do I have to pay and the superannuation and all their annual leave, or time in lieu, and the work cover, in case they hurt themselves doing it, and then my time supervising to make sure they do it right, plus my time to write the recipe and show them how to do it, and then the time to write tasty notes about the dish and then train a front of house staff to have the knowledge so if someone asks, what is this, they can explain it, or they put it down in front of them and they explain it. Then theres the ongoing cost of cleaning up after them plus the linen on the table that they're eating off, plus the person that's pouring their wine, who has that knowledge and cleaning up after them, and there's the kitchen hand, and then the water bill for cleaning up and cleaning the glasses. It's not just the dollar amount of what is on the plate and there's been multiple times in both small and large businesses where I've had to explain that to staff, but there's also been times where I've had customers, not in this business, thankfully, but in other businesses who say, I could buy a steak and cook it at home for a quarter of this. I then explain everything I've just said. Why is it so cheap at the pub? Because they buy cheap meat and they employ cheap labour and they make so much money from the alcohol that they can afford to do that, but it's not like that in this restaurant. Every single dollar from the $5 it costs to put it on the plate up to the $35 that you're being charged for it or whatever it is, goes straight back into this business. Do you understand that a lot of restaurants are lucky to say even 5% profit? It's not a money printer unless you scale it up so large and , it's changed now, but at the expense of other people's free labour that you can make money. It's in the barest sense a business. You go through all the business hoops and you do all the business things. If someone described it to you without the details: we have a product and we sell it for this much, and this is how much it costs me to run the business and pay for all the overheads and the staff and the training and the employment at the end of it we've made 2% profit maybe, you'd say, that's a terrible idea. Why would you open this business? But at the end of the day, there's also so much joy. My staff love working here. They love cooking what they do. They interact with the customers in an incredible way. We have really incredible regular clientele that come in weekly, monthly, sometimes two days in a row. We have one regular who comes in and just wants to eat the clafoutis. Sometimes they'll have two. I love it. It's a very nurturing career, not only for yourself, but nurturing other people. Feeding someone is one of the most intimate things I think you can do. It's a real act of love. You can taste it when the chef doesn't love the food and they don't love serving customers. You can definitely taste it in a restaurant. And the same with the staff if they don't care. They just want your money. But it is a real labour of love to make it happen. So many people don't realise that so much goes into it. I am the payroll officer. I am the one that does all the invoicing. I'm the one that answers emails. If you've left something here, or you want to have a party or I'm the one that's in here on a Tuesday afternoon or a Wednesday morning, scrubbing the canopy or cleaning up the grease trap, or fixing the dishwasher if it breaks or covering someone if they've called in sick. Its a lot. And on top of that, cooking all the food. I love it, but it's a lot of hard work.

You've touched on this a little bit already, but usually my last question is, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef?

Study the history of it, and buy a lot of cookbooks, buy cheap knives to begin with, and learn how to sharpen them properly. You don't need to go out and buy a really expensive handmade Japanese Damascus, you'll fucking ruin it. Take really good care of the cheap ones until you've worked out exactly how to sharpen them into a razor and then buy yourself something nice. Buy a lot of cookbooks and read. There's nothing wrong with watching TikTok reels or YouTube videos and people cooking. There's a lot of people out there doing really amazing things and sharing a lot of knowledge that once upon a time, you'd have to beg for a stage and work for free for two months, which is something that I've definitely done to be able to learn that skill. But I think there is something to be said for learning the fundamentals. Buy a bunch of cookbooks by LaRousse, Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Companion. Buy books that give you the basics. And practise. Subject your friends and family to terrible meals while you work it out. But practise and be aware that it's a hard job and you will work long days and there's going to be days where it crushes you, but then someone's going to come in and tell you that it's the best meal of their life or something that you made, made them cry because it reminded them of something their grandma made them when they were six. And it's going to make it all worth it. But be aware it's hard work and it's not just doing your six or eight hour shift and going home. It's you are climbing halfway inside the deep fryer to get something out that's stuck in there or scrubbing something gross, or you are going to have to just pick herbs for six months until you get skilled enough to do something more. Don't walk into a kitchen and expect that after a week, you're going to be able to say, I've got a whole new menu, what do you reckon. That's not going to happen. You need to be real. There's something to be said for the 10,000 hours. You've got to do the hard work and nail the fundamentals before you get anything, and any of the menus that you write while you're learning are probably going to be a bit shit. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but it might be a bit crap until you work it out. Just learn. Be quiet and learn.

Magnolia, 295 Sydney Road, Brunswick