Mike McEnearney

I’m happy to be here because it is so beautiful. When I came in, I was really surprised at how much more there is when I came pre-opening. The structure, the bones of this building are really beautiful and now with all the greenery, it’s stunning.

They’ve done an amazing job with Goods Shed Number Five. They’ve honoured what they said, and they’ve done, they’ve basically refreshed the entire building. They’ve had all the rafters, all the windowpanes, everything has been redone, all the doors, refurbished, shed built, and then they’ve built the hotel around it. It’s quite a commitment. 

I read somewhere that you had never really wanted to be part of a hotel. 

Oh, gosh, it’s getting around the traps, isn’t it? Maybe I should put it in a different way. Hotels had never been on my radar. I’m not the most conventional chef or person around, so a hotel for me, can sometimes feel cookie cutter and beige. So when I was approached, I was surprised. I had to do my research on the brand. And 1 Hotel pretty quickly felt really aligned. They share exactly the same core values and ethos as I do of being sustainable, small carbon footprint, taking a less is more approach. And I really love that. For me, that’s totally aligned with the way that I think and the way that I cook. They believe in local. Well, that’s how I’ve always been with my cooking, sourcing local. There was an alignment there, which happened very quickly. But as I said at the start, it was nothing that I was expecting. 

There’s food all day?

Yes, we’re up at 7 in the morning serving breakfast at the hotel, which is wonderful. We really focus on a really healthy start to the day. Collagen broths, really nice Bircher muesli, and chia puddings, really beautiful baked eggs that we source from Honest Eggs. Breakfast is all about a really healthy start and then we move into lunch at midday. I like to pitch lunch as an express lunch where you can come and have a set menu for $59. It’s something from the oven, porchetta, some fish, cockerel. We serve it with two sides, and you can be in and out in 45 minutes without batting an eyelid. It’s a really nice, civilised place to come and have a glass of wine and lunch quickly. Dinner is a slightly longer affair where we open it at 5.30. We suggest you sit down, have a drink, maybe have a snack or two, and then share some smaller things, have a main course and some sides and then share a dessert. It’s about sharing, gathering around the table and engaging. 

Now that I see the restaurant set up…I think there were plastic covers over everything the last time I came and it’s so beautiful now. It reminds me of, and I don’t mean this to be a flex, but I was in Copenhagen last year. 

That’s a total flex. 

I know, sorry. But it was my first time and I really loved it. The restaurant reminds me of Restaurant Barr, which is where Noma used to be, and it’s all wood and this is all very woody and natural as well. 

A lot of it is reclaimed timbers from the Goods store and the doors as well. So that falls in hand with their ethos of really reclaiming and making another purpose.

It sounds like your menu seamlessly fits into that. 

I guess for me, the way I like to cook, and I have been focussed this way for a very long time is I try not to have a shopping list. What I try and do is look at what’s seasonal around us and use that and then use that to inspire me what to cook. It’s called From Here by Mike because the majority of what we’re sourcing is Victorian. That’s really important for us to respect that. A lot of it is made in-house. We buy very little out. We try and make as much as we can here and any waste, we try and get a second bite of the cherry, so we ferment a lot of things. For instance, we serve pickled watermelon rind and pumpkin skin with charcuterie and cheese and we’re just trying to get the second bites of the cherry, being more sustainable and respecting the products. That’s our ethos. Victoria plays a very big part. Just to try and work on that as a visual: on the other side of the menu when you first come in is a map of Victoria and there isa list of producers that we currently using on that very menu and they’re dot pointed on the map, so you can see the positioning and where they are and I’m a visual kind of guy, so I really wanted to work on a project like that where people can see that we have a commitment to Victorian projects. 

It’s always a producer comes first with how I cook and what’s in season. So by attaching the name Mike, it gives somebody who’s eaten at my restaurants in Sydney a chance to understand that true thread, which I think is it’s important. It’s not about saying we do something, it’s really walking the talk and being authentic in what I believe in and we’re doing that here as well. 

Mike McEnearney, From Here by Mike

And you have some knowledge of Victorian suppliers from previous times that you worked in Melbourne? 

Not really. I’m the Creative Director of Carriageworks Farmers Market and I have been for 10 years and I guess my alignment with producers runs really deep. But being in Sydney, a lot of the produce that we source throughout the year is also Victorian, and so I already have a connection with what I like to use down here. There has been a constant connection with new producers and local artisan makers that have really excited me and that’s what I like to do. If I’m in Sydney, I’m trying to use as much Sydney as possible, as much New South Wales, but when I’m in Victoria, I’m really focussing on that. For instance, I also wrote the wine list and for me, wine is a really important part of the meal. So if my ethos is buy local with food, it has to be the same with wine. The wine list has over 40 different Victorian producers on it. It’s only 120 lines, so that’s a good percentage of Victorian growers for a small list. 

I was intrigued with the idea of the chef writing the wine list. 

Is that novel? Maybe it is, but I love wine. Look, I’m not an expert. I’m just very passionate about wine. I like wine and I know my cooking style and I know what works well with what I like to cook, so it’s a varied list. But my ethos is it’s first and foremost Victorian and then if it’s not, well then it needs to be a remarkable bottle of wine or somebody who’s making it needs to be doing something quite remarkable to be on it. That’s the way I think of it. I’ve got a Chablis. It’s a really delicious Chablis, but I don’t have five Chablis on. I have one, because I’d rather be sailing Chardonnay from Australia than Chablis. 

I think it totally makes sense for the chef to control the wine list, why not? And what does it mean for you to have your name on a restaurant? Is that more pressure or what does that mean for you? 

I don’t think it’s pressure. I think what it is, is it might allow someone to align with my core values or how I cook so they can come here and understand that there is a through thread into the fabric of what I do. The direct line is always producer driven. It’s always a producer comes first with how I cook and what’s in season. So by attaching the name Mike, it gives somebody who’s eaten at my restaurants in Sydney a chance to understand that true thread, which I think is it’s important. It’s not about saying we do something, it’s really walking the talk and being authentic in what I believe in and we’re doing that here as well. 

At this point in your career, you’re overseeing the markets and restaurants in Sydney and now here. How do you do you juggle that? Are you a spreadsheet person? You’re obviously very well organised. 

I love a good spreadsheet, but it doesn’t dictate how I operate. I think you need to be sensitive to the people around you and their needs. I’ve been here for six weeks, I’ve lived in the hotel for six weeks and worked on all of the training with the staff and opening the restaurant. I’m lucky to have a really great team here to do that. But I’ve also got a great team I’ve built in Sydney that has allowed me to be away for that amount of time. I’m a firm believer in having a strong team and believing that you’re only as good as your team and training and just allowing them to have some space to make mistakes and to learn and to grow with the business and have some trust. that enables me to move around. I have Kitchen by Mike in the city. I have a Kitchen by Mike at the International Airport. One will be coming soon to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. and then I’ve got this beautiful project, From Here by Mike. There are things that need to be done and I’m lucky to have a great team. 

Obviously to have those kinds of opportunities and to be so widespread that really speaks a lot to your character and integrity as well, I think that that you are maintaining all those things and that people do want you to be in those places. 

Well, I’m flattered you say that. Maybe you’re right. I’m not sure. I can’t say that for myself. 

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

No, I didn’t. I liked cooking at home. I cooked a little bit at home, but I never thought I’d be a chef. But just bumming around after school, what I realised was, maybe I could be a chef. I went for an interview at a very well established restaurant in Sydney. It was owned by a Melbourne restaurant family called the Staleys. They used to own Fanny’s and Glo-Glos in Melbourne, very famous restaurants throughout the 80s and 90s and Helen Daly, opened one in Sydney called Chez Oz. I went there for an interview, I got given the job, and on my first day, the chef said to me, hi Mike, here’s your recipe cards, here’s the menu. You’re on cold larder and pastry. Good luck and be ready for lunch. And I thought, okay, great. Who’s my team with me? Oh, you’re by yourself. I’d never cooked a souffle before. I didn’t understand what crème patissière was. I hadn’t even started at Food TAFE. I haven’t started college yet. I’d come straight out of school and I’m thinking, how do I do all this stuff? Anyway, I just made lots of mistakes. I made lots and lots and lots of mistakes. And then all of a sudden it just started to click. And I haven’t looked back. I think back off to that time where you work exceptionally hard. I was doing 100-hour weeks, six double shifts straight out of school and working in this restaurant. But I actually look back at it and I think I wouldn’t have had it any other way because I did make all the mistakes, but made them really quickly and I improved very fast and it gave me a lot of determination to get somewhere. So Chez Oz, thank you. Then I went I went to Rockpool after that and I was there for five years, and I love working with Neil in the Rocks. He was a great mentor and a great chef and someone who really set the tone for me, that it’s a real family atmosphere in a restaurant that you look after your staff, and that was a really great thing for me. Then I travelled for a while and I cooked in Europe for 10 years and I cooked for some pretty high-profile chefs over there: Pied àTerre and Aubergine and places like that. I did Terrence Conrad, did massive numbers over there, then I opened Pharmacy for Damien Hirst in the late 90s, the famous artists. So that was a fun time for me. 

Did you have things in jars? 

No, there was none of that. I didn’t see any sharks in jars, but it was an exciting time and I think through the 90s through London, it was it was all happening. At that time there, all I’d cooked was fine dining food and then I came back in 2006 after cooking in Michelin one, twos and threes to run Rockpool for Neil so he could come down to Melbourne and open the first bar and grill. And my wife and two kids came in 2006, and we ran Rockpool for three years and we had our third little boy, William, and we decided, do we want to be in the UK, or do we want to stay in Australia? So we packed everything up, we went back to the UK and lived on my mother-in-law’s farm. And from that moment on, we lived off the land. We had this incredible kitchen garden. They were totally self-sufficient, had all their own livestock, very old apple orchard, one of the oldest in the UK, spring water, their own power. And for me, it was really living with the seasons. I had loved cooking with the seasons when I worked 10 years in the UK because there are true seasons in the UK and you feel it and you know it. And things come around like birthdays, when you never pick asparagus after Midsummer’s day, you just don’t do that or Mirabelles are with you for two weeks of the year. So you move with the seasons and you cook with the seasons and that started to give me a lot of grounding over those 10 years. It taught me a lot of discipline. And then when I was in Wales on this farm, actually living off the land and being self-sufficient, that taught me a real simplicity of cooking and how to honour the produce coming out of the ground and don’t do too much to it. You want to taste the leek you’ve grown; you want to embellish it very little. You just want to make it taste as good as possible. So that from that moment in 2009 was a big learning curve for me. That’s when I changed everything, how I believed in food. And from then onwards, opening Kitchen by Mike and doing pop-ups and things like that it became a less is more approach where I didn’t have a shopping list anymore. I let the produce speak to me and that’s how it’s been since then. For me, it’s an intuitive way to cook. I love cooking like that. 

I’ve heard it described as democratic?

Egalitarian dining was something that was penned, I remember that. Well, we found this huge space in Rosebery and it was massive. It was a big old factory where it was built for Rosella, the canning factory, and then Aristocrat poker machines took it over. So it was a massive space 2000 square metres. Anyway, I took 800 square metres of that and, wow, it was big space. The space had beautiful bones, like the Number Five Goods Shed we’re in at the moment, it had beautiful bones and I just thought, what am I going to do? Then all of a sudden it came to me after weeks and weeks of stressing about it, because I’d signed the lease, I was ready to go and I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then it came to me that in that factory, people would have gathered in the canteen, and they would have had lunch or they might have had a cup of tea or a cigarette together. It would have been a place where they gathered, and that resonated. I thought, why don’t I build a canteen? So that’s what I did. And we opened up and we were busy from day one because it was novel. It was something that was so new. No one had really thought about. Everyone who thinks of a canteen thinks of being at school, being at boarding school, but what I tried to do is use all of the produce that I was using in all of the great restaurants that I’d cooked in previously and treating them really simply and going to the market a number of times in the week, buying what was in season, what was tasting great, and what was actually really cheap because of that. You queued up and I served you, I cut your bread, I put your chicken on your plate. We slid it along and you had a choice of six or seven salads you could choose from. You paid at the till, you sat down and ate, and you left. There was no table service. So that really simple motion of queueing up rich man standing next to poor man in the queue, all eating the same food was a really great leveller for me, but also for people that were eating there. It enabled us to turn over a lot of people quickly. That was egalitarian. There you are. 

It was definitely important for you, it was a marked part of your career, but do you think that all chefs need to go overseas to get a different level in their cooking? 

Look, I think as a chef, you are learning always. So you can go here or you can learn overseas. I think travelling overseas is in itself a life lesson, whether you’re cooking or not. So I think, yeah, everyone should go overseas because you’re seeing different cultures. When you cook overseas, there are different cultures and there are different ingredients that you’re cooking with. You can’t get some of the ingredients over the side of the world. So I think that’s important. I think when I was cooking over there in the 90s, it’s very different today, back then it was it was 100 hour weeks. It was bollockings in the kitchen. It was shouting and screaming and the industry had been like that for generations. That’s how it was. I went through that and I knew that that’s not how I’d like to manage my kitchens. However, I went with it because I was learning so much at the time and I enjoyed the learning curve, but I’d never, ever run my kitchens like that, ever. What I learned back in the 90s probably won’t be taught today, but I think you’ll still be learning about culture and ingredients. And I think that’s really important. 

And it feels as though that experience of being on the farm in Wales was a really big learning curve as well, and a pivotal part of your career. You grow vegetables yourself now as well, do you? 

No, I don’t. When I opened Kitchen by Mike in Rosebery, we didn’t have enough money in the bank to open a garden when we first opened. But after we’d opened for a year, we’d put aside some money. We were doing a thousand people a day there. It was really busy. But we only had 80 square metres to use, and we couldn’t excavate it. It was a car park, but the landlord said, look, you can have the 80 square metres in the car park and you can build a garden. So we thought, well, hang on a sec. I’m going to have to plant a lot of carrots to feed 100 people a day. What will I do? And then something came to me from what I learned in Wales. Should I digress back to Wales for a second? 

I have been digressing all over the place. 

When we were in Wales, we had this amazing kitchen garden. It’s still incredible today. I get goosebumps when I go there every time to visit my mother-in-law. There were these four beds at the top of the garden that we never touched. And I asked my mother-in-law, I said, Sue, why don’t we use those beds? And she said, well, I rent them to the white witch in the village. It’s a Hippocratic Garden. She follows the four humours of the body. So those plants, she makes tinctures for the people in the village. And I’m thinking, holy mackerel, this is amazing. Of course, I know who Hippocrates is. I did ancient history at school, and food is medicine. That’s what it is. And obviously, I’m staring at these herbs thinking, wow, they’re beautiful culinary herbs, but she sees them in with a medicinal lens and from that minute on, it really struck me that, oh, wow, this is at another level. So as we do, we bank our thoughts or our memories and our filing cabinet of a brain, and then all of a sudden, when I was in Rosebery, the filing cabinet opened and I thought, well, why don’t you build a physic garden, a medicinal herb garden and divide it into five beds that you’re really interested in; five parts of the body that you’re interested in. So I built a gastroenterology bed, an ears, nose and throat bed, a cardiology bed. So all of the herbs in these beds were focussed around parts of the body. The garden became an educational place where you could walk through and learn what the Latin name of a plant was, what it was in layman’s terms. The part of the plant that we like to use and what that part of the plant is doing for your body. I remember that plant 31 in gastroenterology was Oregano and Oregano is an anti-parasitical. So if you really put that simply eating whole foods and putting more oregano into your diet, if you have worms, it may help you get rid of the worms. It’s simple things like this. It’s about understanding that whole foods, everyday food has benefits for your body. It’s just understanding what it’s doing. That was the second cookbook that I wrote; it was based on that physic garden called Real Food by Mike. So there you are. That’s my garden. 

We have probably lost touch with some of those intuitive ways of growing or, as you say, observing the seasons where we just we grow whatever we want to grow now rather than what the land provides. I’m sure we could learn a lot about from Native ingredients as well about their value and nutrition and so on. I think when you live in a city, it’s harder to recognise those things. It’s great to have those opportunities to learn. 

It’s interesting you say, city. Melbourne, for me, is a very lucky city because you’re surrounded by farmland, it’s only an hour’s drive to the Yarra Valley, for instance. Whereas in Sydney, the disconnect is larger. You’re travelling far further to get to any farming land. So I see this constant movement of farmers at Carriageworks where they’re travelling farther and farther away to get to carriage works. What’s happening is their properties are becoming so valuable that they’re realising, hang on, dad, I don’t want to farm. I want to sell our property. So subdivide and none of us will ever have to work again. Why don’t we do that? And that’s becoming really apparent at the moment. I think that’s a shame, but it’s a fact. However, I see in Melbourne, it’s much closer to you. So there is less disconnect and it feels as though there are more producers here, even though there aren’t, obviously. New South Wales is a big state. There’s probably more producers, but it feels like there is more because they’re closer to you and the state is smaller. So it’s a really interesting feeling being here, being close to the producers. It’s a really nice feeling. 

I was just in the Adelaide Hills at the weekend and that’s closer again. I’d never been there before. It’s a pretty lucky country still, despite what people might say.

Do you still get on the tools? Is it important for you when you’re creating a menu and a team that you cook alongside them? 

To get this far here, we’ve done three cook-offs where I’ve cooked the entire menu with the Chef de Cuisine, Josh Bosen, who runs my kitchen for me. He’s an incredibly gifted chef. We’ve done three cook-offs of the current menu together. And then we brought in the team so he could teach them and I could teach them. But what I’ve found is I’m far better to inspire and to talk about how a dish came about and to taste and to give them a direction of how they can make it better rather than me chop all the onions and cook the dish. I want someone else to cook it and to interpret it and to understand how it should be rather than me doing it, because it’s not sustainable, me cooking. These guys need to cook the food that we’re designing together and we’re creating. I’m still on the tools. But very early on in the piece I’m on the tools where I will teach Josh or I will discuss a dish with him and we’ll work on something together. But from then on, Josh runs that kitchen and I walk around tasting making sure everything’s right and explaining why perhaps it’s not right. 

It looks like a big kitchen. 

Yeah, it does look big from this angle. It is actually a big kitchen, but let’s be real, it’s a three- service kitchen. The hotel at peak will hold 270 rooms, plus residents, 100 residents on top of the hotel, there are a hundred apartments. It’s actually not a big kitchen. That kitchen is what we call the display kitchen. That’s where we cook from. That’s where we do service from. There’s another kitchen out the back where we need to do all the mise en place. Because if you think this does breakfast, then is open straight away for lunch and then it opens straightaway for dinner. There’s very little time to prep. So there’s another kitchen out of the back. And then obviously there’s the banquet hall, which, which is one of the biggest banquet halls in Melbourne. It’s pretty compressed. 

Goodness. So I guess with all your experience in mind and hindsight being the clarifier of all things, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef in this day and age? 

Oh, gosh. I would say approach cooking with open eyes but only cook if you love cooking because it’s really hard work and don’t expect to be paid a million dollars on day one. I think that is a problem at the moment where a lot of cooking shows have been incredible, like MasterChef. They’ve really brought a lot of people into the industry. But what it’s also done is it’s also given people perhaps a false idea that perhaps they can run a business or they can be in a position like a head chef only after cooking for a year. That doesn’t happen very often. It’s not realistic. I think: be realistic, be humble. Be eager to learn and just listen and watch and be sensitive. don’t be a bully and don’t be a bull at a gate. Just take your time. Be sensitive with the produce and just really try to understand. Let the produce tell you what to do. Don’t dominate the produce because you won’t really get to know what you’re doing. It’s simple. You’ll have no sensitivity with the seasons and that might not be what you want, but I think if you really want to get deep into cooking, I think that’s part of it. 

From Here by Mike at 1 Hotel, 9 Maritime Place, Docklands