Natalie Jefferson

Hi, Nat. Let's situate ourselves. We're sitting in the beautiful food studies department at Camberwell Girls, which is nice. I feel like I'm doing a bit of co-curricular, co-life because I've brought my outside life into my school life. I was really keen to talk to you because you're so passionate about food. You have a background in hospitality and now you are here. Lucky for us. I wanted to know where it all started and what your journey has been. Did you always know you wanted to work with food?

I grew up in a household with a very passionate mum. Mum cooked all the time, but mum also would buy food magazines, and she would just try different things every week. She was very adventurous. She was a classic home trained cook. I came home to Amy Johnson's slice, which is an old fashioned slice that she would have in her Tupperware. It was a lemon cake with jam and layers of jam and currants and lemon icing. She would make those old classics, and they all went into part of my menu in my caf. I grew up with food all the time. She would also take me to restaurants. Mum would quite often say, let's drive to Sydney, theres a restaurant that's opened up. Let's go and have a meal there. I was very privileged and lucky to be able to do that. She would just encourage this side that I had and also encourage mother daughter side too, where we could relate. At the same time, they were pretty strict parents. But food always brought us together at home. That's how the passion started. I would cook meals most nights of the week, or I would do salads and things. I wanted to do it. I just enjoyed it.

I guess you got that from your mum, but what is it about food and cooking for people that you enjoy?

I always loved doing things for other people. I think it was just inbuilt in me. I think I just was born like that. And it continues still in my life. I think food is a beautiful way that you can pass on gratitude to people and enjoyment, and it just brings people together and it's fun. My early life at home really developed that interest in cooking.

Then I was at school, I went to Wesley, and they had Home Ec and I just loved it. I was good at it and I loved it much more than the academic side of things. I can see that in the students here at Camberwell Girls, they relax. They have fun. They can be creative and they can just let their shoulders relax and, and it comes naturally, there's a space here where they can just flourish. Some students really do have that ability to just fly. They can multitask and you can see right from early on that they get it. They just get it.

That's really interesting because I love cooking, but I feel like I didn't have much of a background in that and I am not very practical. I did do a lot of the cooking at home because Mum wasn't a good cook and didn't have much interest in it. She had definitely had her dishes that she did and we ate well, but very early on, she was keen for me to take over. And I did. But I volunteered at Fare Share for a while and when you have an actual chef who shows you techniques, I was amazed. I don't think I'm very practical. But do you think some people just are or aren't?

Yes. Some people get it. They do. But then I have students in here that have never picked up a knife and have no idea how to cut and theyre scared. Once you show them a little trick and a technique. Even just peeling a carrot, so many students will peel a carrot towards themselves and not away from themselves. Little things like that that can make it safer for them and then they feel comfortable. It's like anything, its just practice. When I have friends over to do a little bit of cooking with me, Ill say, why don't you do it like that? And they'll go, I never thought of that. That's so easy. Why didn't I think of that? Why don't you have a jar of sweet chili in the fridge and just use that for the month instead of making up the dressing each time, so logical things like that have just come very easy. When I finished high schoo, I remember sitting in the careers counsellors office and them pretty much saying, well, what are you going to do? All these pathways that are offered to you are not suiting you and your passions. I had no other options. My mum actually looked up a restaurant in Melbourne that was like an ambassador for a hotel management school in Switzerland. So I actually went to Switzerland and did hotel management. I did a year at uni in sciences. It wasnt for me.. And mum said, well check this course out now. There was nothing, there was no internet at all. We couldn't research anything. Mum basically saw an ad in a paper and said, what about we go talk to this lady? And then that lady just pretty much sent me off to Montreux and I did hotel management.

The facets of hotel management are front of house, kitchen and back of house operations. Of course, the food side of it I absolutely loved. You do a stage as part of your training, like work experience, and you go in and work in a hotel. And I did that in London. I loved the cooking side of it, but I hated working in hotels. It was production line. We were cooking French classic food, but I just knew that I needed to learn how to cook properly and I needed to do an apprenticeship. That's when I started writing to restaurants in Melbourne. This is back in early nineties. I wrote to hundreds of restaurants in Melbourne to apply for an apprenticeship.

I got two trials. One was at Lynch's where I shucked oysters all day and thought, oh my gosh, really? Is that what I'm going to be doing? My hands were just raw. I'm talking about 15 hours of just shucking oysters all day, that's what they made me do, which is fine, I got on with it, but I didnt want to work for them. Then I got a call back from Walter Bourke who owned Walter's Wine Bar and Maria and Walters. I did a trial and he said, you can start tomorrow. And that was it. I didn't have a choice. He said, you want the job, you start tomorrow. He enrolled me in Preston TAFE and I started my apprenticeship. He wasnt a trained chef, but he was a very creative, clever man. And Maria and Walters was a little restaurant in Rathdowne Street in Carlton. He was a ballet dancer and he and his wife opened up this restaurant. He taught himself to cook, and he opened this restaurant that was very classic, velvet chairs, beautiful.

Where was it in relation to, say La Luna?

Further down towards the commission flats, a little bit further towards the city, halfway to the city. Walter took me on as a mature age apprentice. I skipped first year and became a second year apprentice. I ran this restaurant kitchen with Walter and one other chef who was very clever.

So when you say classic, what kind of food were you making?

We're talking seafood quenelles with champagne sauce. Walter was very passionate. He was one of the first goats cheese makers in Melbourne. We would get goats milk delivered through the back lane way and pumped into the bath out the back and we'd make goats cheese.

This is cinematic.

It was so crazy. Back then, the Stephanies, who I worked for later on in my apprenticeship, and the Walters of the world were self-taught. They were passionate, clever. It was the start of a, you know, we were in a, a time in Melbourne where nothing was bought in; you made bread yourself, antipasto platters were just starting to happen. It was a real turning point in food. No one did breakfast, so it was very classic restaurants. You went for dinner and you had a beautiful meal. And this is what Walter was all about. He also was very passionate about wine, and he went on to run Walter's wine at Southgate. Every dish had a wine or a champagne base. We would make souffles every night. I remember we did them to order in a copper bowl with a whisk. I have memories of just thinking, I want to die because my arm's killing me from whisking by hand. We made our own ice cream.

Is there a technique for whisking?

You have to use your wrist.

I was thinking about the Mere Poulard recipe at Mont Saint Michel in France, they are famous for their omelettes, and they say that they do a figure of eight to whisk the eggs.

We were taught the figure of eight. And you use your wrist, you don't use your arm. If you get a sore arm, then you're not doing it right. But of course, if you're an apprentice, those muscles are not developed. You develop these mu arm muscles chopping. Even standing, people say, how do you stand for 14, 15 hours a day? You just do. You just learn to spread your legs apart while you're standing at the chopping board if you're tall or raise your chopping board.You learn little techniques to help you just like in any industry, you just do it. I used to work six days a week for Walter. Sometimes he'd forget to pay me. I'm sorry, Walter, but he would, and it was tough. You would go to trade school on your day off, and then you'd go and work that night.

How long were you there?

I was there for two years with Walter, and then I moved because he closed Maria and Walter's down and opened up Walter's Wine Bar. I worked for a very short period of time at Walter's Wine Bar. But it was a different scale. It was when Southgate first opened, and we, were doing 200 covers pre-theatre. Then wed do dinner, same amount, and then wed do post theatre. We were doing about 600 or 700 covers a day. He was starting to buy cakes in and he encouraged me to start my own cake business from home. So I used to supply him cakes. I was always entrepreneurial. I always took on a lot more responsibility but I just naturally did it. I had a father who owned Jefferson Ford. He was a businessman. He was self-made and has 400 people working for him now. So I grew up in a family of business minded and a passionate cook. You can see the combination was really good for me as a fit when I bought my first business.

And when was that?

I started Natalie's Cakes, which I did from home. In those days, you could do it from home. There was no tax, no GST no Health Department checks, you know, and Walter said, just start making cakes for the wine bar. And he threw me into it. I delivered cakes all over Melbourne up into the Dandenongs. It was such a big learning curve. I was working full-time at Walter's and also doing Natalie's cakes. I was very driven in that area of trying different things. And you can see I'm not afraid to try things. I think as a business person, you need to just not overthink things and just go for it sometimes. I ran Natalie's cakes and then finished my apprenticeship for Stephanie Alexander. That was in her last years at Stephanie's. It was a tough job under Jeff Lindsay. You did what you were told and you just put your head down and stayed out of trouble. I still remember my first day they put me into the pastry section and the pastry chef went on holidays and she gave me a few hours rundown. I was only a third year apprentice and I had to run the pastry section.

Pastry is the hardest!

Oh my gosh. There was this one classic day, right. Every Sunday we would cook Centre Table, which was like an antipasto, but Stephanie's version of it. And you would have to cook fresh sourdough baguettes every morning. And I'd never, ever cooked sourdough before. I followed the recipe and I threw the starter in and I didn't keep some of the starter.

Oh no.

I know. It was a classic. I was one of those chefs that made a lot of mistakes to never do that again. I would figure it out. I remember Jeff Lindsay coming in on the Monday and saying, all right, we have to make sourdough today. And I'm like, oh yeah, no problem. And I get to the recipe and it says, I need a hundred grams of the starter. And he's like, where's the starter? I told him it had gone in yesterdays bread.

How long had they had the starter?

Years. Now you can buy a starter from a bakery. But back then. I thought he was going to kill me. He pretty much told me my life was over.

One day he said, oh, you know, you have to butcher a whole lamb. You're going onto the butchering section tomorrow. Figure it out. So I did. I went down to the local butcher and I spent a whole day and I learned how to break down whole animals because I had no idea.

Do they teach you that at TAFE?

They do but there's not a lot of time. And also, nothing like that. You learn your classics and your sauces and things. But that's where it's very interesting now stepping into a school and seeing these techniques that the students are learning and it's time to get modern. It's time to modernise things.

It's interesting because I've spoken to chefs about the fact that they don't have time now. I still love the people that are breaking down animals and using all of the animal or fileting fish. But I think a lot of them with the hours being regulated, they don't have time to pay people to do that. It's a different quality.

It's totally different world of cooking now. Totally different. I ran Replete in Hawthorn to start with, and that was when breakfast was just starting to happen. Michelle and Justine were my my bosses at Replete. They were from New Zealand. They own Cremorne Street Bakers now. Michelle ran an amazing business. She's such a good business woman. Working for her was fantastic. We pretty much put breakfast on the map at that place. I did that for, I think nearly 10 years, before I bought my business, Our Kitchen Table, which I had for 16 years, it was a long time in food business. We weren't whizzbang, here we are. We just chipped away. We just put our heads down and we just worked really hard and we did good, simple classic food. We cooked everything ourselves. Getting back to trained chefs, I had a chef Glen, who worked with me at Replete and at Our Kitchen Table for almost the whole time. He had that classic training. We could do anything. We could fix a split sauce. We could bone out a chicken if the chickens come in and they werent boned out. We could cook anything. If somebody asked us to cook something for a special catering job, we could do it. I think that's the difference in the chefs nowadays. They've got no idea. They buy stuff in.

It must've been hard going from a la carte or fine dining restaurants and dinner food to breakfast. I think this is still what's happening now, is that people expect to pay a certain amount for breakfast. But you still have to provide them with excellence.

It's really interesting that you say that because when I left the fine dining scene, which was really Stephanie's, I did a stint in London working at Sally Clark's. But that was starting to go into produce like Phillippa's. That was where I started seeing that I could go into other areas which suited my style and personality, my creativity more and the business side. I'd worked for Walter who'd closed his little restaurant down and opened up Walter's Wine Bar. Then I finished my apprenticeship at Stephanie's, and she closed down. Restaurants were struggling. Fine dining was expensive and labour intensive. Things were starting to change. People were spending almost just as much on breakfast and lunch and, and dinners were changing. But I also could see that you're still going to have to make chicken sandwiches in a caf to make money. Because unfortunately, three quarters of Melbourne just want chicken sandwiches.

Well, all that Melbourne wants at all are sandwiches right now. There are so many sandwich shops now.

It's incredible. I think back to that turning point then. My husband Kevin, who's a chef too, we used to talk about it, because we both just love cooking. We love interesting food. But at Replete we were restricted. We were lucky we worked for passionate owners and we could express ourselves in catering. But in the actual cafe, we were one of the first people to serve corn fritters and hotcakes. I think we won an award for the best breakfast in Melbourne for eight years. But that's because it was new and different. And now everybody does corn fritters, everybody does hotcakes with lemon curd and strawberries. But back then it was very interesting. We talk about making that change and how we would have trouble recruiting and getting chefs to work for us that had quality training because they just didn't think that cooking in cafes was special.

There was a definite turning point a few years ago where a whole wave of fine dining chefs moved into cafes. I remember saying to someone, it's a bit like, people used to think film actors were the top kind of actor and the TV actors weren't so good. And then the film actors started going into tv. I felt like it was the same with chefs.

It's so true. It's really interesting, the mentality now compared to 10 years ago.

That must be about sustainability too, because you can't keep up all those hours and the physicality of it.

You can't keep it up. As you get older, you certainly can't keep it up. And also you don't need to, you can see that you can have a certain lifestyle. When I bought Our Kitchen Table, I remember my dad said to me, youve got 10 days to get this place open, otherwise you get your hundred dollar notes and start cutting them up. That's his mentality. I still remember it. He was right. We didn't do a business plan. We just thought we are going to do this and we're just not going to overthink it. You see so many business people, the people that want to go into cafes and businesses, they'll never do it because they overthink it. If you do the figures, it's a lot of hard work.

So how did you get to the point where you, where you knew it was time to move on fromthat?

When I was at Replete, Kevin and I ran the kitchen together. We always worked as a husband and wife team in very, very small areas. Even at Maria and Walters, he was the head chef. I was the pastry chef. We've worked maybe 25 years together in tight spaces. It became evident at Replete that we are very different. He's an absolute perfectionist in the kitchen. He will not take any shortcuts. Whereas I'm the money maker. I can churn out hundreds and hundreds of gingerbreads and shortbread and make them look beautiful. And they'll all sell. Whereas Kevin will do beautiful, intricate, gorgeous food for dinner parties. We were a good team, a good combination. But I could see that we were starting: there's the line, don't cross it. That's my section. Don't come into my section kind of thing, because we were working all day together. And he was just annoying me because he's so messy. It's normal, normal life. But we could see that. And I think this entrepreneurial side was coming out in me at Replete where I pretty much was running the kitchen. And I thought, I can do this for myself. So I started looking, I found the premises for sale in East Malvern. It was only one that I knew of. Back then there werent thousands of cafes. I knew it was in the suburbs, so it was a bit risky. Back then suburbs were risky. We didn't have social media to advertise. You needed a bit of passing traffic. I knew it was surrounded by schools. I thought it was perfect. But they wanted too much for it. We couldn't afford it. We didn't have millions of dollars. We didn't have backers I come from a very proud family where you do it on your own, so I wasn't going to ask mum and dad to help me because I wanted to do it myself. We pretty much made an offer and they said, no, take a hike. And then a year later, it was still for sale and the price dropped. We went in and we took it over within about a month. Then we thought, oh my God, what have we done? We had no idea. The business side of things, and the front of house side and the food, we knew how to do, but we didn't know really how to make coffee. We just pretended that we knew what we were doing, you know, and we taught ourselves. We just had to wing it. We winged a lot of things back then. We didn't even know how to transfer our liquor license, we had to work it out. I think when you start at the bottom like that, and you work your way up. You make mistakes again. We did our own books. We did everything ourselves. We renovated ourselves and we did it in 10 days. Thanks, Dad. It was very rustic. It was very cosy and comfortable. People loved that. They loved our homestyle cooking. They loved the feel when they came in. I had a customer who has invited me for dinner next week, and she said, it was like coming home; when we had breakfast there, I'd have the same thing. I'd see you and Kev hop into the kitchen, have a chat. Her grandchildren, later on, we got to know them. We got to know people and their families. We saw people coming into the cafe that would come and eat, bring their parents, and then they'd go into Age Care facilities and theyd bring them for lunch. It was a beautiful business. I miss that side of it. But I don't miss the taxes, Jo. I don't miss the stress of cash flow.

How'd you go over the lockdown time?

We absolutely loved lockdown. With all due respect for people that struggled, of course. We absolutely loved it. We did so well. If you can picture East Malvin, Central Park, was like a theme park over there. There were just so many people walking. It was so busy. We were very, very busy. It was crazy. But it also gave us an opportunity to look at the business. Luckily, we were already doing take-home food. We'd been doing take-home food for 15 years and we just flew with it. We would make litres and litres of chicken soup. It wasn't hard for us to tighten things up, look at the business a bit closer and go, we're going to have to do everything ourselves to start with just because we don't know what's ahead. We pulled everything back and then afterthat we could get all our staff back in and figure out what we were going to do. In the early days of Covid, it was just Kevin and I; Kevin out the front making coffee and Daisy, our daughter, who would be home-schooling next to the coffee machine or in the kitchen with me. For the first few weeks, that's what we did. We just brought it all back. We did the washing at home. We did the tea towels at home, things like that. We just didn't spend anything. We just kept everything very tight until we figured out what people wanted to buy. And it just took off. Within two weeks, all our staff were back and we had a plan. And we also could afford to supply 400 meals a week to Fare Share, which we would do in the cafe because you couldn't go on site. People in the community would ask where all the soup was going and we said we were donating it to Fare Share and they would help with writing labels. There was a community spirit, and we really involved people. A lot of older people helped us out who were bored and loved cooking. We started to see that we were going to be okay. We were very lucky. I think that humbled us after Covid, we realized how volatile things were.

When we bought the cafe, the first five years were unbelievably busy. And then all these cafes started opening up around us. And you're just competing. It stretches you, even though you do good things and people come back to you, people try other places. You're competing with so many places. We just kept at it. We had to keep reinventing ourselves. But there were definitely years where we went, gee, this is getting harder and harder. The overheads are so expensive. Covid came at a time when we were 13, 14 years into business. We were starting to get a bit tired, and we didnt have our finger on the pulse as much. It was a big wake-up call. It made us look at everything. And then we said, were going to sell.

Moving into a school was that, and it was not planned. We decided to sell the cafe after 16 years. I had aging parents, and I knew I needed to make a change. I actually had to move in with my mum who has dementia, while my dad was in hospital with cancer. I had to stop working. Kev ran the business, and he had an offer while that was all happening and didn't even tell me. I came home from a week with mum, which is so difficult, living with a parent with dementia. I came home and Kev said, we've got an offer for the business, we are selling, you need a break and I need a break. We need a change. I think that I needed Kev to just sort that out. We were made an offer, and we went through the process. I think I could absolutely sell anyone's business in Melbourne after what we went through with that sale. It was so stressful. There are all these other sides to owning restaurants and cafes that you have no idea about. It can be incredibly stressful. We did settle eventually. It wasn't just a little cafe, it had a liquor license and catering. It was a big business. We had 10 full-timers. It was a lot of organizing, selling it. Then I wondered what I was going to do. I really had no idea. I would sit down with my 16-year-old and I said to Daisy, I haven't written a CV for 30 years. I don't even know how to do it. It's a very different world out there.

It just didn't excite me working for someone else after working for myself for so long. I thought, why not make a change? I've always loved the young kids in at work. We'd employ juniors and they would always be working in the kitchen and I love teaching them. I thought, I'm going to give something different. My teenager helped me that with that. She would look through, Seek for me andsay, you can do all these things, mum, you don't realize running a business how many skills you've got. You have to be brave and go for it. I saw the ad for Food Studies and I thought, well that's good. I know food. As for the rest of it, it was an assistants job, which I knew I'd probably do it with my eyes closed. I also knew it would be challenging, working in a school environment. I definitely found the first few months very challenging. Then I started to relax and realized that I was actually quite good at it. I work really well with Jennie, the teacher here. She's been amazing. She has that teacher side, and then I've got, got the prac side, so its a really good combination. Learning to work with the students who I absolutely love has been amazing. It's the best part to teach young people to cook. I made about a hundred omelettes in my first week teaching students. How fantastic to hear that they've gone home and made them at home. And that's what we need to be doing. We don't need to be teaching the white sauces and the brown sauce. We need to be teaching interesting, healthy, fun cooking at home.

I spoke to Gabriel Gate and that is a big thing for him. He thinks it's every parent's responsibility to be cooking with their children. I think there have been some generational gaps. Some of the generations we've come through and food's been a lot easier to buy than to make. People are pressed for time. So, it's hard for them to pass those skills on. But I think that then breeds a different relationship with food. Look at the awe that people have for MasterChef or other cooking programs, because people don't necessarily have those skills themselves. There's also a bit of a fear of cooking and getting it wrong. I just loved when we came in with the Year Sevens for the beautiful French food tasting and they were so into it. They loved it. And having the Year 11 students talking to them about it as well, I'm so glad that there are students who are taking it through to VCE because it's such a great subject.

I think that Camberwell Girls has an opportunity to make it happen and encourage it. I think this is the way things are going. We have a lot of students who have different learning styles. And it's becoming more and more frequent. And I can tell you all those students are very comfortable down here. They have a chance to shine. The pressure's off a little bit. Of course you get to Year 11 and 12 and you've still got all your, your food studies technical side.But as for the prac, they just absolutely flourish and they are relaxed.

It's so satisfying when you create something. When I was doing a PhD Id lived for a year in France and I came back and this was in the nineties in Christchurch. I just set up my own dinner party catering thing where I'd go into people's houses and do a four-course French dinner. With no training. People said it was good, but now I think, who did I think I was. But compared to all the reading and studying and what do you actually have to show for it, but when you cook for people, it's so satisfying. The students must love that.

Oh, they love it. I would love to teach the students to make ricotta rather than buying ricotta. We need those sort of opportunities which relates into science.

Absolutely. I went to one of Joe Vargetto's restaurants restaurant and he just came out with this big bowl of warm ricotta he had just made and put a beautiful dollop into our bowl. So good.

Delicious. We never bought ricotta at Our Kitchen Table in 16 years. We made it ourselves because it was better and it lasts longer. We're always throwing the commercial ricotta out as soon as you open it up, you've got that five days. You make your own ricotta and it lasts two weeks. Its about having the time to show students to do that, but not just students in a situation. It has the opportunity to bring departments together. Which I wouldn't have done if I hadn't have done the French thing that we did. In a school, you've got your professional services, your maintenance and your teaching, and then your assistants. Food brings people together. Maybe instead of people sitting, and having a lunch made for them, as we do occasionally, we could have a cooking class down here.

I think that's a great idea. As you say, it does bring people together and then you're making the food and then you sit down together.

It also mixes people up. It brings people together. That's very important in a school. It's good to get people excited. Yeah. It's too easy to see the negative things, so why not get excited about things. That's what I hope to bring here. And slowly, slowly, you know, I feel like I'm getting there. So it's been a really big change for me, but it's a good change. So that's Nat.