Paul Kasten

Hi Paul, let's start with how you became a chef. Was that something you always knew you wanted to do?

Actually, my mother was and is a very good home cook. I enjoyed baking cookies and fun things like that when I was a little kid. That actually led to my first food business. I was nine years old and I baked giant chocolate chip cookies that we sold at an old shop in a touristy area near home.

Where was home?

This was in south-eastern Connecticut. So as a nine-year-old, I was making $16 a week and buying all the baseball cards that I wanted. But in terms of actually getting into commercial kitchens, my parents let me take a gap year after high school and, needing something to do,

I got a job as a dishwasher at local Mexican restaurant. One year led to two and they started giving me more and more things to do. Before you know it, I was a full-time chef.

Can you remember what it was that you liked about it, that kept you there for the second year and then onwards?

I think at that age, I was probably most drawn to just having an income and some freedom. But I always really enjoyed food, so trying to do it as well as I could and making people happy was a nice part of it. But I got to about that second year point, and they started trying to steer me toward a management track. I took a look at my boss who was working about 60 hours a week, and just seemed exhausted and miserable all the time and thought, whoa, I don't want to do that. So I went ahead and enrolled in uni. I decided I'd pick another impractical career path. I decided I wanted to be a poet, so I went to the University of Iowa where they've got a fantastic creative writing program. I suppose that being my first time really out and away from home and fully free and whatnot, I probably didn't take it nearly as seriously as I could have. I feel like I got out there with a better idea of what I didn't want than, than what I did. At times I did very well in school. Other times, I really lacked the focus and interest and I found myself back in the kitchen out there. That went on for few years before I decided, well, it's probably time to actually take this seriously.

What kind of food was it then?

Italian. I guess what you would call modern American, doing a little bit nicer food, tasting menus, things like that. I was getting to actually learn some things, which I enjoyed. But it was still that old school kitchen experience where youre working crazy hours for very low pay. And I suppose I was exposed to all the other dark side of the industry at that stage, all the negativity of work, the excessive partying and all of those things.

When was that?

It would've been about 2000.

That was the ripe time of the rock and roll in the kitchen, wasn't it?

Yeah, pretty much. Fortunately I fared better through that than a lot of friends did. I decided finally, well, if I'm going to do this, I should probably buckle down and get serious. I moved back toward the East Coast, just a few hours north of New York City, and got a job at the best restaurant in a medium sized city. It was a very old school, steak house kind of fine diner, with a really good wine program, but sad, stodgy, old sixties style food, lots ofbarnetand giant cuts of meats.

And was all your training on the job up to this point?

Yes. Then these guys opened an upscale Italian restaurant, and having some background in that, I went over there and within a few months was into my first head chef job. I wassimply completely unprepared for that leadership role at that stage. But we did well enough with the food kept things turning over without any major disasters.

And how many seats was it?

Uh, that would've been about 90 seats.

Oh, so it's big.

It was fairly good size. We would do a pretty good turnover there.

Were you given a menu or did you have to come up for the menu as well?

Basically, I inherited the menu from the opening chef, and slowly made tweaks from there. A lot of things I couldn't touch, favourites they brought over from their other place. After about a year of that, it was time to go and get an education in cooking. So I went up to Burlington in Vermont to the New England Culinary Institute, which at that time was neck and neck with CIA in terms of top cooking schools. I got to fill in a lot of the blanks from what I'd learned on the job and that really gave me a big leg up toward getting into a better place coming out of that.

I think sometimes it, it can be good to do it that way round, because then you know what you need to know, don't you?

Oh, yeah. I definitely got more out of that experience than some of the kids coming in at 18 with little to no actual job experience. There was a requirement that they spend X-number of months in a restaurant environment before coming over, but, you know, six months working at a McDonald's or something like that , is a lot different to what we were doing. And certainly as an adult learner, appreciating that I was paying for it, makes you take things a little bit more seriously.

Were you doing it then at the same time as the job, or did you take a step away?

No, I stepped away from the job. I was still working a few days a week at another Italian restaurant up there in Burlington just to have a little bit of spending money, but, for the most part it was just school, school, school.

How long was that course?

That was about two years for me, or a year and a half. They let me go through an accelerated version of the program. It was about 60 hours a week on site, mostly hands-on classes, very little lecture time or anything like that. It was almost all doing what you're supposed to be learning rather than taking notes and getting ready for your chance to drive.

Did that change the kind of venue you then wanted to work in what did that lead to?

It definitely gave me a lot more tools to walk into a much more serious kitchen. I wasn't completely out of my depth. It gave me access to a lot of fairly good places and it led me to Portland, Oregon to a place called Wildwood. Its a famous old farm to table restaurant that won the James Beard Award a few years earlier. It was one of the real pioneers of that kind of locavore movement in the Northwest.

What was your role there?

I started out at the bottom end of the totem pole. We don't really go through all the brigade system rankings there, so I would've been called a line cook at the time. It took me about two years to make sous chef and that's what I was for the next six years.

It must have been a great place to work then, because that's a nice period of time to spend in one place.

It was another one of those harsh competitive work environments. But also, once you reached a certain point, they gave us a lot of freedom to do what we wanted. I was able to write my own menus, set up my own events, and I got to learn a whole lot that way. And the products and the skill of the staff were so good that, whether or not everybody got along or just felt completely run down all the time, we all knew that we were doing great work and we were happy to be there.

When you say farm to table, was there a farm there?

We sourced nearly all of the ingredients we would use, from produce through to dairy, flowers, all of that within about a 200-mile radius of the restaurant. In summer, I would be on the phone with the 30, 40 different purveyors on any given week. We'd have people we used for different things. I think it taught me to appreciate and know the difference between real quality produce and the mediocre stuff you see in the supermarkets. And that connection with the people who are growing this stuff is something that I really wish we saw more of here.

Why did you leave Wildwood?

There was an ownership dispute and they had to shut down. In early 2014, we got just a few weeks notice coming up on the restaurant's 20th birthday. It was one of our strongest years ever. I believe the chef and general manager both had minority stakes in the restaurant and were trying to buy out the majority owner. And there was a renegotiation of the lease agreement tied up in all of this. The owner was an old billionaire steel guy, and he and the landlord absolutely hated each other. The landlord kept trying to make sure that the owner would benefit as little as possible out of the transfer. And finally, the owner's CFO just threw his hands up in a meeting one day and said, Nope, that's it. Shut it down.

Wow. Just out of spite.

Essentially. Aside from losing a place to come and eat once or twice a week, there was no skin off his back.

So that pushed you where?

During that time at Wildwood, I'd started doing a lot of beer and food matching dinners. That's something that nobody in the area had been doing at a high level. I was a big beer nerd, and we were trying to figure out what to do with our private dining areas in the quieter months. I'd started doing that and it was a big success and spiralled to the point where I was doing one of those every month and being flown down to the Great American Beer Fest every year to cook there. After Wildwood closed, it took a few months to actually try to relax and decompress bit. Then I started working on a restaurant project with a local brewery. We got as far as signing a lease on the space only to run into some issues with city zoning. Basically after a couple of years of setbacks in that process, they wanted to do a smaller, more casual, pizza sort of concept and at the time and given my experience and where I'd been working – I mean, I'd always loved pizza and I would have friends over regularly to cook pizza at home on the weekends -but I didn't really see myself as ever ending up a pizza chef. I may have turned my nose up at that idea a little bit, and I started exploring other options. I'd looked at going out to Chicago, it's a great dining scene there. I had met a few contacts through my beer work who could get me into some good places. But in the meantime, I'd been flown down to Wellington to cook at a beer festival there with about five Portland brewers. We were doing beer and food matching seminars at Beervana. I met the team from Good Beer Week there. They were all over there to check out what was happening at Beervana and have a little break over there.

I was leaning toward heading to Chicago, but I reached out to Good Beer Week here and they thought there might be some event stuff that they could get me going on here and asked if I was interested in coming down. I really wasn't tied to anything and that seemed at least an exciting opportunity.

I looked at getting into some regular restaurant work down here because I would need a little bit more than part-time event work to carry me through and wasn't having a whole lot of luck, nailing down a sponsored position while I was still over in the States. So, I basically said, what the heck, gathered all my stuff and flew down and started looking for work,.

When was that?

That was November, 2015.

Wow. Okay. Good on you. What an adventure. Had you been here before?

No, that was my first trip here.

With all your stuff?

Well, what I could fit in five suitcases.

Wow. What was your impression when you arrived?

It feels quite a bit like home. No major culture shock, really. Aesthetically it's a little different, but, theres an artsy liberal kind of vibe, quite a bit like Portland or Seattle and those kinda places,

Right. And so then did you find work?

I did. Just in time I got a 457 Visa sponsored job, and I wont go too much into that since that turned out to be the only job I've had to quit in 20 years of doing this. Essentially, I opened a new venue, and everything wasn't going swimmingly with staffing right off the bat. We were I think about twice as busy as we had expected to be. I was giving them 80, 90 hours a week. And basically nothing was quite enough. So by the time I'd been reminded how grateful I should be for my sponsorship a couple of times, I decided to maintain a little self-respect. I had to walk away. By that time I had a new relationship here with my still partner, Kate, which got me on a partnership visa track. Then I started exploring what other work options there were for me here. I think in a lot of ways I've found a lot of Australian employers kind of looked at me sideways. They don't really know the places that I've worked in the States, the quality of that, or they have these ideas that we just make Mexicans do all of our work for us like that. I've been told all of these things by Australian chefs.

After bouncing around between jobs, helping some friends out here and there, a friend got into a serious place. I took over the kitchen at Host Dining in Brunswick. It was a cute little 60-seater in the back streets Sydney Road. I got to do some nice contemporary food. I was back to working with the best of everything. I had chefs under me coming from great kitchens all over the world. It was great. I always had good help and I had people that I was actually learning from as well. That was a great experience.

When did you have the idea to open Deep End?

This really came out of the pandemic. I was still on a temporary visa when the first lockdown happened and I didn't qualify for Job Keeper. My job at the time just went away and I didn't get any assistance from the government here and I started living off my superannuation and all that fun stuff. I looked at the kind of businesses that were actually still hanging in there and doing okay through the lockdowns. I've always really enjoyed making pizza, but I had never taken a stab at doing it professionally. So I just ordered some pans from the States and started tinkering in my kitchen at home. That led to I suppose through the first two big lockdowns, we were working toward trying to find a place to pop up and a casual little Detroit style take-away thing. So just to try test the waters.

And what is the Detroit style?

The Detroit style is the square pizza, a light focaccia-like base, crispy cheese around the rim.

I'm really interested in these different American regional pizzas. How does that even come about? How is there a Detroit style and a New York style and a Chicago style?

Actually, well let's look at Detroit style and Chicago style. These are both things that came around pretty early after World War II, they were both 1940s developments. In the case of Detroit style, there was a little tavern called Buddys Rendezvous Pizzeria and the owner assigned his wife the task of coming up with some kind of pizza offering as he had heard about this new pizza thing that all the guys coming back from Europe were excited about. She had taken some family bread recipe and put it into these blue steel tool trays that were ubiquitous around Detroit at the time with the auto industry being there, and topped them up with pizza stuff. And that's where that came from.

That's very interesting. Is there a lot of topping? The base must be quite high then?

The base is quite high, and it is a little more heavily topped than our New York styles. But not nearly as decadent as the deep dish.

Okay. So the deep dish is different again.

Yeah, well, obviously in Chicago, also right around that 1946 mark, a place called Pizzeria Uno started up and they decided for whatever reason, – there's actually still a fair bit of debate around exactly who came up with the idea of why they did it. But they started building a crust in a deep pan and piling everything into it. One of the other big ones now is called Lou Malnatis. Lou was one of the original chefs at Pizzeria Uno. Theres a whole lot of disagreement as you'd say, about who came up with what, who's IP it was. He claims that the whole thing was his idea. He left and started his own shop, which is going strong today with stores all over the place. Somewhere around 1974 two shops, apparently at the same time, came up with this great idea to make a new kind of deep dish pizza, called the stuffed pizza which is what we serve. It is deeper yet. It has a second layer of dough, all of the cheese and toppings in between and sauce on the top. So it is definitely something that's probably an inch or so deep and building it up to something that would fill a deep pie pan.

Is that an individual serving, because it sounds like it would be pretty big.

Our 10-inch size, which doesn't sound like or actually look like a tremendous amount of pizza, actually weighs about two kilos, and will feed four to six people depending on how hungry everyone is.

And then there's the New York Style pizzas. That's the thin one, is it?

That's right. That basically evolved in the very early 1900s in New York. Recent Italian immigrants were recreating the pizzas they remembered from back home using local ingredients and different flours, different ovens, and that led to a pizza that baked a lot longer at a lower temperature and you get a crispy evenly brown thing instead of the fluffy, soft, Neapolitan that everybody knew before that. I guess in terms of the New York pizza, it's important to distinguish between what you might think of as the cheap street slice, which is softer, breadier, greasier versus what the handful of old school shops and the higher quality new guys are doing, which is a fluffier, much crispier, thinner crust, lightly topped, very deeply evenly brown, not charred as a Neapolitan would at much higher temperatures. Its just something that's aimed more at the quality end of the end of the market. And not just grab and go.

I kind of jumped ahead because you were saying you wanted to do popups of Detroit style pizza. Was that then a roaring success, and you thought, let's have more of a challenge and throw in some different bases?

Oh, actually, no, I didn't actually get to popping up. I got as far as buying a commercial pizza oven, which is still sitting under the steps in my house. A really interesting opportunity came up to open the Deeds Brewing tap room in Glen Iris. They basically threw a whole bunch of money into doing a really fancy fit out and wanted a really high-quality food experience to go with that. And high-end food and beer was something I was still very interested in. I had a couple of meetings with those guys, and when they basically gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with the menu, I thought, wow, this would be a lot of fun. We were basically doing fine dining at a brewery, tasting meus, fun little tweezer food, they're doing everything the hardest, most labour intensive way possible.

It's a small kitchen in there too. I was just there recently and it's a beautiful place. It's so great to see all the vats and everything, but it's classy as well.

Yes it is a very small kitchen. I think it was the only spot that they could put the kitchen due to the loading bay up above, the amount of space that they needed for toilets. We became wedged into that little corner, but we would still manage to have maybe five or six people working in there at any given time. It was crowded, it was hot. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. We had lots of diners come in and say, oh, wow, you know, we had the tasting at Cumulus last week and we liked this better. We definitely got do some good work.

I told the guys going in that I'd been thinking about doing this pizza thing and I'd give them a year, but if something comes up I'd have to make a quick exit. We continued just casually looking around at spaces. And, it was somewhere around March last year that this one became available. And actually back when it was Hammer and Tong, this was one of my early dates with Kate. But the size of the space worked well for us, the location, it's an easy walk to home

Perfect.

We were fortunate enough to have all of the refrigeration in place and all these things. We had to do this on a shoe string budget. This is a little family and friends project, we didn't have the money to do a big refurb with a lot of fancy things so we painted all these walls ourselves. You can probably tell that we made the cushions for the banquettes and there was a lot of shopping on Facebook marketplace. All these tables came out of a pizzeria on High Street. The chairs were from a fish and chipper in Geelong. I think I actually spent more on that pizza oven than probably everything else that we did here combined.

How many ovens have you got?

There are three separate oven decks, all independently controlled, one for each style of pizza.

This is a stupid question. But is it hard to manage three different styles of pizza? I mean, it's what you do, but for each style, how many versions are there?

We do three Chicago versions, and that we've just kept static since we opened, don't mess with the classics sort of situation there. In terms of Detroit and New York, I think we're at seven or eight options for each those.

Nice. There's a lot to think about.

Yeah. It definitely keeps us busy.

And how big is your kitchen staff?

Right now myself and one full-timer, a couple of casuals and a full-time kitchen hand.

So you're definitely on the tools.

I'm in there nearly every minute that we're open.

And what was the reception?

Oh, boy. The response I think was really better than we could have hoped for. We were absolutely rammed from the get-go. Weve got about 58 seats in here, and we were doing 150 or more covers a night each night we were open for the first few months. It carried on at nearly that level almost up to the holidays, six months in.

Congratulations. That's amazing. And is it what you imagined?

You know, actually this has made me wonder why I spent so many years trying to impress people with fancy foods when just putting a great pizza in front of them, everybody lights up immediately. Theres a lot more smiling and laughter than you experience in a fine dining room. So that's been really great.

It's like a full circle back to when you were nine and doing your baking, isn't it? And just the happiness that it gives people. That's great.

That part has been wonderful.

So with all that in mind, my final question is, what would your advice be to someone who is thinking of becoming a chef?

First have, have a serious thought about how much of your time and how fully you want to commit to your work. Obviously there are kitchen jobs that don't require you to be fully engaged and push, push, push every moment of your life, but they're probably also not the most gratifying ones either. So if you want to be able to do this well, it's going to take a lot of long, hard physical hours doing it, and you're going to need the drive to just keep learning independently. And a lot of patience.

Deep End Pizza

412a Brunswick Street, Fitzroy