Pollyanna Harvey

Polly, the interesting thing for me is that I don’t usually get to se the chefs working. I just sit down with them in the afternoon between services. But I have seen you working and I love it. I love cooking but I’m not practical, so all those tips you have for cutting up the vegetables in a really practical way. Just to start off a bit left of field, do you think that you need to be a certain kind of person to be a chef? There’s creativity but there’s also that really practical side.

The big one is really to be looking around your environment and seeing what is going on. Everything that you’re doing today has a purpose in the next three or four shifts. You never stop. So the big thing is planning a strategy, otherwise you end up with very high costs.

That’s so true. We often do think of the creation side, as a diner, or recipient of the food in front of us. We might have an idea about cooking because we do it at home, but it’s not cooking en masse with different time limits.

And you have to work with the skills you have. The environment I’m in today, maybe three other people have the same skills as I do. Nearly everyone I’m working with is unskilled. When I started as an apprentice I always looked up to see what other people were doing. As you design meals throughout your career, you are working with the limitations of your staff. You have apprentices who are doing the simplest thins, right through to the eager chef de partie who is desperate to get up there. You have to allow people to develop and grow as well as put the food up. Some chefs are really good at doing that, others are very proud and like to keep everyone at a level. I like to help people get as high as they can go. And wish to go.

Where did it all start for you?

I can almost say it was my grandmother. If I go all the way back. She grew geraniums and made great desserts. As little people we travelled the world because of dad’s job and I had a couple of years in Asia. When I arrived in Australia, I really didn’t know much about European, Australian food which at that time was meat and three veg. I had grown up on rice and fish paste and all the interesting fruits and vegetables. I saw an orange and thought, what the heck do you do with an orange and a pear was awful. I’d gone from mangoes and mangosteen to an orange. My palate was quite highly developed and my grandmother got us into the kitchen cooking because we weren’t eating. We were little tiny kids who spoke two languages and didn’t know what to do with the food.

We kept traveling and eventually I came back to university and I thought, well, I love design and creativity, so I went and did landscape architecture. I loved that area; design elements, construction and all that. I found working in an office to slow. You’re designing for a garden, a space, a suburb for something that is in twenty years time, whereas every night as a university student, like many university students who work in pubs and clubs and bars and restaurants. I kept getting pulled into the kitchen of a very good restaurant around the corner which is no longer there. It was the first of the glamourous pubs. It was in Albert Park. They had a couple of big trawlers and fresh fish would come in. The fish would be written up on the glass in the restaurants. You could pick out your fish and they’d cook it and serve it with whatever salads were going that day. Towards the end of the night after I’d cleared my tables, they’d be saying, come and help in the kitchen.

That’s where it started. So, my grandmother who had the great food side and the great plant side, I sort of went with the plants first and then eventually went with the food.

I studied, worked for a few years and then decided to become an apprentice. I started right at the bottom. I went from $70,000 to $13,000 as a first year apprentice. Huge hours, compared to what I had been working. I had the idea that I would work my way all the way through. I did a four year apprenticeship. The last three years were at the Grand Hyatt, mainly in what was Max’s then and di three years at Box Hill TAFE because you have to do food certificates. I qualified and a couple of chefs said go and meet these chefs in Europe. So I did. 

I went from high fine dining. I trained with Shannon Bennett. We both went through at the same time and we were both in London at the same time. I did seven years in Europe before I came back to Australia. 

France as well?

Yes. I loved it. I didn’t speak a word of French. I still don’t speak a word of French. I could do the fairly rude kitchen French. Some of the kitchens I worked in, you had to stand on a square in the kitchen near the dishwasher and observe before they would let you anywhere near anything. They practically worship their ingredients. It is quite different to the way we work in a lot of places here. Their menus might be simpler, they are very traditional…some recipes they wouldn’t even let you see how they were doing it because it was a family secret. 

When was that? What decade?

The nineties and noughties. I came back to Australia just after the Millennium.

You would have experienced perhaps the tail-end of brigades and some shouty chefs over there.

Absolutely. When I started at the Grand Hyatt, there were 97 qualified chefs and 20 apprentices. When I finished in the four years, there were about 67 and 15, so even in the three years there, the cost and everything was being scaled down but the pressure was scaling up. I got to Europe and saw a couple of big brigades. With my skills and being a slightly older graduate – because I was at least five to six years older than most others in the kitchens – I stepped into the fairly senior roles straight off. I was at Mezzo in London for a year, and then moved around and then into Europe. I was never ta the bottom; I was level-headed, so I could take on a role and take off. It didn’t matter whether there was language inability, I could get people to do what I wanted them to d and could understand instructions that I was being given in yelled French and on I went. 

I have a light palette so I can pick up on different ingredients and I was always good at balance.  

When I spoke to Philippa Sibley, she said she was glad that I hadn’t asked her what it was like to be a woman chef. But other younger women chefs have said it is an important discussion to have. Did you find that it was different for you going through to men going through at the same time?

There was a little bit of that. I can’t really talk about my apprenticeship days because I was that much older and I saw the level of education versus my level of education. The younger men were treated quite poorly by men that they all worshipped. So then as they went through the ranks, they in turn would treat those below them poorly. That was a spiral. Whereas I got to work with some great women. I used them as role models rather than the fairly aggressive men who were in the kitchen. Some kitchens, particularly banqueting, would have an influx of chefs from a certain part of the world and their style was such that any women working in there would just be cleaning and it was hard to break those barriers. I went through with an attitude that I wouldn’t be part of that; I would see it and get beyond it and do the job and I didn’t accept that kind of behaviour. They didn’t always know how to behave around me. 

As I got into Europe, there were definitely fewer women and they sort of looked at you once to see whether you could do it and then they would say, are you going to have children? I was asked that on a few occasions. But then you’d ignore all that and just work as hard as everyone else. The cycle of, well, it is abuse, that is breaking down. What we see on television is a glorified version and of course they edit for that because it is sensational. Quite often it is very boring working in the kitchen, it’s just heads down working as fast as you can.

A lot of the chefs I speak to talk about the importance of building a team and maintaining it because it cost so much to train new chefs. A lot of chefs now have that ethos that the attitude that prevails on the kitchen is transferred to the food and you want people to be eating food made from a good place. Often when I tell people that I speak to a lot of chefs, they ask whether they are arrogant. I can say with absolute conviction that none of them are.

There was a lot of that in the nineties and I am sure that it’s still there in places but it’s just not accepted like it used to be. The environment I’m in today, I couldn’t get away with it and I don’t allow anyone else to get away with it.

What brought you to FareShare?

Having a child. You can’t work those 80 hours a week, so you have to find something that fits. I stepped back, had a little girl, and as for so many of us, the marriage didn’t last very long and so I had to bring up a little girl on my own with her own needs. When she started kindy, someone saw in 2010 that FareShare, in their old kitchens, put out their first ever, calling all chefs, would you like to give one night a fortnight and it went from there. I came along, saw the kitchen worked with Kellie on the first night, she looked at me at the and said, you can run this. So I started as a volunteer chef, once a fortnight, then it became a weekly thing and I took on a different day, covered a few holiday shifts.

I stepped into a kitchen of a tight-knit group of 16 people who had been coming along on a Wednesday night fortnightly for five or six years and they had seen FareShare go from rented and borrowed spaces to our own little kitchen. They treated every ingredient with respect. It was extraordinary. They were trimming off the horrible bits and using the rest of the vegetable, whereas I’d worked in kitchens where they would just dump stuff if it wasn’t right. Any suggestion you gave them, they would be so appreciative and ask for more tips about how to do things.

It was the same year as Junior MasterChef and because I had a child, they asked whether I would like to run the schools program. When I had Lily, I was trying to work out what I wanted to do and went back to university and did a post-grad in education, thinking I might become a teacher. I took one look at a school and in the staffroom and thought it was too scary. The kids I loved, but the teachers’ space, no. It was all the paperwork and it seemed very political in the staffroom. 

FareShare looked at my qualifications and asked whether I could tailor a program for them. We developed a little program, took it quietly and became a little satellite off-campus, using borrowed spaces and I worked with all the school kids. Now that we are all back in here in this wonderful space that’s the size of almost two tennis courts, we’ve gone from tiny to huge where you’re working with a lot of different people. The love is still there and the dedication and the enjoyment of working with people is still there but the structure has changed. It is a very slick organisation now.

It’s very slick. I come in once a month and I’m such a small cog in the bigger machine and it’s nice to be a part of that but for you the ones running it, you must really have your finger on the pulse to deal with all the volumes of food and all the different volunteers. 

We are all very different people and we work well together. We have slotted into different areas. Some of us have come from purely catering, or the cafes and bistros, or baking. I think I’m the only à la carte, fine dining. So we all bring something different. We are still working on new methods as new ingredients come in and new people each week into the kitchen.

Does it still satisfy the creativity you had in fine dining?

It does in a very different way. I explain to people that that it’s not an open your fridge and think about what’s going on today kind of deal. It is opening seven different vans to see what is arriving. It is very much a seasonal thing. When lamb is in, we might not get any for the first couple of weeks but then suddenly we will get a heap of lamb. After Christmas we get a lot of turkey and ham. Eggs and the different reasons why we get eggs. We get eggs when the batches are going through and they are laying the tiny little eggs and then as they get older, the eggs get firmer and more regular shaped. So we might get ‘green eggs’ or the first lay eggs for a couple of weeks from one farm whereas another farm is constantly supplying us with big, beautiful double-yokers, which you don’t see any more in supermarkets. We get beautiful ingredients and then we get the odd battered and bruised ones. At the moment the kaffir limes are doing really well and a lot of people are trimming their trees and bringing in kaffir lime leaves by the shopping bag. So we have had three days of the most wonderful aroma coming out of the casseroles we’ve been cooking. It’s a beautiful fragrance. 

We use the ingredients and herbs and spices to go along with the seasons, or delayed season. Cherry tomatoes is another good one. We get the by the pallet-load because it is such a fragile little tiny tasty treat. Once one or two are going on a pallet, the whole lot will go so they give them to us. We have a team of people separating out the good stuff and they make the most delicious quiche. It’s a lovely job. We are making beautiful food. It is packed full of vitamins and minerals that has a home-cooked feel despite the mass production. 

FareShare, Abbotsford