I spoke to Rob Kaboord for Broadsheet when Lekker first opened as a pop-up in the Windsor Hotel at the start of January. He was generous then with his time and the stories he shared with me and he was generous again this time. When we spoke in January, we had no idea that by now, mid-March, the world would be in such a state of flux. The hospitality industry has been particularly hard-hit, and the Covid-19 crisis is, of course, front of mind for many of us. Rob shared some insights and inspiration with me which highlight his hospitality heart and why he is as well-loved as he is within the industry and wider community. This is a longer than usual conversation with a chef, so grab a cup of tea, settle in, and enjoy.
Hi Rob, how are you? Thank you for talking to me again.
[elbow greeting]
We’ve been doing the elbow in the kitchen for years; we often have dirty hands because we’ve been busy with butchery and finally Corona is making it cool to touch elbows.
Last time we spoke we didn’t even know Corona was on the horizon.
No, that was well before it all started…years ago…
It feels like that, doesn’t it? You’ve had a really successful residency that is now continuing.
How lucky am I? I don’t know what happened. We said a summer residency then people like you from Broadsheet, The Age, the Herald Sun, Gourmet traveller all said, Rob’s back, so you guys helped a lot.
Oh, I think it’s you. Your reputation and then proving it.
The spruiking of it gets customers in and obviously the proof is in the pudding, so then the residency was up but we were all having a good time and making a little bit of money, even though January and February with the bushfires was tricky for all of our industry. Now we have even trickier times and we foolishly said, yeah, we’ll stay open.
Well, mushrooms are starting to come in, so why wouldn’t you do an autumn menu? I saw on Instagram that you’ve pulled the tables a little further apart.
Yes. We are only 30 seats so we are not massive, but we just feel to make the guests feel better, the social distancing…I mean, I don’t work in feet, but with the six feet ruling coming out of America and the very rapid closure of some high-end restaurants in Europe…I just want to give the finger to Corona virus and we keep doing what we do. We are working on, like most restaurants are, another version…not UberEats but Lekker eats, of some description. But I only have a very small team and we can do the cooking but who will do the delivering so we are talking to a few people.
Hasn’t Dani Valent done a petition and UberEats have put $5 million towards…
Towards the delivering, yes. They are getting on board, which I think is amazing, but at the moment, we have never dealt with UberEats or Deliveroo and we don’t have the context. So we are working that out and in the meantime, we are doing a little bit more cleaning than usual. We have antiseptic and hot soapy water on the door and balustrades and the high contact surfaces. I’m of the opinion that most restaurants are clean anyway because if they are dirty, they’ll get called out on it. Guests don’t go to dirty restaurants. So already we are super clean and super tidy and we have gone slightly further on it…until the government says we can’t keep going.
What’s happening in Amsterdam? Because I know in France they have closed restaurants and cafes…and everything actually.
Amsterdam is closed until Easter weekend, so the 10th April, starting this week. Already there are some sad stories coming out of there, because with the blanket rule that Holland applied, some restaurants won’t come out the other end and that is always bad news. The Dutch Catering Association has asked for a $500 million grant from the government to help with all of hospitality and that goes for airports, airport catering, into tourism, to the little stallholders on the dam or near the dam who sell herring. They went from a tourist population of millions to zero. It went so fast that they are sitting on stock and so they decided to feed the homeless, otherwise they would be wasting stock. There are a lot of really positive things coming out of it and everyone is trying to deal with it as best they can. It also needs to be said, especially with regard to here, density of population…Holland has 60 million people in an area that would fit 70 times into Australia, so the density of population is a lot more drastic than here. The Prime Minister said we have to keep Australia running and I wholeheartedly agree that we should try and remain open for as long as we can without putting families at risks. The risk goes both ways. If I say to my boys, look we won’t be seeing you for the next three weeks, they have young kids, they won’t get paid, they don’t have enough annual leave….especially in the pop-up environment where we are essentially three or four months old and there is no war chest that we have built up over a few years so we can withstand it and show goodwill. If we have to close, we have to close. And in Holland and I think Belgium is on the same track, France and Italy are already there, Denmark, the UK are toying with it.
Global information is so fast these days. When Trump does a speech, we pay a lot of attention here, but some of those dimensions don’t really work here because we have a lot more of nothing here, a lot of space. It was quite poignant at the weekend, because I live in Wheatsheaf and I was in the local pub and there were a couple of farmers in there and it was business as usual; ‘have you seen any mushrooms yet? … how are the pears going?’ and the Corona virus was not on the agenda. There’s a group of them who get together every Monday and I am the offsider who sneaks in and has a quiet beer and listens to them. Every now and then they ask me how it is in the big smoke and I tell them it is pretty dire and their response it, ugh, city folk and then they’re back to their meeting discussing their cows. Life is very different there. You can even see it in the local IGA. Everything is there and in stock.
I heard about these terrible things, these Corona tourist buses, taking city people out to rural supermarkets.
It’s disgusting. I can kind of understand the fear and the panic behind it but that is mainly because of the global news. When it first broke in Italy, there was a guy that was quarantined for two weeks and he had a packet of pasta and a tin of tuna and that’s it, but it was all over the news all over the world. A lot of people thought, fuck, what of that happens here?
I cook for a living, I have a vegetable garden, my house is stocked ok. I would survive two weeks. I don’t see myself buying 120 bog rolls. For what?
I think it is the only way people see that they can control the situation on a personal level because I think everyone feels a bit out of control.
Absolutely; it’s reassuring to have a couple of tins of tomato sauce and a couple of packets of pasta. The upsetting thing with that is that all of a sudden people became really selfish. It shows the side of humanity that isn’t the friendliest. I don’t roll that way. Pretty much all of my crew, we have a sensible level head approach and we ask each other whether we need anything.
It is a shame if hospitality venues close. I think that offers hope and a respite for diners. Your suppliers are obviously still coming through. It would be nice if people can still come out and have nice times.
Whoever is well, come, we are here and we are operating as usual. The predictions, even from the suppliers, are pretty dire, where they are looking at leaving more cows in the paddock because no one is going to buy them. That means that in the future the prices will drop, but it’s a disaster for the farmers because they still need to move their stock. This will trickle through all the industries. Hospitality is measurable because if this keeps going, they are predicting a 30% drop in livestock. That’s a lot of cattle and some of these guys are still recovering from December and January, especially in East Gippsland where now all of a sudden there is a second disaster thrown at them.
We have started using #savehospo. It’s not because we just want to save ourselves, but also our suppliers, our farmers, the secondary industry, the casuals…The list is starting to become frighteningly large. I think there are some great examples of people, like Hannah at Etta is doing their own delivery from their menu. Little businesses don’t have the war chest. They can’t sit on their hands; they have to be proactive in dire straits to make sure the rent can be paid, the staff can be paid and that they still have a little bit of control.
On Monday I had an interesting meeting with a couple of people in the industry and although people are saying that we have to try and stay open as long as we can, hard decisions will have to be made. A friend of mine in Sydney has just closed one of the two restaurants he owns because it is in the financial district and those guys stopped eating out because of all of the money they just lost but also there has been a case of corona virus. So all of a sudden that’s 22 staff at home and they can’t afford to pay 22 staff to sit at home. He asked me whether I needed anyone for two weeks, but not really because I’m fully staffed, but I asked around and we can share staff if we can and try and make ends meet. it’s the only thing we can really do.
That’s a good thing to come out of this; the community. I think there is a community of chefs here and I like that idea that you’re willing to help each other and it’s not a competition.
Definitely. Melbourne has always been a community that engages with one another…in my little community. You can share and care and do stuff for each other.
I still do it for the service. The prep job is what you have to do but the creativity of making something and then seeing it go out in a busy service is till probably the biggest joy of cooking.
Where did your love of hospitality start?
Pretty early on. When I was four, I wanted to be a garbage man. In Amsterdam, they hang off the back of the truck and it was manual labour and I liked the idea of doing that. Then it wasn’t until I was six or seven and it was raining cats and dogs and I saw the garbage man going past the house and I thought, No, I won’t be doing that for a living. I always liked hospitality or the service aspect of hospitality. I didn’t really know where or how, but I’ve always been better with my hands. I can read and write and I know how to do maths and all that stuff, but I’ve always preferred practical things. I finished my secondary education and then you can choose and I went to hotel school because then I could be a general manager or a chamber maid; there are a lot of facets in hospitality. It was a broad cast.
I did that for five years and spent a year on stage. The first couple of months I did the more books kind of stuff and I hated it. I could not sit in an office and check numbers. It was so boring. I asked for a transfer within the hotel; it was the Waldorf. Once I was in the kitchen, the chef put me on sandwiches. That was pretty tame. Afternoon tea was pretty big there, but when you make sandwiches you learn how to do your mise en place but after about three or four months I asked if there was something more exciting. I really hoped there was something else because I didn’t know what to do with myself if there wasn’t. The chef put me in the bistro and that particular bistro used to do close to 500 to 600 covers a day and my first service there I just thought, what the fuck is going on here? The speed, the efficiency…there was a pre kitchen with double-sided fridges and people would put the prep in and the guys cooking would pretty much pull it straight out. I walked out of there scratching myself like an addict because of the adrenalin, and I was like, I need more of this. Where can I get more? I completely got bitten by the service bug.
From there the progression was pretty steady but pretty fast to where I am today. After you’ve been a commis in a bistro you think, cool, can I be a commis for a Michelin star? Then that’s fun, can I do it for two Michelin stars? Then can I do it in one, two, three hat restaurants? Can I do it in a hotel? In a bakery?
In your own place?
Yeah, like I said, it’s a massive snowball of adrenalin and I still do it for the service. The prep job is what you have to do but the creativity of making something and then seeing it go out in a busy service is till probably the biggest joy of cooking, where you go, cool, that was executed well…we have now perfected this dish and we can move on.
You’re really big on sustainability and zero waste, or as little waste as possible.
As little as possible.
Has it always been like that for you?
No. When I was a young cook, I didn’t even know where beef came from. As a youngling, you have to navigate and learn your way. I was lucky with my mentors. Very early on, provenance was a really big pat and there was no excuse for not knowing provenance. As soon as you know about provenance you know that livestock also means deadstock and how much hay does a cow need to become a cow. What do you mean that an eye fillet is only one hundredth of a cow? Most of my mentors have been progressive to zero or little waste and they’ve said things like, don’t buy that fish because if we keep fishing it, in two years it is not going to be around. So what fish should we use? So out of professional curiosity and wanting to learn, because you will never stop learning as a chef.
Do you have to be more creative to be sustainable and get your wastage down?
Yes. Because there is no buying one cut. That’s where this place struggles a little bit because we’re not big enough to do this to the full effect, but you know, if you buy a whole pig, the challenge is always how creative you can be with every scrap. Can I do a little bit of tail here, a little bit of hoof there, a little skin number, the bones can become a broth or even taking it further and carbonising the bones to make charcoal to roast the lettuce so there is truly zero waste.
So what are you doing now we are moving into autumn?
We are changing most of the dishes but the pademelon is staying, mostly because it drops beautifully into autumn with the beetroot and also because I really like that dish.
It’s so delicious. I have been telling everyone about this pademelon tartare that I tasted. But now mushrooms are coming out.
There are some cracking mushrooms around at the moment. I haven’t committed to them yet because the season is so wishy washy at the moment. My preferred mushrooms come later in the season. The blewitts and the morels. The pines are in full bloom already…the slipperies will need a bit more rain. I have a forager who I use, Matt O’Donnell from Mushrooms Anonymous, when he goes out, he always makes a little Rob crate because I like the smaller, younger, bouncier ones. He’ll make a little crate for me. We had a recent discussion and he said just to wait a little bit longer. Traditionally, it is Easter, so we are very early. All the seasons are a bit skew whiff at the moment. But seasonality is always a good reason to play.
Where do you get your ideas? I don’t want to say, is it from being on the industry so long and imply that you are old, because you’re not, but you have been cooking for a while and you have lots of experience, or are your inspired by books, Instagram, other people?
It’s a little bit of everything really. In my earlier years, I would seek out what’s good in autumn. Now it’s more a case of, yeah cool, autumn is coming, let’s start thinking about this set of flavours and things I would like to use. Eggplant is traditionally a summer vegetable and that’s on now because that’s a good little wedge, but we do that with smoked eel. So we are bringing the earthiness into a fish dish with lovely eel from Silver Lake. You come up with ideas and then you think, well, what is the weather like and it’s nearly a case of looking at the forecast for the week and seeing it will be dreary and rainy, so let’s bring on the slow braised dishes and the things with chutney and the heavier, warming dishes that give you a nice little cuddle and go well with a big shiraz, as opposed to a frivolous rosé. That’s usually where the concepts and the ideas come from. I have been cooking 24 years this year, so there is a lot of stuff in the library, and for example I might remember a Brussel sprout dish but realise that if I make it that rich here, people will walk outside and die because it is still 27° out there. This is the cautionary two weeks and then after Easter, it’ll be a little cooler and when it is usually open season. Some of the stuff we did in Europe doesn’t really translate here, like game season. but I can get my hands on some amazing venison. Some of the things you can seek out and then it’s about amping up the cuddle in the bowl. Dishes can be a bit wetter. I don’t really do soup but we could have a little broth or consommé on the side. It’s about pitting more oomph in. I’m still doing five courses.
What’s your dessert, because that apricot dessert was so divine; it had all that deliciousness in it.
The dessert now is probably the closest thing to a signature of mine, it’s the Dutch mess. The Dutch mess is an old dish. It started off as an Eton Mess and then strawberries go out of season and I didn’t know what to do but I liked how it sat food cost-wise and production-wise and it sat really well in the menu. I think it started with my supplier having a supply of Valencia oranges, which are technically around right now; we have two maybe three weeks left and then all the oranges and citrus will come in. I made this Eton Mess homage with a swiss meringue and a sorbet and some other little orangey bits, so then I thought I can’t really refer to it as Eton mess any more, because Eton Mess is three things and it is very strict in what it should be. I had this young apprentice working with me at the time and he very cheekily said to me, Chef, you should call it the Dutch Mess…get it? Orange! I thought he was so cheeky and then I thought about it and I thought, that’s brilliant. It’s me in a cup and orange and I’ll happily take the piss out of myself. So I made one up and took it out to Front of House and they asked what they should call it and when I said Dutch Mess, they said it would never work and behold it sold and it stuck. I started with it just before I got to Merricote and when I got to Merricote, every time Valencias were good, the Dutch Mess would appear. It’s vanilla ice cream and orange sorbet with a little bit of cardamom in it, swiss meringue, orange jelly, orange segments, candied orange, Pashmak, which is a kind of Iranian fairy floss and that’s it. It’s kinda like the apricot, it’s all hidden, so you have to dig around a bit to get at all the bits. Then it’ll be time for some warmer desserts and then it will be spring again.
Will you still be here in spring?
Will any of us be here in spring? I don’t know. I’m going to say yes, I’d love to still be here. The hope is still that we would find something else whether that’s in the city or a little out. So far, I’m happy here and the owner is happy with us too. It’s quite liberating that I don’t have to look too far ahead. I like to be super organised and plan a year out in advance of menus, but it’s quite nice to be as free as we are right now to be able to say yes to events.
Hopefully in a few months’ time you will be able to get back to doing events.
I hope so. I’m quietly hoping that Australia has been proactive enough with travel bans and so on. Let’s focus on staying clean and staying nice to one another.
Lekker, 1 Bourke Street