Ryan Dolan

Ryan, I’ve been reading a bit about you and I just read your article on Vice’s food website, Munchies, from a couple of years ago…

Jesus, no.

I loved it. Lots of things intrigued me about Cabale and you’re the concept of bistronomy that you have brought to Broadsheet Kitchen’s first residency. Cabale is French for uprising or rebellion, is that what you intended or is there another meaning you wanted to come out of it?

If you want to read between the lines, that’s kind of how it goes. It stems from bistronomy which is a rebellion against fine dining and its constraints. It’s liberating everything in that sense. I’m not here to shake things up, I’m not here to reinvent the wheel, but originally for the actual concept itself, it came from where you have everything controlled by just chefs, which is what I was doing in France; no waiters, no waitresses, not even a dishwasher or sommelier. We did everything 100 per cent. We knew how to control the food, we knew where it was going, when it was ready and we would serve it. It was a very long and strenuous process. At the end of the day it was also because we had limited funds. 

That was at La Bijouterie?

Correct. When you start a business on a shoestring budget, you have to compromise on certain things. We tried not to compromise on the food but for everything else we had to make it as simple and minimalistic as possible for the ease of service and deliverability. 

How do you go from the stove to the table?

How it worked over there was you have me who was behind the stoves and another guy who was doing desserts and entrees as well, and one would stay on the floor, greet the guests, sit them down, give them wine then as soon as everyone was seated, we’d go from that point of delegating and the two of us would cook and then rotate around every time there was a table ready. If it was a table of six, maybe we would go together; take the food, explain and then get back to cooking. Because we only had 32 seats and it was one sitting, the control was from that point. Two hours before service, or depending how much in the shit we were, we’d prepare everything precisely for those 32 people. We were always booked out two weeks in advance, so it was never a problem for numbers and calculations in that sense. We’d always have ten per cent more just in case we had walk-ins, but we would never really turn the restaurant around more than one and a half times. At that point it’s too much for three people to handle.

So coming to this concept now, here, where I have Scott Pickett’s team, the Saint Crispin team already in place, they’re a two hat standard, it’s not like I can get rid of all the front of house and say it’s just going to be the chefs. It’s not 100 per cent what I wanted it to be and we are still finding the kinks in terms of the food but as long as the integrity of bistronomy stays on the plate, that’s a starting point for now.

I was thinking when you were talking about La Bijouterie that it’s like putting on a play. It’s like theatre when you say, this is how it’s going to roll over the next two to three hours, you’ve all got your roles and you know what’s going to happen. It’s a performance.

Correct. It was a kitchen more or less the same size as the one here.

It’s not a big kitchen. 

It’s not and when you consider there’s upstairs as well, it can get sticky. But that’s like any other kitchen. As soon as the restaurant is full there has to be a bigger push and you have to get the food out.

Is this degustation?

No, it’s not really degustation. It’s a two course or three course choice and I keep the menu very small. Again if we’re looking at deliverability and in terms of cutting down the amount of options and choice that a lot of people in Australia have – we’re a country that’s spoiled for choice – I just wanted to condense that and really work on each individual element so that it sings. 

I guess that controls the experience the diner has. You know what you want them to experience and you have more control over what they will taste if you have put those elements together for them.

It’s not supposed to be so strenuous in the kitchen these days. Everyone is veering towards a different sort of vein. And rightfully so. If you get chefs in the kitchen with a 40-item menu and each menu item has 12 or more elements on each plate, they’re going to look raggedy and sometimes you can’t deliver on that and the food gets compromised and doesn’t have its true worth or essence of what it should be, because the consistency is not there. Sometimes they’re stressed because the restaurant is full and they 50 billion dockets away at once and they can’t keep up and then you taste the stress in the food as well. That’s not nice. For the people making food, it should be a labour of love. What we are trying to achieve here is a genuine sense of hospitality. If the chefs are happy, then the food is going to be great and if the food is great, then the customers are happy and then they’ll come back, which is what you want.

I’m such a big believer in that. There’s a Spanish book, Like water for chocolate, and it’s about a woman who cooks and the people who eat her food can taste whatever emotion she had while she was cooking. 

I think it’s very true. It transcends into the food. We are only the middle man in the sense. Let’s not forget the farmers. Without the good produce, we can’t create anything tasty to give to the customer. If the love starts from there, and if we carry on that love to the customer, then that’s when you get your three Michelin star cuisine in a very relaxed bistro setting. That’s what it should be about. It should be a fun atmosphere where you can catch up with friends and family without any pretence. You shouldn’t feel that you should have to be anyone other than yourself when you walk into this space.

That’s good. Who started the bistronomy movement?

It can be traced back to two people, the first one, let’s call him the granddaddy, Yves Camdeborde, he would have been mentioned in that Munchies article as well. Let me just touch base on that Munchies article by the way. I do not hate French people. I love French people. That title was not even my own. That was a very pessimistic article and I got so much hate mail from it. 

What a shame.

If you’re going to be a foreigner in the country of food…actually, that’s going to start some arguments too…I didn’t go over there to offend anyone. I went over there to cook. Those were my experiences and I gave positives for every negative there, it’s just that those positives weren’t written down. If you didn’t know me, you’d probably say, who is this guy?

Look, I thought it was an interesting take. I loved the image of using a pencil sharpener to make a carrot into a mini carrot. I lived in France as well and you can eat so well in France, but, as with anywhere, there are old traditions that haven’t been changed. There's that French phrase that we do things, comme il faut, (as they should be done)…it’s good to reflect on things. But I guess it’s always difficult as a foreigner reflecting on another culture or way of doing things. But as you say there has been change that has come up from within French culture and French cuisine and that was what you were observing.

Exactly. In terms of innovation and the standard of cooking, it will always be in France, as much as the trends keep shifting now to Scandinavia or before that, Spain, or even Japan. Japan and France are very similar in terms of language, where you have an almost hierarchy; a very polite way of speaking, a high way of speaking and then something more familiar or vulgar, depending on which way you want to look at it. The same with the food. It’s all very seasonal, it’s all very provincial and the deeply rooted traditions of culture at least move in parallel with each other. If they don’t move in parallel, they’ll move in resistance and that’s how bistronomy happened. That’s how I understand it. Give me one second, I’ll try that coffee again…

[Ryan goes to make coffee.]

Do you miss the coffee and croissants in the morning? Where were you in France?

I was in the South of France in a small town near Avignon, Châteaurenard. 

When I first went to France, I was in Montelimar.

Ah, nougat!

That’s what everyone says. That’s another thing I miss, actually, every single city has a particular speciality. If you go to the riviera you have the Tarte St. Tropez, then if you go up to the north a little bit more to Grasse, where the perfume was invented.

And Nice has socca, the chickpea pancake. You were right on the border in Lyon where it changes from cream to olive oil and then you have all the Mediterranean vegetables and fish more than the heavier food.

The sun food. That’s how they describe it.

That’s a good description. 

Then the mountains have raclette and fondues, all the heartier stuff.

We had a weekend with a friend’s grandparents in Millau and it was meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner and I came away feeling as though I needed to be vegan. It was too much. Then we did a tour of the caves de Roquefort and I couldn’t even enjoy the cheese because I was so full of meat. They love it though. 

France and French people are wonderful. I think if you can speak the language, you have a different experience. I think we misunderstand because of our Antipodean and Anglo-Saxon background. I don’t think French people are arrogant, I think it is absolute confidence in where they come from and I think that comes through in lots of facets in the way they live their lives. But they’ve been on that continent for centuries and fought and lost and fought and lost land and they’ve established their identity. It’s hard for New Zealanders and Australians to understand that. We don’t really get that art of debate they have. We can think they’re arguing, but for them they are just discussing. 

They can sound heated. But they are hot-blooded. That stems from passion. They stand their ground. They believe in their ideals, they don’t go two ways about it. That’s not something that bothered me about the French. Other cultures are the same. Italians are like that. There’s something in every culture but it’s just not so pronounced.

That’s right. Before you went to Lyon…because they talk about Lyon as being the capital of gastronomy, you were in the big time at a Michelin star restaurant…what were you doing before Lyon?

I was lucky to get that job. I was learning the language. When I went over to France, I didn’t have any French at all.

That would be so hard in the kitchen.

Absolutely. That’s the reason why I couldn’t get a job straight away. So I went to the Alps and started snowboarding. Great discovery as well. It was silly how naïve I was in thinking that it would be similar to surfing. Absolutely not. I enjoyed that. While I was snowboarding…I spent four months there…I picked up the language. I could start to construct sentences and hold a conversation. Then tuning my ear to the intonations. From that point I went to Paris but my French still wasn’t good enough so they told me to come back when I could speak French. I got lucky to go to Lyon. I sent my CV everywhere, in Paris, Bordeaux, in every single city in France and no one would take me because I was this foreigner who couldn’t really speak French. So then I did handwritten letters and actually gave them to people. I knocked on doors and asked if they had a job. That’s when Tetedoie opened his door to me.

You’d been cooking in Australia before that.

Absolutely. Before that I started in pastry in Cairns and quickly got bored of Cairns. So then I went to the Gold Coast and that was probably my first experience working with someone who was French and of a two Michelin star standard. there was a chef, I don’t know if he still has his restaurant any more, Meyjitte Boughenout, at Absynthe at the Q1 resort. He had had two Michelin stars in Belgium. He was very very strict, and let’s not beat about the bush, it was an aggressive kitchen to work in. But that changed my view of the kitchen and showed me a level. That was the starting point for me to get serious about cooking. So then I went down to Sydney. I worked at Becasse, then Glass. I did a stage at Pierre. Glass still exists but sadly Becasse and Pierre don’t exist anymore. From there I said, ok, well French food seems to appeal to me, so let’s go to the source and learn from the source. That’s when I jumped into Tetedoie. I already had the skill set but then I had to forget everything I had learned in Australia and relearn it the French way and that’s the correct way.

From that point I worked my way up to sous chef and then they proposed another restaurant in their group, a bouchon, that wasn’t doing very well. A bouchon is kind of food for the masses, mother’s cooking. A lot of secondary cuts, hearty food. 

Did you cook a lot of offal? They’re renowned for that in Lyon, aren’t they?

Ah yeah. There are several dishes in Lyon that highlight offal. Tablier des sapeurs, for example, which is fireman’s blanket, which is tripe that’s been braised and then crumbed and then put in a rich sauce of butter. It’s very very heavy.

It’s probably great because it’s using the whole animal, but I just can’t do it. 

I have some ox tongue on the menu right now. Just cooked in a very simple mirepoix vinegar in a bag overnight and then we take it and dip it into a Japanese sauce or tare that they use for yakitori grill. This is a base of soy sauce, kombu, katsuobushi and what I do is I toast some hay and infuse that into the sauce as well. So if you were to take it from a stem of the cow eating grass, hay, that was the connection there. It’s a very rich sauce and very tasty in itself, but trying to sell that to people who aren’t used to seeing all these offal and secondary cuts, again that’s a cultural divide I’m trying to work on here.

There’s nothing wrong with tongue, or heart, or liver or kidney. All of that stemmed from necessity out of the war, of course, and bringing that into a first world country where people are spoiled for choice…who’d go to a restaurant and order a dirty bit of tongue when you can have a nice filet mignon or something? Looking at it from a different angle, the general potential of the tongue can be just as good as the filet mignon. You just have to be open-minded enough to accept it. Maybe if it wasn’t a degustation format…sorry, a tasting format, I’m still thinking in French!…and something gets put down in front of you, of course you are going to eat it and then you’ll probably ask after, what was that, and they tell you it was tongue, you’d be, well that blew my mind, I didn’t know tongue could taste like that or even look like that. But if you were to have them order it form the menu, choose, it, I don’t think they would.

That’s right. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I was just thinking, probably wrongfully because that’s not what you’re about, but how much French influence can people see when they eat this food, but I guess bistronomy is about creativity and more about terroir, it’s not about being authentically, traditionally French per se, but about achnowledging where you are and using the ingredients you have here but with those French techniques and understandings. Is that kind of it?

We can also put it in the sense that it is a contemporary cuisine. My type of bistronomy, because of my multi-cultural background and all the different cuisines I was exposed to when I was young, is a global cuisine. You can take a French technique and mix it with some Asian produce. It’s adapting to a region. Terroir does come into it, but I’m not bound by culture, I’m not bound by history, I’m not bound by anything that has a set way. This is supposed to blur the lines and create something that can be innovative, that can be very straight edge but at the end of the day it has to be tasty and show some sort of technique. Execution of any good dish has to come from the technique. If you’re going to fry something, make sure it’s fried properly otherwise it’s not going to be a good dish. How many times have you had soggy chips and gone ugh, that’s not nice? But then when you get them golden brown and nicely seasoned with that nice little crunch but fluffy on the inside, it’s amazing. That’s just execution of proper technique.

Two things: execution of proper technique and produce as well. That’s another thing I’m coming to terms with here in Australia because produce is absolutely not the same. You can’t just put a tomato on the plate and have it taste as amazing as when you were in Provence. 

That is so true. We had a Marché d’Intérêt National in Châteaurenard and every morning all the big trucks would come from all over Europe to buy produce for the supermarket and a friend’s father worked there and I went down there to check it out. Honestly, I ate an apricot which tasted like the sun, it was like a mouth full of apricot jam, it was so flavour full and sweet and delicious. We talk about having amazing produce here and we do, but it’s different.

You have to go there and experience it to know what the difference is. In the six years I was in France I hadn’t been back to Australia so I thought I’d take a little holiday and see the family. I was in Sydney for a little bit and I ate at Sixpenny and I was talking to Daniel Puskas there and I said, man, what do you do to make the produce taste so good? He said, I can’t just put a tomato on the plate. I have to do x amount of things. I have to make tomato juice, dehydrate tomato skins and concentrate them to make into a powder just to make that tomato taste amazing. That’s the difference. You have to work more. 

I know you have work to do, but just as a last point, I liked the idea you came back and did some stages here, working in other people’s kitchens. You were saying that when you went to France you had to relearn their technique and I guess coming back here you’d have to relearn Australian technique and things would have moved on in those five or six years you were away as well. I liked that you’d been to Igni and Ramblr…

And Amaru. It just shows where the level of food is in Australia. I think I chose a few good ones. Especially what Clinton is doing at Amaru is very good. Even Igni, he has his own place. I found it quite similar to what we were doing in Lyon, at La Bijouterie. 

I went, well this is the level and this is what we’re cooking with and this is what I can potentially do with everything and this is great and this is what I was doing in France and then you find the medium. Hence what we’re doing at Cabale. Hopefully I can reach that level. 

Awesome. Enjoy your season here. It is a season, isn’t it?

It is. We are definitely heading into the festive season and we are already fully booked. It’s really good.

L?isten to this amazing chat here.

Cabale at Broadsheet Kitchen

300 Smith Street, Collingwood