Sam Field

Conversation with a chef: Hi Sam, welcome to Conversation with a Chef. We’re sitting upstairs in a really nice quiet room at Molly Rose Brewing in Collingwood, which is a great place to be. I wanted to hear a little bit more about you and the food and what it’s like at Molly Rose. Let’s start with you first, Sam. I read that you grew up in Chichester in England.

Sam Field: I grew up, actually, originally in Newcastle. My father was in the army, so we used to move around all the time. We settled in the south when I was about 14, in Chichester. I’d already had a bit of a love for food at that point. Moving around a lot was amazing because we used to meet lots of different people and the army community would all come together and eat. Food was always a part of my life in that sense. The dads would all go away and all the kids would go around the neighbour’s house and just eat whatever was being made. Army camps tend to be very multicultural, so you’d have Fijian food, a lot of Nepalese food from the Gurkhas. It was just all these amazing cuisines coming together. Then when I moved down south, coming into the teenage years, it was time for me to work and it was just natural really, straight into a kitchen. I never looked back.

There’s something a little bit different between enjoying food and eating different cuisines and stepping into the kitchen. What was it about hospitality that drew you in?

I think if I’m completely honest, with the age I was, it was the only job I could really get into.

How old were you?

When I first started working as a kitchen porter, I was 13. I needed money to go out with friends, buy a car or a motorbike at that point in life.

Were you still at school though?

Yeah. I used to finish school at three and I had to start my kitchen porter job at six. I did that five nights a week after school. It kept me out of the riffraff. It was good fun. When school finished it was a natural progression. I’d already fallen in love with the maturity of kitchens. You have to grow up very quickly, especially at that age if you’re joining a kitchen with experienced chefs. You know your place. If you don’t learn, you fail. It became an obsession to just get better and better and better. Then it just led me to great places. I was very lucky.

Did you start work in a pub?

My first job as a kitchen porter was in a pub. One day, I’d probably been there just under a year, one of the three chefs called in sick, and it was a really busy night. I had just been watching the whole time I was there. They said, “Do you want to have a go on larder? We can show you.” But I’d already known it all because I’d been watching for so long. They were quite impressed and said, “You can just keep this job.” So that was my promotion from kitchen porter to commis chef.

Were there moments where you felt nervous about making mistakes? Or did it all just come quite naturally to you?

Fifty-fifty. Even today I still get nervous about making mistakes because you just want to make everything as perfect as possible. One thing you learn quickly is there’s no such thing as perfect, but you still end up pushing for it. I’m confident in some things, but even then, I still get nervous because at the end of the day I just want to do it one percent better than I did last time. Without putting that pressure on yourself you don’t ever get any better. I never want to be too cocky when it comes to food. A lot of chefs are very good at is being overly cocky with food. I don’t feel like I learn if I act like that. I just try to absorb and be a sponge and see what other people are doing. That’s what excites me.

Did you do any formal training or was it all through observation and on the job?

I left school when I was sixteen. In the UK you’ve got two options really. You stay in school until eighteen or you go and do a trade. I was lucky enough to go to a two-rosette restaurant, just outside of Chichester, as a commis at a fine dining guest hotel. I worked there from sixteen to eighteen. I worked full time and one day a week I’d go to college and sign a bit of paper. For me that was so much better than sitting in a classroom. I never learned well in classrooms. I famously did really badly in school. But I can learn so much quicker hands-on. If I can see it being done, I just want to do it.

It’s a different form of self-torture, fine dining. That’s where the striving for perfection came from for me. But I love the pub scene because you can interact with customers more. It’s much more laid back. You’re enjoying yourself as you’re working instead of pushing one hundred percent all the time. You can forgive yourself for making mistakes in a more relaxed setting. In fine dining there’s no room for error. It took me a while to adjust to that.

Sam Field, Molly Rose Brewing

What’s it like for you, that difference between fine dining and a more casual setting? Do you have a preference?

It’s tough. I love fine dining. If I could do it now, I would. But it takes up so much time in your life. I’m getting older now, getting married, so I need to think about those things. Doing sixty or seventy hours a week until two or three in the morning and only serving twenty guests isn’t sustainable for me anymore. I miss it. It’s a different form of self-torture, fine dining. That’s where the striving for perfection came from for me. But I love the pub scene because you can interact with customers more. It’s much more laid back. You’re enjoying yourself as you’re working instead of pushing one hundred percent all the time. You can forgive yourself for making mistakes in a more relaxed setting. In fine dining there’s no room for error. It took me a while to adjust to that. When I moved back to pubs, I was a horrible chef at first. Very angry because things weren’t the way I wanted them to be. Someone had to say to me, “You’re not in that situation anymore. You can relax.” When I did that, I actually became a better chef.

Do you think there’s more tension in fine dining kitchens?

It depends who’s running the kitchen. I worked for a chef called Jake Saul Watkins, who was renowned in the UK for holding a Michelin star for the longest time. He was a horrible person to work for, but I learned more in those two years than I did in five years anywhere else. Some people say aggression in fine dining is a good thing because it pushes you. Others say it’s bad. But a lot of people can’t take it, and I, at one point, was one of those people. I had to go do something else for a bit because it was self-torture in the pursuit of perfection. It’s such a tough argument. I think we’re lucky today in hospitality, it doesn’t happen as much. But I also do think that you see a dropping of standards because of it. I think there’s a line. Some chefs get it right. They’re strict but fair. Those kitchens are doing really well at the moment. If you go too far, eventually nobody wants to work there. That’s inevitably what happened with JSW.

And very recently with Noma and René Redzepi as well, those stories coming out are quite confronting. It’s disappointing and it’s sad. Hospitality should be about making people happy and it is astounding that those thigs are going on in the kitchen. Are there any things that you bring through from fine dining, maybe techniques, or concepts or I don’t know, ways of seeing things. Can you bring ways of saying things that you can bring into even the kitchen here?

For sure. I think within fine dining, you learn a lot of techniques that, if you’re used to the pub scene, you might look and go, that’s an unnecessary step. There is a slang saying in the kitchen; the cowboy method. It’s the easiest way to do something. With fine dining, you do steps just because you have to, not because it actually means anything. I still keep those steps because I think it’s important to do things correctly, not necessarily easily. For example, we just spent the last three days in the kitchen changing the weight of the herbs that go into the brine for the chicken schnitzel by 10 grams doing them four different times just because we want it to be as good as possible. That is a classic mentality. But in six months time, when you’re happy with the way it is, and it’s still just as good as it was the first time you did it, then you know why you’ve done that as opposed to, it’s okay, it will be fine. I want it to be the best I can do and then stay the best I can do, which I think is a very old school fine dining way of looking at things. I think it’s good to hold on to it. For me, it’s pride because you’re not just eating my food, you’re paying for it, right? We all know the hospitality industry is dying, actually crashing a lot recently. People don’t want to spend as much money, and when you do spend your money, I want it to be a little bit better than either what you would make at home or you get at a local pub. I just wanted to stand out a little bit, that’s all. I think bringing in those old school techniques and just keeping things classic in terms of technique, you set yourself apart.

What brought you to Australia?

I was 20 and I’d been working in JSW for two years. I was run down, I guess. I got bored of the rain and the cold. I woke up one day, I had a bit of extra money in my bank account, and I looked at flights to Australia. I thought, I’ll buy a one-way ticket and come back in two weeks’ time. And now it’s seven years later. I don’t think I’m going back any time soon.

Was it a culture shock when you arrived?

Less than I thought it would be. It was my first time ever outside Europe, so I thought it would be so different. We went to Brisbane first and walking around parts of Brisbane, I wouldn’t have known if I was in Spain, England or Australia at that point. But then you go to other sides of it and it’s completely different. The food culture here, with the Asian influences and the European influences, is incredible. It just blew me away. Even when I go back to the UK now, I’m always underwhelmed. I just can’t wait to get back to Australia. It’s the best.

And is this your first head chef role?

In a pub, yeah. I did a café before. I enjoyed it, but it was just too slow for me. I was finding myself dragging my feet a lot. It was almost boring. The pubs I’m enjoying a lot more. It’s busier, we’ve got a nice small team that I can trust and we can just bang out nice food all day. What’s not to like about that?

When did you join Molly Rose?

Beginning of December. It was a bit of a strange time to join a kitchen, but I seem to have fitted in pretty well. We got through the busy period. It was probably good for me to see the busy period and now we’re focusing on new menus and trying to adapt and match to our beers as best as possible.

I want to ask about that because matching to beers must be different from matching to wines. Where do you start?

I guess with wine, depending on the restaurant, I’m looking more at banging individual flavours to that wine. I want a certain flavour to pop to match with that wine. With beer it’s actually different. You can have a wider range of flavours on the dish and the beer will still cut through it nicely, more complement it. With wine you want it to match perfectly. With beer I want it to drink well. The biggest difference as well is that with wine you’ve got a small glass. With beer you’ve normally got a pint. So you don’t want the food to be too overwhelming every time you take a sip. It needs to drink really nicely together. I’m actually really enjoying matching beer to food, especially here where we have eight or nine different types of beer and it changes every week. Normally with wine you’d say red meat, red wine. Very simple. With beer I’m matching lemon beers with beef and altering the flavours, maybe putting a little bit of lemon myrtle on there to cut it. But I can also do stouts with fish. There are so many good flavour combinations with beer and it makes it really exciting in the kitchen.

Nick Sanderly, the founder, seems to brew some quite visionary beers. That must be exciting to work with.

Yeah, it’s always fun when he brings me the new batches and we play a game where I try to guess what they are. It could be anything with Nick. He brews crazy flavours. At the moment we’ve got a jalapeño radler on, which goes really well with the fish dish. That’s really fun. But you never know what you’re going to get. It changes every week.

How many different beers are there at one time?

At the moment I believe we’ve got seven on. That goes up and down depending on quite a lot of things, like how much time Nick has to brew. Normally on an average day we’ve got seven. But then we’ve also got all of our canned range, so there can be another seven there. We’re very lucky that the team all love beer, so they can tell you where that hop came from, how long it was brewed, why it was brewed, what flavours are in that. Which is great from the chef’s point of view because if I need to know something about a beer, I’ve got all that knowledge right there. I’m more of a drinker than a knower when it comes to beer, so it’s great to have those guys there to say, right, this flavour pops here, this flavour pops here.

One thing I found pleasant about working here is it’s very team-based. Before any dishes even go to the owner, all the staff taste them with the beers and help match them. It’s great from a chef’s point of view because you get so much feedback. We’ve got lots of different people, therefore lots of different opinions, which is really good when it comes to writing a menu.

The description here is “European beer hall through a Melbourne lens.” What does that mean for you?

When I first came here, I was drinking one of the wheat beers and we were running more of a Southeast Asian-style menu at the time. Then we opened up the hall after the renovations and it changed the space completely. It went from being quite a closed restaurant feel to this really open space where beers are flowing. When that tank is brewing beer and you get that smell of beer wafting through the restaurant, for me all I wanted was a schnitzel or a bratwurst. So we started playing with the idea of a European beer hall. We’re using as many Victorian products as possible. I’d say the menu is about 98 percent Australian, probably 60 percent Victorian. It’s super local, but we’re doing German, Spanish and English-influenced food. Lots of sauerkraut, things we can match well with beer using local ingredients. For me it also reminds me of sitting in Berlin drinking beer. That’s where the food inspiration comes from. Homey, warm food. I don’t want people to come in and feel uptight. I want them to relax, put their shoulders down, eat hearty comfort food and drink good beer.

Do you have a favourite dish on the menu at the moment?

We’ve got a local barramundi coming from near Werribee at the moment. It’s incredible fish, so the fish dish is probably my favourite. But I can’t get away from a classic schnitzel. I love the classics. Schnitzel, mash and a beer. You can’t beat it.

Can a chef go wrong with something like a schnitzel?

I don’t think wrong, probably not. But there’s a difference between a good one and a bad one. You go some places and it’s 28 or 30 dollars for a schnitzel and it’s just a schnitzel. I want to pack as much flavour as possible into it. We brine ours for 48 hours with heaps of botanicals going through there. Just to make it a little bit better. I don’t want it to just be a schnitzel. I want it to be the Molly Rose schnitzel with sauerkraut, mash and pepper sauce. Perfect.

If you’re not a meat eater, do you have things on the menu for those vegetarians? 

We do and one thing we do, which we get a lot of good feedback on, is we do a Kohlrabi Parma. We peel kohlrabi, slice it, steam it in the brine, then breadcrumb it in gluten-free breadcrumbs. And then gremolada, mozzarella cheese, and fresh nap on top. You look at it and you go, it’s a chicken parma. Actually, it’s a nice thick piece of kohlrabi, nice and peppery with the brine going through there as well. It’s nice seasoned. Gremolada on top. It’s a really good dish, I think, for the vegetarians and vegans because it’s not one you see everywhere. It’s a little bit different. Kohlrabi is an awesome ingredient. One thing I really wanted to try and push forward was I want the vegetarian dish to almost look better than the meat dish or just as good. We’ve put so much effort into making the vegetarian dishes really, really good. We’ve also got a rigatoni a la norma on. We actually sell more of the kohlrabi parma than we do a lot of the meat dishes all of the time. 

What about if people just want some snacks? 

School prawns are our big ones at the moment. One of my favourites. So we’ve got like a really nice salty school prawn and wakami salt. Really good with beer. Most of our snack food is tailored to be put on the table and drunk with. Black pudding sausage rolls with that English influence. They go down really, really well. I was a little bit nervous when I put it on the menu. Aussie seems to love it or hate it. We are always selling out. We make them every day. Saganaki, good old classic. We’re also doing a toasty range after the kitchen closes for beer drinkers are coming in late. 

Do people tend to have dessert here? 

That’s something we’ve been trying to push. But not really. We’ve got on a stout molasses chocolate fondant. When I’m drinking beer, I don’t normally have sweets. We use the beer in the dessert. It’s a very earthy, stout, chocolaty flavour. There’s not a lot of sugar in it. Very heavy, very dark, it goes really nicely with a dark ale. That’s doing pretty well. We tried to do a sticky toffee and it didn’t work. No one wanted it. It’s just too sweet. Cheeses are our biggest after meal. Cheeseboard and a nice beer. 

That’s fascinating. But it probably does fit with what I was thinking for sure. When you’re trying to distil a menu, how do you decide what to put on? 

Trial and error, normally. A lot of people write lots of dishes and then narrow it down in their heads. I struggle with that because I write all these dishes down and I want all of them. What I do is I cook all of them, put them all out on the table, get people to taste them, front of house and the other chefs, then we narrow it down to the top 15. Then look at that in terms of balance. I can only have six. So then we pick one deep fried thing, and get rid of all the other deep fried things. Then we’re going to need something fresh pan fried, so we’ll pull that one in. That’s the way I try and balance it. I don’t want the menu to be too carb heavy. I don’t want it to be too brown. Occasionally we finish the menu, look at it, and after a few days, we’re like, ah, maybe that doesn’t actually fit. Okay, let’s pull that off. Let’s do some other tasters of specials, and see what sells well. Okay, let’s move that onto the menu. 

I guess potentially it’s a neighbourhood place. So there’s probably going to be favourites that have to stay on like the schnitzel. Are you trying some of those changes out through specials? 

I start working probably about two months before a menu change. I carry around a notebook when I’m working and write down whatever I’m thinking. I look at that at the end of the week and go, okay, let’s try that next week, see how that works. But also I think in the pub setting, I don’t want to be changing it too regularly because like you say, we’ve got locals, we’ve got people that are coming in expecting something. So instead of doing a full menu change every three or four months, we’ll do one dish change every so often and just start slowly pulling things apart. When something is coming to the end of the season, we’ll change it. When kohlrabi goes out, we’ve already planned to go to celeriac for the parma. We tweak things a little bit without completely wiping it and starting again. I think in a lot of restaurants that works really well, just completely scrapping the menu and starting afresh. I don’t think in a place like Molly Rose, where we have our core beer range, and we incorporate a lot of our beer in the cooking that it’s the best idea to just scrap it. People want occasionally to come in for the same thing. The schnitzel is a great example. There’s nothing on that that is in season. So that one can stay on all year round and then it gives me an opportunity to play with the other stuff. 

We talked about before about the team mentality here, which is fantastic, and you’ve learned some lessons about leading in the past, maybe what not to do. What’s your style then? You are a leader in the kitchen and you have to get across what your ideas are for the food and consistency and all those things. How do you approach that leadership role? 

I think, like you say, taking things from the past is really important. I’ve learned how I don’t want to be treated in a kitchen. I like to think I’m very fair as a head chef. I don’t want my chefs to not be able to tell me something’s wrong in terms of prep or cooking or service because then it causes more issues. I’ve learned that in the past, people were too scared to say anything and therefore they won’t. And then you find out about it two hours later and it ruins the whole service. All the chefs I have are very mature, very good chefs. It’s more of like a friendship mentality as well as respecting each other. As long as we’re all trying, that’s all you can ask for. Even if you do make a mistake, as long as you try, I don’t mind. We’re humans, at the end of the day, we’re going to make mistakes. There’s no point in getting upset about it. I think that’s rubbed off quite well in this kitchen. I think when you do that, you actually notice less mistakes when people aren’t on edge. I’ve worked in kitchens where people are constantly scared and they always make mistakes. The moment the head chef isn’t there, they’re great and they are cracking food out. I think that taught me that if you just let people do their job, then they’ll do it. It’s the same for front of house here as well. 

Food costs are such a big thing these days and you don’t necessarily learn all the ins and outs when you are studying. Suddenly, when you’re head chef, it’s all on you and there’s got to be a profit and you want to use really good quality ingredients. How do you marry the two? 

I was very, very lucky when I took over this job, that some good friends, the head chef of The European supported me with that side of things and gave me really good advice about not sticking to one supply, moving around suppliers, comparing suppliers. But also looking around you to see what other people are using? There must be a reason why they’re using that. Let me look into that. Then you notice patterns, We’re in a quiet time of the year at the moment and it’s really hard for a lot of kitchens to keep their food cost low. It’s a lot easier with a busy menu to get good food costs. For me in this kitchen, it’s minimum ordering, trying to do little and often as opposed to prepping for a week and keeping your wastage down. It’s the only way we can do it. So far, it’s been nice and steady, especially with the menu change, which we were quite happy with. Food prices are just every day. I had the oil man in this morning who told me my oil was going to go up by 10 cents a litre. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but over a period of a year it’s $1000s. Then you have to then add that into your budget. I’m quite lucky. I’ve been set up by chef friends with heaps of spreadsheets. Every day, I spend 20 minutes filling out spreadsheets, and it tells me, okay, you’re spending too much on this, you need to pull this one back. It’s only going to get harder, especially in Melbourne. I think everyone’s a bit nervous about it for the future, compared to when I was a young chef and it was almost not really thought about. As long as your menu is selling, you’re probably going to make money. It’s not the case anymore. It’s about balancing. I think that’s the best way I can describe it. It is a struggle. But it’s also really good at the end of the month when you see that number and it’s where you want it to be, it’s the best feeling. 

I guess it’s a game thing. The gamification of the kitchen numbers. With all that in mind and your experience, and where you are today, what would your advice be to a young person starting out as a chef? 

Be a sponge. Listen to everything. There’s a million ways to skin a cat. And then, one chef’s going to do something different to you. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Just watch it. Listen. Ask questions. I think that’s all you can do. Cooking is about knowledge. The more you know, the better you can cook. So just listen, take it all in. I’m still learning today. I probably will be until I’m 70. I’ll still be in the kitchen, and I’ll still be learning as well. 

Molly Rose Brewing, 279/285 Wellington Street, Collingwood