Scott Huggins is mates with two of my favourite chefs, Scott Pickett and Dan Hunter and is, himself one of Australi'as top chefs. Scott told me that he has always loved eating and cooking and once he had decided to pursue cooking as a career and was accepted as an apprentice, he felt super excited and as though everything was going the way it should go. He has never looked back. Scott has worked in different parts of Australia and in top restaurants around the world and he has been at Magill Estate since 2013. This year he took on the role of Director as well as chef of the Adelaide winery that is home to Penfolds Wines, Australia's leading producer of wines since 1844. I have to admit that I have yet to visit Adelaide and when I was asked to speak to Scott, I did google flights to South Australia just to see if it was possible. Sadly, it wasn't for now and I spoke to Scott on the phone. He actually had to pull over and chat to me in his car from the side of the road and the way he spoke about Magill Estate and the orchards and vegetable gardens they are establishing in Piccadilly, a 20-minute drive away in the Adelaide Hills, I really wanted to be there. It is definitely on my list, but in the meantime, chatting to Scott was a pretty good substitute. You can listen to the podcast here.
Hi Scott, it is so nice to talk to you. I have just been reading about you and it sounds as though you have had a lot of great experiences and also congratulations now that you are the Director as well as chef at Magill Estate, that's amazing.
Thank you, it's great.
Let's start back at the beginning. Did you always want to be a chef?
Yes. As far as I can remember I have always loved food. I was always passionate about eating food to the point where dad was quite hands on and with two boys on the property, it wasn't forced on us, but we were expected to go outside and work on the cars and pull our weight in that aspect and I gravitated more towards mum cooking and baking inside. That's where it comes from, I guess.
Was that in South Australia?
No, I grew up in Victoria, in The Patch, which in between Monbulk and Belgrave.
Oh! It is so beautiful there. We were looking at houses there for a while. It is gorgeous.
Yeah it is beautiful. This is going way back, 40 years or more. Mum and dad's property backs onto the Monbulk jam factory, you could smell the jam cooking during the day, all the sugars, so it was pretty amazing.
What an idyllic place to grow up.
It was awesome.
What sort of things would you bake and cook with your mum?
I was pretty lucky, Mum was good at cooking and grandma always made amazing sponge cakes and biscuits and yo yos, as a kid it was pretty good. Mum reckons I was making my own pancakes at age 5. I don't know if they were any good. I think I was always pretty hands on with that, Mum would do a lot of roast meals. We see roasts now as a special occasion thing. For us, it is, but growing up we would have three or four roasts a week; there would be roast chicken one night, roast lamb the next, roast beef another time.
I think it used to be an easy way to feed a family.
That's the thing. You can put a joint of meat on in the afternoon with some roast potatoes and vegetables and it's an economic way to feed the family, at least it used to be. I think it is a bit more expensive now.
It does seem to be. How did you make that step to thinking it might be a career for you?
I always loved it. This is a side story, but at my 21stbirthday, it was quite funny, they were reading out the speech and they pulled out a letter I had written to a girl who used to mind us when mum and dad would go out, and I was seven years old and I had written how much I loved her and when I was older I was going to be a chef and I was going to cook for her every night. I didn't realise that I wanted to be a chef back then but it is quite a funny story. But moving into high school, I probably had attention problems at school, I wasnt great and still am not great at reading and writing. It has always been hard and then at the school they pulled me aside and gave me a lot of extra care and attention and it got to the point where they said maybe there might be an opportunity for me to spend a day out of school a week doing a trade. I jumped on that opportunity and started doing a day a week in the kitchen. We looked at Stephanie Alexander's restaurant and there was a place up in the hills then run by a friend of mine from high school. On a Wednesday instead of going to school I would go there and help out doing prep. I absolutely loved it. It was the first time I could really focus on something and I loved it. It engulfed me in many ways. I think it was New Year's Eve when I was 15, the chef then who is now a very good friend of mine, Mark Dakin offered me an apprenticeship and I started cooking full time. I remember being so bloody excited and calling mum at 1am to tell her because they were out somewhere. She was over the moon and my parents were so supportive of me making that move. I respect my parents a greatdeal for supporting me and encouraging me to do that because they knew I wasn't enjoying school and I wasn't particularly good at school but they knew how much I was loving what I was doing and it paid off in the end.
Amazing.
Japan has an amazing ability to seek out and respect amazing produce and highlight amazing produce without complicating things. Working in those three star restaurants in Japan probably taught me to not over complicate my food and to keep it quite simple on the plate, but to be complex in the way we do it without overdoing it. The difficult part when you first start cooking your own food is you want to do too much on the plate to show off what you have learned over the years and try to cram in all your techniques, so you are cooking for chefs and trying to impress all the chefs on Australia rather than thinking about the diner. I’m not sure how to describe it but I think Japan got rid of all that. I realised that you can keep it a lot more simple and it is a lot better. ~ Scott Huggins
What do you think it was and is that drew you in? I guess there are a few aspects. There is the creative side and the making people happy and then there is also perhaps the buzz of service. What do you think it was for you?
I don't know. I love eating too so I have always loved food. Back then working in a structured and disciplined environment because I was a bit of a ratbag and then the challenge of a service was incredibly gratifying. The creative thing probably came later. I have only really had to push my creative side in the last 10 years when I started at Magill. Other than that I have always been the sous chef or head chef for someone else. That was probably the final piece for me. I think it was the buzz of it all, not in any rock star way but the team mentality. Everyone worked really hard and I liked that grind, I guess.
I see too that you went overseas to Spain and Japan.
Yes. I left school when I was 15 and left home when I was 18 and worked up at Ayers Rock Resort for a year, which was fun. I had never worked and did never work in a hotel after that but it was good to see a five star hotel and working in a resort is fun at that age. From there, I moved to Mallorca in Spain and worked on a private yacht for the Crown Prince of Dubai. Then from there we lived in Ibiza for a few months.
What?! That's cool. How did that come about? How do you get to do that?
I was living in Mallorca and a friend of mine was in Ibiza. I went to visit her, she was a friend from Ayers Rock, and they were short one chef that day or that week, I forget, and I got a job to go on and help for a couple of weeks and stayed on for a couple of months and then a chef left and they asked me to stay on for another six months after that.
Were they always out on the boat?
It was almost like a floating hotel, they would come and go. When they weren't there we would stay on the boat and when they were there we would stay in accommodation off the boat. It was a pretty amazing opportunity.
I guess too it was a bit of a culture shock finding out about different food and so on?
It was. I had never heard of caviar before and I remember sitting in the crew mess and eating a tin of caviar that was probably worth about 500euros back then and getting my arse kicked pretty hard. You learn pretty quick.
My uncle was a skipper on a yacht for a family that would go out from Antibes in France and Mallorca as well and they would just point at somewhere on the map and say they wanted to go there even if there was nothing there, it was all about the party.
It was like that. It was pretty fun and you heard some pretty amazing stories from chefs who got to go around the world on sailboats for two years. They made good money and were looked after really well by the families and in some cases became part of the family. You don't really spend money because the family takes you out for lunch when you port so you just see the world flat out for two years and end up with a whole lot of money in your pocket. It is pretty awesome.
That's a great experience. Wow. Then how did you get to Japan?
From Mallorca I went to Andorra, between France and the Pyrenees for a little bit, came back to Australia for a little bit, went back there for a little bit, came back to Australia and then worked for Teague Ezard at Ezard in Melbourne for 2 or 3 years as his sous chef and then moved to Singapore and worked at a restaurant called Iggy's which at one stage was in the Worlds top 50 restaurants at 26. I was head chef there for two years. I left there and went across to Tippling Club with Ryan Clift who used to be head chef at Vue de Monde in the old days. I was head chef at Tippling Club for a year, left his restaurant, came back to Australia and worked with Dan Hunter for a about a year at The Royal Mail and then left there for Japan andNihonryori Ryuginbefore coming to Adelaide and ending up at Magill Estate.
Some people focus on the bottom line and how much money they can make rather than on the experience they can get and at the end of the day, when I did what I did, I worked for some low numbers overseas. In Japan I was on $1000 a month and in Singapore, I was probably on $2300 a month. But what I learned and who I learned from is priceless. I made a lot of sacrifices to learn what I learned. It’s all about the craft.~ Scott Huggins
It sounds as though you weave some Japanese philosophies and methods into your dishes. What are those things?
Japan has an amazing ability to seek out and respect amazing produce and highlight amazing produce without complicating things. Working in those three star restaurants in Japan probably taught me to not over complicate my food and to keep it quite simple on the plate, but to be complex in the way we do it without overdoing it. The difficult part when you first start cooking your own food is you want to do too much on the plate to show off what you have learned over the years and try to cram in all your techniques, so you are cooking for chefs and trying to impress all the chefs on Australia rather than thinking about the diner. I'm not sure how to describe it but I think Japan got rid of all that. I realised that you can keep it a lot more simple and it is a lot better.
orn
Yes. Although you did then come back and win Best New Talent.
Yes. To add to the pressure.
Is there still pressure when you are in such a great place that is renowned for its wines and you have been noted as amongst Australias finest chefs, is there a pressure to keep that up?
There is a pressure to keep that up. I think years ago there was more pressure in terms of a fear of being judged whereas now it is more about who you are. When the Gourmet Traveller has the world's top restaurants and you are ranked or Good Food has its hats, there is always pressure. In Adelaide we are not in that. The Good Food Guide hasn't been here since before Covid so that takes the pressure off and Gourmet Traveller 1 to 100 haven't given a number. There is always pressure to deliver. That's what we do and I always want to evolve. I have some amazing people around me now who make it a lot easier.
It sounds like a beautiful place and now you have invested in it so you must think it is a great place to be. Am I right in saying you grow produce there as well?
Yes and no. We have small gardens out the back of the restaurant with bits and bobs and this is part of the bigger picture with taking over, it is my business now, we have got 10 acres in Piccadilly and we have what I think are some of the most beautiful pockets of land in Adelaide. It is really fertile with lots of rainfall and really incredible. We are working with a landscape architect now to divide the property up and start doing am orchard with fruit and nut trees and vegetables. As well as providing vegetables for the restaurant, I want something aesthetically pleasing, that is absolutely fucking beautiful, that we can walk through. The idea is that I can take my chefs up there for some R & D, and the idea of producing dishes from the garden is beautiful and the idea of guests starting there with a glass of wine before coming to the restaurant and saying, how amazing is this? Picking a peach from the tree and then cooking it over the fire at the restaurant. I think that sounds amazing. Coming from the angle of the kitchen, coming up there and having a wander through and producing take-away items we can ferment or make jams from, it is like a full circle I'd like to look at.
I love that idea as well. I have spoken to Annie Smithers from Du Fermier in Trentham and she now has a bogger property that she grows lots of vegetables and it is straight to the plate and she told me that it means you have more respect for the food you are cooking and you are less likely to waste it.
It is amazing what it does to a chef when they go out and pick vegetables for themselves. What it did for me working with Dan, taking the vegetables form the garden and bringing them to the restaurant, washing them under a tap, how much more respect you have for that dish. Not just the prepping and serving of it, but the true whole cycle. It is incredible.
With all that in mind and with your 24 years of experience, what would your advice be to young people considering becoming chefs?
It's hard work. Keep in mind that it is hard work and it is not overnight. I think there is some expectation in the industry now that overnight you are there, like on MasterChef that you are amazing at what you do. It's a craft that takes a long time to be really good at. My brother is a surgeon with a double doctorate and he is operating now and he is a little bit older than me and he has all his tickets to do what he wants to do and that has taken the same time for me to run my own restaurant and be director and he has got his surgeon's ticket. That's how long it has taken. That's the way I look at it. Some people focus on the bottom line and how much money they can make rather than on the experience they can get and at the end of the day, when I did what I did, I worked for some low numbers overseas. In Japan I was on $1000 a month and in Singapore, I was probably on $2300 a month. But what I learned and who I learned from is priceless. I made a lot of sacrifices to learn what I learned. It's all about the craft.
It sounds to me, the way you talk about he produce form the garden and so on, you sound as excited now as perhaps you were right at the beginning. Is that right?
It has sparked a new lease of excitement, that's for sure.
That's great. I love hearing these stories, so thank you, Scott, for your time and for pulling over in your car for me. It was lovely to chat to you.
Magill Estate, 78 Penfold Road, Adelaide