Sebastian Pasinetti

Conversation with a chef: Hi, Sebastian, how are you?

Sebastian Pasinetti: Good. How are you going?

It seems as though you you've been busy. You're selling the restaurant?

Yes, it has been a tough time. It's tough for everybody though. I dont know anyone who's doing amazingly well, which is really sad.

Maybe people in groups are doing well but feels as though there are so many headlines these days where hospitality institutions are closing down and yet there are people opening places as well.

It's so interesting you say that because the reception we've had from selling OKO Restaurant and the people that are really eager to get into it, it's really nice to see that new energy and excitement coming through. But I've been really transparent and said, I would just cross all your T's and dot all your I's before you get into business, because there's so much stuff that comes up halfway through that you're not prepared for. Especially for people who have never worked in hospitality before. I think it's a really big feat. Especially when, you're right, the institutions are closing down and downsizing, but the big ones are getting bigger. My best friend and who I used to work with at Chin Chin, my best friend is the General Manager there now, and they're just about to open French Batard in the city. Those groups are machines, and they'll keep going. Hopefully the government steps in at some point. I think they're going to have to bridge that gap. It's so interesting because the nitty gritty of it, when you chart when food costs go up and the government implements new restaurant awards rates, which are great and that's how much staff should have been paid, but, it's so difficult to then counteract that on a menu price. I genuinely don't know how businesses are going to do it. Unless they start pivoting and doing all of these different kinds of offerings, whether that's catering or cakes even. Its really difficult.

I wonder whether it is the time when people start moving into, as you say, cakes or specific things. I've noticed, and there are other businesses doing well, but the businesses that are doing really well, Tarts Anon or Mietta and I'm sure savoury things as well, but when people are very specific about what they're doing and there's almost that French artisanal leaning to perfecting one or one line of things, it seems to work.

I think it's the only way to be successful moving forward.

But how does that work for restaurants?

Oh God, that's a million dollar question, isn't it? I think that style of eating out with small plates, which is what OKO restaurant initially was when it opened, we wanted to do a bunch of Spanish, Greek, Italian, that just doesn't work anymore. You're right, it has to be honed into one thing. Whether it's like places like 1800-LASAGNA, why it's doing so well is because it's figured out its craft. Im not saying that it's the best restaurant in Melbourne, but they have figured out marketing, they've figured out what they're offering and product and their audience and they've nailed that specific pasta area of what they're doing. So I think it's really about honing in on one of those things; whether that is savoury, sweet. The guys at Worksmith did a bunch of community talks last year and now their whole focus is just on cocktails, batched cocktails, and getting it into restaurants. I think anyone hospitality or hospitality adjacent has just had to hone their craft or skill or offering.

What a tough time. And is this because of Covid or is it just a natural progression of economics or what?

I think it's a multitude of things. I think Covid definitely had an impact. I think everybody had time to, and this is for the cohort of employees, I think everybody had time to sit down, reflect and figure out their work life balance and what they really wanted. That had a knock on effect, which we're seeing now, we don't really have those hospitality professionals anymore. The turnover of staff and holding onto your staff is a lot more difficult. Big companies like Lucas Restaurants and groups like that have the money to offer big salary packages, which is also bridging the gap for the little guys and little restaurants. We just can't compete with those kinds of salary offerings. So that's another thing, I think. I feel like we need to flip the script and almost get back into schools and universities and really get them to focus or highlight that there is sustainable career growth plans in hospitality. People think of hospitality as either a waiter, a bartender, or a chef, but there's marketing, there's HR, there's reservations. There are so many different elements to hospitality, and they're never spoken about. Those positions almost glorified within businesses, and you never hear about them. But I think if we just reframe how we're talking about hospitality and then we have to start again, we have to go over the young people because I think the millennials and the generation above have just tapped out.

I think it's interesting to touch on the marketing aspect. And I think that's where you can really home in on or tap into the younger generation because they've got such great ideas for getting things across to their audience. I just had a really great chat with a chef the other day about the PR company they use and he said how amazing they are because they really care about every restaurant that they represent. This is a PR company I work with quite a lot and they quite often get me to talk to their chefs. I knew they were great, but I hadn't quite realized the extent that they sit down with the chef and they don't tell him what to do, but because they've got their finger on the pulse, they can steer him, and he said that he didn't even realize and thought it was all his own ideas but that he was gently steered in the right direction. I just thought they were putting things on Instagram and writing press releases. But a marketing company now has so much influence.

A hundred per cent. It almost is the only way to be successful.

But how do you afford that?

That is again, the million-dollar question because it's not so inaccessible, but when you're up against labour costs or food costs, there's just no budget for that kind of stuff. But I agree there is so much benefit in Marketing and PR and if there's a way to engage a younger person fresh outof uni or who is studying marketing at uni its a good idea. We've worked with a few kids who are 18, 19, and they have really good ideas. I don't want to say they are less expensive than these established PR and Marketing companies, but they are. So I think there's little nuanced ways of doing it that can really benefit the business. It's just about really researching and finding it or calling these PR companies for a screening call. I know most of them do that kind of stuff because they are focused around community and hospitality and genuinely believe in getting the best business for your business. So yeah, I think engaging in those are really, really important.

So, tell me what's happening for you? You're selling the original OKO?

Yes, OKO restaurant is about to be sold, which is quite exciting. Sad as well, really upsetting. I feel like I'm at the other end of it now. The last six, seven weeks and prior to announcing the closure was a really tough time for mum and I. Mum is who I do the businesses with. But we are coming out the other end of it now and I think we've definitely made the right decision. We funded it completely ourselves. So, there was a point where those funds run out and you have to measure the cost of what it is going to look like in five years if you keep going and how much debt you can get yourself into. Debt is good sometimes in business, but there's a definite fine line with that stuff. We're concentrating on the cafe now. We are still doing the catering side of things, which has been really great. We just did Midsumma's Award Ceremony and we're doing a lot of community-based catering, which is really exciting. We are looking for another site where we put the restaurant back in and/or another cafe.

How long have you been here?

Over a year and a half now. We opened this six months after the restaurant. Which in hindsight was an oversight now. But this just being a part of Rose Street Artist Market is guaranteed foot traffic. They have three to four thousand people a day going to that market and we are the only food and drink offering in the space. So those two days are our money makers and our breadwinners. It is really fun being part of that community. Then my other business Minds en Place, that's kind of taken off in the background as well. So I'm focusing a little bit on that.

I started talking to you when I went and spoke to your mum and Kim for the podcast, but then I've really caught up with you over the mental health and hospitality evenings, which I just think is so important and such great conversations and the turnout to those really underlines that. There are a few things going on in my mind. Number one, how you got into hospitality and then how you got into that mental health area as well. I know you got into hospo quite young because your family was a hospitality family.

Correct. We were a hospitality family. I remember mum managed a cafe in Preston and I was eight years old. I was wiping tables and taking orders. I started really getting into it when I did work experience when I was 15 in a restaurant in Mill Park. They ended up hiring me part-time as a waiter. Then I decided I wanted to be a chef. I tried to do that for a couple of years and then quickly realized that I didn't feel enough support. I was still figuring myself out as a queer person of colour and where I sat in the world and in society and within a workplace that was predominantly white and predominantly straight. And that was all challenging. I decided the safest place for me was to be interacting with customers and guests, and mostly the team front of house was female based, so I felt way more comfortable around that kind of energy. Then I got a job at Chin Chin, opened Chin Chin Sydney, came back to Melbourne for a couple of months and then moved over to London. In London I worked as Head of People for a restaurant group called Brother Marcus. I did HR and marketing for them. Then in my one-year review, my director told me that I needed to man up and have more of a masculine approach when dealing with situations, which was just the final straw with the struggle of so many cultural and societal issues that are so prevalent, but had been intertwined into the hospitality culture. And I just was fed up. So that was the point where I met Tobie-Anna Durk who was running a cause called Kelly's Cause Foundation.

Kelly was a chef in London who died by suicide. It wasn't a direct affiliation with hospitality. They were harassed in their workplace, which had a knock-on effect. Then there was a multitude of reasons, but Kelly took their own life in 2018. Kelly's Cause came to fruition and supplies hospitality workers with Mental Health First Aid. That was when I got into it and was working in the restaurants. She was a head chef at the restaurant with Tobie-Anna who created the foundation. We got talking. I'd never felt so inspired by someone who was looking at hospitality from a different angle or just simply calling out the stuff that was happening. They were teaching me what reporting sexual harassment was or what even sexual harassment was because I had had chefs in the past just slap me on the bum or touch me inappropriately on the back, which is so normalized in this industry. People wouldn't even understand that as a form of harassment, or little microaggressions about race. Or if there was a black table, a manager being, oh, why don't you go serve that table? Just little underlining things that were happening. Racism, sexuality slurs, like being called – I'm not even going to say those names – but it was a bunch of stuff. Tobie-Anna was really coming at it from a mental health focus. I got obsessed with what she was doing and have now been working with her for nearly five years.

We've recently launched in Australia and, and now that's a part of Minds en Place, which launched last year with my business partner Rushani Epa. We sat down and just tried to figure out, okay, what is the hospitality industry really asking for? Where are the issues and how can we fit in? We understand that we're not experts in all the fields, so we decided to partner with people who had created content and workshops based off their own lived experience. That's where Minds en Place came from and kind of where we are now.

How does that operate? Do people come to you? Do you go to them?

It's a bit of both. People absolutely reach out and how the whole system works is a company or ideally how it should work as a company reaches out, we administer, we do an initial call with them and then we administer a survey to their staff. The survey's based around the five subjects that we do workshops for: disability awareness, sexual violence training, mental health, anti-racism training and clear allyship training. The questions are based around that. We get those results and then we present the owners with a report where we think they're critical in. It's a traffic light system, so based off that, then we make a bespoke workshop with our facilitators that best suit the business that we are working with. And then we facilitate that workshop. Then the other aspect is we have BIPOC caterers, so Black Indigenous People of Colour catering companies that we try and link up for those workshops. It becomes a whole lunch and learn. You do a three hour workshop about anti-racism in the workplace and then you are having food that has been created by a person of colour or a black person or an indigenous First Nations person and we've just tried to make that connection.

I really like the idea of the Mental Health First Aid and I feel like everyone should do a course like that. I know at school every year we do First Aid, but knowing how to be a first responder with a mental health crisis in this day and age must be like a really pressing need.

A hundred per cent. The thing that's so funny is most people are doing it already. They probably have the first initial steps of Mental Health First aid, the same as physical first aid. You seeing someone on the ground shaking, you're going to approach them, maybe lay them on their side. There's a few things that we just know, from interaction with other humans. But Mental Health First Aid is so important. And like you said, we should all have done a course in it. It essentially sets you up with a toolkit on how to have difficult conversations. Then there's a roadmap of getting that person to appropriate professional help. It's the same way as physical first aid. No one's trained to be a doctor in a four hour course. The same way you're not designed or you're not taught to be a therapist. It's just about that initial conversation when you notice signs and symptoms of someone that is experiencing poor mental health. Especially in a workplace, you see people dipping in and out of that. It's so common for people to experience poor mental health without having a mental illness. I think once we start to understand that and normalise that and then be able to have honest, open conversations in a workplace that's the way forward and it's the only way to create mentally healthy work environments.

I know people would say that there are many industries that would be under pressure and all of those things, but I really feel, and from hearing people speak on those hospitality nights, you're really on show in hospitality and there are so many different pressures. There are hungry or hangry people, drunk people, people with opinions on food because everyone thinks they know all about it. You are on show and there are time limits and all of those things. It is a particularly pressurised industry that can lead like those kinds of highs and lows in mental health. I know when I spoke to Alan Tompkins about The Burnt Chef Project, we were talking about the importance of perhaps getting some of these ideas around mental health first aid into culinary schools or hospitality schools. Is that something that's happening?

The conversations are definitely happening. We're engaged with quite a few at the moment. The Australian Technical Institute of Chefs, William Angliss, the conversation is definitely happening and it's almost at a point where trying to convince a restaurant owner that this is important is quite hard, especially when they're really disconnected from the business. They're not in service every day, they're not understanding the pressures or the stress that comes with just baseline hospitality work. I think it's really important for us to put a focus as well onto getting it into schools, whether that's high school, primary school, whether that's there's a youth program for Mental Health First Aid. Mental Health First Aid Australia has really scaled it to be able to be accessible and applicable to all age groups. I really think there's a massive benefit from having it from the get go. It's almost like an industry standard.

When you set up OKO, it's an inclusive restaurant with the traffic light system. How has that gone?

It has been a challenge for sure and OKO Restaurant probably was more challenging than the cafe has been in its approach to getting the mental health support be something that people feel comfortable with and using the traffic light system. As much as you can ask people to get involved and to think about how they're feeling when they're showing up for work every day, it is quite difficult. I will be really transparent. I don't think people are used to that kind of support or that level of support. So they almost are intimidated or overwhelmed just by saying, I'm feeling good or I'm feeling not so good today. You have to pull it out of people in a different way eventually. And whether that's picking herbs and you're having a conversation or everyone's prepping in the kitchen and that's where you start to have a conversation.I think leading with vulnerability has been a really powerful point.

I think once I started talking about my mental health struggles, whether that's now or 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that's been really powerful. And then normalizing the specific points of the industry that are leading to poor mental health. For example, knockoffs were never allowed at OKO restaurant. Not because I wanted to be an asshole or because it was a cost thing. It was generally because I've worked in businesses before where it's almost like a reward at the end of your shift and then you are almost punished for rocking up to work the next day hungover or a bit slower in the morning. But, you gave me all of this alcohol last night at 2.00 am andI'm starting at 8.00 am the next day and you're haven't once thought about the implications that's going to have on how I'm showing up to work the next day. I think having that intention behind it and then explaining the intention, that's the only way to have really got it stuck into people's minds.

A couple of years ago I spoke to someone at the Prince Dining room and I know they were trying to implement some of those wellbeing things as well where they didn't have knockoffs, they'd have knockoff smoothies and do yoga together. I think it's really great when workplaces are being more intentional about that because it's a culture. It's a habit that people get into, to have alcohol as a reward or as a means of winding down. It's the same in Australia and New Zealand that every time we catch up with people it's catching up over a drink instead of perhaps catching up for a walk. The culture does need to change because there are clearly problems with that.

For sure. And look, it's hard because a doctor, or a GP, doesn't finish work at 11.00pm. A receptionist doesn't finish work at five o'clock and then is handed a glass of wine or a beer. I understand that we work until late at night, but there has to be rituals or things that people implement into their day that helps them wind down that isn't based around alcohol. It is especially hard because of our direct access to it and then how much has been normalized as kind of a perk of the job? I've seen job ads still today where knockoffs are in the perk section of a job ad. And I just think it, until people really clue onto that and understand that those 1% things all add up and contribute to a person's wellbeing and mental health, the shift in the culture is never going to change., which is why I feel so passionately about all this stuff and why I keep speaking out about it. I think it potentially was a detriment to me in OKO restaurant. As in, I have a friend who's quite up in a really big restaurant group here in Melbourne and said to me that I made the restaurant too political and it overwhelmed people because they were confused about what exactly I was offering, which made me understand where the general population is with this kind of stuff. It's all about figuring out ways of constantly speaking out about it and having these conversations and engaging more and more people.

It feels like you're sitting with a little bit of uncertainty at the moment about where to next. How do you manage that space of uncertainty? Are you optimistic?

Im optimistic. I think we had a really good product and I know the people who came to OKO had a really good time and that was always the case. I'm optimistic. I just dont know what direction it's going to go in. I don't know if Minds en Place is going to be the goal for moving forward and it turns into an educational based situation for me, or if we open more restaurants or more cafes. I honestly am not sure at the moment. I think we are just trying to grieve the loss of OKO restaurant, and again, find our love of what we do and why we're doing it and really understand and focus on what our offering is and what we can bring to the community. And then, like we spoke about before, perfecting that and then reimagining what OKO looks like.

And so you're doing a little bit of cooking now?

I am, yes.

Do you get joy from creating food?

I do. I love cooking and I've always wanted to be a chef. It's been a really big dream of mine. I think I didn't have much to do with my dad and he was a chef and so I think growing up that was always me trying to reach for connection with him. I think also this is going a little off traffic, but growing up in Watsonia and Greensborough, a predominantly white space, being a Person of Colour, having an Italian mum, having an African dad, I've always found food a really cool way to explore all of that and then engage the whiter parts of my life and community with that kind of stuff.

I remember at school, our lunches were always a source of interest, people would flock in from everywhere because they wanted a bite of my sandwich mum had made or something I'd cooked from the night before or any party or dinner we would have, everyone at school would be talking about it. I think I've had a love for food always and for what that can do to people in bringing them together. In every restaurant I've worked at that's been my biggest joy: watching that experience. So it's been really fun to be on the other side of it now and have firsthand creation in it. It's really stressful. I've worked in kitchens before but not led a kitchen before. So that's been a challenge and it's been fun and the creation part's been fun. I don't know where it's going to end.

Have you learned some things about yourself you didn't perhaps know before?

Definitely. I have learned some things about myself for sure. I think I've learned about my stress. Service front of house is just very different. Breakfast service is very different to restaurant service. People want their food in 10 minutes, they're hungover on a Sunday or Saturday morning. It's just a different type of service. It has really been about understanding that.

What have you been cooking?

We've been doing a lot of fun stuff. I've recently changed the menu again. We have tried to have a Mediterranean overview of the menu. It's a little bit challenging with breakfast because people want eggs and bacon, or pancakes and those kinds of things. We have a fig honey and ricotta French toast with whipped ricotta. And then we make a really nice orange syrup, put that on it. We have a Pasinetti classic, which mum and I have been making our whole lives. It's a polenta stackwith truffle and it's got a fried egg with Parmesan cheese on top. Mums meatball sub hasn't left the menu because everybody's obsessed with that and everyone's obsessed with meatball subs in Melbourne at the moment. Really weird. We do a lot of vegan and gluten free stuff, so most of our menu's gluten free. I've been making vegan corn fritters at the moment, which are also gluten free and they've been really popular. Recently on the menu we just added red velvet pancakes with a white chocolate cream cheese and that's also been really popular.

Amazing. And you open the days of the market?

We open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at the moment. There's a hotel being built next door. It's about to open in the next couple of weeks. They've projected March the first, so we'll see if that happens. We're just kind of waiting to leverage on that and then we will open from Wednesday to Sunday from that point.

And it's got the really interesting name of the Standard Hotel. I had a chat to the chef that's been overseeing the kitchen getting it up and running. It looks fascinating. It's has names like Leonardo DiCaprio involved.

I heard it's Snoop Dogg and Leonardo DiCaprio's company that built these hotels. We'll see if they make it down.

Nice. Well look, it's really great talking to someone who has that real heart for the industry and for the people in it. And it sounds like you are an optimist with some really great ideas. I hope that it just keeps on moving forward.

Thank you so much. I hope so too.

OKO Rooftop and Caf, 60 Rose Street, Fitzroy