Telina Menzies

Hi Telina, it's nice to meet you and, seeing the huge production going on out there, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. You sent me your bio and I've read it, but I still have lots of questions because it seems to me that you are so busy and have so many things that you do. When I rang you, I asked whether you thought about food 24/7, but do you even sleep with everything you have going on?

I do. And I actually dream about food and then sometimes I wake up at 2 in the morning thinking about a great idea I have for something and then I find it hard to get back to sleep.

You're an Executive chef and for some people that might mean they oversee two or three restaurants. What does that mean for you?

Thirty.

I can't even really get my head around that. Can you maybe explain what that means to be Executive chef over thirty venues?

I still find it hard to work out some days and I spin in circles. I oversee and support our head chefs, I am basically there for support. It's up to me to hire the right people, mentor their teams, make sure the food is good quality, help them with their financials, make sure they've got the right tools and that the culture is right in the kitchen; that's a big one for me. So, working alongside them and making sure we're all doing what we need to do.

That's the Australian Venue Co.?

Yes. I do 17 venues, I think in Melbourne. It's hard to keep track because we take on new ones all the time. But 17 in Melbourne, we have 5 in regional New South Wales and regional Victoria with another one coming on board soon, which is super exciting. We had a new one in the snow, but unfortunately snow season was a bit of a fizzer. Then we've got nine in WA. We're renovating a hotel there to make a brand new venue, which is exciting. I come from Perth, so I am fond of the town, but can't get back there right now unfortunately, but looking forward to getting back there. That's about it. I do a lot of the pop-up activations and help with a lot of that sort of stuff as well.

Do you feel stretched doing all that or is it really invigorating?

I love chaos, so even during Covid, I'm always looking for things to sink my teeth into, whether it is the meal program we are doing, I love to be busy. I love the fast pace. I've lived in London, I moved to Melbourne from Perth to be in that hustle and bustle so I am a bit addicted to the madness. But with our structure, I have senior head chefs and I have a lot of support and great staff and it is all about delegation which took me a long time to learn but the more I've learned that, the better my life has got.

You mentioned the meals and that is Meals for Hospo. How did that come about?

The first big lockdown, last March when we locked doors and we were moving stock and thought we would cook for staff, it was unprecedented times and we didn't really know what was going on and then we had the major lockdown, the big four month one. I actually just got goosebumps right now even just saying that. One of our staff, Grant Vink, he's over in WA now, he was cooking for some of his mates out of his house. I was sitting and gazing out my window and feeling a bit lost and wondering what I was going to do, given that I had gone from zero; from thirty venues to nothing and I knew I couldn't keep sitting around drinking tequila. So, I rang our CEO, Paul Waterson, an amazing man and all for his people and very generous. I said to him, we need to do something, we need to scale this up. He said, T you're right, we need to do something. So, we decided we were going to do a meal program. We started pretty small. We were doing a couple of lasagnes. I love doing my grandma's lasagne, so that brought me a lot of comfort and that's always a feature on the menu every lockdown when we come back and the staff love it. We started doing a bit of lasagne here and there. Then we scaled up and what we realised was that there was a massive gap in the government money and there were a lot of people left with nothing, including our friends of friends; our security guards, musicians, suppliers, our fish guys and the guys who deliver the fish each week. It went a lot further than our own issues. The more we thought about it and the more they heard about our program, they would say, hey T, I've got salmon and they were trying to move stock they had in their freezers and needed to move. All our suppliers were so generous and wanted to help. As we started getting more food in, I thought, maybe we should go from three meals to four and then we ended up doing seven meals a week and it was really important for us to do at least one hot meal a week so people didn't have to think about it and take the pressure off them financially. We were doing all the comfort food. I think all that nostalgia food really came back in. I have never seen so much lasagne in my life. We were trying to offer some support.

It doesn't matter how many venues you have and you can have the nicest venues, but your people are everything and looking after your people is the most important part and we wanted to make sure they were still connected with us when we came out of this and we are still working on that now with this lockdown. The hardest thing about a five-day snap lockdown are the first five weeks and now we are in it for seven or eight weeks. We are very lucky to be looked after financially by the government but now it is more about connecting our people and having an engagement at the moment and get our staff off the couch and moving their legs and stimulating their minds by coming in to help out with this. We want to make sure that when we do open, which we can't wait for and is coming very soon that we are all, not only physically fit, but that mentally our head is in the game and we are ready for it. Because it is going to come and it is going to come hard and fast, so we need to be prepared. It is important that we are connected with our people, we are giving them project work to do and letting the know we are still here and we want them with us to take on Christmas and beyond.

Mental health is a really big thing for you. What does that mean in the context of hospitality? We often read of the drinking and drug problems in the hospitality industry and the long hours. What does it mean for you?

I come from the old school. I am 20 years in the industry. I came from a time and trained in a time when it was fine to abuse staff and I would be lying if I said I wasn't pretty firm and didn't do things that are not ok and wouldn't be ok now. I have struggled myself with mental health issues; being put in roles I wasn't ready for, using substance, you know, to drink the pain away, etc. I had little menty b's I like to call them along the way; mental breakdowns, and using substance to hide that or to suppress and self-medicate. As I got older, I have realised, my teams are young and I really want to nurture that and nurture their mind and look out for that. I only wish when I was younger that I had had someone who had flagged that within myself. I had to trudge through it myself and it can be a dark and lonely place, so I see it as my responsibility to shape and mould and take care of them while they are here and making sure we are checking in. It's a big problem in this country and especially with Covid, it seems to be its own pandemic that is going on in the background and isn't spoken about enough, unfortunately. It is something that is very important to me and I've lost people; I lost one of my chefs once and it tore me apart, so it is definitely something that is at the forefront now of how I try to run my teams. It's not just about food to me and trying to push the guys too hard to get the food out, it's about the culture in the kitchen. That is of the utmost importance to me and my business and the rest will come with it. If your staff are happy then the food ends up good because they want to be there. If your staff are happy, they come to work because they want to be there and then you don't have staffing issues and the retention and the turnovers. If the staff are happy, they cook good food and they bring the customers and everything comes into line. Its all those things. When I learned to shift that focus, it changed a lot of things for me, because a lot of the pressures came from not focussing on the right areas.

Is that where Proud to be a Chef comes in as well?

Yes. Fonterra do the Proud to be a Chef program and it has been running for 25 years. It is a really great initiative for young chefs. It is really great to give them exposure to other chefs. I know, for myself I did Chef of the Year, Apprentice of the Year, Nestle Golden Chef's Hat, a lot of those competitions and what that did, was expose me to a lot of really great chefs and to mentoring. I was so lost when I was a young kid. As I've said in a few other meetings, someone took me under their wing, I was a bit off the rails and he put me under his wing and I got a chance. It was a once in a lifetime with the Australian culinary team and I ended up winning a heap of Apprentice of the Year and Chef of the Year awards and without him kicking my arse into line and identifying that I had talent but was a bit lost, which you do tend to get when you're young and he really put me on the right track and without him, I would never be where I am, so it is a focus of mine to pay that forward. I feel like I just want to change one life if I can, that would be good.

Is that what you do? Are you given a chef to mentor?

They put applications through and do a dish. They work with their chef in their venue and put a dish in using Fonterra products, who do some amazing dairy products and then we judge that and we do some interviews based on their application which asked them why they are passionate and so on. Then you pick finalists and they come for a once in a lifetime experience in Melbourne and we give them mentoring and give them heaps of Masterclasses; there is a really great team of chefs I am working alongside and they do pastry and a whole lot of different skillsets, we take them out to dairy farms and do dinners and put them into venues and hopefully inspire them to become the next generation. There is nothing more important than the next generation of chefs. It is an industry that has had its bumpy times and people have tended to go elsewhere because of hours and culture and all those sorts of things but it is changing and thank goodness it is changing. I hope that I can be part of that change. Hopefully we can inspire the next generation to come in and it would nice to be able to retire and know it's in good hands.

You're too young, you can't retire yet!

I'm nearly 40. I'm not that young.

You come from a family of chefs, is that right?

I do, yes.

So did you always know you were going to be a chef?

I wanted to do Graphic Design and Photography; I'm a bit of a creative. I'm not great at it but I still enjoy it. Two of my uncles are chefs and my biological father was a chef and they all said not to do it, as most chefs tell their kids not to do it. But I did it anyway. But look, in school I wasn't an academic, I still can't read and write properly, but there are other areas I'm great at. When I was growing up, and I'm nearly 40, they didn't always pick up things like that and target learning. I'm really good with math and mental math and there are other things I'm really good at, but I'm a visual learner. If you give me a recipe to read, it takes me a few goes and I have to rewrite it. I just learn differently and back in the eighties, there was only one way of doing things and if you didn't get it, you got put in the low level class and you got left there. I just learn differently. If I don't understand something now, I can just look at a video. Obviously now we've got Google and so on so if I don't quite understand what a step means in a recipe, I can just watch a video and then I get it and then write my own.

How old were you when you launched your career?

It was the end of '99. I did Year 12 and in Year 11 and 12 I worked in a kitchen on Fridays, Friday lunch service. It was a brutal way to start, but it was good. I realised I liked it. I liked the fast pace; I liked the madness. I liked to go and have underage beers with the chefs after the work. That was fun back in the day. I really had a love for it. I was lucky because I did photography and art subjects and graduated Year 12 in creative subjects. Eventually I was lucky enough to snag a role at the Hyatt in Perth and back then hotel restaurants were it and we still have some great ones today but then it was really where you wanted to get through. I was really well supported through there and then moved around a bit.

And you were in London? Obviously, that's a great place to learn but often it sounds as though it can be tough.

It was brutal. Coming from Perth too. Like I said, I like the chaos, but as a female, things were tough. I can't wait for one day that we are all just chefs and not, this female chef, but being a female chef in a male dominated industry. I thought when I was younger that it was brutal in the kitchen but some of the behaviour was cutthroat and actually pretty disgusting with the masculinity and the bullshit that comes with it. And what I am still upset with and have a lot of regret for today is that I did a bit of, if you cant beat them, join them, and I bought into it and went along with it to a certain extent. Although part of it was to protect myself.

It's interesting that you mention the whole female chef thing. When I spoke to Philippa Sibley she said at the end that she was glad that I hadn't asked her what it was like to be a woman chef because she is a woman and she is a chef, and that is a fair enough standpoint. But I do often get asked why I don't have more women on Conversation with a chef and I want to, but there aren't a lot of women around. Well, there are and there aren't.

There was a lot when I started off and when I was a sous chef and chef de cuisine in big establishments, my best chefs, the young apprentices were female, I'm not saying all because I don't want to generalise but so many of them were so talented. But back then with the 70 hour week, it was too much and then a lot of them found partners and wanted to have children and it is very hard to have a kid doing those sorts of hours. Luckily it's getting better. Now our guys are rostered on a very normal roster. It's a big focus for us. The days of 50, 60, 70 hour weeks have gone. They don't exist any more; they just don't happen.

I've said this before, but the reason I started Conversation with a chef is because one of my really close friends in Christchurch was a head chef, Nicola McDermott, maybe 20, 25 years ago and she is an incredible chef and every conversation I had with her, I thought people needed to hear it because it was so great. But she was a head chef in quite a few venues around Christchurch and she said that when you are a woman and you walk into the kitchen, you have to earn respect, whereas a man already has respect and has to do something fairly drastic to lose it I. That's really hard. So that must mean that people are not only just going off and having families and the hours are difficult but I think there must be a level of hitting your head against a wall sometimes. But hopefully that is getting better.

It is getting better. We are getting more females and, to be honest, male, female, whatever you identify with, it's different now. I'm obviously from the LGBQTI family myself so I am all about equality and fairness and I dont give a shit what you are. You are equal in my kitchens and you are treated the same and I have seen it firsthand and I have done things I'm not proud of and it is now time to make those changes and it is a big focus for me especially and our group is trying to do a lot of stuff in that space.

That's right and I think it's important in an industry that has such a high profile and I don't mean to put too much pressure on hospitality, but you can perhaps be models in that way.

We have to be.

So, London. How do you just go from Perth to London? Where did you work?

I had a couple of offers with Soho House Group and the Gordon Ramsay Group to do fine dining. It was tough because of wages. I have never been so broke in my life, living in London. I was doing a great job at the Convention Centre and I sold my house to go over there. Because I came from the event side of things and so I found basically the best catering company in London and they do all these amazing pop-ups in Buckingham Palace, St Pauls, The V & A, the Natural History Museum, and they take over all the catering there. It is just pumping and its madness. We would prep in the HQ and then we would truck in and I was coming from the Convention Centre where I was running massive functions for 1500 people and running massive teams. I was only 25 and they ran me through the wringer a bit at first and then they said, oh you can actually cook and hold your own. I'm definitely not one to sit back and take anything from anyone so I pretty much stamped my ground. Getting the ability to run these functions and I got to see so much of London and we were paid to travel from job to job. I was really well looked after in the end. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but I was really lucky to get that chance.

Was that two years?

Yes, I did a couple of years and then the joys of social media really took off in those years and I was going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark and it was freezing and was watching all my friends back in WA and Australia doing all the festivities and seeing all the beaches and WA has the most beautiful beaches in the world and I knew I had to come back. My grandparents brought me up for a lot of my life and I was very connected with them and they were getting older so I thought it was time to head back. I'm glad I did. I got some amazing experience back in Perth and here I am now.

Was it a natural chef for you as a chef to come to Melbourne? Was it the thing to do?

I've always loved Melbourne and its food scene and look, Perth has come on in leaps and bounds now as well. Some of my favourite places are there now. Melbourne was something I wanted to tick off my list and then I fell in love and even after a tough 18 months, I still love it here and dont want to give up. I got the opportunity to transfer. My good friend and boss at the time was running the company and decided to move onto another group and I was lucky enough to be asked if I wanted the Group Executive chef role and I almost jumped on a plane that same day to get over here. I wasnt going to turn down that opportunity. I did a few years with that group and then they sold to my current group, so I have had continual employment.

Seeing as you are overseeing a million places and doing a million things, are you still on the pans?

Yes. Not as much as I would like to be. I cook a lot at home.

I was going to ask you about that because I have seen it on Instagram.

I cook a lot at home and the reason why is that I actually love food and cooking, it's not a job for me. I'm in a lot of meetings and my life is Zoom, which we are lucky to have as a technology because it is hard to run businesses across the other side of the country and you need to meet face to face. Zoom isnt the same, but it helps. I cook a lot at home because it relaxes me. People say, I can't believe you go home and cook, but it helps me wind down, it's my comfort and my safe space. I could have had a hard week or a hard day, but being in the kitchen for me is like people going for a run or people playing X Box. It's my space and where I feel comfortable and relaxed.

I imagine you have such a repertoire now of hundreds of thousands of meals. How do you decide what to cook?

My beautiful partner, Bree and I have this thing which is quite frustrating, where we go, what do you want? No, what do you want? She is really getting into food now and she cooks a lot of great stuff. We like to smoke meats. Sometimes it's just simple. Sometimes I am cooking because I have some produce I want to try or there is something I want to try out or sometimes I feel like chicken and rice.

And you were saying you are inspired by your grandmother's lasagne.

That's the only thing she cooked well, by the way. That and pavlova.

My mum is similar, but it was spaghetti bolognese. And you wouldn't be a cookbook reader, where else are you getting inspiration?

Instagram. I follow loads of chefs; there are so many amazing chefs out there and friends and colleagues who cook. The thing I love about Instagram is not the, I'm having a hard day ranting and so on that you get from other social networks, it's boom, this is my salmon, here is my dish and you think, hell yes that is awesome and so you pick up inspiration. And you've got all these amazing chefs doing so much stuff with zero waste or native foraging and this, that and the other and I think, wow, I didn't know you could eat that or that is such a cool idea, fermenting kojis. Like I said, I've got colleagues and friends and people I look up to who I follow and watch what they are doing around the world. I do, even though I said I don't read, I do have hundreds of cookbooks. I like to look at the pictures. I definitely flick through them and revert back to them at times. They are very inspiring.

What would your advice be for someone who wants to become a chef now?

Do it. When you love your job, it's like never working a day in your life. But just make sure that you're in the right space and the right place and that you have the right employer and that you are checking in with yourself: am I learning? Am I somewhere that is culturally good for me? Am I able to move forward? Don't get stagnant, and don't be afraid to learn.