Trevor Perkins is a passionate advocate for eating locally and sustainably. Local for Trevor is West Gippsland where he cooks overlooking the vines at Hogget Kitchen. On the day I visited, the countryside was shrouded in a smoky haze from nearby bush fires, a reminder of our footprint on this land that was so well managed and appreciated for thousands of years. It is good in times like these to talk to good people like Trevor, whose love for his region, the produce he works with and for teaching and sharing his knowledge with others is inspiring. Trevor’s connection to the land started in his childhood and is now woven into the food he puts up. After our chat, he took me for a tour of Hogget Kitchen to check out the hanging charcuterie, native garden, the carcasses waiting to be butchered on site and the huge bookshelf of cookbooks ranging from the Larousse Gastronomique to Rohan Anderson. I want my house to look and feel like Hogget Kitchen; it’s a gem of a place.
Thank you for your time today, Trevor. We’re sitting looking out over the smoky vines. How close is it to you?
It’s towards East Gippsland, so it’s about an hour and a half away. They’ve copped it pretty hard down there.
Yes. It’s an interesting age we are moving into, do you think, just to leap right in…do you think, in terms of being a chef, do events like these change the way you cook, thinking about working in with the environment and so on?
I love cooking over wood, so my kitchen smells smoky a lot of the time, but I think sustainable cooking, working with farmers and produce and supporting the regions you source your produce is really important.
I met you at Corner Inlet at an amazing day set up by Sascha Rust for The Good Fish Project. I found that day so exciting. I think you already had connections with the people in Port Franklin, but just seeing chefs talking to the fishers themselves was incredible for me, because when I talk to a lot of chefs, it sounds as though it can be difficult to have that direct connection and you have managed to continue that.
Every time I get the opportunity to share with hospitality and other chefs, I think it’s so good. It brings it back to the produce again; talking to the farmers, whether it’s to the fishermen or to local farmers where we source our produce, there is so much more value in the product you bring back to the kitchen. You see where it comes from and how it’s grown and also to work with the product and take it right through to serving it. I think one thig we keep talking about is telling the story and informing the diner where we get the produce and they walk away with so much more value from the dining experience here.
I think that’s important as well, but why do we think it’s so important to have that connection?
I’ve been in hospitality for a long time now, but as you go through your career, you learn how to cook, but I definitely believe that cooking with passion and what you do in the kitchen is really important and the produce helps drive that a lot. I’ve seen a lot of produce that has no value. You don’t actually see where it’s from when it arrives in a box. Since we’ve started here at Hogget, we do our own butchery, we buy in whole carcasses. We haven’t bought in any boxed meat since we started. And it’s the same thing now with the connection with Corner Inlet is getting the fish straight from the boats. You can see in the kitchen how it has supported our menu, but also the culture. A lot of people know us now for providing a good representation for Gippsland; the produce is from the farms and from locals.
Absolutely. I imagine…and from talking to chefs like Alejandro at Pastuso who brings his chefs to Gippsland to see where the produce they are using is grown, that it perhaps gives the staff more of a respect for the produce and you’re perhaps less likely to waste things.
I take my chefs out of the kitchen all the time to the farm. When you come back to the kitchen then you have so much more energy. As you say, you have more respect for the product but it’s also getting out of the kitchen and seeing where the produce comes from gives it the value we were talking about.
When we were down at Corner Inlet, Sascha talked about how important that space is in terms of the incredible handshake agreement the fishermen have not to overfish. You were already a fisherman, yourself, but what did you get from going out on the boat with those guys?
I definitely like the way they farm. When they do catch the fish, they sort it all by hand, and the respect they have for the produce. You can tell, when we get it here, or when we were there for the day, the quality of the produce, but you can also see how they are sustainable they are. Just talking to them, I could imagine them coming into our kitchen and seeing how we work and it was great seeing them and how they work. I love outdoors, so it was a great experience for me.
I had an experience, obviously as a non-chef, but when I first came to Melbourne a few years ago, I went out to Melbourne and had such a city girl experience, but it was with a guy called Rohan Anderson and he was doing workshops with people to give them the back story to food and we had to dispatch a chicken and take it all the way through the process. It was a loss of innocence for me. I didn’t want to get a thrill from killing an animal, but having taken it all the way through, it made me think really carefully after that about what sort of meat I was choosing. It made me feel as though I had a relationship with that chicken and then I felt responsible for it to give it a quick and painless ending and to cook it properly as well.
I’ve had some similar experiences. One of the winemakers here, William Downie, Bill…I finished up at the other restaurant and spent a fair bit of time at his vineyard and one night looking out over the farm, we had coq au vin, and it was amazing. I think the rooster was chasing the girls around and it was time for it to go. But seeing it through and seeing the respect in cooking it…and that’s something we look at here; the dining experience. Sharing food from our region. When I was working round Bill’s property at the vineyard, we had so many paddock to plate or farm to table experiences there, sitting under a tree enjoying a really nice glass of wine and I think that brought me to where Hogget started. I had been cooking in the industry for a long time and had started doing hospitality training and a few other things and it got to the point where I really loved that style and homed me back towards sourcing the produce. I already had a really good connection through the other restaurants but right here it was about good wine, good food and the environment here. We do a lot of sharing here.
It’s a nice way to eat, isn’t it? What are your thoughts on wild meat? I just spoke to a Dutch chef in the city who is getting Pademelon from Flinders Island where they are a pest and so he sees it as super sustainable that he is doing that. What do you think about that?
I grew up hunting with my parents; duck, wild rabbit. Venison…I do a little bit of bow hunting, I haven’t actually got a deer yet, but I’ve been out a lot with my friends. Wild meats are so much more flavoursome, particularly growing up on wild rabbit. We get the Yarragon Farm rabbit here. It’s chalk and cheese in terms of flavour. We use a lot of the offal from the rabbit to use terrines and so on to get that gaminess.
I just went fishing down at Ninety Mile Beach yesterday and I remember growing up down there; Mum and Dad used to go down there for four to six weeks at a time and we used to do trapping along the fence-line. I remember going out shooting at night and then checking all the traps. We would wash the rabbit in salt water from the ocean, so brine it and then Mum used to cook it up. It’s funny, Rohan Anderson was here a while ago and I did Mum’s style fried rabbit for him and he loved it. Mum used to boil it up in a chicken noodle style of thing and then deep fry it.
We write the menu pretty much daily, depending on the produce we’ve got and the different cuts of meat. There is plenty of opportunity to change. Particularly with the seasons; you see new produce come through and you have tail ends of produce. It’s organic the way it happens in the kitchen and it’s exciting as well, because we don’t have a static menu we work from day to day.
It sounds as though you came from an amazing background and lovely childhood, did you always know you wanted to be a chef?
No, not really. We spent a lot of time outdoors as kids and we did a lot of four-wheel driving and going trout fishing up in the hills, or trapping. We always had that connection to the outdoors and to the food. Mum and Dad always had a good vegetable garden. Then I had an opportunity to become kitchenhand through a family friend, so that’s where it started for me, washing pots and pans. From there, one of the chefs left and I was offered an apprenticeship. I did four years there. It was a country apprenticeship so I learned a good style of cooking down here but definitely refined it when I went to Melbourne. I worked with quite a few good chefs there. It felt as though I did my apprenticeship all over again when I went to the city. I encourage all my young chefs to experience that. It’s good now because I have a very young crew here in the kitchen and I’m passing on that experience to them now through traditional cooking and making stocks the right way.
It’s interesting it, isn’t it, that you had your early experiences and country cooking and now you’ve come back to that, but, as you say, bringing in other techniques as well.
It’s the whole process. As I said, we buy in the whole carcass and do the butchery and we use the bones; it’s complete nose to tail cookery. We visit the farms. I think as a chef, even when you have worked in the city and you come back to the country, you see a lot of quality restaurants that have those fundamentals in the kitchen.
I love hospitality training. I have always loved teaching and passing on my knowledge. I have been fortunate enough that I have worked with and know a lot of good chefs. Even growing up, there was a lot of power industry where my dad used to work so culturally a lot of the different stuff we were tasting and experiencing and fortunate enough to learn about feeds into that. I remember as a kid eating rollmops and blue cheese, which was quite new for us, but I think it was Dad’s experience from working with other people and seeing what they were eating. We actually have a pickled mullet on the menu at the moment and it brings back memories of that Scandinavian, Polish-style food.
That’s really interesting. I was going to ask you where you get your inspiration. And I guess it’s from what’s in season and from your repertoire over the years, but do you write things down or do you have lots of cookbooks?
We talk a lot about motivating and I keep pushing them to learn. One of the things I think we do really well here is that we sit down in the kitchen and talk about opportunities; we look at the produce we have and encourage them not to continue doing the same thing over and over but learn to push boundaries. We’ll sit down and look at a particular ingredient and go away and think what we can do and then bring the ideas back. We write the menu pretty much daily, depending on the produce we’ve got and the different cuts of meat. There is plenty of opportunity to change. Particularly with the seasons; you see new produce come through and you have tail ends of produce. It’s organic the way it happens in the kitchen and it’s exciting as well, because we don’t have a static menu we work from day to day. It’s a bit chaotic sometimes, particularly for Front of House. We invest a lot of time keeping them updated on what we are working on so that they can tell that story once it gets to the table.
There’s nothing better. I love it as a diner when Front of House clearly know what’s going on and they love it as well. I’ve had lots of really good experiences, for example at Embla in the city, where I’m on the edge of my seat hearing the story of the vineyard and the food. That’s what I want as a diner. I remember when I was at university and I was a waitress…a long time ago…there was a real Front of House and kitchen division and we were afraid of the chefs. Those days have gone and it’s more about the team approach now.
We do a ‘Trevor’s Menu’ [Let Trev Cook For You] which is pretty much a five-course and the diner doesn’t know what they are getting and I think that’s a good opportunity to pass on the story when they do put the food down. We specialise in charcuterie and that’s normally our second course. That can change almost daily. Joel’s working on a mortadella today and it’s exciting. As soon as we finish something like that, it’s good to educate the Front of House what’s in it and what’s going on with the produce.
I love that. It’s such a beautiful setting. It feels as though it is a real lifestyle choice to be working here.
It’s good. We’ve got the winery out the back and there are about five or six winemakers who come in and out of this space and they are all foodies as well. It’s good talking to them about their wine and the stages they go through and looking out at the vineyard and seeing the seasons change, it’s great.
Thank you so much for your time. It was lovely to see you again and hear more.
6 Farrington Close, Warragul