Freshly back from five weeks in Italy, Zac Cribbes’ enthusiasm and joie de vivre is infectious. But I get the feeling it’s not just because he has been away, Zac embraces life and is full of excitement about , cooking and the general hospitality scene in Melbourne. Again, as always in my chats to the incredible chefs we have here in Melbourne, I was struck by the fact that no matter how many conversations I have about food, cooking and restaurants, there is always something new to articulate and gems to impart.
Hi Zac. Let’s talk about you first. How long have you been a chef?
I’ve been a proper chef since I was 23 or 24. I grew up in a restaurant though; my mum is a trained chef and my dad was front of house. They owned a restaurant when I was growing p in Adelaide, so I’ve been around food pretty much my whole life. But I finished school and went to Uni and worked out that Uni wasn’t really the thing for me so I went overseas and travelled for three or four years on and off. I lived overseas and then came back and travelled for a bit then came back and then I lived overseas again. Then when I was living in Sweden, I decided that I had always loved cooking and had always wanted to be a chef but thought I’d try everything else first. Then I decided I really wanted to be a chef. That was 2005, so 12 years ago. It’s different to a lot of other guys who do it straight out of school. I did it the other way around.
I think it’s like anything; the more you can bring to a job, the better; the experiences and food you’ve eaten would all play into your role as chef now.
Exactly.
I’m not so sure about Sweden in terms of a catalyst for pursuing a chef career.
No, well there wasn’t much happening at that stage.
Apparently they are really into foraging now.
Yes they are right into everything now, but NOMA was only just kicking off then, and that was in Denmark. The whole New Nordic was brand new when I was there. I was living there because my wife now, my girlfriend then was studying there. It was a great opportunity just to be there.
A lot of my mates who are chefs did it straight out of school or didn’t finish school and did an apprenticeship and then they got to around 30 and wanted to go traveling. I got all that out of way first. Since becoming a chef, that’s what I’ve been focussed on.
So it was a conscious decision then. Now that you’ve been in it 12 years, you obviously love it.
I do. The thing with being a chef is that you have to love it. If you don’t love it, there’s no point in doing it. The hours are crap and the nights are long and when you are first starting out, the pay is crap for the hours you do. So if you don’t love it, you’d be silly to stay in it.
I’ve always loved food. For me, if I wanted to relax, I’d cook. My whole family is like that. My mum is a chef, but finished cheffing when I was eight. The house was always full of food and full of cooking. So for me, being a chef was really a natural choice but I wanted to try other things and also had an idea that it was below me almost. Or I thought, that’s what my mum did so I don’t want to do the same thing. In the end, though, I love it.
I was just listening to an interview on on the way in and the presenter was chatting to a jazz musician and he was quoting Rodin, the French sculptor, who said something along the lines of anyone who does something for pleasure is an artist, whether you’re a bricklayer or a lawyer or a chef. Although I did say to Annie Smithers once, what you do is art, and she said, “No! It’s a trade.” Do you see cooking as art?
Do you know what? I reckon it has different things about it. A major part of it is art and that is the expression of yourself you put in and show on the plate; it’s your creativity, but a lot of it is trade. You need to learn how to do something and there can be ten different ways of doing something. When I was first starting out, I learned all these different ways and then chose my own one, but that was part of the trade aspect; you take different things from the different pope who taught you, like any other trade and then you add in the artistic, creative side at the end.
My first eight years of being a chef weren’t that artistic or creative. They were repetitive; do your work on your section, do the same thing. One of my old chefs used to say that being a chef was doing lots and lots of really crappy jobs really well. At the end you get a good result. Once you get further up the chain you can be creative.
At Lucy Liu, we are changing things all the time. The physical menu stays pretty stable but we run seven specials a day which allows for the creative side.
Have you always been drawn to Asian food?
I’ve always been drawn to eating it. When I came back from Sweden, it was 2005 and Taxi Dining had just opened so I went to Taxi. A friend of a friend of a friend worked there and he said it was a good restaurant and they were just about to win Restaurant of the Year, not that they knew that at the time, and so I rocked up there and asked them to give me a job and I told them I’d be an apprentice and they didn’t have to pay me. They said I was crazy to be an apprentice at 24, so they took me on as a commis chef and paid me properly. Those four years there were like an apprenticeship. That was all Pan-Asian and that kick started it.
From there I went to Mornington Peninsula for a while at Port Philip Estate with Simon (West) and worked at Maha for a while and some other places. Then we opened The Smith. When I went out, I would always choose Asian food, and a lot of the time when I was young, I travelled to Asian countries. For about eight months, I travelled through south-east Asia and Nepal and I loved that. It was probably my favourite traveling experience. Being able to cook that food and live that life and travel back and forward, and now it’s part of Melbourne and so I was drawn to it, I suppose.
It’s interesting, it is almost as though I had to relearn some of the trade to open Lucy Liu. I was talking about trade work and creativity before but it was a bit like getting back to the trade here to rekindle some of the knowledge. I hadn’t been working with Asian food for ages. The Smith was really a gastro pub. I had to retrain myself. I had to relearn the techniques. I love Asian food.
The first thing we care about is the taste. We just try really hard to make things delicious.
I’ve heard lots of “bests” when people talk about Lucy Liu. A lot of people have called it one of the best restaurants in Melbourne and the pork hock is the best in Melbourne. How do you get to be the “best”?
I don’t know. For us, we just try really hard to make things delicious. I’ve got a head chef and a couple of sous chefs and the reality for me now as an Executive chef, having them, they are really the ones who push the restaurant along, I guide them but you have to have a great team if you want to be the best. I’m really lucky here. All the guys who run the place now, and I’ve just been away for five weeks, they smashed it. That’s one of the major aspects of being the best.
The reality is that we are surrounded by awesome restaurants. Coda, Oter, Chin Chin, Supernormal are all great restaurants. Taxi is across the road. We all try to be the best in our area.
The first thing we care about is the taste. It might be the ugliest and most unpresentable thing in the world but is it delicious? So then we try and make it presentable.
It’s interesting that you talk about the other restaurants around you and how you have friends in those restaurants because you are in competition with them but it also feels as though there’s a community.
It is a massive community. I was lucky when I worked at Taxi. There were heaps of really good chefs who worked there. And they’ve all gone off. Rishi opened a restaurant in Singapore and has just got the first Michelin star for a Sri Lankan chef. Jake is Executive chef at Est in Sydney and Tony is running Taxi again. Perry is running Supernormal and Brad is at The Smith. Melbourne’s chef scene isn’t that big. there are a lot of restaurants but if you’re in that group, everyone knows each other. Everyone gets on and is friendly.
Interestingly, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival for March, 2018, the theme is community. We’re doing a neighbourhood pool party with one of the chefs I used to work with who now runs Om Nom. We got in contact and now we’re running a pool party on the roof at Ezard. Tony is the Executive chef at Taxi and we are doing an event together for High Country Harvest. It is a community and it’s nice. A lot of my friends now are chefs I’ve worked with over the years.
I like to think about it like that because food is about hospitality and bringing people together so I like to think that it is created from a place of togetherness.
Definitely the best places I have worked in have been restaurants where the front of house and kitchen has been happy and they get on. They sometimes clash, but when everyone is happy, that makes for the best restaurants. If you have ever worked in restaurants that aren’t like that, then you know about it. They’re awful. It’s the same for being a chef; if you’re going to do it and work the hours and be antisocial while everyone else is having fun, then you want to make sure it’s a good environment and it’s fun.
23 Oliver Lane, Melbourne