I think Zane was a little unsure of what he had struck when I swept into Sibling on a Monday afternoon and started quoting his blog to him. Conversation with a chef was going down some sort of monologue by the conversationalist track while the chef patiently listened. But Zane’s writing is superb and I was intrigued to meet the man who five years ago had so thoughtfully and honestly recorded the reality of life as a chef, and who is now working for a café mostly staffed with volunteers from all walks of life with 100% of their distributable profits donated to charity.
Zane, just to start off, I did a bit of reading up on you this morning, and please don’t think I’m a stalker but I found your Young and hungry WordPress blog and it’s really amazing. You should write a book. Then I saw something else where you mentioned that Anthony Bourdain had been a really big influence on you in terms of his storytelling. Such a great connection.
Your last post on Young and hungry was five years ago tomorrow and you had been talking to a 13-year old dish hand whose career aspirations were largely based around how much money he would earn. You reflected on the life of a chef and listed all the reasons why people shouldn’t become chefs, but you ended by saying, except for people like you, who have the passion. I loved the gems you finished with:
“Be relentless in your willingness to learn.
Never steal, and try not to lie.
Be resilient to all adversity; it’s one of the greatest weapons you can use.
You’re never too good, you’re never too old and you’re never too unintelligent to achieve if you so desire.”
They are brilliant observations and you obviously do have the passion, because you are still doing it.
I am still doing it. I guess it was a bit of a click-baity title, but I wanted to aid people who wanted to face the reality of what it’s like to work in a hospitality environment. If you can do it realistically, facing those challenges, then perhaps you can continue on and do it, if you are passionate enough. This is now my fourteenth or fifteenth year.
I read somewhere that you started when you were 13. Was that an after-school job?
Yeah, it was an after-school job then eventually a school-based apprenticeship and I fell in love with it from the get-go. It wasn’t as popularised at the time as it is now with all the details we have of celebrity chefs and so on.
Did you grow up in New Zealand?
I was born in New Zealand and then we moved to the Sunshine Coast in 1999, 2000.
You would have been only little in New Zealand, but when I was growing up there, the food industry wasn’t great for a long time and then it suddenly got great and now it is super great.
My sous-chef and I were just having that discussion about the progression of food and food celebrities and how far it has come from when we started. I still remember faxing orders to suppliers. And that wasn’t that long ago.
That seems crazy, doesn’t it? At 13, did you make a conscious decision to pursue a career as a chef? Is your family about food?
Not really. My aunt had a dairy farm and she was always teaching us how to cook and pickle and preserve. Mum was a normal single mother looking after her family and putting food on the table, which is probably why we had to get jobs after school. I’ve always loved food and thinking about it as a profession happened when I was about 13 or 14. The first progression was that I wanted to be in the environment because I liked it; it was fringe and odd and strange. But I eventually developed a passion for making better food.
As you were going through, some of your observations in your blog are quite dark and quite scathing but really honest. It sounds as though, like many chefs, you had some tough times.
Some of the kitchens I was raised in were that very militant style. Luckily I haven’t picked up too much of that. It has been something I’ve seen my peers drop as well. We don’t really have that any more. That way of doing things is less conducive to having a good life. It teaches you very quickly because you have to know things. You do the amount in one year that a normal person would do in three or four. You gain knowledge very quickly.
A few of the older chefs I’ve spoken to say that, even though they don’t adopt that militant style themselves, it did teach them discipline and they learned a lot.
I’ve rethought that. It is, to an extent, the same way that going to war helps you be a good soldier. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the only way. I think more and more that a lot of people’s frustrations and culture comes from bad teaching. If you can teach better, you don’t have to do that style of hospitality that is luckily falling out of favour.
I guess, as you mention in your blog, there’s a lot of addiction; drugs and alcohol to get them through and then it’s a pressured environment, so that if there are people within that who haven’t worked out how to navigate that or communicate effectively and they get frustrated, it’s a recipe for a volatile situation.
That’s the thing I really appreciate about being here. Some of the volunteers at Kinfolk and Sibling have been through the justice system or have just come out of it and they are working with charity partners that help them get jobs, but we have a culture here where we talk through things with people rather than giving an ultimatum that this is how you do your job, or you don’t have a job. So many of my friends have fallen victim to addiction in a big way. It’s sad, but it is starting to change, which is a silver lining.
I wanted to ask you whether since that last post five years ago you think things are changing in hospitality.
Yeah. Someone interviewed me a couple of years ago when I was running Bluebonnet. I think they were trying to get a particular answer out of me about my opinion on how the workforce is now. It was only about a year before the overtime debacle and everything started happening. It was about generational blame for chef shortages. Chef shortages happen everywhere and it is a problem, but probably not a good one to address by accusing a generation. You’re not going to get anyone to work for you if you have that opinion.
I think there is a lot changing. I think it will change for the better, hopefully. Even to the extent that many professionals I know who have grown up doing 80+, 90+, 100+ weeks are now on 38 hours weeks. It doesn’t matter where you are; Attica, I have friends in London, who are now doing these short working weeks because people realise that it’s not the way to run a business well. You can’t really turn a true profit if you are exploiting people.
And then you have businesses like Sibling and Kinfolk that are so holistic in their approach; it’s not just about providing a space for the volunteers to learn skills and feel safe and to give a charity, it’s also about doing really good food and coffee. It must be great to work in a place like this.
It’s pretty amazing. I’m cooking food from some friends’ farms. It’s all pretty local and we have minimal wastage as well. I’ve shaped the menu backwards from that ethos.
So you knew those people and could use your relationships and networks to bring them on?
Yeah, I’ve met them through multiple other fine dining restaurants and other venues I’ve worked for. Then through building those relationships, we could go directly to the farmers and ask them to send us certain things. Our goat is from Echuca and they are slaughtered to order. It’s amazing. It’s something that doesn’t usually happen. Usually it’s a cryovacced bag of something. Being able to cook a menu that is largely based around vegetables from a few friends’ farms is pretty good.
That’s a big shift too, isn’t it. You would have seen over your career, that plant-based eating has become more popular? And it’s easier now to provide a range of vegan and vegetarian options.
I like to think that the way food is going, or should be going, is that it’s inclusive. I don’t really need to do much with the staff to train them about what people can eat of they come in with a dietary requirement. It should be easy for them to a certain extent. 80% of our menu is vegetarian, 50% is vegan, a lot of it is gluten free, or can be. It’s too hard in tis day and age to push away from that. Or if you are going to push away from that, be very sure of what you are doing.
Know your worth. Never sell yourself short, that’s the advice I have been giving people lately. So many chefs I’ve met have never had any formal training and they are brilliant. So, never sell yourself short when applying for a job and applying yourself when you have that job.
Where do you get your ideas? Is it from reading…?
Everything. I still do quite a few pilgrimages to Books for Cooks. But usually just from eating and more to the point, whatever happens to be coming in from the farms. So many times, they bring in food that I’ve never seen before, like a new tomato. I would have thought I had seen it all over the years, but it turns out there are things I’ve never seen before in my life. Especially Days Walk Farm, if you think you’ve seen something somewhere, they can attempt to grow it, which is such a good way to work. I can be, oh I really like this radish from the UK that isn’t available here, do you reckon you could have a shot at growing them here?
That’s what I find really fascinating about chefs when you’ve been working for years, you build up a library in your palate of flavours and you can work out what to do with those. If you got a completely new vegetable that you had never come across before, what do you do, do you smell it? Where would you start?
It’s all an experiment. There’s a difference between having a good palate and between having a palate memory, I would say. There’s crossover, like in a Venn diagram, to have a very good palate is being able to pinpoint flavour and having a good palate memory is about being able to remember where that flavour comes from and particularly also what it goes with. You understand more as you eat. When I get a new vegetable, it’s an experiment. Can we roast it? Can we smoke it? Can we dehydrate it or pickle it? What kinds of things will it lend itself to? It’s trial and error. You taste it raw, what’s it like? Terrible? Excellent, let’s cook it. But you don’t really know until you go through that process. Something as simple as we got these pumpkins that we though were for ornamental purposes only but we shaved them really thinly and salted them and they were beautiful. You never know until you try.
In the old school chef mentality, there was only one way to do something and this is the way you cook this, but it’s not true. You go anywhere in the world and you see, for example in Japan they boil the living hell out of a stock and that’s because they want to extract all that milkiness out the bones or you go somewhere else and they stew their beef at a very high temperature rather than low or vice versa. Right or wrong, it’s what you’re going for and how you do it to achieve that.
I was talking to Mark Ebbels at TarraWarra Estate and, first of all I think it’s amazing that he is vegan and cooking meat and having to taste it, that’s a huge sacrifice to make. But he was talking about working at the Fat Duck and learning about all the different ways you can use a vegetable and all of the vegetable and then working in a lab sort of situation to work out recipes.
I think there’s a way you can do that in any kitchen: what can you do with a waste product. There are so many things we do with things people normally throw out. We are staring a community kitchen in a couple of weeks time to help people who need a bit more. Most of the food to be donated is food that restaurants aren’t using. There is a massive need for people to learn how to use everything. It has been forgotten. I feel like the mid-2000s taught people how to waste food. They started putting everything into individual portions into little sous-vide bags that they then threw in the bin.
It seems to me that there is a much better way to go about it. We’ve been doing some interesting experiments lately, making coffee kombuchas with the old coffee grounds, and literally with anything we can get our hands on. I also don’t understand why chefs aren’t more willing to do it. In essence, it’s free money. If it’s something you normally put in the bin, then it’s free money.
But does it come down to that wages and time thing. They don’t have the staffing or time to experiment with that side of things?
No, I think it’s how you plan. For me, I’m never doing the waste product for the current menu. That’s going to be fermented or pickled or turned into something else for the next menu. As long as you are working one step ahead. You have to create your workload around your team and around your product. It’s hard to create the menu you want and then make people and product fit around that.
Have you worked in the UK?
No, I’ve spent a lot of time there. I mainly did my stages in other countries; Sweden and the US.
Do you think it’s important, as a chef, to work in other countries?
No. I think travel is important. Broadening your horizons and figuring what there is out there is very important. But in terms of actually working, I never wanted to work in London because I knew it would ruin it for me. At least in Australia you get paid ok. What’s the alternative? Share a flat with 20 people in London, be dirt poor and not really have any fun.
You’re right. A lot of chefs do their stages in those big name places for nothing, just so they can say they have worked there. That must be hard.
It’s great for your resume. But you end up working 100-odd hours a week, six days, doubles and you don’t have time to do anything else. It ruins you. I don’t if I want to ruin a city for the rest of my life because London is a great city. I have the same approach to other places; don’t ruin Italy, don’t ruin Paris.
Have you been to Paris and eaten there? Did it live up to your expectations?
Oh yeah. You just have to know how to find the best food. I think the best phrase you can learn in any language is, “Whose grandmother makes the best food?” It always works. So when you’re down at the pub, you ask a group whose grandmother makes the best food, someone will say theirs does, then there will be an argument…especially in Italy. Then you might get to eat it.
I love it. And if you were talking to a young chef now, is there anything you have learned in the intervening five years since that post that you would add to your advice to the 13-year old dish hand?
I think in addition to the realities of the job, I would say, know your worth. Never sell yourself short, that’s the advice I have been giving people lately. So many chefs I’ve met have never had any formal training and they are brilliant. So, never sell yourself short when applying for a job and applying yourself when you have that job. That’s the best piece of advice I can give.
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