Their cookbooks come with instructions on how to keep chooks; their Byron Bay cafe is surrounded by pigs, cows and vintage tractors; and they really would, as the bumper sticker says, "rather be surfing".

Meet the Duckies, as they are known; two of a fluid group of mates who opened a surfside cafe in Bronte in late 2010, and another in Byron Bay in 2015, after years of schlepping in tough-love, fine-dining kitchens.

Darren Robertson and Mark LaBrooy – Spectrum's new food columnists – are the faces of Three Blue Ducks, poster boys for the grassroots, cow-to-chow approach to cooking. They're as busy as bees: running cafes and doing photo shoots, television shows and charity events. They have just announced they will take over the old Kitchen By Mike premises in Rosebery and will open for breakfast and lunch there in June. And they make it look as easy as ducks gliding through sun-dappled water.

Which is not to say there haven't been years of furious paddling beneath the surface. The pair first met in the pressure-cooker kitchen of Tetsuya's, the spiritual home of modern Sydney dining and training ground for a raft of Sydney chefs from Rockpool's Phil Wood to Sixpenny's Dan Puskas and Mr. Wong's Dan Hong.

Labrooy was completing his apprenticeship, while Hertfordshire-born Robertson applied for the job from Gravetye Manor in England in 2001. For Robertson, cooking was an exit strategy from his homeland. "I was obsessed with learning to cook so I could get away," he says, "although I was very unlucky. The first chefs I worked for in a small seafood restaurant in my home town were absolute arseholes." At Tetsuya's, he was head chef for four years under then executive chef Martin Benn.

"Darren was a big thinker from service to cooking, and always had a great work ethic," says Benn, who now runs the three-hatted Sepia with his partner Vicki Wild. "It's no surprise to me that he has evolved into one of the country's more creative and entrepreneurial chefs."

LaBrooy trod a different path. Born in Goulburn to Sri Lankan and Swedish parents, his first job was working for the highly respected Klaus Hubert at JB Morgan doing boardroom lunches, where he was soon named Apprentice of the Year. At Tetsuya's, however, he was at the lower end of the food chain. "I was a shit-kicker, a nobody," he says. "I used to get picked on. I was pretty rough and raw, and I had to have this full-on barney with some of the older chefs to stop them sabotaging my kitchen prep."

Martin Benn remembers LaBrooy as a smart and enthusiastic young chef with a great will to learn. "He often ran before he could walk, but you could see he had a burning desire to take what he had learnt and use it," he says.

Wanderlust then had LaBrooy spend seven years travelling and cooking in the surfing hotspots of Europe and North Africa. It was on a trip home in 2010 that he and foodie mates Sam Reid-Boquist and Chris Sorrell spotted an old chicken shop a few blocks from the surf in beachside Bronte, and decided to open a cafe. Together, they built a laid-back, open-kitchened space that helped launch Sydney's casual-cafe-with-serious-food movement. Labrooy's brother Grant – a fourth Ducky - turned the backyard into a permaculture garden and the kitchen was soon self-sufficient in herbs. "We cooked everything from scratch as if it were a restaurant," says LaBrooy. "Right down to churning the ice-cream for the milk shakes."

Early reviews called Three Blue Ducks variously "a fresh, cool, little cafe riding high on Sydney's new wave of dining", "charming, inventive and ethical" and – my favourite – "excellent-looking humans with a side of delicious food".

And there it might have stayed, had not Robertson left Tetsuya's in 2011. After joining forces with LaBrooy on a pop-up guerilla dinner they decreed "a good laugh", he officially became a Duck.

"Watch 'em go broke" was the standard industry response to this new chef co-operative. But the idea was right for its time, as traditional hatted restaurants struggled with high rents and wages, and the degustation-wary diner looked for something less formal and more "real". When the Duckies started doing four-course $80 dinners, The Sydney Morning Herald announced "you can eat as well in this cool little cafe as anywhere in Sydney", and suddenly they were flying high.

They opened a bar next door with Bronte neighbour and brewer Jeff Bennett, and launched a winter-only pop-up kitchen in Falls Creek, Victoria ("because we like snowboarding").

The next big dream was to have a farm. And just like that, one came along and fell into their laps. When Tom Lane, heir to the Oroton business, bought 34 hectares of prime grazing land on the fringe of Byron Bay to establish an organic working farm complete with bakery, yoga and children's workshops in 2015, he didn't have to forage far to find the right chefs to run the on-farm cafe. It now feeds a thousand people a week, surrounded by heritage pigs, shaggy highland cattle and (truly) free-range chooks.

The friends divvy up their time between Bronte and Byron, fitting in the odd heli-skiing trip in British Columbia (LaBrooy) and having the odd baby (Robertson), always with an eye on that all-important life-work ratio.

Robertson goes all gooey at the mention of Archie, his six-month-old son with partner TV presenter and meteorologist Magdalene Roze ("He's lovely. Can I show you a photo?"), although he admits being a new dad hasn't been easy. "I'm used to long, crazy hours so I thought it would be a walk in the park," he says with a laugh. "We've only just gone out for the first time to have dinner with other grown-ups. It felt like New Year's Eve."

La Brooy is happiest when he's 17 metres under the surface of the ocean, spear in hand. "Freediving is extremely therapeutic and primal," he says. "It's the last frontier."

Having a life, they say, makes them better chefs. "We've seen a lot of chefs who get caught up in the limelight, and they leave behind the things that took them there in the first place," says Robertson. "Like their partners, and the team who stood behind them in the kitchen and supported them."

They are also working to change the toxic kitchen culture of the past.

"In the early days, kitchens were run on fear," says LaBrooy. "But you never get the best results out of someone when they're scared. Now, you look out for each other."

It's "the way of the duck", which means feeding people fresh, healthy food, preferably made from scratch. It also means wasting nothing. Their signature green chicken recipe, for instance, calls for chicken pieces marinated in a fragrant green paste made from handfuls of leftover parsley and coriander stems and stalks, garlic, ginger, red chilli, soy sauce and grapeseed oil, roasted and served with a squeeze of lime.

"Our food is quite simple, and very responsive to what's growing out there," says LaBrooy. "It's weekend food you can enjoy cooking."

So Spectrum readers will be spared recipes with cheffy techniques such as snap-freezing with liquid nitrogen?

They fall about laughing.

"We don't use liquid nitrogen," says Robertson, grinning. "Keeping food cold in the snow would be about as close as we get."

These recipes appeared originally in The Sydney Morning Herald's Spectrum section.