It’s 1993 and celebrated chef Shannon Kellam is a 16-year-old apprentice, living at home with his folks on the acreage they’ve recently bought at Caboolture, an hour north of Brisbane. His dad, Barry, is a fitter and turner who’s just started his own trucking business; mum Lorraine works as a cleaner, and his two older brothers, Jason and Darryl, are both apprentice car mechanics. Kellam’s finished Year 12 at Pine Rivers High, near Bray Park in Brisbane’s north, and is studying cooking part-time at Caboolture TAFE. He’s working in the kitchen at Rick Stephen’s acclaimed Raphael’s restaurant at Shorncliffe, overlooking Moreton Bay, after Stephen turned up at TAFE looking for an apprentice.

Before work, he’s up at dawn racing through French cookbooks and reading about French history (soon he’ll ditch TAFE for an education in Stephen’s kitchen). Kellam’s studying not ­because it’s his job, but because it’s him, food is his passion. He’s a working-class lad enraptured by everything about French cooking – the way the great French chef Auguste Escoffier organised his kitchen along ­military lines, inventing the brigade system from his time in the French army for the opening of London’s Savoy.

Kellam loves the fact that French food is made from scratch. He loves the care, the attention to detail, the way French cooking is not only about the taste of food in the mouth, but how it sometimes approaches something like art and beauty.

COOKING TO PERFECTION

Chef Rick Stephen recalls his young apprentice as “a big, solid lad”, 110 kilos in his bare feet, so keen he was forever getting in his way. “I named him ‘Blocker’ – I’d go to the fridge, he’d be there; I’d go to the stove, he’d be there, blocking my way. It was a very small kitchen, but every time I turned around I’d bump into him,” he tells Qweekend over the phone from his home in Singapore.

Stephen knew immediately that Kellam was the real deal: “He worked hard, he worked very hard. If he was supposed to come in at two o’clock and he wasn’t there by nine in the morning, I’d be surprised. If you want to learn, you must keep learning, in your own time. Shannon was more than up for the challenge.”

Stephen recognised a fellow perfectionist when he saw one: “He’s got a fire in the belly. His idea is to put up the perfect plate, every time. When Shannon sends a plate out, he wants 10 out of 10. Some might say it’s ego, I say it’s because he’s a ­perfectionist.

“He’s not interested in the glory – he’s in it for the challenge.”

Stephen is now Director of Kitchens at one of the world’s ­largest food catering suppliers, SATS at Singapore’s Changi ­Airport – as well as directing SAT’s 19 other kitchens around the world catering for the aviation, hospitality, health and ­government food sectors. As he’s watched his protege’s ­career flourish, he’s ­noticed praise hasn’t turned Kellam’s head, because Kellam’s never forgotten that food remains what it’s all about. “The man has great cooking skills, he can cook like crazy,” he says. “Shannon absorbs all the ­information and filters out all the rubbish. He doesn’t take any nonsense [in the kitchen], either.”

Today chef Kellam, 40, and his wife Clare (formerly ­Wallace), 35, whom he married in April, own Brisbane’s premier French restaurant, Montrachet, on up-and-coming King St, the Lend Lease and RNA development precinct near the Brisbane Showgrounds in Brisbane’s inner-north Bowen Hills. Originally established in 2003 in Paddington, in Brisbane’s inner west, by Thierry and Carol Galichet but taken over by the Kellams in 2015, the glamorous new ­Montrachet dining room opened last December.

Attached to the ­restaurant is the business’s first ­combined boulangerie and patisserie, which Lyon baker Patrick Delbar helped set up, now run by longtime Montrachet commis chef Tara Bain.

The new Montrachet, with its dramatically high pressed-metal ceilings, recycled European oak floors and ­banquettes in burgundy-coloured leather, closely resembles the old Montrachet, except with added elegance. It’s been fully booked since it opened, its kitchen pushing out two-and-a-half times more dinners a week than it used to. A month after opening, Courier-Mail restaurant reviewer Des Houghton gave it 10 out of 10 for food, his first perfect-scoring review for food, and it’s just been awarded three hats in the 2018 Gault et Millau. Kellam was also named Chef of the Year in The Courier-Mail 2018 Food Awards last month.

In the 25 years since Kellam was “Blocker”, and entered his first salon culinaire – just up the road from his ­current restaurant, at the RNA Queensland cooking champ­ionships, where he won gold and silver – Kellam’s represented Aust­ralia many times. He’s twice represented his country at the world’s most prestigious cooking competition, the Bocuse d’Or, regarded as the culinary equivalent of the Olympics.

Kellam’s worked in acclaimed Brisbane establishments, from Il Centro to Wilson’s Boathouse to the Brisbane Club, and he’s possibly the only top chef in Australia who has not starred in a reality-TV show.

So how did “Blocker” from Caboolture end up knowing his pâte á choux (an unleavened batter) from his pâte ­tournée (a leavened batter)?

LIKE GRANDMA USED TO MAKE

One clue is Kellam’s maternal great-grandmother, Dorothy, a round-faced country girl from Dorset, England, who could turn her cooking hand to anything. Lorraine Kellam, 66, Shannon’s mum, says family lore has it that her youngest child inherited his round face from Dorothy, as well as her cooking prowess.

Lorraine tells Qweekend her grandmother came to Aust­ralia as a war bride after World War I, settling in Bendigo, 150km northwest of Melbourne. “She had a beautiful old house on a farm. She made her own butter, bread, everything. She’d cook once a week, anything you could dream of,” she says. Before long, Dorothy became head cook at Bendigo’s most famous restaurant, Favaloro’s Café (since closed).

The second clue to Shannon Kellam’s success is the ­Kellam family’s extraordinary commitment to hard work. “My philosophy in life is that anyone can achieve anything if you have a goal and set your mind to it,” says Lorraine.

“All our boys ran their own businesses,” adds ­husband Barry Kellam. Darryl, 47, now runs a business providing rocks for landscaping designs and Jason, 44, recently sold his car mechanic business to become a ranger on Fraser Island.

The first two boys were born in Victoria, but Jason was often sick with bronchial asthma, and a doctor suggested he might thrive in the Queensland heat. Shannon was born in Bundaberg where the family settled, before moving to ­Brisbane’s Bray Park three years later. Growing up in the far northern outreaches of Brisbane, where the housing was cheap and kids can be tough, was sometimes challenging, says Kellam. “Pine Rivers was a fairly rough school back then, but Mum and Dad were very strict with us, they had strict rules as far as respecting other people goes, and a good work ethic. They were very, very hardworking people.”

Kellam was always a big unit – the only one in the family to play rugby league. “I’m the only Queenslander in the family!” he says, laughing. Now his son Lochlan, 17 (from his first marriage to Letitia), is a talented footballer, in both league and rugby. He’s in Year 12 at Marist Brothers ­Ashgrove where he played rugby, but he also plays league for the Fortitude Valley Diehards and has just ­finished an NRL pathway competition for Under-18s called the Mal Meninga Cup, and plays for ­Wynnum Manly Seagulls. He lives with his dad and Clare at Hamilton in Brisbane’s inner north because it’s easier to get to school and footy training (sister Charli, 9, and brother Darcy, 7, live with Letitia).

SURVIVING THE PRESSURE COOKER

At the new Montrachet, Kellam’s got a big new kitchen (the old premises had a small kitchen much like the tiny one he started out in at Raphael’s). His team of five has expanded to 10, the new site includes a special ­controlled-temperature wine cellar housing 300 wines (Thierry Galichet imports all French wine for them), and the former 48-seater has expanded to 60 covers.

Neither Montrachet was freehold, with both properties being leased, and Kellam and Clare bought the name and business from Galichet. Thierry Galichet preferred not to be interviewed for this article – he was busy preparing for his own reincarnation in new premises on the corner of Leichhardt and Wharf streets, Spring Hill, a bar and wine shop, which opened recently.

It was Galichet who suggested Kellam take over the helm of Montrachet, back in 2011, but at the time Kellam was in training for the 2012 IKA Culinary Olympics in ­Germany immediately followed by the 2013 Bocuse d’Or in France. Kellam promised Galichet he’d be ready after that.

But at the 2013 Bocuse d’Or – where he ranked 15th in the world – the judges encouraged him to try again. Not only did he have to talk Clare into it – being away in France for months at a stretch – he had to talk himself into doing it again. “We were in the truck leaving Lyon [where the ­competition is held], driving back to Carcassone where my coach Franck Putelat was based,” says Kellam. “You’re ­deflated, exhausted, you’ve been running on adrenalin for the past three months. It’s very, very intense physically as well as mentally because you’re missing full cycles of sleep.”

Yet, the extraordinary will to rise to a ­challenge won out. “I wanted to be the only chef in the world to have done two Bocuse d’Or,” he says. Except first he had to tell Clare he wanted to do it again (she was supportive), and then Galichet.

LEAVING THE D’OR OPEN

Galichet is one of those chefs known for shouting and he does not hold back when Kellam tells him he will not be taking over Montrachet till after the 2015 ­Bocuse d’Or. This time he was living and working at his new coach Serge Vieira’s two ­Michelin-starred restaurant in Chaudes-Aigues, in a remote part of the Massif Centrale in southwest France (with ­frequent trips back to Australia to see Clare and his kids).

Rick Stephen says he took a lot of calls from Kellam ­during those competition days. “I said to him, ‘Shannon, cook from the heart, mate. That’s what you do, and you do that extremely well’.” He did, finally hanging up his salon ­culinaire hat after gaining 12th place for Australia – then equal to the highest score ever. “I was ready after that to start doing something for myself, with Clare, I wanted to settle down and spend more time with the kids,” he says.

Clare grew up in Alderley in Brisbane’s northwest with a project manager father and a mother who was a nurse, ­attending St Peter’s School before doing an arts degree in history and literature at the University of Queensland. Her background and her husband’s couldn’t be more different, but what drew them together (they met when Clare was working front-of-house at the Brisbane Club) is their shared love of the art of food and drink. Clare’s thing is cocktails: to support herself through university she worked in hospitality, but it was only when she worked at the ­famous American Bar at London’s Savoy Hotel for several years that she began to see it as an art.

“Everything at the Savoy was done at such a high level, the beauty of the whole thing was amazing,” she says. It’s that sense of beauty: the perfect white linen tablecloth, the perfect matching wine, the perfect taste of Montrachet’s signature dish of double-baked crab souffle, to which both Shannon and Clare aspire.

Kellam has little time for nonsense about his profession being high-stress, besieged by drugs, and bad for mental health: “If you want to be a gastronomic chef and make everything from scratch and need to create stuff and time for testing, it ain’t ever going to be an eight or 10-hour day.”

He reckons if chefs complain about the hours they work, the answer is simple: “If you don’t enjoy it, leave. I’ve done it for 25 years this year. Of course I love it – I get up every day, I’ve probably only been in bed a few hours – and I can’t wait to get back to it.”

His aim is to be at Montrachet for the long haul, just like Chef Stephen’s at Raphael’s: “How many rest­aurants in Brisbane run for 27 years? Our aim is to make sure Montrachet’s still around when we’re ready to finish. I want my next achievement in this industry to see that Montrachet will have continually traded for 30 years.” ■