Coronavirus: Top chefs on coping in the restaurant lockdown

The great chefs of Australia are doing many things to salve the pain of a trainwreck week for their industry.

Oakridge chefs Jo barrett and Matt Stone harvest vegetables in their kitchen garden. Picture: Aaron Francis

Washing tea-towels. Baking cakes. Picking pumpkins. Without customers, kitchens or dining rooms at their disposal, the great chefs of Australia are doing many things to salve the pain of a trainwreck week for their industry.

They’re just not cooking in their restaurants.

Some are employees, some self-employed; some have lost a salary, others are watching their business fail. But they all took a mighty kick in the guts last Sunday as the thoroughly entrenched Australian pastime of eating out — from cheap-and-cheerful to the finest harbourside tables in Sydney — came to a screeching halt.

Matt Stone and Jo Barrett – Oakridge Estate, Yarra Valley

“We didn’t really expect to be in this situation,” says Matt Stone, “this” meaning stood down. As The Weekend Australian speaks to Stone and partner Jo Barrett, the team behind Oakridge Wines’ award-winning Yarra Valley restaurant, they’ve just come from a meeting to be told they are joining the rest of the industry in limbo.

Since closing the restaurant, the couple has been madly harvesting everything their extensive kitchen garden grows, “pickling, fermenting, making charcuterie, turning milk into cheese, and then we’d planned to turn the garden beds in, to rest. There’s no point continuing to grow food for no reason.” Until this week, their goal was to never buy vegetables again.

Come Tuesday, Barrett and Stone are on annual leave until that runs out. They’ll be back, with other members of the restaurant team, for pruning in the vineyards soon, “and there are things we’ll need to keep an eye on, for our sanity. But takeaway isn’t a viable option here and, honestly, for a lot of businesses, I reckon it’s just clutching at straws. I don’t see it lasting that long.”

Josh Niland – St Peter, Sydney

For the fresh-faced chef with an international reputation around his approach to fish, the situation might have been a complete cal­amity but for an “essential” retail site next door. Josh Niland’s tiny St Peter restaurant, in Paddington, has seen 15 staff stood down this week, but a few — on a rotating roster — have moved into his Fish Butchery retail business next door.

“We opened (St Peter) last Saturday but the writing was already on the wall. It was like putting a ­tissue on an open heart.”

He launched Mr Niland at Home on Monday: 80 per cent-done meal kits he says has allowed him to keep a few chefs employed and “been good for my mental ­capacity. I’ve got three kids and a mortgage; I need to be mentally fit to be a good husband and parent.”

Danielle Alvarez – Fred’s, Sydney

Chefs don’t get much chance, or inclination, to cook at home; ­Florida-born chef Danielle Alvarez, who usually runs the kitchen at Paddington’s Fred’s, is seizing the moment. “I’m just trying to keep cooking in my home kitchen because I love it and it’s sanity,” she says. As a staffer at Sydney’s giant Merivale restaurant group, she’s part of possibly the industry’s largest mass standing-down of employees. “I’m thinking about people who are single. And families stuck at home with kids and no income. And thinking about how we reinvent ourselves if this doesn’t come back. Sure, some restaurants will come back but one thing’s for sure, some won’t.”

Peter Gilmore – Quay, Sydney

“I thought I might take up ceramics again,” says perhaps the best-known, hands-on chef in the country, Peter Gilmore, of his current situation. Neither Quay nor Bennelong are keeping him busy, although he says “we’re hopeful of reopening when this crisis is over (but) it really depends how long it goes on for”.

Ceramics? “It’s something I did for a little while in my early 20s (and) I’ve always been interested in it but never had the time to explore it properly. And I guess a lot more time in my vegetable garden, dreaming of new dishes. It all feels pretty raw at the moment — being told you can’t do what you have always done — but I think we all understand why these measures have been put in place.”

Joel Valvasori – Lulu La Delizia, Perth

“I’m working on the shit stuff,” says Joel Valvasori, chef and co-owner at his popular little Italian-ish restaurant in Subiaco. “Typing letters to employees, calling suppliers … I didn’t think takeaway was right for us, and I still don’t.”

All his staff have been stood down. Leftover tiramisu and pasta have been doled out to neighbours and he may turn his premises into a pasta shop, depending on the landlord’s flexibility: “But I’ll see what developments are. The whole week’s been a wait-and-see and that’s going to be the same next week, too.”

Like most small-restaurant operators, Valvalsori and wife Ivana draw no salary. “We rely on the business to make a profit … The faster we shut this town, the faster we can get back to proper work.”

Ross Lusted – formerly of The Bridge Room, Sydney

“A lot of people reckon I had a crystal ball,” says chef/restaurateur Ross Lusted, who shut his famed restaurant in 2019 amid the chaos of neighbouring construction works in central Sydney, and is soon to announce a project that will open – he hopes – in 2021 in conjunction with Crown.

“But if this goes on for six months, I don’t even know where this leaves us. Everyone in our business is hurting, it doesn’t matter who you talk to, and there is some desperation, too … There will be mental health issues to deal with. Personally, I’m really happy to be at home and assessing what’s real. I think a lot of people will review how they live.”

Attica’s Ben Shewry has opened the Attica bake Shop. Picture: Aaron Francis

Ben Shewry – Attica, Melbourne

Imagine an internationally renowned chef knocking on your door on a Wednesday night with a home-delivered lasagne? “I’m just working around the clock right now,” says Ben Shewry, owner of Attica. “Cooking all day, delivering all night.”

Amazingly, Shewry has been able to keep his entire staff of 37 by quickly getting up both a web-based home-delivery business and turning his test kitchen into a “bake shop” selling baked goods, all made in the Attica kitchen.

“The idea is that by hustling this way, we can tread water for as long as we have to,” says Shewry. “The bushfires had hurt international trade before this … We have a lot of Chinese and North American customers. But I felt this coming and started making plans quite early.

“It’s both exhilarating and terrifying,” he says. “The beautiful thing about this is that there’s no one I’ve encountered so far who doesn’t understand the immediacy of the situation, the very real fear that if we don’t do something, we won’t be here next year.”

Lennox Hastie – Firedoor, Sydney

How’s the chef going? “Not great, to be honest, but we’re trying to navigate the situation as best we can.”

Lennox Hastie operates Firedoor in Sydney’s Surry Hills, a restaurant he reckons has never been better or busier, after five years’ trade, “and then this happens”.

“You share ideas around, look at every possibility … But we are in the hospitality business, not the takeout food business.”

Like many restaurants, Firedoor has suppliers who rely almost solely on the one restaurant.

“Our chicken guy said he was going to kill all his birds and put them in the ground, so now we’re doing produce boxes for our regulars to pick up,” says Hastie. “Fruit and veg, a piece of fish and a chicken … We made up 50 and got orders for three times as many … It’s great to be able to thank regulars and say goodbye.”