Cooke after a new crown

A STAR chef returns to Australia to open his most ambitious restaurant yet.

Simply the best: Donovan Cooke is back in Melbourne and planning a seafood palace. Picture: Aaron Francis

IT WAS the moment Donovan Cooke realised he was destined for a career behind the stove. Hand wrapped in insulation tape to hide a knife wound sustained within the first few days of his apprenticeship at an exclusive London restaurant, the then 18-year-old rang his dad in Yorkshire to say he hated it and wanted to come home.

“Son,” came theapologetic voice at the end of the line. “I’ve already rentedout your room. You’re going to have to stay there.”

Twenty-four years later, it’s clear tough love was the right strategy. Cooke, who went on to complete that training stint at the famous Savoy Hotel, is refl ecting on a career that has put him alongside some of the world’s most famous chefs - Michel Roux, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay among them - and led him to mentor a procession of young staff who have gone on to achieve their own success.

Cooke’s hands - now a road map of cuts and blackened fingernails - tell their own tale of a life spent cooking; of a wandering spirit who left Europe in 1999 to run successful restaurants in Melbourne (Est Est Est and Ondine) before being headhunted in 2004 to become the chef de cuisine at Derby Restaurant & Bar in the exclusive Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Happy Valley Clubhouse.

Nearly seven years after his Hong Kong posting, Cooke is back in Melbourne and working on his newest restaurant, The Atlantic, a super-sized, 300-seat seafood extravaganza which is due to open in the city’s Crown Southbank waterfront precinct early next year.

“I’m not trying to shoot myself in the foot, but it’s the most exciting project I’ve ever seen,” he says of the expansive restaurant space that will comprise four concepts – private dining rooms, chef’s table, main dining room and an oyster and crustacean bar – and which he is launching in partnership with entrepreneur Hatem Saleh, fish wholesaler Con Andronis and Schiavello Group principal Tony Schiavello.

“This is going to be the best seafood restaurant in Australia.”

Tucking in to lunch at Maze restaurant, where Cooke’s protege from Est Est Est, Josh Emett, has his name above the door, the Yorkshireman is discussing the importance of respect and discipline. They are traits he learnt under Roux while working at The Waterside Inn restaurant in Berkshire now the fi rst restaurant outside France to hold three Michelin stars for 25 years. Cooke has often been described as tempestuous, an enfant terrible, but, surprisingly for a chef of his pedigree, he comes across as without ego.

“The fact is that to get excellence in any shape or form, you’re not normally a nice guy, and nothing’s changed on that front,” he says, with a grin. “I’ve been known to throw people out of restaurants before, but that’s generally for being drunk and showing disrespect to my staff.”

Cooke speaks of the chefs who have shaped his career; fi rst the formidable Roux – “Everything I do now has its roots with him” – and, more importantly, Marco Pierre White, who made Cooke his head chef at Harvey’s in London’s Wandsworth at the astonishingly young age of 23.

“The chef who captivated my generation, and inspired me most, would have to be Marco,” he says. “He showed me how you can take a dish that is maybe 20 years old, and tired, and put new tyres on it. Don’t change the wheel, just new tyres, refi ne it, work on the presentation … he instilled a rock-and-roll aspect to cooking.”

Cooke says he is not about to change the wheel with The Atlantic, either. He will simply continue his formula of using the classic skills he learnt early in his career and apply them to a new audience.

“When I opened Est Est Est it was on a shoestring budget,” he says. “Now, all these years later, people want different things. They still want fi ne dining, they still want quality service and quality food, but we intend to make it more affordable to more people, to provide them with more options.”

It’s hard to imagine that Cooke could have had anything left to learn, but he credits his time in Hong Kong with giving him the one thing nobody else could.

“I’ve become a chef,” he says with a surprising frankness. “I wasn’t one before - I was too much of a cook, too much of a ‘get it done, show I’m faster, better than everyone else’ kind of bloke. But in Hong Kong, I had to manage 12 chefs who spoke minimal English and get them to create food for people with expectations as high as they’d have of any Michelin restaurant. When you’re in that situation, you can’t blame anybody but yourself. It’s up to you to get it right.”