How Lennox Hastie, Firedoor chef, kept flame alight during COVID-19 pandemic
When Lennox Hastie had to shut the doors on his Surry Hills restaurant, Firedoor, in mid-March, he admits he went into shock.
For Lennox Hastie, it has always been about fire. But what the Sydney chef has learnt in 2020 is that it is actually all about people; it is about his team, the producers he works with and his guests.
When Hastie had to shut the doors on his Surry Hills restaurant, Firedoor, in mid-March under the first lockdown, he went into shock for a few days. He missed cooking more than he could have imagined, but he missed the interaction with his staff the most. He worked out that fire brought people together.
“You realise that a restaurant, at the end of the day, is just a space, and it is the people you bring into the space and being able to retain connections with those people that is so important,” he says. “It is a meeting place for people, essentially like one big open fire; the people come together in one place and you work with producers and you serve guests. You are bringing people together for one style of cooking, one idea, and that is cooking over fire.”
Hastie opened Firedoor in 2015 after four tedious years of trying to get the right space for his radical concept of cooking only over a wood fire. The English-born chef trained at the legendary Spanish restaurant Asador Etxebarri with equally legendary chef Victor Arguinzoniz, and came out to Australia in 2011 when his wife Diana, a surgeon, accepted a job here. WISH interviewed him in anticipation of his new restaurant in 2012, and then again in 2017 after it was up and running.
“It has been a never-ending rollercoaster ride,” he says when we tell him the last time we chatted was three years ago. “It is such a journey, especially this year. I am still trying to find a path forward in terms of not wanting to compromise what I wanted to do in the first place. I never just wanted to open a restaurant, I wanted to do something more than that. I wanted a deeper connection with suppliers, and to present and celebrate Australian ingredients. I also wanted to inspire people to find ways to cook over fire, otherwise it is a bit of a lost art.”
Hastie and his team survived lockdown by opening up Fireshop, a small store that sells produce and dinner boxes for customers. It still runs every second Friday, with people putting in orders for the boxes. The dining room has been open for the better part of the year but it is only serving 37 guests instead of 60, and Hastie is offering a set menu that changes frequently instead of the pre-COVID menu that included a chef’s selection as well as a la carte.
“I have never gone into restaurants to make money but I have to be able to pay my staff, and that’s what I have done in order to do that,” he says. “Some people keep asking when we will bring back a la carte but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense for us at this time.”
Hastie’s year improved substantially when he featured in the Netflix’s Chef’s Table series in September. “What a year, from going from an extreme low of having to close the restaurant to an extreme high to be part of Chef’s Table,” he laughs. “And I didn’t release it was so closely followed in NSW. They are the only people who can come to our restaurant [at that time] and we saw a 400 per cent pick-up in reservations. For tables of two on Friday and Saturday night, unless the restrictions ease we are booked up until June next year. It is a little mind blowing.”
The producers of Chef’s Table contacted Hastie in November last year asking if he wanted to be part of the show, which has become something of a global phenomenon, and at first Hastie thought it was a practical joke: “Then I realised it was genuine and I said of course I do! What do I have to do?!”
Netflix wanted to come out in January to take Hastie on a two-week trip around Australia to film the episode. It almost didn’t happen because of the bushfires, but thankfully the producers went ahead with it and filmed in areas not affected by the disaster.
“The two-week shoot was exhausting,” Hastie says. “It was like nothing I have ever done in my life. The demands are very different when it came to filming. The quality of production was so much higher, and the sheer volume of information they have to get. It was like some sort of lengthy exam.”
The end result was extraordinary, he says – just 47 minutes of television – and after getting over how weird it was to see himself on screen he very much enjoyed watching it with his team. He says the feedback has been amazing, from young chefs around to world to just regular fans writing to tell him how much he had inspired them in their own work.
When WISH interviewed Hastie back in 2017, he talked about the fact that his original plan was to open a regional restaurant in Australia. He knew he had to do five years of hard yards in the city to establish his name in this country before heading into the bush. Is that plan still on the cards?
“You never know what is going to happen,” he says. “My life has evolved and it continues to be a journey, but if I am honest I still feel strongly about the desire to create something regionally.
“I have also realised that it is actually about the ingredients. Cooking with fire almost comes secondary to that, because it is the act of cooking with fire that brings me into contact with the ingredients. The ability to go and spend time with the producers, especially people who are as passionate about what they do as I am, and working out ways to collaborate together, that is just the best thing.”
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