Resilient Restaurants

Josh nyand our last speaker tonight is one of the current stars of Australia's restaurant industry as I'm sure you all know as the chef responsible for Sydney's St Peter he is the face of its philosophy of sustainability and of using every part of the catch from Gill to tail including blood skin eyeballs and calamari Seaman what an intro and you may um when the lights go up also notice that he made a John Dory chandelier which is jier a jelier he's calling it above that um beautiful food display from the Wayside chap Chapel so I I suggest that you shine your phone torches at it later behind that story of success and awards all achieved by the age of 30 there is another story that may surprise you and is much less shiny please welcome Josh nyand uh I too would like to acknowledge and pay respects to the traditional owners of this land resilience can be best described as the ability to cope when things go wrong things went very wrong 2 days after my 8th birthday when I was diagnosed with a Wilms tumor the intensity of being met with the news of having cancer was overwhelming I still remember the drive home with my mother stopping at the traffic lights and bringing herself to tears as a father now of two children I can't even begin to put into words how my mother must have felt in that moment it's truly remarkable that A Moment Like This in the early stages of life let alone at any stage can give you such purpose and Direction since the last day of chemotherapy over 20 years ago every day I have felt as though I must achieve something purposeful I keep notes on my phone with certain things that I want to achieve in a certain time frame and until they get crossed off I work as hard as I can to do so I've been professionally cooking now for 14 years and in those years I have been very fortunate to have worked with some profoundly talented people few more so than St hoders Steven gave me the gift of his knowledge of fish I first met Steven at a Cancer Foundation sponsored event uh called crabfest um where chefs met to eat crabs as quickly as they could to raise money for kids with cancer um it's a good excuse to eat a lot of crab um Ted suya Matt Moran Yanni Christie Steven hodgers many more were there that day Steven actually donated a voucher for a fish face and and I was lucky enough to get that at the event and that first meal at fish face was um one that I would really like to share I arrived knowing that fish face was an extremely popular restaurant at the time and only had 34 seats so I arrived at 5:20 p.m. knowing that they arrived at 5:30 I walked up darling Hurst Road um and there was a few Chairs set up out the front and there was a man sitting there with tracksuit pants on a white T-shirt it was a bottle of coke on the table box of Panadol um cigarette in the mouth and a bowl of tomato pasta between his legs and I ran up to him and I said Steve I'm coming to have dinner tonight I'm really excited then he goes what happened you wet the [ __ ] bed I'm like oh no I okay and so I ran back 10 minutes and then I came to um I came to Fish Face and Steven had changed in the 10 minutes into the most hospitable you know lovely man that you'd ever met so I suppose from that moment of interacting with Steve was really the kind of the hook I suppose of why I I wanted to pursue working there so on my first day at fish face it was my trial I I basically got told that I would observe the service so I stood where the wash up was I suppose and Steven was in front of me opening oysters we had a sushi chef we had a young girl on fryer and then uh the head Chef cooking service had started it was Manic and dockets everywhere a piece of fish had been brought back to the kitchen by the manager and it was overcooked and the chef didn't like that he threw the plate um few heated words between him and the manager and then at the young girl in the corner and then at Steve and then it ended up in this triangle of horror and I was just watching it happen and the head chef threw his towel down and walked out and then Steve left and then I was standing there wondering what to do um with a full set of dockets a young girl crouched down beside her Benin in the corner crying um and then a sushi chef unfaced by anything um and basic basically I decided to take it upon myself and cook um so we had a whiteboard on the wall and I just decided to follow what it said um and having done my research uh I I had a vague idea of you know what Steve was doing so I got through the service it was about an hour before anybody emerged um and when he did come back there were a few dockets left and he said all right what do you think and I'm like um yeah it was it was a good night I think like most people got what I was yeah it was fine um and he goes all right you want the job and I'm like well um okay yeah I'll take it and so at 19 then I was you know in that World um and it was amazing um and for a man like Steven uh to be plagued by you know so many of his own personal adversities um he basically shared his life's work with me um from how to scale and gutter fish correctly to the minuscule details of flavor profile between species of fish working at fish face was extremely hard not just your typical physical services and lot and clean down hard but emotionally and mentally exhausting I felt completely indebted to Steven that he was investing so much effort and time in me that when I failed a task or it wasn't achieved to the standard that he or I wanted the anxiety of that for weeks uh I would carry until basically he'd bring me back back to the pedestal that I was on to then carry on and I suppose that wasn't an overly healthy pattern to be in but that was my work and I loved what I did at the same time my wife uh Julie and I we just had our first child and obviously being a new family every day was extremely challenging it had reached a point uh with fish face so that I personally wasn't coping with how things were going um so I decided to lift uh sorry I decided to leave fish phas to spend time with my wife and son and wanted to slow down looking back on my time at fish face it's only now that I see the importance of the basic lessons that Steven would tell me daily from cleanliness of the whole restaurant inside and outside to then cooking yourself a piece of fish every day as you would a customer so you can determine the travel time from the past to the table and then what the dness is depending on the heat of the garnish on the plate it was basically time for me to do my own thing and it had to be fish we opened St Peter and we had a manager in place and basically we lost that manager on the first service we call it a mish hire but we yeah we um we had a few mishaps that evening it was our soft opening and so I didn't have the courage to do it so Julie handled that and um the very next day we were very fortunate that we had um Wim Winkler join us at at at St Peter and she basically walked in on day one and owned the restaurant and gave it the maturity that we we needed it to have um we started St Peter with Three Chefs and then we worked as hard as we could because we knew that you know this was everything like if if we drop the ball it's kind of lights out and it got to a point about 5 months in that the three of us were really on our last legs so Julie and I decided that for the longevity of our staff and the business we would employ more chefs to accommodate a more hospitable roster that allowed chefs to have a life outside of work within a week we went from Three Chefs to six two weeks after making this decision our numbers showed us that we were faced with an 8% increase in labor everything was new to us and basically we're making decisions as issues arose to act quickly I stayed firm in my belief that our numbers would pick up and we would just have to be patient during this time of having the luxury of having six chefs in a 34 seat restaurant we managed to develop a recipe for nearly every part of the fish this meant we managed to reduce the food cost by close to 6% and see it sitting under 30% where it continues to be today the national award season Came Upon Us and we were met with a string of very flattering awards that our team and I are still very proud of our numbers increased and St Peter had finally realized its potential fish Butchery our other business was born out of a necessity that we needed more space because we'd outgrown St Peter to a degree there's only so much fish can fit in that cubicle um and we basically wanted our customers that came to St Peter to have access to the kind of fish that we're getting our hands on um fish Butchery basically is championing a sustainable fish that we get our hands on we work with some fantastic fishermen and I suppose it's our job as a chef like my job as a chef to realize the amount of effort and work that goes in on their end um to go out every morning or every evening and go out and catch the exact fish that we're after and then put it on the back of a truck put it in the air and then some 12 hours later we get to pull the lid off and it's our responsibility then to do justice to that product and I think that's a lot of the Mantra of what we're doing at St Peter uh and a lot of the reason why we're focusing on Pardon Me we're focusing on the 60% so you you look at any kind of education that a chef gets and it's always 40% yield 60% loss what is that what's the 60% loss we're all getting educated on the 40% and I find it far more you know a useful skill set for young chefs coming through to learn about that 60% um so that then you know you're not running at a loss you you are actually you know training the next wave of chefs to to better understand the product and have respect for it it's been nearly 2 years now that I have owned and operated a small business I've learned a lot about myself as a person I know I can be very impatient and I know that I often bite off more than I can chew but what I can be sure of is that I give all of myself all the time I strive to be a good husband a good father and a good leader as a chef the highs are an extreme high but the lows come quite frequently and um you know affect you in a similar way just in a polar opposite and I believe that as a chef resilience really is the only option thank you