Chef's Table (2015) s01e05 Episode Script
Ben Shewry
It's hard to imagine how I decided to become a chef at all.
Growing up in New Zealand in 1982, we don't have chefs on television, we don't have articles written in magazines about chefs, we don't have columns in newspapers written about food even.
I grew up in this tiny, little isolated community with hardly any neighbors.
Well, the nearest neighbor was a 15-minute drive away.
When you don't have video games, and you don't have proper television until you're 10 years old, you have to find all these other things to give you joy and to be creative.
When I was 14, I got a job in a small place run by a brother and sister, called the Time Out Cafe.
From the little cutout in the wall of the kitchen, I could see into the dining room, and I could see the customers eat my food.
It was the most incredible feeling.
I was hooked.
I can remember the first time when I went to Attica.
It was like trying to, sort of, work out what is so special about the place.
It's not glamorous.
Every once in a while, you can hear the neighborhood bus literally, sort of, driving by.
And to eat in a place that is world-class, you expect something that's a little bit more like Hollywood.
Attica is a small restaurant.
It's not an expensive restaurant.
It's in a suburban part of Melbourne, on, you know, the wrong side of the world.
There are three pork, one chicken, two fish, then Twenty-seven, pork, one chicken.
Have one chicken ready? Ready.
It's small, it's dark.
You kind of go, "Wait a second, this shouldn't be a top 50 restaurant in the world.
" Five potato.
Four egg, please, Danny.
Can we get some slightly larger bowls, please, Danny? Yeah.
You look at Ben, he's not your celebrity chef, your supermodel-dating, Ferrari-driving, leather jacket-wearing chef.
Question that's asked, "Is this small restaurant as good as the best restaurants in the world?" And the answer is, for me, Attica would be one of 20 restaurants that I would travel to visit if I didn't live here.
But you know what? I live here.
It's round the corner.
I'm very proud of what it does.
You walk inside the dining room, everything is focused on the table, the light shines on the food.
It's pure theater.
The butter arrives, then the bread arrives, and then before you know it, it's like a total seduction of courses after courses after courses.
Eating there is like looking at somebody who has put his soul into the food.
It plays tricks on your palate in the nicest possible way.
A chef these days has gotta be so much more than a cook.
They've gotta use color, language, images, emotion, in order to animate what's on the plate.
And as a writer, my job is to try and find people who are saying something different, who've got something to say.
You look at what makes Ben's food special, there's a history, there's a story, there's a relevance, there's a sense of place.
So, Pete, this is gonna be our bowl that we wanna make it look as if it was just, kind of, cut from the field.
So, you want that dew on those leaves here, but we don't want it in the center where it can dilute the cabbage too much, all right? Okay, so, we put these back in here like it was never disturbed.
This gets carried out.
We put that straight on the table, like that.
And then those two bowls come out, but we'd have to decide on which we prefer out of those two.
At Attica, we only want to do things that are true to ourselves.
I had these cabbages and then I had these feelings around Bolognese.
It was a family dish growing up.
I wanted to use that kind of technique of making a Bolognese to make something new that didn't actually relate to Bolognese in any way, but still made me feel kind of good.
You start by making a Bolognese, and then, that doesn't really work.
It's not refined enough, it's not delicious enough, and then Pete says, "Well, why don't we press the Bolognese and just use the juice of the Bolognese?" And this happens organically.
We're not trying to replicate our mother's cuisine, but there's something that is soulful and is fulfilling.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
I'm trying to take people back to those times in their life where people who loved them cooked for them in a way which was really meaningful, and really satisfying for them.
When I first moved to Australia, everywhere I looked, there was influences of different countries.
And when I looked at a restaurant and I saw a risotto on the menu, it didn't invoke a sense of Australia in me.
And that's one of the reasons why we started working with native ingredients of Australia.
Most people have never heard of 99.
9% of these ingredients.
These are just things that are totally unfamiliar to the general public.
Australia has this hidden paint box of new flavors to play with.
What's fascinating about watching chefs like Ben is there's a hunger, a desire, to try and find ways of turning them into a gastronomic culinary experience.
When we're working with the native ingredients, they're very hard to harness.
There's no information on the Internet about them, there's no books that have recipes using them.
When you're developing a dish like the kangaroo dish, you wanna take it and work with it as many ways as possible.
Over that time, whether it be three months or two years, you're always thinking, "One day, I'm gonna unlock the greatness of that ingredient.
I'm gonna find the most delicious and most natural way of cooking with it.
" This is an important part of our country's heritage.
Australians should have a sense of pride in these ingredients, they should know what they taste like.
Because the connection to your roots is really one of the most important things of all.
Growing up in New Zealand, we were given incredible freedom from our parents.
Their great gift to us was a sense of self-belief and their time, which is the most valuable thing that you can give a child, is time.
As kids, we had these amazing adventures.
When I was eight years old and my sister, Tess, was six, we tramped two hours from our house by ourselves, into the native bush.
We walked to this hut and we camped there the night.
We understood which plants that you could eat in the bush.
We picked wild berries, and we picked blackberries, and we fished for eels in the stream.
We did so many amazing things.
While we never felt rich in money, we were rich in family spirit, and we were always rich in food.
There was hangis being held on our farm, organized by my uncles and my mom and dad.
When you dig a pit and build a fire and put these ingredients into the earth, and then 12 hours later, to dig them up, and they've been transformed That's a really amazing thing to share with people that you love and your friends.
On the farm, you're in never any doubt where food comes from and the connection of it.
There's one incident, where we'd gone to the coast to harvest shellfish for a family meal.
You walk through this very old tunnel, and it opens up into this cove.
There's no people around to speak of.
Two sets of fathers and sons had drowned at the spot, so it's a dangerous place to swim.
I was offshore, maybe 100 meters.
I'd swum out to a reef with a lot of mussels on it.
My family was playing on the shore, and I had my back to the sea.
And a big wave came in and it knocked me over, and it dragged me across the reef.
I came up for air, and another wave hit me.
And it pushed me down again and it bashed me.
I came up again and a third wave had come, and it held me down.
And I was drowning.
I do remember the feeling of being held down.
I remember how lonely I was.
You know, like And how lost I was and how upset I was about how this was gonna be the end, you know? And my father, who was always my great hero, he swam in and saved me.
That's the thing about my dad, he was always watching us.
Who's that? - Mommy! - Mommy! And shall we see if we can find Daddy? Who's that? - Daddy! - Daddy! When I was 27 years old, I was working as a cook.
My wife and I had had a baby, and my wage was not enough to support my family.
And so, I needed to find a head chef's job.
I lived in the same neighborhood as Attica.
I used to walk past the front of the restaurant and think that it had good bones, but no soul.
I applied for the job and got it.
I probably thought it was gonna be a little bit more glossy than it was in reality.
I didn't actually realize the financial state of Attica at that point.
We owed $150,000 to our suppliers.
We had to get credit cards and max them out to pay for things.
And it didn't have any customers.
In the early days, it was pretty intense 'cause he was so focused.
Work started at, like, maybe at 7:00 in the morning.
And we'd go hardcore all day, just be ready by 6:00, and then doors were open, and no one would show up.
We didn't have enough pots or pans.
We would cook a table of four, we would use all the pots.
And then they would go into the sink and we'd have to quickly scrub them to cook the next round.
After about eight months of putting my hands raw into the water, my fingers began to bleed under the nails.
I remember going to the doctor, and she said, "You've got to stop and have three months off.
" I said, "Three months?" I said, "I can't even take three hours off.
" I don't know whether he had a set idea on what he thought the restaurant should be, what it needed to be.
It just hadn't been successful before that.
So, I think he definitely felt the pressure of having to make it successful.
It just took forever to build momentum because we were a two-year-old restaurant which everybody hated.
So, we had to turn around that.
I was a young chef, had a young family, and we were struggling to make ends meet.
And if you're a young chef, and you don't succeed the first time, it's hard to get a second chance.
Tuesdays are different at Attica.
It's an experimental day.
It was conceived because, at the beginning, we didn't have a test kitchen, and we had to find a way to experiment so that we could develop our cuisine faster and more passionately.
Could someone grab some tea towels, please? Yes.
The night before, I stay up late after my children have gone to bed, and I write the menu based on anything that comes into my head that I want to do.
Today, we're gonna start with the mussels and boab.
Tuesdays are pretty crazy, to be honest.
Pretty much just due to the fact that us chefs, besides Ben, don't really know the menu until the morning we come in.
I want to make a cream from garlic that we cook down in oil.
Then we're gonna grate raw portabella mushroom over the top of that.
As a diner on experimental Tuesdays, you are literally in the hands of the gods, put it that way.
Because you just don't know what you're getting.
Then we wanna do a dish of Western Australian marron.
We've killed the marron to order by brain-spiking it.
Let's get started.
Ben's experimental Tuesdays have been a smart idea.
It's like, well, you need to develop stuff up, and you need guinea pigs.
So, why not pick your quietest night of the week, and invite people in at a cheaper rate to see things in progress, to understand dishes? And you'll see dishes that are disastrous and will never see the light of day, and you'll also see dishes that will become a signature on the menu.
What I like about Tuesdays is that you really see the workings of a real creative person.
It's probably the closest you get to how his mind works.
Get the vinegar straight on the mussels, okay? Or should the saltbush go on top of the cheese? Yeah.
I think it should, eh? Enough? - More? - Yeah.
Just take it off and put the saltbush on.
I think this is gonna taste nice, but to be completely honest with you, I don't really like it when I get a dish which I can't see what it is.
If you're being honest with yourself, you've never cooked any of these things before, and it's difficult to cook them well for 55 people on the first night.
You're just having to make split-second decisions and hoping that they're the right ones.
I actually don't like what I just did then.
I liked it before it was covered with butter.
I think what's interesting about the experimentation in top restaurants is, it's always there on the menu.
It just depends how you do the fine-tuning.
And with a small restaurant like Attica, you don't have the financial luxury of 70 people working all the time, just fine-tuning a sauce.
That doesn't happen.
Until about 5:00, 5:30, 6:00, I'm still thinking, "What's the dish gonna be like?" Go for it.
How is it? What do you think? Before he tells us what he feels, he'll ask us, "What do you think about the dish?" And it's nice to know that, even us, who with the hierarchy of the kitchen, we're at the bottom, he'll still want to know our opinion.
How'd that go? Tamarillo is a lot nicer.
Yeah.
I feel like they need a touch of salt, or something? Couldn't hurt.
Couldn't hurt.
I think it's pretty well balanced apart from that.
- All right, let's move on.
- All right.
Almost needs a spoon, eh? When I'm tasting things for the first time, I'm looking for something that I have never had before.
Then I'm looking for simpler things like the balance of the ingredients.
Maybe the vinegar's too strong.
You'll have a plate in front of you, and it's not right, and you're just trying to grab that thing that's gonna bring everything together that you haven't thought of before.
And I'm thinking right back to the beginning of my first earliest memories of cooking when I was five.
And all of that experience cooking, through childhood right up until now, 38 years, everything that you ate as a human being make up your memory palate.
Once you have a really good range of different styles and experiences, you always have that to draw on, and just subconsciously almost knowing what works and what doesn't work.
There's quite a bit of acid in the sauce already, eh? So Yeah, yeah.
I think it's more like a little drop on each mussel.
Or maybe it's not even the vinegar, maybe it's a drop of lemon, like you suggested.
If it was a little more cooked, it would be a little more clean tasting, a touch.
Each week, each year that goes on, you're gaining confidence, and your vision becomes clearer.
And so, over nine years that vision has got to the point where it's quite focused.
There's a real interest in the ways chefs work.
And so often, development is carried out now in laboratories by chefs in a closed-off world, and I think people want to get a real sense of how the creative process works.
To be able to go down on a Tuesday every month and see new things that you may then be able to spot further on down the track, it's kind of cool.
For me, it's always about wanting to get better.
There's a feeling of elation when you create something new.
It's greater than almost any sensation in your life.
So, I've ordered the marron.
Yeah.
I haven't ordered the chicken thigh because it was just 1.
5 kilos that I was needing.
- Just go out to Solomon's.
- Yeah.
Green wattle, 'cause I couldn't remember if we had any or not.
- We do have green wattle.
- Okay.
- Twelve hundred of the wild flowers.
- Yeah.
And I've ordered sandpaper figs.
Cool.
I think it's important to know that Ben didn't spring fully-formed from the womb as a super-chef.
When he first started at Attica, it wasn't particularly auspicious.
And the early Ben Shewry menus were a million miles from what he does now.
When I started at Attica, I didn't feel, at the point, that I had a culinary identity.
Before the restaurant opened, I dreamed up of all the things that I would like to eat at a restaurant.
Thai dishes, European dishes, dishes from mentors.
Three pork, away! Three? Three pork, one chicken, is that what we're doing? Yes.
And we were running around, trying to cook this food, had no idea what we were doing.
Picking up.
Pick up, Chef.
Around that first week, we had a table come in and have a look at the menu, and turned to the waiter after reading it and said, "Whoever wrote this fucking menu must be on speed.
" And I thought, "My God, what have I done? I've created some kind of monster which everybody's hating.
" That week, on a Saturday, we might have done 18.
On a Tuesday, a table of eight, then the next night, a table of four.
We sit 55, so we were going backwards.
There's a romantic story that says people are just creative because that's what they like to do, and they just go around all the time creating.
Which is just kind of ridiculous in a way.
Sometimes people have to create out of pure necessity.
If I didn't create stuff that was inspiring to people, and that people didn't like, we were going to go broke.
I was in a place of frustration because nobody cared about the restaurant and it didn't have any customers.
It made me sad.
And it made me mad as well.
And I realized at that point, that that was not the future for me, cooking Thai food or cooking European food.
The future for me was trying to develop my own voice in cooking.
I wanted to create something that was meaningful to me.
I started looking back on my life and I remembered that time that I nearly drowned.
I thought at the time that, you know, that people were creating dishes with seafood elements and stuff, but none of them really invoked in me a strong sense of the sea.
Not many people know the feeling of nearly drowning, either.
Having saltwater stuffed down your throat and up in your nose, and being held under by a force far greater than you.
So, I wanted to create a dish which invoked that sensation in somebody who was eating it, you know? Which is kind of macabre.
I went down to the beach and there was a boat ramp, and the sea was really wild, it was like churning and carrying on, it was dark and gray, and it was raining.
And this little wave lapped up the boat ramp and then it dispersed.
And what it left was the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest bit of bright green seaweed.
And I was like, "Oh, my God, look at that!" And I ran down the boat ramp and I picked it up.
I started looking around.
"Well, there's one thing that's edible.
And there must be other things, you know?" So, I started looking and I started trying, and I started tasting, and all of a sudden, I'd discovered, like, six things in this one area.
And they all become ingredients on this dish Sea Tastes.
It was the first moment of creating something myself that wasn't like other things that other people were creating.
It was the first time I was really proud of something that I'd cooked that wasn't a knockoff.
How far is the cabbage, Matty? It's ready to go.
It's ready to go? Yeah.
Obviously, if we're working over here, Matty, you need to bring the garnishes over here in future.
Yes, Chef.
As a young cook, I was the one in the back of the kitchen doing all of my mise en place, and then moving on to some unrelated project to try to blow everybody away with it.
And often, that work goes unrecognized.
I wasn't satisfied with that.
My ambition was really strong and it was based around becoming a new father for the first time.
And I had this little baby, and my dad had been my great hero.
And I suppose I wanted my son to feel that way about his dad.
I was super ambitious for recognition, ambitious to win awards.
You say to yourself, "I'm gonna do everything I can within my power to make something of myself.
" I was like a rabid dog that just wanted to achieve so much.
This table of four came in, they asked the waiter if I could go and see them at the table.
I thought, "Oh, my God, here I go again.
This time I'm gonna cop it face-to-face from them.
" And they said to me, "No matter what you do, don't ever change.
And stay true to yourself.
" I thought, "If there's one table that likes it, there will be others.
" We'd won awards.
It made the restaurant busy for a little while.
And then winter would come, and the restaurant was dead again.
If you're a very driven person and you want to achieve a lot, there's a point where you can hurt a lot of people.
Running a restaurant becomes your life.
It's not a normal eight-hour shift, it's a 24-hour-a-day job.
Children need support and they need to be around their parents.
And I wasn't there in those early years, you know? And it's And it cuts me to say that.
My father had been a promising pilot.
He gave away many of the things that he probably wanted to really do professionally to create a wonderful environment for his children.
The way he worked was brutal, to say the least.
On the side of hills, cutting scrub, just for hours and hours.
He would cut hundreds of acres of scrub.
I've never seen anybody work that hard to this day.
And the whole time, Dad would work like that with a smile on his face.
My mother, too.
She was working incredibly hard, so they both were a really strong team.
They just did the best they could by their family.
They made the right decisions.
I didn't appreciate my childhood until I started raising my own children, and I realized how hard that is, and how well my parents had done.
- Have some orange juice, kids? - Okay, thank you.
Is that healthy one? Everything's healthy, a little bit.
A little bit, okay? Thank you.
At around the fourth year, I was still working too many hours, and I wasn't seeing my children.
Ella! It tastes different.
It came to a point where it all compounded on me.
What's Poppy gonna have? Poppy's gonna have a pikelet.
- Is he gonna have anything on it? - No, nothing.
When I was at home, I mean, I was a full-on zombie.
I would be sitting with my kids, they would be talking to me, and I wouldn't be hearing them.
I disconnected from my wife.
And I was resenting my work, which I'd never really felt before.
You realize that there are some things that are not right in your life.
And you start reflecting on them, and start wondering, "Is it worth it? Is it really worth it, what I'm doing?" You know? Around that time, we began working on this mussel dish, and a friend of mine and I had arranged to go to Portarlington where the mussel farm is.
We met Lance, and Lance told me his story.
He told us how when he was a young man like me, this entire industry had faced extinction.
He'd worked so much that he'd missed a lot of his children's childhood and it really struck a chord with me.
It made me realize I was wasting a significant part of my life and I had to change.
Four years ago, my son, Kobe, formed a basketball team with his friends from kindergarten, called the Red Dragons.
First season, I don't know if I saw a game at all.
Take him on! Couldn't get away from work.
I took a night off to go and watch a game and I was like, "Wow, Kobe's got natural ability at this.
" Other parents went as well, but they didn't have a coach, so somebody was just subbing them on and off.
And then, I ended up as the coach.
Good passing, boys.
It'd just become this huge thing in my life.
Three.
Six.
Set, go.
After that, it became so important to be able to feel joy outside of the restaurant, outside of cooking.
I'd lost some of that somehow.
If there's anything to describe what Ben is giving to the rest of the world, I think he is giving a lot of himself.
There is a part of Ben that is in all those dishes.
His food is like an emotional response to moments in his life.
I can remember, there was one dish which blew my mind.
It was his well and truly documented dish, the potato that's cooked in the earth where it comes from.
And it's just nothing but a potato.
But it's the best, best potato you have ever, ever eaten in your life! And you could almost genuflect at somebody who has made the humble potato into an edible piece of art.
After that, there was this underground current that ran around, talking about this young man doing really, very experimental stuff.
When he first used to start getting reviews, I used to go and get two copies of everything.
I would cut one out and I would laminate it to keep it.
I think we always thought that we'd get a few and then that would be That would be all it would be.
We don't do that anymore.
The first time we ever came into World's 50 Best was just one of the craziest days ever.
We had three phone lines and they were just jammed.
The website crashed.
It's such a funny situation to find yourself in, when you went from having no customers to having far more than you would ever need, you know? When you look at the most exciting restaurants in the world at the moment, they're not in Paris and London.
They are hidden away.
You've gotta make the effort.
If you're doing something unique, you're doing something wonderful, people will find out about it.
I suppose there's a bit of fairy tale about it, isn't there? If you look at Attica 2005, 2009, 2014, 2015, it's always better.
Every meal is always tastier and more interesting.
That's what it's about.
Kobe! Kobe! Dinner time! There's a saying, if you've done a hangi with a stranger, that you've pretty much bonded for life, 'cause it's such a difficult and painful thing to do.
When I was younger, I was very interested in trying to achieve a certain level of success, winning a lot of awards, and reaching a level of recognition from my peers.
Get your corner and we'll lift it up like that.
- One, two - Yeah, that'll do it.
Come on.
Chuck that! As you grow older, you realize that the things that really matter to you are your friends and your family.
It doesn't matter to them whether or not my restaurant's ranked number 33 in the world.
They only care, really, if I'm a decent human being, and that I treat my children and my wife and my family and my friends with respect.
- Is everyone ready to eat? - Yep.
Go.
Grab a plate.
Food shouldn't be some sort of artistic torture.
It's gotta be something uplifting, and fulfilling and delicious.
And it should invigorate people.
But if you're not happy with your life, then how can you possibly achieve that? People can't create anything truly significant in food unless they're happy when they do it.
Growing up in New Zealand in 1982, we don't have chefs on television, we don't have articles written in magazines about chefs, we don't have columns in newspapers written about food even.
I grew up in this tiny, little isolated community with hardly any neighbors.
Well, the nearest neighbor was a 15-minute drive away.
When you don't have video games, and you don't have proper television until you're 10 years old, you have to find all these other things to give you joy and to be creative.
When I was 14, I got a job in a small place run by a brother and sister, called the Time Out Cafe.
From the little cutout in the wall of the kitchen, I could see into the dining room, and I could see the customers eat my food.
It was the most incredible feeling.
I was hooked.
I can remember the first time when I went to Attica.
It was like trying to, sort of, work out what is so special about the place.
It's not glamorous.
Every once in a while, you can hear the neighborhood bus literally, sort of, driving by.
And to eat in a place that is world-class, you expect something that's a little bit more like Hollywood.
Attica is a small restaurant.
It's not an expensive restaurant.
It's in a suburban part of Melbourne, on, you know, the wrong side of the world.
There are three pork, one chicken, two fish, then Twenty-seven, pork, one chicken.
Have one chicken ready? Ready.
It's small, it's dark.
You kind of go, "Wait a second, this shouldn't be a top 50 restaurant in the world.
" Five potato.
Four egg, please, Danny.
Can we get some slightly larger bowls, please, Danny? Yeah.
You look at Ben, he's not your celebrity chef, your supermodel-dating, Ferrari-driving, leather jacket-wearing chef.
Question that's asked, "Is this small restaurant as good as the best restaurants in the world?" And the answer is, for me, Attica would be one of 20 restaurants that I would travel to visit if I didn't live here.
But you know what? I live here.
It's round the corner.
I'm very proud of what it does.
You walk inside the dining room, everything is focused on the table, the light shines on the food.
It's pure theater.
The butter arrives, then the bread arrives, and then before you know it, it's like a total seduction of courses after courses after courses.
Eating there is like looking at somebody who has put his soul into the food.
It plays tricks on your palate in the nicest possible way.
A chef these days has gotta be so much more than a cook.
They've gotta use color, language, images, emotion, in order to animate what's on the plate.
And as a writer, my job is to try and find people who are saying something different, who've got something to say.
You look at what makes Ben's food special, there's a history, there's a story, there's a relevance, there's a sense of place.
So, Pete, this is gonna be our bowl that we wanna make it look as if it was just, kind of, cut from the field.
So, you want that dew on those leaves here, but we don't want it in the center where it can dilute the cabbage too much, all right? Okay, so, we put these back in here like it was never disturbed.
This gets carried out.
We put that straight on the table, like that.
And then those two bowls come out, but we'd have to decide on which we prefer out of those two.
At Attica, we only want to do things that are true to ourselves.
I had these cabbages and then I had these feelings around Bolognese.
It was a family dish growing up.
I wanted to use that kind of technique of making a Bolognese to make something new that didn't actually relate to Bolognese in any way, but still made me feel kind of good.
You start by making a Bolognese, and then, that doesn't really work.
It's not refined enough, it's not delicious enough, and then Pete says, "Well, why don't we press the Bolognese and just use the juice of the Bolognese?" And this happens organically.
We're not trying to replicate our mother's cuisine, but there's something that is soulful and is fulfilling.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
I'm trying to take people back to those times in their life where people who loved them cooked for them in a way which was really meaningful, and really satisfying for them.
When I first moved to Australia, everywhere I looked, there was influences of different countries.
And when I looked at a restaurant and I saw a risotto on the menu, it didn't invoke a sense of Australia in me.
And that's one of the reasons why we started working with native ingredients of Australia.
Most people have never heard of 99.
9% of these ingredients.
These are just things that are totally unfamiliar to the general public.
Australia has this hidden paint box of new flavors to play with.
What's fascinating about watching chefs like Ben is there's a hunger, a desire, to try and find ways of turning them into a gastronomic culinary experience.
When we're working with the native ingredients, they're very hard to harness.
There's no information on the Internet about them, there's no books that have recipes using them.
When you're developing a dish like the kangaroo dish, you wanna take it and work with it as many ways as possible.
Over that time, whether it be three months or two years, you're always thinking, "One day, I'm gonna unlock the greatness of that ingredient.
I'm gonna find the most delicious and most natural way of cooking with it.
" This is an important part of our country's heritage.
Australians should have a sense of pride in these ingredients, they should know what they taste like.
Because the connection to your roots is really one of the most important things of all.
Growing up in New Zealand, we were given incredible freedom from our parents.
Their great gift to us was a sense of self-belief and their time, which is the most valuable thing that you can give a child, is time.
As kids, we had these amazing adventures.
When I was eight years old and my sister, Tess, was six, we tramped two hours from our house by ourselves, into the native bush.
We walked to this hut and we camped there the night.
We understood which plants that you could eat in the bush.
We picked wild berries, and we picked blackberries, and we fished for eels in the stream.
We did so many amazing things.
While we never felt rich in money, we were rich in family spirit, and we were always rich in food.
There was hangis being held on our farm, organized by my uncles and my mom and dad.
When you dig a pit and build a fire and put these ingredients into the earth, and then 12 hours later, to dig them up, and they've been transformed That's a really amazing thing to share with people that you love and your friends.
On the farm, you're in never any doubt where food comes from and the connection of it.
There's one incident, where we'd gone to the coast to harvest shellfish for a family meal.
You walk through this very old tunnel, and it opens up into this cove.
There's no people around to speak of.
Two sets of fathers and sons had drowned at the spot, so it's a dangerous place to swim.
I was offshore, maybe 100 meters.
I'd swum out to a reef with a lot of mussels on it.
My family was playing on the shore, and I had my back to the sea.
And a big wave came in and it knocked me over, and it dragged me across the reef.
I came up for air, and another wave hit me.
And it pushed me down again and it bashed me.
I came up again and a third wave had come, and it held me down.
And I was drowning.
I do remember the feeling of being held down.
I remember how lonely I was.
You know, like And how lost I was and how upset I was about how this was gonna be the end, you know? And my father, who was always my great hero, he swam in and saved me.
That's the thing about my dad, he was always watching us.
Who's that? - Mommy! - Mommy! And shall we see if we can find Daddy? Who's that? - Daddy! - Daddy! When I was 27 years old, I was working as a cook.
My wife and I had had a baby, and my wage was not enough to support my family.
And so, I needed to find a head chef's job.
I lived in the same neighborhood as Attica.
I used to walk past the front of the restaurant and think that it had good bones, but no soul.
I applied for the job and got it.
I probably thought it was gonna be a little bit more glossy than it was in reality.
I didn't actually realize the financial state of Attica at that point.
We owed $150,000 to our suppliers.
We had to get credit cards and max them out to pay for things.
And it didn't have any customers.
In the early days, it was pretty intense 'cause he was so focused.
Work started at, like, maybe at 7:00 in the morning.
And we'd go hardcore all day, just be ready by 6:00, and then doors were open, and no one would show up.
We didn't have enough pots or pans.
We would cook a table of four, we would use all the pots.
And then they would go into the sink and we'd have to quickly scrub them to cook the next round.
After about eight months of putting my hands raw into the water, my fingers began to bleed under the nails.
I remember going to the doctor, and she said, "You've got to stop and have three months off.
" I said, "Three months?" I said, "I can't even take three hours off.
" I don't know whether he had a set idea on what he thought the restaurant should be, what it needed to be.
It just hadn't been successful before that.
So, I think he definitely felt the pressure of having to make it successful.
It just took forever to build momentum because we were a two-year-old restaurant which everybody hated.
So, we had to turn around that.
I was a young chef, had a young family, and we were struggling to make ends meet.
And if you're a young chef, and you don't succeed the first time, it's hard to get a second chance.
Tuesdays are different at Attica.
It's an experimental day.
It was conceived because, at the beginning, we didn't have a test kitchen, and we had to find a way to experiment so that we could develop our cuisine faster and more passionately.
Could someone grab some tea towels, please? Yes.
The night before, I stay up late after my children have gone to bed, and I write the menu based on anything that comes into my head that I want to do.
Today, we're gonna start with the mussels and boab.
Tuesdays are pretty crazy, to be honest.
Pretty much just due to the fact that us chefs, besides Ben, don't really know the menu until the morning we come in.
I want to make a cream from garlic that we cook down in oil.
Then we're gonna grate raw portabella mushroom over the top of that.
As a diner on experimental Tuesdays, you are literally in the hands of the gods, put it that way.
Because you just don't know what you're getting.
Then we wanna do a dish of Western Australian marron.
We've killed the marron to order by brain-spiking it.
Let's get started.
Ben's experimental Tuesdays have been a smart idea.
It's like, well, you need to develop stuff up, and you need guinea pigs.
So, why not pick your quietest night of the week, and invite people in at a cheaper rate to see things in progress, to understand dishes? And you'll see dishes that are disastrous and will never see the light of day, and you'll also see dishes that will become a signature on the menu.
What I like about Tuesdays is that you really see the workings of a real creative person.
It's probably the closest you get to how his mind works.
Get the vinegar straight on the mussels, okay? Or should the saltbush go on top of the cheese? Yeah.
I think it should, eh? Enough? - More? - Yeah.
Just take it off and put the saltbush on.
I think this is gonna taste nice, but to be completely honest with you, I don't really like it when I get a dish which I can't see what it is.
If you're being honest with yourself, you've never cooked any of these things before, and it's difficult to cook them well for 55 people on the first night.
You're just having to make split-second decisions and hoping that they're the right ones.
I actually don't like what I just did then.
I liked it before it was covered with butter.
I think what's interesting about the experimentation in top restaurants is, it's always there on the menu.
It just depends how you do the fine-tuning.
And with a small restaurant like Attica, you don't have the financial luxury of 70 people working all the time, just fine-tuning a sauce.
That doesn't happen.
Until about 5:00, 5:30, 6:00, I'm still thinking, "What's the dish gonna be like?" Go for it.
How is it? What do you think? Before he tells us what he feels, he'll ask us, "What do you think about the dish?" And it's nice to know that, even us, who with the hierarchy of the kitchen, we're at the bottom, he'll still want to know our opinion.
How'd that go? Tamarillo is a lot nicer.
Yeah.
I feel like they need a touch of salt, or something? Couldn't hurt.
Couldn't hurt.
I think it's pretty well balanced apart from that.
- All right, let's move on.
- All right.
Almost needs a spoon, eh? When I'm tasting things for the first time, I'm looking for something that I have never had before.
Then I'm looking for simpler things like the balance of the ingredients.
Maybe the vinegar's too strong.
You'll have a plate in front of you, and it's not right, and you're just trying to grab that thing that's gonna bring everything together that you haven't thought of before.
And I'm thinking right back to the beginning of my first earliest memories of cooking when I was five.
And all of that experience cooking, through childhood right up until now, 38 years, everything that you ate as a human being make up your memory palate.
Once you have a really good range of different styles and experiences, you always have that to draw on, and just subconsciously almost knowing what works and what doesn't work.
There's quite a bit of acid in the sauce already, eh? So Yeah, yeah.
I think it's more like a little drop on each mussel.
Or maybe it's not even the vinegar, maybe it's a drop of lemon, like you suggested.
If it was a little more cooked, it would be a little more clean tasting, a touch.
Each week, each year that goes on, you're gaining confidence, and your vision becomes clearer.
And so, over nine years that vision has got to the point where it's quite focused.
There's a real interest in the ways chefs work.
And so often, development is carried out now in laboratories by chefs in a closed-off world, and I think people want to get a real sense of how the creative process works.
To be able to go down on a Tuesday every month and see new things that you may then be able to spot further on down the track, it's kind of cool.
For me, it's always about wanting to get better.
There's a feeling of elation when you create something new.
It's greater than almost any sensation in your life.
So, I've ordered the marron.
Yeah.
I haven't ordered the chicken thigh because it was just 1.
5 kilos that I was needing.
- Just go out to Solomon's.
- Yeah.
Green wattle, 'cause I couldn't remember if we had any or not.
- We do have green wattle.
- Okay.
- Twelve hundred of the wild flowers.
- Yeah.
And I've ordered sandpaper figs.
Cool.
I think it's important to know that Ben didn't spring fully-formed from the womb as a super-chef.
When he first started at Attica, it wasn't particularly auspicious.
And the early Ben Shewry menus were a million miles from what he does now.
When I started at Attica, I didn't feel, at the point, that I had a culinary identity.
Before the restaurant opened, I dreamed up of all the things that I would like to eat at a restaurant.
Thai dishes, European dishes, dishes from mentors.
Three pork, away! Three? Three pork, one chicken, is that what we're doing? Yes.
And we were running around, trying to cook this food, had no idea what we were doing.
Picking up.
Pick up, Chef.
Around that first week, we had a table come in and have a look at the menu, and turned to the waiter after reading it and said, "Whoever wrote this fucking menu must be on speed.
" And I thought, "My God, what have I done? I've created some kind of monster which everybody's hating.
" That week, on a Saturday, we might have done 18.
On a Tuesday, a table of eight, then the next night, a table of four.
We sit 55, so we were going backwards.
There's a romantic story that says people are just creative because that's what they like to do, and they just go around all the time creating.
Which is just kind of ridiculous in a way.
Sometimes people have to create out of pure necessity.
If I didn't create stuff that was inspiring to people, and that people didn't like, we were going to go broke.
I was in a place of frustration because nobody cared about the restaurant and it didn't have any customers.
It made me sad.
And it made me mad as well.
And I realized at that point, that that was not the future for me, cooking Thai food or cooking European food.
The future for me was trying to develop my own voice in cooking.
I wanted to create something that was meaningful to me.
I started looking back on my life and I remembered that time that I nearly drowned.
I thought at the time that, you know, that people were creating dishes with seafood elements and stuff, but none of them really invoked in me a strong sense of the sea.
Not many people know the feeling of nearly drowning, either.
Having saltwater stuffed down your throat and up in your nose, and being held under by a force far greater than you.
So, I wanted to create a dish which invoked that sensation in somebody who was eating it, you know? Which is kind of macabre.
I went down to the beach and there was a boat ramp, and the sea was really wild, it was like churning and carrying on, it was dark and gray, and it was raining.
And this little wave lapped up the boat ramp and then it dispersed.
And what it left was the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest bit of bright green seaweed.
And I was like, "Oh, my God, look at that!" And I ran down the boat ramp and I picked it up.
I started looking around.
"Well, there's one thing that's edible.
And there must be other things, you know?" So, I started looking and I started trying, and I started tasting, and all of a sudden, I'd discovered, like, six things in this one area.
And they all become ingredients on this dish Sea Tastes.
It was the first moment of creating something myself that wasn't like other things that other people were creating.
It was the first time I was really proud of something that I'd cooked that wasn't a knockoff.
How far is the cabbage, Matty? It's ready to go.
It's ready to go? Yeah.
Obviously, if we're working over here, Matty, you need to bring the garnishes over here in future.
Yes, Chef.
As a young cook, I was the one in the back of the kitchen doing all of my mise en place, and then moving on to some unrelated project to try to blow everybody away with it.
And often, that work goes unrecognized.
I wasn't satisfied with that.
My ambition was really strong and it was based around becoming a new father for the first time.
And I had this little baby, and my dad had been my great hero.
And I suppose I wanted my son to feel that way about his dad.
I was super ambitious for recognition, ambitious to win awards.
You say to yourself, "I'm gonna do everything I can within my power to make something of myself.
" I was like a rabid dog that just wanted to achieve so much.
This table of four came in, they asked the waiter if I could go and see them at the table.
I thought, "Oh, my God, here I go again.
This time I'm gonna cop it face-to-face from them.
" And they said to me, "No matter what you do, don't ever change.
And stay true to yourself.
" I thought, "If there's one table that likes it, there will be others.
" We'd won awards.
It made the restaurant busy for a little while.
And then winter would come, and the restaurant was dead again.
If you're a very driven person and you want to achieve a lot, there's a point where you can hurt a lot of people.
Running a restaurant becomes your life.
It's not a normal eight-hour shift, it's a 24-hour-a-day job.
Children need support and they need to be around their parents.
And I wasn't there in those early years, you know? And it's And it cuts me to say that.
My father had been a promising pilot.
He gave away many of the things that he probably wanted to really do professionally to create a wonderful environment for his children.
The way he worked was brutal, to say the least.
On the side of hills, cutting scrub, just for hours and hours.
He would cut hundreds of acres of scrub.
I've never seen anybody work that hard to this day.
And the whole time, Dad would work like that with a smile on his face.
My mother, too.
She was working incredibly hard, so they both were a really strong team.
They just did the best they could by their family.
They made the right decisions.
I didn't appreciate my childhood until I started raising my own children, and I realized how hard that is, and how well my parents had done.
- Have some orange juice, kids? - Okay, thank you.
Is that healthy one? Everything's healthy, a little bit.
A little bit, okay? Thank you.
At around the fourth year, I was still working too many hours, and I wasn't seeing my children.
Ella! It tastes different.
It came to a point where it all compounded on me.
What's Poppy gonna have? Poppy's gonna have a pikelet.
- Is he gonna have anything on it? - No, nothing.
When I was at home, I mean, I was a full-on zombie.
I would be sitting with my kids, they would be talking to me, and I wouldn't be hearing them.
I disconnected from my wife.
And I was resenting my work, which I'd never really felt before.
You realize that there are some things that are not right in your life.
And you start reflecting on them, and start wondering, "Is it worth it? Is it really worth it, what I'm doing?" You know? Around that time, we began working on this mussel dish, and a friend of mine and I had arranged to go to Portarlington where the mussel farm is.
We met Lance, and Lance told me his story.
He told us how when he was a young man like me, this entire industry had faced extinction.
He'd worked so much that he'd missed a lot of his children's childhood and it really struck a chord with me.
It made me realize I was wasting a significant part of my life and I had to change.
Four years ago, my son, Kobe, formed a basketball team with his friends from kindergarten, called the Red Dragons.
First season, I don't know if I saw a game at all.
Take him on! Couldn't get away from work.
I took a night off to go and watch a game and I was like, "Wow, Kobe's got natural ability at this.
" Other parents went as well, but they didn't have a coach, so somebody was just subbing them on and off.
And then, I ended up as the coach.
Good passing, boys.
It'd just become this huge thing in my life.
Three.
Six.
Set, go.
After that, it became so important to be able to feel joy outside of the restaurant, outside of cooking.
I'd lost some of that somehow.
If there's anything to describe what Ben is giving to the rest of the world, I think he is giving a lot of himself.
There is a part of Ben that is in all those dishes.
His food is like an emotional response to moments in his life.
I can remember, there was one dish which blew my mind.
It was his well and truly documented dish, the potato that's cooked in the earth where it comes from.
And it's just nothing but a potato.
But it's the best, best potato you have ever, ever eaten in your life! And you could almost genuflect at somebody who has made the humble potato into an edible piece of art.
After that, there was this underground current that ran around, talking about this young man doing really, very experimental stuff.
When he first used to start getting reviews, I used to go and get two copies of everything.
I would cut one out and I would laminate it to keep it.
I think we always thought that we'd get a few and then that would be That would be all it would be.
We don't do that anymore.
The first time we ever came into World's 50 Best was just one of the craziest days ever.
We had three phone lines and they were just jammed.
The website crashed.
It's such a funny situation to find yourself in, when you went from having no customers to having far more than you would ever need, you know? When you look at the most exciting restaurants in the world at the moment, they're not in Paris and London.
They are hidden away.
You've gotta make the effort.
If you're doing something unique, you're doing something wonderful, people will find out about it.
I suppose there's a bit of fairy tale about it, isn't there? If you look at Attica 2005, 2009, 2014, 2015, it's always better.
Every meal is always tastier and more interesting.
That's what it's about.
Kobe! Kobe! Dinner time! There's a saying, if you've done a hangi with a stranger, that you've pretty much bonded for life, 'cause it's such a difficult and painful thing to do.
When I was younger, I was very interested in trying to achieve a certain level of success, winning a lot of awards, and reaching a level of recognition from my peers.
Get your corner and we'll lift it up like that.
- One, two - Yeah, that'll do it.
Come on.
Chuck that! As you grow older, you realize that the things that really matter to you are your friends and your family.
It doesn't matter to them whether or not my restaurant's ranked number 33 in the world.
They only care, really, if I'm a decent human being, and that I treat my children and my wife and my family and my friends with respect.
- Is everyone ready to eat? - Yep.
Go.
Grab a plate.
Food shouldn't be some sort of artistic torture.
It's gotta be something uplifting, and fulfilling and delicious.
And it should invigorate people.
But if you're not happy with your life, then how can you possibly achieve that? People can't create anything truly significant in food unless they're happy when they do it.