Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce yet another episode of Read This Out Sister podcast. It's hosted by the editor of The Monthly and book nerd Michael Williams, and it features conversations with some of the best and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from New Zealand born chef and author Ben Schuri. Before we do, Michael is here to share a bit about their conversation. Hello Michael,
Hi Ruby. So Michael, your guest today is the chef and the owner of Attica, which is a very famous Melbourne restaurant. But for anyone who isn't as familiar with Ben Shuri, could you tell me a bit more about him.
Ben's a really fascinating figure. And if like me, you're a big fan of Kitchen Confidential, or you watch The Bear, or you really like the little rat inside the Hat and writer tooy, like you have an idea that a celebrity chef is like all about McKeay mow and kind of.
Sweaty rages and big egos.
And the thing that's most remarkable about Ben Shuri is not just that He is a culumnary genius in many ways, but he's widely described as a fundamentally decent human being. And the man that I got to talk to was
a man who's so thoughtful about what he does. Vocational about food and about feeding people and about you know, producing the best that he can and everything that he does, but actually really interested in the cultural questions around food, in the ways in which we build community in a kitchen, in a restaurant across the country through the things we put in our mouths.
And so his book, it's called Uses for Obsession. It's described as both a memoir and as a manifesto. So what does that actually look like on the page?
Look, the most important thing to note is there are a couple of recipes in here. In particular, he goes deep on his approach to Lazo, and he has a number of differing ways that he does that. But yeah, this is not a memoir. In there, I was born, then I worked in my first kitchen, then up to Attica, then kind of overcoming the hardship of COVID shutdowns or whatever.
It's not a linear story. It's very much a memoir informed by the way he sees the world by the way in which his philosophy informs the way he works the obsessions that he has, and the way he conducts himself with those obsessions around other people. And it's a really fascinating.
Mix coming up in just a moment. Uses for Ben.
Shuri, Uses for Obsession is an excellent title. It conjures up what we imagine we might want from the chef. Uses for soliriac or uses for a mandolin or uses for Marjoram, something grounded and relatable that translates a familiar but intimidating media into a space we think we might navigate the achievement of this book, though, is that Ben Shuri understands that the intellectual, philosophical, creative facets of life can be equally served by the methodology of a chef.
After all, what is a great chef if not a storyteller. For Ben, the spinning of a tale is central to how he does what he does.
It's probably more influenced by oral storytelling, actually, and that comes from my earliest memories my childhood, which was about making the most of what you had and getting on with things. One of the main family traditions for shuries and the Turners. Our form of entertainment as a family and our extended family was around a fire or around
a dinner table telling stories. And my aunties and uncles and my mother and father were to tell these tremendous stories about overcoming odds, and often they were very funny, and it was how we kind of made sense of the things that were hard that were happening in this time in the seventies and.
Eighties and rural New Zealand.
Often they were against the odds, stories of going up against the man. You know.
That was always the council, which I think is hilarious.
But there was always humor, and there was always heart, and it was always truthful. And so as a child I just loved sitting there.
I lapped all of this up, and eventually, when I was old enough.
I was able to become a part of that. And so in a lot of ways in this book, I'm actually honoring my own family's history of storytelling, even though it's not a written history.
But the oral tradition. Like part of what's so lovely about this book is structurally it has an episodic energy where it's not a linear narrative. If it's not a conventional this thing it is then attica, then you know misfortune, and then triumph over adversity. You know, it's not that. It's a book that draws deep from your personal philosophy and from anecdote and kind of moves between them freely, like all the best fireside chats.
I think, well, thank you.
I was well aware of the pitfalls of writing a memoir as a well known person, and I just didn't want to add something else bland to the market. You know, whenever I do anything, I think about that product and the need for it, and so it's no different with a book. If I'm going to write a book and use those resources, you know, how is my book going to be meaningful and useful to people?
This book does many things beautifully, and it has all these kind of parallel tracks going on. But one of them is about your journey from not knowing to knowing, and a journey that is a constant and ongoing one, and that's part of the joy of it. But when you write about those early days, you know, when you write about the certainty, a knowledge that comes from a French cooking tradition, and then there's certainty a knowledge that comes from getting access to a tie cooking tradition. One
of the early engines is a book. Is you going into a second hand bookshop and finding a book that tells you that the stuff you've learned before then might not be adequate for the task. Can you describe that for us?
It's a rather beautiful moment. I'm living in Wellington, New Zealand, and not long before had completed two years of rigorous brutal training under French chefs. It was two years of formal training at Waikato Politech and the one thing that I took away from that I was really young. I was sixteen to eighteen, and the one thing I took away from it was, yes, there there's a level of mastery in these techniques, and there's a history, but that history does not feel like this place. It does not
feel like anything that I know. In fact, it seems from a world far away from us in New Zealand. And so whilst I didn't really know what my cooking would become, I did know that that didn't feel like home. And so several years later, I'm in Wellington and I go to this bookshop which is still there to the stay called Artibs, and it's the second hand bookshop. It's
a really great secondhand bookshop. And I'm in there flicking through the covers of the cookbooks that are around, you know, And this is a moment where there's a very very famous French chef called Thomas Keller, and he has a book out about his restaurant called The French Laundry Cookbook. And this book is just looming larger in the chef land, in the culture, and it just didn't speak to me either,
with the most respect to him. But what landed kind of in my lap in that second hand bookshop was the small, thin paperback cookbook with hand drawn pictures, no photographs, which sort of seem to be exuding in internal confidence, saying something to me like this is a bastion of unheralded recipes and ideas and thoughts on Thai cuisine that cannot be found elsewhere. And I opened it and I began to read it in the bookstore, and immediately the author,
David Thompson's words transported me to another place. And I remember kind of buying it and clutching it and sort of skipping home excitedly to begin working from it. And what I discovered from working within this cuisine Tay cuisine, classic Taye cuisine, or dishes that are hundreds and hundreds of years old from the Royal Thai Court, is that one Tay Cuisine is one of the world's greatest cuisines, right up there with more celebrated cuisines like French cuisine
or Italian cuisine. And two more importantly, Tay cuisine is a cuisine of the mind. And by that I mean following recipes is foolhardy on a lot of levels. You can follow a French recipe. You and I could follow one to day Michael, and to be completely honest, we'd get a pretty similar result. But if we both tried to follow it an advanced Thie recipe would get incredibly different results. Now that's cool, because you know ties the way that they Seeson is personal.
That's correct as well.
Some people like it's sweet, as some people like it more sour, more spicy. But I was I became transfixed by this book, and it would actually be you know, the factor that would mean that I would leave my home country. I would move to Australia in pursuit of it, and eventually London it would consume my entire life for
six years. I would be largely owned by it. It would drive me close to the edge of madness because it is so complicated and complex that it's impossible to have any level of mastery over it.
Well, it was for me.
But one of the things I love about that is, you know, you say at the point at which you read that book and you went home in Wellington and you decide, Okay, you're going to try and master this. Not only had you not eaten typhood. I think you say in the book you might not have even met a tie person. And that's true. This is entirely an abstraction that you're trying to make real. And when you get to Sydney and you eat your first proper Thai meal, the thing that hits you is you can't learn this
from books books. I can't do it for you.
No.
And the thing that I write about that meal was that it was the most ruthlessly beautiful meal that I'd ever eaten. And it destroyed me in the best way because I learned that I knew nothing, And so I love this feeling of being humbled. You know, this is incredibly powering and compelling to human growth if we choose to see it in that way. But at some stage I realized, really what Thai cuisine didn't need.
Was me creativity and the twin engines of creativity. It seems to me that you kind of tease out in this book, both in the book itself, but also in the way you talk about cooking and you talk about food, and they're on the one hand technique and precision and learning and those very possibly rigid things. And then on the other hand there is joy, and there is discovery, and there is play, and there's those things, and they seem to me to be potentially intension in any creative process.
Where do you sit on that spectrum?
Well, you know, I think they serve each other in so many ways. I guess as a part of the book which says that before you can subvert something, you
must completely submit to a rigorous understanding of it. And the ways in which people go wrong in all kinds of context in human life when they racing to change something, And if you haven't humbled yourself by absolutely committing to a complete and utter focus on that subject for a sustained period of time, you've really got no business mucking around with it.
You know. I love that idea of humility in the face of something that matters to you. You know, but whatever it is, if this matters, you have to be humble. You have to concede what you don't know. And I think as a society, as a culture, we're very bad at saying I don't know, or I can't or I need to learn.
Well, I think you're right, and I think as a society we would benefit from more thinking along the lines of we're all just making this up as we go. When I cook, I don't have enough time left on this planet to really have any real understanding of what is happening and what this is about. And I've been humbled time and time. I'm in time, particularly in this country with sixty five thousand years of continuous cooking and cuisine by Aboriginal people and tourist for out other people.
Because there'd be moments, as a highly creative chef where I would have thought that I've reinvented the wheel was some concept or some dish that I've made, I've brought two ingredients together. And there's a great story about bringing nerdy Gugoni word for green ants together with raw fish, and there's a synergy between these two ingredients in my mind as I developed this dish, and I'm like, hmm, you're pretty damn good, you know, Like it's like that
feeling of like, well, I've discovered something here. And then six months later, being in Maningrida, a community in Arnham Land and sitting down for a coffee with an elder with Auntie Lila Nimbajia, and Auntie starts telling me this story about how her mother they couldn't always get fit, she had an appetite for fish, that she would try to quench her thirst for fish, if you like, by eating green ants, and green ants is a medicinal and culinary food from that area.
And she said, we always served.
Green ants with fish, and I was like, oh my goodness, how little do you know?
You know, it's absolutely remarkable.
You're just a speck of sand in the desert.
A gettl Again. The culture tells us that professional food culture isn't open or generous. It's aggressive. It's a particular kind of matcho, it's a particular kind of self aggrandizing. The prevailing picture in pop culture is that someone who devotes themselves to restaurant excellence at the highest level is inevitably some kind of monster.
That's an unfortunate truth. As an industry, we've been incredibly cruel.
We've had our.
Whole mindset around the wrong way, and many of the people that we've looked up to and admired and celebrated haven't deserved it. And for me, coming into this world as a sensitive young man from the back country of New Zealand who'd barely been around large groups of people in his life, I thought, as an outsider that I
would find a home in professional kitchens. But I was quickly taught that because I didn't fit into the status quo that quite often kitchens were an incredibly unkind and unfriendly place for me, And if it was bad for me, it was devastating for women. So for me, that's always
been through line. Women have been held back by men, have been treated appalling by men and kitchens, and for me, when I had the chance to run my own place, that's something that I wanted to stamp out immediately to the best of my ability, knowing that I have many blind spots as a man, but listening to women, making sure that there were women in possessions of power making
decisions at the company. I've wanted to prove in my career when I had the opportunity that it could be done a different way, that this is not actually connected to any thing good. You know that yelling and shouting and macho behavior and the abuse of drugs and alcohol are not things to be celebrated. In the book, you know, I write about the influence of certain parts of Anthony
Bourdain's memoile Kitchen Confidential. You know that book and parts of that are incredibly sexist and incredibly damaging, I believe to our industry because generations of young male chefs have looked at that book and looked up to it and worshiped it, and still to this day.
I think it also valorizes a particular kind of not just agro, but ego, I think, and I'm curious about that relationship between creativity and self belief. You know, to be a creative person, to be making things that you put in the world, you have to believe that your voice is worth hearing, or people should come and eat the thing that you make, or they should come and
invest in the thing that you are creating. And so inevitably there's a requirement for a bit of ego, But why does that ego in the context of restaurants, in the context of chefs, why does it curdle in the way that it does into something so ugly, Because.
That kind of ego and that kind of behavior has been rewarded time and time again. You know, it's been glamorized, as you point out, by books, by movies right through the culture and still ongoing to this day. You know, largely these stories are to by other people. They're not actually told by chefs either. But I think that you know, that is all just a way of men controlling the industry.
You know, there's still a huge imbalance in industry between men and women, and of course there are other groups of people who are also affected in various ways, But most restaurants are still owned by men, and the legal and the moral obligation for this behavior to stop begins and ends with them.
When we returned, Ben shares the risks of writing a tell all food memoir and reveals the one thing that he allows himself to be a little bit chitter. We'll be right back. You are someone who has a de awareness of your responsibility to others. And I'm curious about what effect that had on the writing process, because this is your story, but it's a story about many people in your life, and your awareness of the ways in which putting it down on paper, you know, has has repercussions,
that has ripples. Was there an anxiety about that for you?
Well, first of all, there's stories of others that I've shared. I've always thought that there's an incredible and grave responsibility for writers to consider when sharing other people's stories. So that weighed heavily on me in the writing about others
or the sharing of other people's stories. And then kind of to other point, to reconcile the risk involved, you know, long and hard conversations with those closest to me, you know, and none more so than my wife Kylie, who has bravely encouraged me to write this, you know, and at every stage even you know, her own frankly brutal story. But also the immense amount of peril and risk that
we've potentially put our company in. I think that we're very resilient and I am not somebody that gives up easily. I also don't mind a fight.
It seems important, and not as a sad thing because it does tap into the recurring thing through this book, which is the relationship between the art of what you do, the business of it, the life that you live when you're doing it, and what those relationships look like that come out of it, and how we extract meaning I guess from what we do. Are you at a point in your career where you feel happy with where you've landed between those different imperatives.
I'm made a point in my career or where I feel like letting it rend. I feel like we all have limited days on this earth. And there was probably some questioning about whether or not I'm too young to write this book, but I thought, if I don't write it today, if I don't take this risk, and if I don't face up to these truths, both.
My own failings and the failings.
Of others, I might not get another chance.
I want to talk for a bit about obsession, because you are an incredibly driven human being, and you were driven by a desire for excellence. You hold yourself to a standard, you push yourself to that standard again and again, and I'm interested in how hard it is to both honor that on the one hand and not let it descend into something corrosive. On the other what do you let yourself be shit at?
Ben Suri, Well, I love skateboarding, but I'm not a great skateboarder. You know. It's been something that I've done my whole life. It informs the work at Attica, and even the writing in the book is there's references to skateboarding. But the thing that I loved about skateboarding was the skateboarder doesn't just sort of fall off and then give up the first time they try a trick. You know, they get back up and they try again, and so
that's very compelling to me. And it also offers up a level of kind of pain and intensity in suffering, which I think is not necessarily a bad thing. I know we're going to try to avoid that in the future, probably, but I don't think we should.
I think there's a level of going.
Through stuff that's healthy for humans.
On being obsessed with things, I think, you know.
Anybody of power or anybody of influence needs to be really mindful of their ambition, especially when that person works in teams. And so I've always had the ability to kind of consider the people that I'm working with and ask the question in which ways do these affect our team and it is a neat or positive or is it some positive and negative? And by that I mean there's a lot of people in the world that are perfectly happy to shell ten thousand baby pas or pick
twenty thousand lemon time leaves, both insufferable jobs. I would analyze whether or not it's actually worth it, does it actually make an impact on the plate, or is it pure ego, Because if it's ego, then it's kind of cruel, and if it's not ego, if it's necessary. Look, let's be frank, it's never necessary to pick twenty thousand lemon time leaves. But if it is necessary to do this menial, mind numbing task, then work out a way within the team to make it fun. And so that just means
that the whole team does it. Maybe there's twenty cooks on a shift at Attica, and all twenty will shell the peas, and therefore this job that would take somebody, you know, eight hours, which I would say is a bit soul destoring if you're a qualified chef, for eight hours is shared by a team of twenty and that's done in twenty minutes, and you listen to music and you can have a conversation.
So it's just.
About a reframing kind of a lot of the times of that ambition and how we'll get there in a better way that doesn't break people down.
Part of what I like so much about the book is that you are very honest about those personal eccentricities and peccadillos and the ways in which obsession can be such a personal thing. And so they're navigating your personal obsession through the world is its own kind of set of challenges, And I'm curious, when are the moments when it all feels worth it to you? When are the moments when you feel like you've made a perfect thing, or you're proud, or it's enough.
First of all, being with this tremendous group of people at Attica every day, it feels like it's worth it, you know, having the privilege of cooking for people every night, and then you know, fighting for your creative freedom on a daily basis, pushing against the market sometimes, you know, but ultimately there's this one thing that happens, and it's sort of this pursuit of the completion of a dish.
So I'm working on a lot of different dishes at once, and daily we're working on something and we're trying to bring a group of ideas together.
I've had a.
Vision for a dish or an idea for a dish, and.
We're working on it.
It's a process that goes for really for months and occasionally years, depending on how big the concept is. And we're working, and we're working, and we're failing, and we're failing, and that's completely utterly normal. But we keep working. We keep honing it, we keep tweaking it. We learn what we learn, and we make notes and we come back to it, and we keep going and it gets closer and it gets closer. And then there are other people
coming in. There's makers and art artists. They're making plates or they're making baskets or cutlery, and they designing things for this project as we're going. So we're getting the dish ready, and then is a moment when all of a sudden it clicks into place and is a moment of clarity. And this moment is the moment I live for.
This is standing in the kitchen and plaiting.
That dish for the last time and taking a spoon and bringing it to my mouth and realizing that it's that it's there, and there's this euphoric hit that shrieks through my body and I beam and everybody knows, you know, and this is the sort of end of this journey.
And I've said often if I couldn't feel this feeling, that I'd hang up the knives, you know, because this is actually the reason, feeling this sense of joy from following an idea through to its completion and then just being so excited to share it with other people.
Have you felt the equivalent feeling as a writer on this.
Book multiple times?
Writing this book has been one of the greatest joys of my life. It's also been one of the hardest things I've ever been through in my life.
I get the feeling been true that if it wasn't one of the hardest things, you couldn't find the joy like that joyful experience, that beaming moment that you describe almost needs the pain and the journey to get there to be fully realized. Is that fair?
I think it is.
And I think it's kind of a well known fact that that exists within creativity. And I'm not talking about the tortured artist trope.
I don't believe in that.
You know, But I do believe that anything that's truly worth doing entails some level of suffering at some point.
And there were moments in book that were incredibly joyous to write.
The chapter Chipgate, I wrote it in response to coming out of a really dark time from writing and being affected heavily by writing writing about the stories of survival during COVID, for example, which is something that I hadn't really wanted to do, but something that I decided to do as a sort of a man in the whole
narrative structure of the book. But it was too soon to revisit that struggle for me, and it depressed me, and I didn't realize it went on for a couple of months and I wrote Chipgate, which is absolutely silly and hopefully funny.
It's important.
It's a manifesto for outside well it is, and I mean, you know, who doesn't love a hot ship?
Is that not just the best food ever?
Look, it's on the list. And I do like that when you acknowledge that love, you also have to you pay a little apology to the lasagne because you're like, well, i feel like i'm playing away here that you know, I'm being unfaithful.
I'm holding two thoughts at once.
I think it's possible to be to love both hot chips and lasagna. I embody that idea.
Me too, Me Too.
Venture's memoir Users for Obsession has just hit bookstores and it's available now.
Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with Robbie or Not and Santilla Chincape. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.