Ben Shewry’s secret to ongoing creative success

It's been featured several times in the World's fifty Best Restaurants list and has been named the best restaurant in Australia. He's also won the Age Good Food Guides Restaurant of the Year three times, Chef of the Year twice, has earned three Michelin stars, being featured on the Netflix series Chef's Table, and Well. I could go on for a long time with his list of accolades. But what you might not have known is that Ben is also a

brilliant writer. His latest book, Uses for Obsession, is a memoir of his experiences in the hospitality industry, and boy is it an amazing read. In this episode, Ben reveals how he knows a creative idea won't work, Why you shouldn't get angry even when people steal your ideas, and how to stay passionate about your creativity even when success brings new challenges. Oh and he also shares a few

tips for us novice chefs. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. Obviously, a lot of Ben's creativity centers around making new dishes at Attica, so naturally I wanted to know what his process is for creating each new dish.

a year, depending on how big the project is. And that's really taking a kind of a three hundred and sixty degree approach to all of the elements of a dish, not only the food and the recipe and the creativity, but the plate, the physical aspects of the dish and how it interacts with the room and the customer, and then of course the story of it sometimes and how the front of house, how the waiters will articulate it to our guests, and how it all fits into sort

of the cultural context. Does it feel like something that comes from our restaurant? Does it feel like something new?

so we need enough to sustain for several months. And then it's really like, for me, it's probably about having tiny little snippets of ideas and just seeing them through So, for example, I just come back from Bologna, the home of Lasagna and Bolonnais in Italy, and there I brought a incredible brass pasta press, an extruder, a hand extruder. It's kind of like a cylindrical chee with a corkscrew on the end, and it pushes the pasta dough through the tube and then it comes out through a little

die made from brass. And I saw this beautiful handmade thing, and I bought it from my home. But in my mind, I'm thinking, well, you know, at the restaurant right now, Yas, who's one of our sous chefs who is from Japan, has been working in his own time at the restaurant on a sober noodle which is made from a native Australian grain. And so it's not quite landing though, because

it doesn't quite feel like the Attica context. That's because right now this dish is a straight sober noodle and it feels very Japanese and it needs to feel like something from Attica, and perhaps by pushing it through the extruder into a macaroni shape, it will start to feel like something that we could serve. Right now, it's just a kind of a great concept, not quite a dish that we could put on the menu. This has probably been going on already for three months, and I can

see it last at least another month. But there's every chance that all of this work can be just a complete dead end.

of our dreams and our hopes and our work. And it's very much a team project with a lot of people in the kitchen contributing, and we've been through potentially one hundred iterations of a dish, but then with a slight shift of the dynamic or a slight little change in the recipe and the plating, it might come together. And I always know that moment. I might be the single person that knows that moment. That's maybe my job to know that moment, and that moment is really where

the magic happens. I think for me is this feeling of they're the dishes, it's everything. It's that your all of your self into an item of food. It's delicious, it looks beautiful, and the culmination of all of those things is really a massive sort of moment. It's almost addictive, and I just can't wait to kind of share that with people. But I always kind of know when it's ready. It's hard to put an exact line on why I

know it's ready. It's just my special skill. I suppose it can never come on though, until I absolutely believe that it's ready, because to do so would be the service to the standard that we've built over nineteen years.

their own. I want, don't know, because you feel like the sort of person that doesn't hold on to this stuff that doesn't hold on to potential anger. How do you do that? Like, how do you let it go when?

back on with the menu. And what that does is it just keeps us looking forward to the future constantly, and it evolves the restaurant and the cooking in ways that are not possible if you're sort of reciting your repertoire of dishes that you keep coming back to each season, which is kind of the classical way to run a

restaurant like house. But for me, I think when you're young and you're starting out and you haven't made it, perhaps whatever made it means, and people are copying your ideas and any creative endeavor, I think it really hurts

and it's really hard to deal with. But I think just by knowing that I will come up with another idea, it eases the pain of seeing somebody you know, take your really hard work frankly and pass it off as if it was their own, which is a very different thing than being honest with your inspiration and saying, you know, I'm really inspired by this culture or this person and their work, and that's a really honorable thing to do.

I'd probably argue that there should be a little bit more of that and creative endeavors in the world.

stung in those early years. So it's easier for me to sit here now and say, you know, oh, like I can kind of if I do see my work and elsewhere, which I do. If I see it on Instagram, I'm kind of like, well, you know, sale a V and I know that I've got this other thing that I'm working on. It's less easy to do that at the beginning. For sure.

brought us the success in the first place. So for me, it's about returning to cooking constantly and cookings what has made me successful. And of course the demands on my time are so many now, from podcasts like this, to requirements of staff, to running a company with forty employees, to all of the other things that I do in my life a family. I need to keep returning to cooking. So it's about finding new ways to return to cooking and not just staying in the format, which was I

turn up at the restaurant nine am. By ten am, I'm cooking. Now. Sometimes I can't cook at ten am. Sometimes it's not till twelve. Sometimes that doesn't allow enough time to see an idea through in the rest of the day till five when the service starts in the restaurant. So sometimes I need to work on the idea at home, or the idea starts off in the home kitchen as an idea for a dinner party, and then it eventually

makes its way onto the outer communue. So in the last three years, that's sort of how I've evolved that process. But I've realized fundamentally that thing that brings me the most joy and the thing that I need to protect is cooking and my ability to do it. And of course I'm going to come back to that idea. The more successful will you become, the harder it is to

do the thing that made you successful. So I always remind myself of that, and I think it makes me feel really good as well to be able to go you know what.

it opens you up to a different world. And so whether it's travel or listening to music for me, or skateboarding or art or whatever it might be, it doesn't matter really, it's about having a different sort of experience with a different group of people.

that main interest. And when I was and you know, the research would suggest that T shaped people are quite a bit more creative than I shaped people, which kind of makes sense. And when I was reading Uses for Obsession and just learning about all these different areas that you've gone so deep in, it's like, no one day, you're so incredibly creative. I do want to ask about music because that's clearly a passion and I love that you actually created Spotify and playlists that go with the book.

That's awesome. How does music help with your creativity? And what I mean by that, Like, you know, I've spoken to various creative people around how they'll use music to get in a certain mood for whatever it is they're trying to create. How does it help, I guess, boost your creativity when it comes to cooking.

The last hour before the restaurant opens, we amplify ourselves as we set up frantically for the first guest arriving at six o'clock with music, sometimes quite intense music, very loud music. It's something that happens with or without me, you know, in fact, mostly without me. You know, I'm mostly an observer to the kitchen using this as a mechanism to get themselves in the right headspace. So at Ataka, there's you know, a joke that it has the most

stereos of any restaurant in the world. Is pretty much a stereo in every room, so every person in the organization can be listening to music if they want to. You know, I just can't imagine creating without it, really, you know, I think it's such a useful tool, and

I always feel so indebted to artists. Another sort of very cool kind of fact in restaurants is that, especially creative restaurants, it attracts a lot of musicians, and so we get to serve and cook for musicians and sometimes become friends with them, especially touring musicians, and that's such a beautiful thing. I would say that sometimes it creates a bit of nervousness with the playlist in terms of

will they like it? And in fact, sometimes you know, famous musicians come and their music might be on the playlist, and I almost feel bad about that because I don't want to make them feel uncomfortable. But it's the greatest pleasure, you know. I think it's such a gift music.

that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com. I want to talk about self doubt because you write about that quite a lot, and you've had many moments of self doubt, and you talk about them just very honestly and with a lot of humility, and I would love to know what if you learnt about how to overcome that in moments where you really need to A very.

But in terms of like self doubt, I find that there's been quite a few moments in my career and at Attica where it seemed to the outside world that the idea is outlandish, you know, whatever creative idea it might be, and a perfect one would be you know, at the end of the Lockdown's Attica, we could only open the restaurant to a very limited capacity and we were going to go broke, so we had to open a big outdoor restaurant in the arablly called Attica Summer Camp.

And when I sort of proposed that idea, nobody accept My wife Kylie and our architect Eva thought that that was a good idea. In fact, people were ringing to tell me out of concern for me, that we would probably fail if we did that, but there was just something in me that I just had to do it. I thought that it was the way I could see. It turned out to be this amazing thing. But I think sometimes when you if you're doing something different and

changing something, you know, people don't love change. And so probably talking about more other people's doubt in this, but also my own self doubt, which was fueled by well intentioned friends suggesting that I not do it, But ultimately I just felt like it was something that I had to do. I think there's always a bit of internal

self doubt, and I think that's healthy. I think, you know, reason questioning within yourself of your ideas and not just sort of blindly going into things to change them is important. So I don't necessarily see self doubt as a negative thing. I think it needs to be controlled like anxiety does. I would probably say to younger people listening or people are starting off on a journey in a new direction, that it gets easier as time goes on and you can kind of build on its success or a failure

for the next time. And perhaps that for me, that self doubt's got a little easier to beer, you know, But sometimes you just have to back yourself, you know. I think as well, like despite all of your fears, And there's been defferentely in moments where that's been true. And probably the peak one was going from being an employee in a restaurant for being the first time owner. I was filled with self doubt. I didn't think it

was my place to own a restaurant. And that moment was like, I was thirty eight, thirty nine, are you ever going to do this? You know, are you ever going to do this? And I laid everything on the line a bit, my house, on my capacity to run a restaurant. I'm glad I did.

I guess, build up the courage. I don't know if that's the right phrase to do it.

You know, I've always tried to be honest about things, you know, because I really feel like glossing over the harder things, whether that be with me health, or whether that be the way that the restaurant's run or a creative process. I felt like glossing over that stuff is not helpful to other people, especially people who follow you and look up to you. And so I've felt a sense of responsibility to a broader community into my industry.

And I also think that if you see something bad happening and you walk pasted it, it's not good for the victims of that bad thing that's happening, but it's certainly not good for the person that walks past it. You know. I actually in some ways that might affect them even more. And so you know selfishly as well, like if I don't say this, when will be my next opportunity. It's funny because I never really had a plan to say any of these things that I wrote about.

I actually wrote them at the beginning of it. I wrote a mind map on the wall of maybe over a hundred ideas, which I felt fabulous about it, and then I didn't really write about any of them. And I think there's just something about reacting to how you're feeling and what's going on in writing that is really sparent and really sort of this rule. I think, you know, the point of writing for me is to tell the truth.

That's what writing deserves, and I wanted to honor that truth in my writing, and I just several times in the book, I just felt like, you know what, this is not easy to write, This is scary, This scares me what I've written, This scares my wife Kylie. But ultimately, what I just kept coming back to was I can't not say it.

we're really up and down on it. Some days, you know, you'd be feeling yeah, you know, like really empowered and bold and like yeah, you know, we need to say that, and then other times you'd be like quite and be like, oh, but what happens if we lose everything? What will people do to us? You know? And so there's like there's fair but ultimately, I guess kind of what I felt really strongly at the end of it, and so did Kylie were really aligned on this, and we had to

be because this is her future as well. She didn't write this, but like it's her company too. Was that if we couldn't say these things and run the restaurant, then we'd find that the running the restaurant wasn't worth it anymore.

just been incredibly humbling and also totally heartbreaking. You can't believe the response. So I could never have seen this. I knew my own experience, of the experience of my own team, and the experience of many close friends in our industry, and we were pretty aligned on it. Whether or not we'll speak out about it publicly or not. I didn't expect the reaction that it got like that positive reaction was just staggering.

business owner in the world. And I love that distinction, and I would love to know what are some of the most important things that other small business owners or business owners in any industry could take from how you do things at Attica.

Whether or not you make a profit or not, or whether or not you have high levels of customer satisfaction or not, or whether you have high levels of employee satisfaction, it's all going to come back to the people and how the people feel about the work and how they feel about the way that you treat them in the culture that you've built, and also, most importantly, how the leader is behaving and the standard that they're setting, not just the standard they're asking for, but the standard that

they're laying out for themselves first and foremost. And there's that old classic saying the fish rots from the head. It could not be more true when applied to business. And so everything starts from there, you know, really it does. And so I think we have a tendency in business and small business and all kinds of businesses to over complicate everything. And what I've experienced is it's much simpler than that. Often managing people is much simpler than that.

You know, it comes down to some basic fundamentals of common decency and fairness. And I guess you know, I'm really speaking on the side of owners here. You know that it needs to be an equitable agreement where both the business and the employee are winning. And I think if you can't kind of get to that in business, then you have to really question your reasons for doing it. For me, my reason for doing it is for people.

It's not for profit. It needs to be profitable, but I think that I feel pretty strongly that by doing things the right way or trying to do them the right way, that the profit side of it, as long as you have good fundamentals and business and by that I mean good accounting, good bookkeeping, that the profits will generally take care of themselves. But the thing that's often missed is the sort of human element of an organization. And you see this in all different types of businesses.

But there's just something about a team that is well cared for, that is respected, that respects the company, that it's the sort of fourth dimension that is not really about money. It's hard to put a sort of a finger on exactly that. You just go into a business and you feel it, and it's genuine engagement with the work. It's real care and pride in the establishment that the people are working for. I can always see it. I just had it in Paris at a tiny little crapery

restaurant called Crapery Little Raise in Paris. It's the most amazing, tiny little restaurant where the crape was ten dollars and it was so beautiful. But it wasn't just the crape. It was the energy, the humility, the kindness of the people behind it. It's the most successful crape restaurant in Paris, but it doesn't carry itself like it. It carries itself with dig and grace, and it made it so much more magical. It transformed it from a crepe to something extra.

And I'm still thinking about it, and I suppose that's what I'm getting at, is that there's a lot of crape restaurants in Paris and they cook very good crapes, but Little Brays does something else as well as make a crape, you know, And I believe, I don't know the business, but I believe it's connected to the leadership and that it seemed like a really great place to work.

to do their job. And it's of course incredibly emotionally draining undertaking, and the weight is constantly asking is the customer happy? What can I do to make the customer happier? If the customer is happier, and it sort of is expressing that it becomes much easier for the waiter if

somebody's cold. The weights trying to change tack and trying to you know, it's a really intellectual undertaking being a great waiter, and so if you don't get anything, you don't know if the persons enjoying it, and so you're

trying to maybe improve the experience or tailor it. And we have to do this table by table anyway regardless, but ultimately you're just shooting yourself in the foot because you know, as I right, the waiter is your personal hedonistic agent for the evening, and who would do anything to compromise the waiter. You know, waters are awesome.

and the less friendships you cultivate. And I feel like it seems like in reading the book, in the very long list, in the acknowledgment, that you've kind of done the opposite. And I imagine it's probably quite unconscious, but I was wondering if you could consciously unpack that, what do you do ben to cultivate friendships as an adult.

turn stones. You know. I'm definitely drawn to people who are unusual. But also I'm really drawn to people who are kind and people who communicate. And I love friendships where I'm not the only one who is the one to keep in touch. One thing I really believe in friendships is if I say that I'll do something, I will do it. I will always do it. And I

think my friends know that. But I think one of the things I love most about friendship is the ability to be generous to people, and something that I really adore. As a child, I always loved giving gifts. It was much more than received them, and we didn't have a lot of money, but I would save up my pocket money or earn money by doing odd jobs and spend it almost all of it at Christmas time and I would go into the town that we lived by and spend just all this time choosing presents for my sisters

and my mum and dad. And in a lot of ways, that's how I am with friends, not with gifts, but with experiences. So maybe a month ago, I went on this boat trip up to the Arrow. It's just like a little higher boat that you hire for like sixty bucks with my daughter and my wife, and we had a lovely day. And I thought, oh, you know, I would have written boats in the raw off of something

tackier tourist thing. But then when I was seeing the city for the first time from a boat, it's like, this is cool, and so in that moment I had but what if I got one of these boats and I packed it. I think there's eleven people can fill in this boat. And then I did a tasting menu on the boat, ten courses that are all preprepared kind of and I could just take this big chili bin and serve them. But what if I got this group of friends together and I just told them to meet

me at the room a bank. They had no idea what was going to happen. And so that's what I did, like two or three weeks ago. And it's just so silly. It's effefesent. And I think that in friendship, but in life, silliness is really underrated. Have such serious lives, you know, and our professions are so serious and so important. To us. But a bit of silliness I think goes a long way because it just sort of lightens everything.

they've always made a really great decisions. So I think just engaging kids with school lunches is important. It's what you want it. You want them to eat it. You don't want to throw it out, but teen like they ate it nice.

for the zest and the juice. Coffee. I can't live without coffee, Yeah, I don't know.

a surface contact of around bladed wooden spoon. So a good flat bladed wooden spoon is a good tool. And microplane greater is also a very useful thing. But a decent box grader is a really great tool. So you can do a variety of different jobs on a box grader.

fry that I like. And chicken thigh, which is kind of a robust cut of chicken. You know, she marinates in a bit of olive oil, a bit of garlic, maybe a bit of Dijon mustard, maybe a bit of lemon salt and black pepper, and then she just lays it on the rack and air fry and cooks it hard and it gets really caramelized and really tasty. So I think that's the best thing I've had in the air fry. But I also like to sort of do I hate the word meal prep. I think that's such

a disgusting term for like cooking food. But let's say that I'm going to use it in this context. If I'm making I like to maybe chop up some sweet potatoes and cope them with a little bit of olive oil eight very healthy and some salt pepper and lay them in a single layer on the air fry and then it's about twelve minutes in the air fry on the hottest temperature, and then that's great for the base of a salad the next day. So I think it's a really helpful tool.

a market. If you have that ability and be able to talk about where that food comes from and how it was produced, that's almost going to guarantee that it's good, you know. I guess I have like a repertoire of ingredients that I trust, farmers that I trust, and I've just built that up from experimenting a little bit.

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