Keep calm and make good eggs with Attica’s Ben Shewry

Melbourne's award winning restaurant Attica. During COVID, Ben had to pull out all the stops to save his business. Instead of serving international foodies three hundred and ten dollars per person tasting menus, he was driving around Melbourne serving takeaway Lasagnia's. So how did he stay motivated when everything he had worked for was being taken away from him? How does he create what he refers to as a culture of playful anxiety? And how do you make perfect poached eggs?

My name is doctor Amantha Imbert. I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work A show about how to help you do your best work. So in eight weeks, Ben went from serving sixty customers a night in a three handed restaurant to pivoting to home delivery. Let's start by going back to March fifteen, just after COVID had hit.

I was with my children and my partner, Kylie, and we were trying to celebrate my birthday, and I just felt I felt sick inside. I felt like everything that had worked my entire life was about to be taken away from me. So, having only owned the restaurant for five years, I thought that I was going to lose

it. It's a very tough industry, as a lot of people out there will know, and hospitality has been one of the hardest hit of all industries through the pandemic, and so I just did what I knew that I could do. So I made plans with Kylie to do something, to try. We didn't know if we could succeed. We had forty full time staff who usually cooked for sixty guests, one of the highest staff the customer ratios of any business

in Australia. And so my concern first and foremost was really for those people, more than twenty of whom were visa workers and would have no sacked in net in Australia, no help offered to them by the government. And I had made a commitment to them, and I take that commitment seriously to offer them a job and to pay their wages, and to take care of them as they take care of me and my company. It was really a natural thing to find a way to fight.

and the biggest gamble. And my sort of philosophy towards that is just if you're not in it, if you're not their present with it, and you're not absolutely giving it everything, then you won't survive it.

and it takes hours every day. But sometimes people will come in and throw an absolute spanner in the work, so they haven't communicated to us at all what their situation is, and that is very challenging. It can be very challenging. So in a restaurant, you have the right amount of people to do the right amount of jobs, and that's all planned across how many covers you have

and so on and so forth. But if somebody comes in and says, well, you know, I have there all these dislikes and sometimes they're really complicated, and that means maybe we have to leave the restaurant to purchase more food to cater for them. That could take somebody out of the rotation for several hours. Now that is very hard sometimes to deal with. But also there's this sort of these moments where you are just making split decisions

and they're very instinctual and not planned. And I like some of the learnings that come from these more instinctual, more guttural kind of decision making experiences. It's very very difficult to replicate that brain process when you have more time and you're trying to be more planned and more researched. So I like a combination of chaos because I like the results that come from chaos, and I like to be incredibly organized as well. So I'm a little bit

odd like I have these two things. I'm very very rigorously organized with my work and very very very precise, and any imprecision is really not acceptable. But at the same time, I like a bit of disruption as well, because I feel like that makes us better and challenges us, and it also shakes up any form of complacency. And sometimes it puts a very small level of anxiety into

the work, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. People talk about anxiety being a negative thing all the time, but a level of playful and anxiety in the working environment can be a powerful thing as long as it's not harming people's mental health. But the feeling of just being a little bit uncomfortable is not bad, you know. I feel like sometimes as humans we're too comfortable.

big project. And so that might mean that we would renovate the entire backyard. Okay, we've planned it now, we're going to begin on Monday, and there we go, off we go. And so it's the sort of mentality of sort of zero excuses about why we can't achieve things and always and how will we achieve them? And that has been the guiding principle Attam for fifteen years.

Like I've mostly talked about the more sort of cutting edge and driving aspects of the business, but the fact is that is that most people who arrive in that working environment have never been in the working environment that feels like at can before. That's not to say that it's better or worse. It's just very different, and it's deliberately different. And there's various means and ways that we employ to cultivate that feeling. And it's always always the

team first, never the individual first. The individual needs can be met, of course, and we allow space and time for that to happen through people being able to develop their own recipes. And I've never said no to anybody that wanted to create something to show me and to make a moment in the day, and I would buy those products to do that with so that they can learn, so that when they leave aut it for eventually they

have those skills. But there's just a sense of kind of caromaraderie amongst our teams and a sense of givenness and a sense that nobody is better than anybody else in that environment. We're on the same level. And that includes me, who's completely prepared to jump in to wash dishes, to unpack deliveries, to do the clean the toilets, to do any of the things that are required to be done in my business at a moment's notice.

And one of the ways that we know how to deal with that is by taking every request and every allergy and every dislike very seriously, because often people that have allergies and have dietary conditions have never really been treated very well in a restaurant before. So often it will be the first time that their concerns and their dislikes, and they're very real and serious elergies have been taken very seriously, and so it really comes down to this matter.

It's basically that we have a full time staff member just to deal with those things, and that person writes incredible amounts of data lists, diagrams on the menu that we have. As it is, so most of the senior staff or everybody really immediately knows when you say that, Hey, amanth they can't have this, can have can have that. But then sometimes we wouldn't have catered necessarily for your range of directory restrictions, because if we do and there's

nobody booked them, then that will be wasted. So we may have to run across the road or go down to Elwood, or run down to Leaf which is a great local supermarket, and buy some extra things. But that's okay too. We're completely prepared to do that, just like completely prepared to jump in the car and go to Dan Murphy's for a can of VB if that's really what somebody wants, If that's what they really really want, and nothing else will do you know, of course that's what we'll do.

you've worked, where you're living, what do you like. And I'm trying to disarm the person who I'm interviewing, because how often really nervous, and I understand that feeling of nervousness, and you really want a job, So I'll try to disarm them, and I'll be very warm and friendly, and often Kylie or one of the other staff members will ask the more pointed questions about what was the what would your last employee, what was the worst thing your

last employer might say about you, or something along those lines, trying to get to honesty. But there's really only one thing that I want to say to people and one thing that I want to hear. So at some point I will say, so, there's only one rule here there at Attica, and that is that there is no negative

attitude allowed. And I will go on to detail that. So, for me, negative attitude is talking back to somebody, being rude, being disruptive in a negative way, dropping your shoulders, sulking, muttering under your breath, being lazy, obviously not showing up for work, on time. That's negative attitude. And so I'm very clear about what negative attitude is. And then I'll

go on to say what is not negative attitude? What is not negative attitude is if you ever harassed, made to feel intimidated, touched and appropriately, God forbid any of those sorts of things, that is not negative attitude. Now I want to know about those things immediately if they ever happen to you in my workplace, and then they

will be dealt with quickly and succinctly. And so I make that definition because I'm asking people to not have any negative attitude, but it doesn't mean that they have to beary real problems that they might face in the workplace. So once that's clarified, I then look them in the eyes and say, hey, can you commit to that? Can you be that person? Can you be the person that comes to work every day who says hello to everybody and gets on with their work in a really productive,

team orientated way without any negative attitude? And if they say yes, I expect them to actually verbally say and commit to it. And then I say, I'll remember that we had this conversation, and if I ever seen your negative attitude we'll be having conversation about it straight away. Now that sounds hardline and hardcore, but what it does is it just sets the standard from the beginning that negative attitude is intolerable to me and to the other

people that work and in our work environments. And this comes from a place of not running the business the way that I wanted to in the past, and having basically a bunch of negative people who I let be negative because I was such an inexperienced and incompetent manager. I didn't address any of the issues, and that got so bad that it nearly destroyed the business, and it nearly destroyed me. It put me in a massive hole, and it really made me not want to be a

chef and not want to run Attica. So coming out of that time, those people left and I took ownership at the restaurant, I had the chance to build it exactly how I wanted it, with the culture exactly how I would want it to be. And so just by having those simple conversations at the beginning, it really eliminates just about all of the problems. And nobody can say that they weren't warned. If they do become negative, it's a very easy thing to sit down and have a

conversation about what's going on with you. We had this discussion. You know what the standard is and you're not meeting it. How can we meet it? Or do you need to consider another place to work?

I would listen. But that's ever happened. I'm generally exceptionally positive and I don't dwell on things. So if there are mistakes made, and there are every day, of course, there's always problems in business. That's really the definition of businesses problems, So it's just about how you'll overcome them. I don't dwell on them. I like to deal with things in the moment. I don't like to sit down and have a big monthly meeting about all the things that went wrong. I like to deal with them every

day as I see them. So people working for me generally know if they've made a mistake, then I'll have a discussion about it with them, but I won't hold it over them, and the next day or the next hour is a completely new thing and we'll move on. And that's good for them, I think, because there's no games and there's no uncertainty, and it's good for me because I don't hold on to that stuff. Well, it

sits within me and I can't let it go. So I have to deal with things like that otherwise I'll go home and feel anxious about the mistakes or anxious about the situation. We're anxious about the relationship. So I like to deal with things quickly and positively and move on.

star rating or writing a comment. And aside from the warm, fuzzy feelings, this will give both you and me, it also helps other people find out about how I work. So thank you in advance. Okay, Ben Shuri, We'll be back after this break to talk about how we can all level up cooking skills at home. Now. I want to shift gear into cooking tips because I imagine the listeners of how I work. Perhaps we're cooking a fair bit at home prior to twenty twenty, but I imagine a

lot of listeners started cooking a lot at home. And I want to know what's the difference between being a kind of average amateur chef at home and being a really impressive one. Like, what are some things that people can do differently to level up there at home cooking prowess?

level on everything that I do every single day. So I think sometimes how that applies to cooking is sometimes different things in cooking are viewed at different values. So if you were cooking a dinner party, it would be really important that that dinner party be really awesome because you want to impress your friends, whereas your breakfast might have sucked a bit My approach to getting better at cooking is just to apply one standard to every single bit of cooking that you do. So don't make a

terrible breakfast. It's just as easy to make a great one. So if you just try to take that approach, and I imagine a lot of people that are listening to this a pretty high treat achievers and a driven so that they should already be familiar with a high level. Just apply the high level that you have in your life already to cooking. And with cooking, there's heaps heaps of variables every day, and those variables are the oven that you work with might not be the same oven

that you work cooked with yesterday. The tomato is definitely not going to taste the same as they did yesterday if they're not the same tomatoes. But even if they are the same tomatoes you had for two days, are going to taste different, especially if you get them on the bench. The best cooking is always intuitive and is with feel. So times and temperatures, while they be important, feel is more important. Feel only comes from repetition, from

doing something time and time again. What is really helpful to progress quicker in cooking, To go from being like a good cook to a great cook is trying to remember the data in one of two ways. Some people can just retain it in their mind and other people need to make notes. I would say if you're at the beginning of your trying to get better at cooking phase, then you should take notes, especially if you're making the

same thing. So if you make a bolin aise tomorrow, write down what you did, and then afterwards write down what was really good about it. The next time that you go to make a bolin, you've got those notes to refer to. Now you might want to make some changes because you thought that maybe your source wasn't rich enough, maybe it didn't have enough olive oil, maybe it needed a bit more sugar because the tomatoes were to acid it.

You can move forward in the quality of that bottle naze by remembering what you did the last time, and then you'll reach a point after maybe ten times, where you no longer need to refer to those notes or even really think about it, because it becomes intuitive. So that would be probably a pro tip is how to get better. A lot of really good young chefs are

trying to get better take notes. Obviously, there's good and bad recipes, and there's good and bad cookbooks, so I suppose some of the classic cookbooks are often the best. I think anything by Fergus Henderson, the celebrated English chef from Saint John, those are really good, fundamental books on cooking. Don't get too carried away with glossy, fancy, beautiful looking restaurant cookbooks. I say this as somebody who once produced a book like that, try to find something that's more realistic.

All good cooking in the world generally stems from home cooking, including my cooking at Attica. I think Stephanie Alexander is an absolutely amazing inspiration and a great book book author. You can't go wrong with Stephanie or Maggie. Maggie Bear is also another exceptionally gifted Australian cook. Neil Perry's books are excellent. I really like Adam Leo as well. I've got to say, as a both as a person and as a cook, I think he's a really awesome person

for people to follow who cook at home. Sometimes chefs, you know, sort of high end restaurant chefs like me, can get a little bit caught up in the nature of their work, so sometimes we're not the best to follow, to be honest, in terms of trying to cook things at home.

you know as they might seem. To cook Eggs really well as gain something that you should research and read about and then practice so once you've got it down, it's just really easy to make them well, whether it be scroundwater or poached. To give you a little tip on poaching eggs, something that I've learned to poach eggs successfully is to have a pot of water that's a bit deeper than you think it should be, and to have a bit more volume of water than you think

you need. So I would probably be poaching eggs and about twenty centimeters of water. I would have it just below boiling, just a gentle summer. At the start, I always put in a capful of white vinegar, not white wine vinegar. White vinegar, the cheap stuff that helps the eggs cook and helps the protein set nicely. And now some people will swear by cooking eggs room temperature, others from the fridge. I'm take from the fridge and cook egg. Egg guy, no salt in the water. What I would do.

They would take a spoon and I will swirl that water a little bit like a little bit like a whirlpool, and then that will spin. That water will spin in the saucepan. And then I'll take my egg and I'll crack it directly into that gently swirling the water slowing as I'm adding the eggs, And what that does is it helps the egg whites that wrap around the yolk, and you get a nicer shape. To try it next time, I would then turn the water down a little bit.

I don't want it to summer or boil at all as I'm poaching them, and then just very simply drain the eggs, take the eggs from the saucepan with a slotted spoon. I might just touch the bottom of the egg on a paper towel, so my toast is not soggy and proper bread, something with structure and really good butter. Now you might be thinking, well, really good butter is expensive. I always say it is expensive, but use less. You know. That's kind of I guess, probably part of my cooking philosophy.

To buy the best ingredients you afford, you can afford, and if you can't afford a lot of them, just buy a small amount of them. Eat more vegetables, less meat. That's the way to go.

have a richer and more full of flavor. Most of the milk and cream in New Zealand than in Australia I believe is from freezing cows and it's more about quantity. But yeah, if you can buy Jersey cream or Jersey butter, it's always generally more yellow and rich. But yeah, the Gippsland Jersey butter is really great.

If you're so, if you really want to go that deep into it, I would say avoid eggs from supermarkets would be my would be my definite advice if you can, because you just don't know how long they've been hanging around, how long they've been in the distribution center before they got to the supermarket, and how long they've even been at the supermarket before you brought them. So if not from a farmer's market, definitely from a small or a

local independent grosser, from a farm gate. I mean maybe that's a little romantic, but just try to make some kind of connection to it. Do your research, but also buy different types, different ones, and just settle on the ones that you like and the eggs that are consistent. So once you've got good eggs, and it's actually not a hard thing to buy in Australia, e. The good eggs, we're very lucky. If you go to North America, good luck trying to buy good eggs. So take the eggs.

And I like to do a two egg omelet. So I've got my omelet pan. I should say as well, So you need a lovely pan. That's really helpful.

can afford it, the best pan. Like it's just a say, a steel copper core pan, and sometimes saying the steel pans are really sticky, but this one's not. It's smallish, it's not huge. Say, it's probably got to twenty centimeter base. And what I do is I have my eggs, I crack them into a small bowl and I whisked them with a fork, not a whisk. Why is that because I don't want to break them up too much. I want to break them up just enough. You'll still see

in my olmelets little bits of white. I don't want to break down the texture and the structure of the egg too much, and you can almost collapse it and it becomes, in my opinion, tougher, and it's stickier kind of to the pan and it's just not as nice. So definitely with a fork. I like to have my pan on a medium heat, not too low, not too high. I like to put a little bit of olive oil into the pan first, like I would say, a half

teaspoon and teaspoon, swell that around, whist my eggs. Most of the time, I don't seize my eggs, but you can season, but there's definitely skills of thoughts on whether or not they should be seasoned. At that point, I don't season them in the bowl. I add a knob a good butter again, not any butter, but good butter to the oil. And I watch foam now and it's not going brown or black at this point, it's just fibing.

So it's got a good temperature, but that the butter is not burning, I will pour the eggs into it, using a spatula to get all of the egg out of the bowl. That's approach it. You never leave anything in the bowl for any preparation in cooking. Do not leave anything in the bowl, no matter what you're making. And I like to use a spatula to make my omelets, a rubber spatula like some chefs seem to call them maurices,

but it's always just a spacheler for me. And I use a heatproof one with a red handle and smallish and I pour those eggs into that pan that' said the moderate heat, and the butter is fimbing, but not color, no color, And I just shake the pangently above the element a little bit. I then allow the eggs to cover the entire base of the pan and cook a little bit. And then I quickly use my spatula to stir them just once, and then I'll probably take the pan off the heat and just let the heat of

the pan do the cooking of the omelet. Now, sometimes if I'm putting something in it, I'd like to put a small amount of gria or a parmesan or even a soft cheese, and then I'm going to basically take the handle of the pan in my left hand and I'm going to lift it a little bit so that the pan is now on an angle sloping down towards the stove, and I'm going to use the spatula to roll my omelet into the shape of a cigar. This is a very classic style of making omelets. What I'm

looking for is that nice, even round cigar. I'm letting the omelet roll on itself. I'm using the gravity because I've elevated the pan on an angle in my left hand, and at the end or just give a little tap to help the omelet form into the cigar. And then i will use that same angle, the same sort of awkward looking angle to put on the plate. Now the key. In my opinion, omelets should have no color on it, should be no brown on it at all. It should be golden like yellow, the color of the egg. And

that's how I do it. I always want the omelet to be a little bit runny in the middle, especially as eggs will continue to cook in the pan, and then a little bit when they're on the plate as well.

myself to I don't know to do that. I'm sort of willing to take the risk of chopping off my fingers because it just seems too hard to change that habit. But I don't know if that's one the basic skills to master. But what should we be thinking about? Where should we invest our time in terms of really upskilling ourselves?

of cooking. You want to find a cook knife that suits you. There's a different and correct cook's knife for every person out there. If you have finer hands, smaller hands, and thinner wrists and you want a lighter, smaller cook knife, you don't want a huge ten inch cook knife. That's not going to be appropriate for you. That's going to be uncomfortable, unwieldly and difficult to use. Even you know, I've got reasonable size hands and nothing huge and reasonable

size rests. I prefer a smaller cook's knife. I don't like really big cooks knives. I want to control the knife at all times, so therefore I want a smaller knife, and I know where the tippers and I know where the bladers all the time, and I'm minimalizing the risk or injury to myself but also making better cuts. So I would say go to a specialist knife shop is the go, and there are a few in Melbourne and throughout Australia. I really like chef's hat and talk to

the people there. Often in catering shops and knife shops there might be somebody who was a former chef who can advise you. I like Finder blade knives. Some of the cheaper knives and the heavier German knives have a very very thick heft and very thick heavy heel on them. I don't like that. I have no affiliation with the brand Lectro Knox, but I swear by their knives as affordable,

practical products. So while I have incredible handmade knives by Australian blacksmiths, an amazing beautiful, stunning handmade and machine made knives by Japanese knife makers, I also have rosewood handled and plastic handled Victor Knox knives that I really like using because they've got a fine blade and I find the height from your chopping board to the handle to be appropriate. Easy to sharpen because the steel is a

little bit softer. Some of the German steel is incredibly hard and difficult to keep sharp unless you're a real expert at it. Make sure that you have a steel always. It would probably make a lot of knife experts out

there gasp and horror, but I like diamond steels. They can chew through the babe of your knife, but they allow me to keep an edge for longer and I don't go hard on them because realistically, having a stone and putting a knife on the stone on a weekly or monthly basis is not practical for a lot of busy people. So those are tips now in terms of actually using the knife, practice by yourself a bunch of onions,

and practice on onions. Onion is probably the best thing to practice on because they're probably the hardest thing to cut well, especially brinoirs, which is the French word that chefs use for fine dice of onion. So with an onion, when you peel the onion, you need to make sure that you don't cut too much of the core off, only just a little bit. The core is where the roots of the onion growing. Just trim it off slightly. The other end where the tip is, just cut that

off slightly. Cut it in half lengthways through the core to the tip, and then peel it and then put the onion flat side down. And the technique to use it's quite hard to describe in words without actually showing, but the technique that I like to use it I

call it a crab technique with my hand. And what that means is I have I'm a right handed cook, so I have my left hand that will be holding the onion, and I make what looks like a kind of crab or claw out of my left hand, and what happens, I basically protrude, protrude my knuckles further out than the tips of my fingers, so I make it impossible to cut the tips of my fingers with my left hand as I'm holding food, and I run the blade against my knuckles, and of course I don't bring

it up so much that it could cut a knuckle. I keep it down low on the board or on the food. So that's the best way to go. Make sure that the knuckles are protruding. And it's really that first joint on your finger, not the second joint so much, even though you can use that second joint as well to keep your blade square to the board. Practice cut, like you know, buy every every shop that you do, buy I don't know, four onions and makestock with them

or something like that. Four onions a week, and practice trying to bring on them. There'll be heaps of YouTube videos out there, but definitely practice and you'll be a proficient in no time. That's the knife tip. The other knife that I absolutely love again. I'm going to sound like I'm an advertisement for Victor Rocks, and I certainly have no affiliation with them, but they do the small serrated,

rounded tip powering knife, and this thing is unbelievable. Everybody should have one of these in their kitchen, Like every one of my kitchen has ten to twenty of these knives for all the stuff to use, whether they have one or not. It's just a really good utility knife. I even use it on the building site when I'm renovating. It's just an amazing knife. It's ten dollars or nine dollars on. Another tip to get really good at cooking the main

tep it doesn't even involve cooking. The number one step that I could give any person that wants to make better food is get good at choosing your food. Get good at knowing about food. Get good at knowing what food is sustainable or more sustainable. Sustainable is a dodgy word food. So the more you know about the ingredients and the better ingredients that you select, the better your food will be. That will be the biggest single factor in improving your cooking. It is our outweighs your ability

to become technically proficient at anything. One of my greatest skills as a cook is that I have the ability to select the best food.

the appearance of food. Sometimes things look great and they don't taste great, especially if you're talking about apples or stone fruit. But generally, find a green grosser that you trust and that consistently has good food. That would probably be the single easiest way to do it. Melbourne gain no affiliation, but I totally believe in the food that the small supermarket leaf sells. It's always good. It comes

from a lot of the same farms that supply Attica. Yes, you pay more for that level of food, but good food costs more to grow those farms are taken care of their workers generally and taking care of the environment as well, So that would be the number one thing that will probably only be learned through the difference between going and buying a supermarket tomato which never tastes good, never ever does it taste good to me, and buying a tomato and season from a small grosser that's maybe

never seen a core room before. That can be the difference. And those differences between those ingredients are earth shattering and anybody can identify them.

simple and very delicious. And we're cooking over huge charcoal rotchessaries which is heaps of fun. And even better than that, we have a dessert trally and incredibly talented team of patry chefs churning out amazing things, including a sponge, which I believe to be one of the best that I've ever seen. It took me three months to develop in lockdown and then online atka dot com dot au and on Instagram at ben Shuri at Attica Melbourne at Attica Summer Camp amazing.

from dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode is the wonderful Jennakoda, and thank you to Martin Imber my dad, who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.