Chef virtuoso Luke Mangan is a busy man. Looking spry despite having just flown into Perth from Tokyo, he counts off the next round of engagements on his fingers.
“Tonight I’ve got a dinner to cook at (Fraser’s executive chef) Chris Taylor’s other restaurant, Indiana Teahouse, for a corporate group. Then I fly to Adelaide tomorrow, where I’ve got another corporate dinner. Then it’s on to Melbourne for another corporate dinner. Then I fly to Brisbane for the same thing. Then I fly to Sydney, where I do a corporate lunch. So there’s a bit on this week,” he says with a wry smile.
And it’s this sort of globe-trotting lifestyle that Luke is keen to share with Australia’s up-and-coming chefs in this year’s Electrolux Appetite for Excellence Awards, a national competition that promotes and rewards emerging hospitality professionals. Along with last year’s Young Chef winner Matt Dempsey and Young Waiter runner-up Fleur Savage, Luke is currently in town to deliver an industry talk to Perth’s young hospitality hopefuls. And, as co-founder of the awards that he helped establish in 2005, it’s a subject close to his heart.
“I want to show these kids that there is a big future out there in cooking, and that you can travel the world. You can meet amazing people and eat different things. It’s about encouraging them in that and getting awareness from this award. We’re getting lots of kids out of Sydney and Melbourne entering the awards. But there are great young chefs here in WA as well, so we need to get that awareness out here too.”
But Luke is quick to point out it’s not all foie gras and frequent flyer miles.
“I didn’t enjoy my apprenticeship. It was all peeling potatoes and washing dishes. But the message is, is that although I have been lucky and reasonably successful, you have to stick at it. I came back from London and three restaurants in a row that I worked in all closed down. They all went broke. So you’ve got to be persistent. And that’s what we’re trying to tell the kids, that it’s not just an overnight thing. You’ve got to work hard to get that luck and be good at what you do.”
Luke practices what he preaches. At fifteen years old he was kicked out of school and went on to chase, and secure, an apprenticeship at the legendary Two Faces in Melbourne. After completing his training, he looked to England and began to enquire after employment at three-Michelin starred restaurant The Waterside Inn.
“I was told there was a two year waiting list,” he laughs. “I thought ‘stuff that’ and went over to London anyway. When I fronted up, I was told the same thing. So I offered to work for free for a month, on the proviso that if they liked me, they’d give me a job. And they said ‘can you start in two weeks?’”
It is this sort of dogged determination that has paid off. Luke is now an international culinary force, with restaurants in Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo and San Francisco, and on P&O. He has written four cookbooks, launched a product range and has been a personal caterer to everyone from Sir Richard Branson to Danish royalty. Perseverance is a trait he’s keen to foster, along with a healthy dose of reality.
“You get young chefs coming to us who say ‘I want to be a chef. I want to write a cookbook and I want to be on TV’. But they don’t realise that, well, I started cooking when I was 15 and I’m now 39. It’s probably only been in the last ten years that I’ve developed as a restaurant person and a chef and got recognition for it. Then they actually find out the work is too hard and throw it in. I mean, the drop-out rate for apprentices before they finish their apprenticeship is over 50%, so that’s not a good sign for the future.
“I think with this award, what we’re trying to do is encourage the people who have done the apprenticeship and give them opportunities they can’t otherwise get. Because there’s no awards program like this in the country. The winner of this award gets the opportunity to go cook in Venice in the San Pellegrino cook-off against chefs from around the world. We had a young girl from Adelaide who won our award a few years ago. She then went to Venice and won. I mean, she beat Michellin-starred chefs. We would like to see more applicants from Western Australia come through because we know there are so many great restaurants and so much great produce here.”
Applications for the Electrolux Appetite for Excellence Awards can be found at http://www.appetiteforexcellence.com/ .
Link to article in Fresh, The West Australian, February 2010
