Brewing at Cradle Mountain

It was time to get back to what I know!

After having a crack at tree planting and getting this strange itch every night around service time, I knew I had to get some sorta plan together or I was gonna end up dead, in jail or be bestowed with some kinda addiction that grips so many chefs.

We become what we surround ourselves with, like it or not, and I was riddled with flees. More on the personal side than the work side at the time, but anyways.

Ain’t nothing wrong with playing hard, yet burning the candle both ends without a safety net in life will take anybody to the dark side and I had seen to much of that shit at the ripe young age of 23!

Shutting out the indulgences that hospitality has to offer needed to happen aswell and if people were gonna hate me for it, then fuck them, I was outta there. A good work life needs a good home life for anyone to be able to hit their straps!

The head chef up on Cradle Mountain when I first got up there nearly blinded me with the gleam as the sun hit his jacket when he rolled outta the kitchen to introduce himself. “G’day, I’m Andy” he said.

After a bit of a tour and a run down on the operations, he decided to start me the following week. People had warned me about big hotels and the political drama that come with them, yet I didn’t care, work ethic would get me through any drama that presented itself.

Bistro bitch on weekdays and breakfast buffet on weekends was what he promised and for the first time in my career, that is exactly what I ended up doing!

Going from living the party life to near complete isolation was hard work, but Andy Mcnab and Command & Conquer got me through in the beginning!

There were kinda two main crews, breaky and dinner time. In nearly any kitchen I’ve ever worked in there is this kinda us versus them thing that goes on between the breaky chefs and the night chefs!

There is an expectation from the night crew that the breaky guys will do their prep. This usualy happens when your slow, yet when it is busy over breaky and shit doesn’t get done for the dinner crew, things are always said. Its definatly a love hate relationship between the two crews, as your grill chef sure as hell dont want to be doing poached eggs in the morning. Nothing ever gets too nasty, but the divide is always there! Best look after your own miz has always worked well for me!

After a fair few times noticing Andy not getting a skerrick of splashback on his attire, we started wondering how he got away with it! We were pigs for the most part, Amy and I, yet Andy always caped up with a waist apron and somehow never got dirty! I have always felt at home in a full butchers bib apron myself, the blue units with the white strips! They’ve got a certain look of professionalism about em, plus they hide my sloppiness well!

“Did Andy really do any work, or was he a magician” was what we wondered on too many occasions.

Sure enough though, we would find out. Big Damo had called in sick one day after his RDOs and the hot buffet prep was baron! Andy was gonna have to pull a buffet out of his arse in about 6 hours and he was sure AF gonna get messy, there was no way around it and for some reason, we couldn’t wait!

Yet true to form, after putting up one of the best buffets I think I ever seen up on the mountain, he had one distinct spot of napoli on his chest, that was it!

I ended up hitting him up and actually asking him how on earth he does it! I worked hard, put in 110% every day, yet I was nowhere near where I needed to be!

“Find a good chef, get some of his books and study him! Work out how he did it and that will get you started”. That right there was some of the best advice I have ever received.

I ended up coming across this book called White Heat, by some dude called Marco Pierre White, yet as much as I studied his books and stuff, it wasn’t really what was just in the books, it was what you applied to your job from the books, day in and day out, with someone that could do it that made it such good advice!

Anyone can read a book or watch a TV show, but it’s a lot harder to actually get good at something if your not actually doing it every day!

I’m assuming most people have had those kind of epiphany moments before. You may not always pick up on it at the time, yet there are truly certain moments in good environments that set you up in ways that change your life for the better!

Its the same thing as in bad environments, yet things go bad as opposed to going well for you. Cradle mountain at that time for what I needed in life was perfect.

I strict work place with hard but fair consequences if you got out of line! Good work mates that you bonded with as you lived together, plus a true level of proffessionalism and pride by those that lead the trenches and all those that followed! If you didn’t, you didn’t last long.

What always helps is those around you that demand something from you as a person, yet deliver themselves in a manner that is truly a benchmark! In work and life.

If you wanna get happy and go somewhere, go and get around those that are already doing what you feel the need to do, then you can watch the flowers blossom, or the trees rot.