British chef Martin Benn on finding fame in Australia and learning from Marco Pierre White
The founder of acclaimed Sydney restaurant Sepia was recently in Hong Kong cooking ‘four hands’ dinners with Richard Ekkebus at Amber at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental
How did you get into cooking? “I wanted to be a chef from a young age – I’m the black sheep because my family is in the building trade. At that time, there was no such thing as a celebrity chef, though I watched TV’s Keith Floyd. I enjoyed cooking at home with my mother, who was a really good cook, and I was already buying cookbooks at a young age.
I started working in a pub when I was 12, but I didn’t know how to start my career until I met the pub owner’s son, who was a chef. I remember watching him make lobster thermidor and wondered, ‘What is that?’ He saw I was interested and suggested I go up to the guest house he worked at, in Maidenhead [west of London], and learn to cook. It was a whole new world for me – it was masculine, noisy, sweaty, with lots of shouting; it was so exciting. I worked there during my school holidays.
“When I told my parents I wanted to become a chef, they said I couldn’t stay in Hastings [a town on the south coast on England], and that I’d have to go to London. I think they tried to scare me, but I thought, ‘Yeah, OK.’ At 17 I moved to London, where I did a two-year cookery course. I spent five years in the city.”
Kitchens are very different now than they were then. It was a lot more aggressive, like the quick or the dead – if you didn’t perform, you wouldn’t be there the next day
You worked for Marco Pierre White in London. What was that like? “I was working at The Criterion [then owned by White] at the time. It was good fun, hard work – you had to be quick. I learned discipline, to make sure that everything is the same all the time, thinking on your toes. It was big pressure for a 21-year-old. Kitchens are very different now than they were then. It was a lot more aggressive, like the quick or the dead – if you didn’t perform, you wouldn’t be there the next day. Before that I worked for Jean-Michel Lorain at Michelin-starred The Oak Room.”
Why did you move to Australia? “I had always wanted to go there. I applied for a visa and it took a year- and-a-half to come through. I had no idea what I was getting myself into because I had no idea about the cuisine. I had trained in European cuisine, which is rich food with heavy sauces, but Australian was more Asian-based.”
What did you do when you got to Sydney? “I tried to get a job at Rockpool, with Neil Perry, but I was overqualified. I applied to many places and never heard anything for eight months so I made pizzas at the InterContinental Sydney. Soon after, I got a job as sous chef at Forty One restaurant – the place to be in Sydney at the time.
“Dietmar Sawyere was doing pan-Asian cuisine – Malay, Singapore, a bit of Japanese, Thai. But I thought pan-Asian was too confusing and wanted to find something that’s distinctive rather than mixing flavours. Tetsuya [Wakuda] was doing something interesting, Japanese cuisine using Australian ingredients. I started working there around 1999, when he was really hot.”