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[title]In typical Melbourne behaviour, the sun that’s blessed the city the entire week disappears on the day I head to Stokehouse. A chaotic wind tunnel blows me into the St Kilda restaurant, where I’ve come to chat to executive chef Jason Staudt and congratulate his team on winning the Time Out Legend Award for 2023.
The inclement weather turns out to be a lucky coincidence, my previously neat hair be damned. Staudt assures me we would have found it difficult to carve out a nook for the interview in the restaurant had it been the day before.
“We were rammed. But I like chaos,” he says with a smile. “It’s when I see clearly, you know?”
I’m reminded of an animal getting ready for the hunt, vision sharpened, senses heightened. An ex-snowboarder who once hit the slopes by day and cooked up a storm in kitchens by night, he’s a man who’s no stranger to adrenaline. But the analogy makes him laugh.
“I don’t know, it’s weird. Like, you can foreshadow mistakes happening and you can jump on it before it happens.”
In contrast to his alertness on the floor, he’s disarmingly laid-back in conversation with a light Canadian accent. Of working in the kitchen, he tells me he loves it.
“Different cultures. Different people. No two days are the same.”
After more than a decade of working as a head chef in established Sydney restaurants like Aria and Barangaroo House, jobs he describes as “intense”, I ask him why joining Stokehouse in 2019 seemed like the right next step.
“When I met Frank [the owner] and he was telling me about the Green Star Rating, and what they were going for, I was like, ‘yes!’ Because I was already pretty passionate about being sustainable. And so when he said we’re looking for someone to kind of champion it, I felt pretty excited. A seachange was on the cards.”
Stokehouse was recently granted a Five Star ‘Australian Excellence’ Green Star Design and As Built Rating. It’s a first for a fine-dining restaurant in the Southern Hemisphere and Staudt is visibly stoked they’ve achieved it.
“We kind of wrote the book to an extent. No, we don’t really buy chemicals. The e-water cleans everything, which is just iodized or electrified saltwater. And all of our oyster shells, any of our bivalves, get picked up weekly and inoculated. Then they get dropped back in the bay to create more reefs for more habitat.”
The restaurant has also partnered with Seafood Positive to launch their OneFishTwoFish program. For every fish Stokehouse buys, they put two back into the ocean. But that’s just the beginning of the restaurant’s sustainability initiatives.
The chefs are forbidden from using clingfilm, and then there’s also Bardee, Stokehouse’s world-first organic waste pick-up program.
“So our food waste gets taken to this factory and blended up,” explains Staudt. “And then it’s put into this room with one million black soldier flies. They break down the food, the larvae is fed to the fish farms and then the exoskeletons of the flies are dry-packaged up, made into compost and sold to Bunnings. You go to Bunnings and you can buy this thing called 'Superfly' fertiliser and it’s all the leftover exoskeletons of these flies. Feed it to your plants, and they’ll literally explode. There’s so much nutrients.”
This innovation is mind-blowing. It’s something Staudt masters even in his design of Stokehouse’s seafood-forward menu.
“Seafood can be sustainable,” shares Stuadt. “If you look at the triangle of the seafood pyramid, there’s the apex predators and then you have the feeders that feed up. So we try to have more of the bottom half on the menu than the top half on the menu.”
An example?
“We’ll always have calamari on the menu. In particular, southern calamari, because it’s one of the fastest growing species on the planet. It grows so fast that it’s actually quite sustainable. Plus shellfish, clams and oysters. Everyone needs to eat more oysters, they really do.”
Aside from sustainability wins, it’s been a huge year for Stokehouse, from hosting a high-profile Aston Martin red carpet event to having Barack and Michelle Obama dine at the restaurant in March.
Staudt remembers the presidential couple fondly, describing them as “the most wholesome people you’ve ever met”. But was he a bit sweaty about it?
“I don’t really get nervous because people are just eating. We’re not saving lives, we’re just creating good experiences. But there is a level of nervousness when it’s the Obamas. It was upstairs, they had the whole half of the room. It was a pretty special experience.”
In any case, he tells me they loved the food. The humble simplicity of dining is something Staudt returns to later in our conversation.
“The less we do, the more people like it. So less is more in so many ways. Just give good quality produce, no mucking around. Don’t try to be a hero. Just do it well. Just execute."
“No-one’s really focusing on execution that much anymore. They’re just trying to grab the next marketing gig or the next Instagram photo. I just feel like we should just calm down a bit. We’re just doing food and wine. You know, have some fun.”
Of course, that’s not possible unless you have fantastic produce.
“It’s everything,” agrees Staudt. “So, team first. Then produce is where I spend so much of my time – sourcing smaller producers, better producers. It’s not very hard to showcase amazing produce, they’ve done half the work for us. We just zhuzh it.”
Having dined at Stokehouse a month ago, I definitely picked up on the “team first” mentality. Detecting more of a family feel than a business, I want to know how much of that is natural or if it’s a culture he’s helped to create.
“I’d say fostering innovation and creativity, and a comfy place to work, is probably my first job. Because if I do that well, then they kind of do the right thing by me and the business, and then it just kind of trickles down.”
Everything seems to be going swimmingly for Stokehouse, but what’s next on the cards? Staudt doesn’t miss a beat in rattling off his goals, including more sustainability initiatives, better guest experiences, helping young people succeed as farmers through buying their produce, and more events to put Melbourne back on the map post-COVID.
“And then, the number one thing would probably be focusing on the next generation. Making sure I have a good impact on them. And creating new leaders in the industry. The training here is very good. But the generations coming through now want to be a part of something. They don’t just want to come in, punch a clock, go home. So it’s about allowing them to be a part of something.”
Well, it’s something special alright, and the reason why we’ve crowned Stokehouse our Legend of the Year. Restaurants may come and go in Melbourne’s fast-paced dining scene, but with a visionary like Jason Staudt at the helm, this institution is clearly here to stay. We can’t wait to see how it evolves.
Here’s to the next thirty, Stokehouse. Cheers!