Self-belief, hard yakka are the secrets of success, Rockpool's Perry says

Chef Neil Perry in one of his seven restaurants

A PERFECT storm of stuff-ups was pushing the blood hot and fast through his veins. A wrong order. Key ingredients depleted. Dockets flying like confetti and something had spilt near the door. The new kitchen was a cauldron of chopping, sweating, stirring, smoking, 50-degree heat. A tray clattered to the floor and Neil Perry's face burned crimson. It was then that he started to holler. "He yelled at me, which he's never done before," says his daughter, Josephine, who was working front-of-house. He yelled at the prep cook, the sous chef, the dishwashers. "He was just grabbing everyone and yelling at them. It's the first time I've ever seen him really lose his Zen."

On a scale of 1 to Gordon Ramsay, the outburst was middling. But the short, sharp shock of it surprised even the Zen master himself. While many famous chefs shout and pout and throw tantrums on TV, Perry - the engine behind seven top-shelf restaurants, overseer of 600 staff, cookbook author, trusted culinary adviser to James Packer and Qantas - has tended to go about his business calmly. And he'd opened plenty of restaurants before. Josephine, at just 19, had been through the furnace with him for many of them. This was different, though. This was the rebirthing of Rockpool, Perry's landmark restaurant in Sydney's The Rocks that has, since 1989, marked the apotheosis of upscale dining in Australia. There were bound to be some labour pains.

"Oh man, to be honest, I opened the restaurant a week too early," Perry, 56, says now, on a break before lunchtime service at Rockpool's new home in the baronial Burns Philp building on Bridge Street in the city's heart. It's a spectacular space. Where the original, 24-year-old Rockpool on George was light, white and subtly luxe, the new dining room, with its towering black columns, dark timber hues and soaring pressed-metal ceiling the colour of squid-ink, is full of drama and secrets. It's the perfect backdrop for the jet-hopping beau monde that Rockpool attracts, and a showcase for Perry's vaulting ambition.

"I probably have always been really good at saying I could do something I wasn't really ready to do, my whole life," he continues. "So I've never lacked confidence, I suppose. To accelerate through life, you've really got to believe you can be in the place that's further forward than you are now. Then you've got to work really hard."

Hard yakka saw this big-dreaming son of a butcher beat the notoriously long odds to grow his restaurant empire over a rollercoaster three decades; to become the chef many critics regard as having introduced the notion of a modern Australian cuisine. Hard work (and the kismet of right-place-right-time during the Sydney Olympics) dug him out of a $2 million hole in 2000 when he was forced to close restaurants left, right and centre and nearly put the entire business into liquidation.

And it was hard work pulling it all together for the opening night of the new Rockpool. Perry had committed to hosting 100 guests of Qantas at the new premises on November 12, 2013, three days after the final service at Rockpool on George. No time for sentimentality, then. Doors shut there. Pack up nearly a quarter-century's worth of gear. Haul heavy equipment in the rain. Install a new kitchen, wire it up and, voila, doors open here. Except that, hours before the heavy timber doors were to admit expectant fine-diners, the kitchen at Bridge Street was still not ready. Food was being prepped at the old George Street restaurant and shuttled across in moving vans. Worse: Perry returned from an inescapable prior appointment with minutes to spare to find a fire truck parked outside the restaurant. "I said, 'Oh God, I hope that's not us' and it was us," he says. A sprinkler had been installed too close to the combi oven and the kitchen was in disarray. Water everywhere. Head chef Phil Wood, normally a happy-go-lucky soul, was nearing meltdown. But, says Perry, "we were lucky because we only lost one tray of bread and a date tart".

Out front 100 guests, including Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, were happily inhaling the intense and exotic flavours on the plates before them. Wait staff, starched into crisp new uniforms, worked the room like they'd personally held the mortgage on it for years. "They all know how it should be," says Perry smoothly. Glide like a swan, paddle like a maniac.

That night, front of house, Perry was beaming, adrenalised, flying. He gave an emotional speech about survival, the power of passion, and what it takes to stay on top in the restaurant game for so long. But the move had taken its toll.

Five weeks on, the seemingly indefatigable industry veteran looks dog-tired. It's not just the speckling of grey in his trademark ponytail; a haze of fatigue has settled around his slumped shoulders and his face is a road map of punishment. He's been doing doubles - lunch and dinner - six days a week since opening and, by his own admission, he's "too old for standing on my feet 18 hours a day".

"This has been the hardest opening of all of them," daughter Josephine says. "There's a lot riding on this; everyone's already got a preconceived idea of this restaurant and to keep it at this level, that's quite stressful. You can tell by the look on his face that Dad's exhausted. Poor thing hasn't seen his family."

Josephine Perry has all the blonde, bubbly warmth of a Preston Sturges screwball comedienne, without the screwiness. She is Perry's daughter from his second marriage, to former model agent Adele Seagar, and has been working at her father's elbow since childhood. "She's awesome," he says proudly, looking over to the hostess station where she's answering phones, smoothly rejigging reservations for the top end of town. "She's incredibly headstrong so I see a lot of me in her." She's also "personable" and "sensible" and has a sixth sense for what diners need before they need it. To Perry, she's the future. Plans are afoot, whispers at this stage, for a joint venture, a cross-generational alliance on a casual, younger-skewed eatery. Perhaps Korean BBQ. Maybe Mexican. "Not something people would expect Neil Perry to do," Josephine confides later. "Maybe shock people; throw a spanner in the works."

JP, as she's known, was folding napkins at the original Rockpool when she was five and she worked weekend shifts at her father's Sichuan-accented Spice Temple, in Sydney, the way other teenagers labour at McDonald's. She left school midway through Year 11 to work full-time with her father. They've since criss-crossed the country together opening, in succession, another Spice Temple and a bar, The Waiting Room, in Melbourne's Crown Casino and Entertainment Complex; the grand and gilded western outpost of Rockpool Bar & Grill in Perth; then back to Melbourne to open the sophisticated Italian, Rosetta Ristorante, also at Crown.

"It's been a really lovely father-daughter bonding experience," Perry says. "An opening team has this thing together - it's like blood, sweat and tears that no one else can ever feel." It's also a dream come true for Perry, who bought The Great Chefs of France when he was the age Josephine is now and pictured for himself a life as a Great Chef passing the ladle down through generations. That 1978 tome, dog-eared and sauce-splattered as all good cookbooks should be, still sits among the 2500-odd cookbooks that line the shelves at the Rose Bay home he shares with his third wife, Samantha, and their two daughters.

Perry can see seven-year-old Indy following him into the business - she won't eat fruit, but "abalone, lobster, chilli, everything else" yes please - whereas Macy, nine, has yet to discover her inner foodie; a diet of chicken schnitzel and chocolate cake would keep her happy as a clam. "My step-mum cooks separate dinners," Josephine laughs, "and Indy chases Macy around the house with her tuna pasta and Macy gets disgusted and Indy thinks it's hilarious." This is a cosily familiar tableau seemingly at odds with the public face of a culinary luminary: the virtuosic cooking displays, the offhand hubris, the high-living, hard-charging Chefapalooza of an oft-fetishised vocation.

But off-duty, Perry is a different story. He's actually very shy, says Josephine. A homebody. That man doing a late-night raid on the fridge for frozen Kit-Kats? That's Perry. ("You've got to put them in the freezer! It's next level. Next level!") The guy queuing for lunch with his daughter at Happy Chef in a brightly lit Chinatown food court and ordering No. 37 off the picture board? Perry. And while the uber-chef still jets around the world sampling breaded ox testicles in Copenhagen and pigeon in Phuket, bar-hopping and late nights have given way to simple pasta dishes and superb wine on the balcony of his harbourside home. His wife Samantha cooks - "she's really good" - but if friends come over he'll metaphorically don the toque "because they kind of expect it, I guess". Only star chef mates like Guillaume Brahimi are brave enough to invite him to dinner. "People are paranoid when they really don't need to be at all," Perry says. "I'm just so happy to be sitting down and eating."

Handed-down wisdom and global eating adventures to illuminate its principles are the pillars of Perry's belief system. His father Les introduced him to the joy of food and led him to understand that Mother Nature is the true artist. "He was a butcher and a fisherman and a gardener and he really taught me about the seasons and that the ingredient is king," Perry says. "My whole food philosophy is just an extension of that."

Perry grew up eating oysters off the rocks at Bald Face Point in Blakehurst, southern Sydney, the youngest of seven children from a blended family. His father later moved them west to Rooty Hill where he became proprietor of a meatworks. The young Perry mixed with the southern European and Middle Eastern men who worked in the boning room, as well as his father's many Chinese and Indian friends. "We'd always be eating really interesting things. I didn't even realise when I was eating brains and tripe that that's not what normal kids ate," Perry says. The family's frequent trips into the Sydney CBD to eat in Chinatown - "it was so tiny back then, in the '60s" - began Perry's love affair with Asian flavours. (A "mindblowing" trip through the aromatic street markets of Thailand with Australian Michelin-starred chef David Thompson would later reinforce it.)

Perry's three brothers are butchers but he bucked the trend. After flirting briefly with hairdressing - the famous ponytail first appeared in Year 10 at Methodist Newington College and he left school rather than comply with an order to chop it - Perry started as assistant manager at the newly opened Sails at McMahon's Point when he was 18. "I loved being part of the whole restaurant experience - doing the wages, cleaning the toilets, ordering the wine, buying the fish, talking to the chefs, working with the customers. I didn't head into the kitchen until I was 25."

In 1982, he answered an ad and became head chef at Judy and Michael McMahon's Barrenjoey House, on Sydney's northern beaches. Four years later he opened Blue Water Grill at the northern end of Bondi, sending the food cognoscenti into a lather and changing the course of dining in Australia with a casual synthesis of char-grilled seafood, chilli sauce and a world-beating view. Perry would later pay the price for not heeding an early lesson that he learnt here: location, location, location.

In partnership with his cousin Trish Richards, still the business brain behind the group, he opened Rockpool in February 1989 at a then-unheard-of cost of $1.8 million. It was a sensation and, buoyed by his new high profile, Perry went into overdrive. During the 1990s, Perry ventures sprang up like wild morels: Wockpool and Star Grill at Darling Harbour, the MCA Cafe in the Rocks, a couple of noodle bars, Bistro Mars. At one point his restaurants employed 400 people and were turning over $20 million.

"Sometimes you think 'if you build it they will come' and you get caught up in your own fervour or belief that what you're doing is the centre of the universe," he says. But it wasn't and they didn't. After a soul-searching coffee together at the MCA overlooking a near-empty Circular Quay as the century turned, he and Richards decided to strip the empire back to the bare bones of the mothership, Rockpool. "We took a bloodbath with a couple-of-million-dollar loss," he says. "But we just shrunk our life down." With revenue from a contract with Qantas to feed its first-class passengers and the bonus prize of extra Olympics-driven traffic, they picked themselves up off the floor.

Six years later, Perry was approached by James Packer's lieutenant John Alexander, now executive deputy chairman of Crown Resorts Ltd, to expand the Rockpool brand to Melbourne. With the aid of a new financial backer, American IT billionaire David Doyle, he opened Rockpool Bar & Grill at Crown Casino. In 2009, in the wake of the crippling GFC, Perry and partners rolled the dice again, spending a reported $35 million on putting Rockpool Bar & Grill into a gorgeous green-marbled, art deco building in Sydney city (with Spice Temple in the opium den-inspired basement). It is now arguably the country's top power-dining palace. Packer, one of the chef's many prominent friends, last year appointed Perry and Brahimi as Crown's culinary directors. "John Alexander deserves credit for [originally] bringing Neil to Crown," Packer says. "I'm so grateful to both Neil and John for that, as I personally love all Neil's restaurants." Perry hopes to continue the association at Packer's planned Barangaroo development.

"I learnt the hard way it's as much about what the site brings to the experience as what you bring," Perry says. "So you can cook the best food in the world and have great service and if the restaurant itself doesn't really offer anything or it's not in the right location, it's just not going to happen. If you look at my seven restaurants now, they're all something special."

Soft 1930s-era jazz seeps through the speakers as the new Rockpool ramps up for weekday lunch. Perry is struggling to convey the true horror that was the steakhouse that previously occupied the space he and his long-time collaborator, architect Grant Cheyne, spent four months transforming. He sputters about cherry-red timber, fleur-de-lis carpet and faux lights. The now breathtakingly beautiful room would have been finished earlier but for a weeks-long stand-off with the City of Sydney's heritage department over the off-white pressed-tin ceiling. Perry and Cheyne wanted to paint it black; council said no. The fact that council capitulated is testament both to Perry's terrier tenacity and his obsession with detail. "If it had a white ceiling and white columns this would be half the room it is," he says, looking skyward.

Perry believes in fine-dining, classic and pure, and in trumpeting the flavours of our Asian neighbours in a refined context. "People say to me, 'what is Australian food?' and I say the one thing we do better than anybody is integrate Asian flavours because we grow the produce here and we have so many Asian people here, and we're able to taste authentic Asian food in our own cities," he says. "It's an incredibly exciting place to cook and live, Australia, because of that very Asianisation."

Perry is full of praise for past and present co-workers and associates, singling out as his mentors former Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon, the late financier David Coe and former Qantas boss James Strong, as well as his long-term business partner, Trish. The chef/restaurateur's own monstrous work ethic means he finds laurel-resting unseemly. "We have only one way to go unless we really push ourselves and that's down," he says. "And the only way we stay focused and keep moving ahead is if I'm enthusiastic. I'm the figurehead of a large company now and, for my 600 staff, if they don't see me, feel me, touch me, they don't see where the dream is."

Hence, he's been traversing the country, firing up the troops, diligent men and women who, across seven restaurants, turn out 20,000 meals a week. "We're always looking at how can we source things better, how can we cook them better, and that requires me to be working continually with the managers, the chefs, the guys in the kitchen," Perry says. "If I run out of energy, the group runs out of energy. That's one of the things that gets me up every day - realising that [the staff] look at me and they say, 'God, he's asking the earth of me. What's he doing?'"

Source:  the australian - 25 January 2014