9 minute read
PROFILE: DYLAN CASHMAN
Dylan Cashman
The chef is encouraging diners to think twice about where their food comes from.
WORDS Aristine Dobson
PHOTOGRAPHY Luisa Brimble
IT’S NOT OFTEN you go to a restaurant and find out who is providing the food on the table before the plates arrive, but that’s exactly what happens at The Blue Door in Sydney. Guests are given a menu that lists the farms the ingredients are sourced from, emphasising provenance as much as produce. Sustainability is at the forefront of the pocket-sized Surry Hills venue that’s the brainchild of Dylan Cashman, who opened The Blue Door in late 2021.
The head chef and owner is known for his head-to-tail approach to cooking, a holistic sentiment that is not only seen on the menu, but exercised during day-to-day operations. Sustainability has long been a buzzword in the industry, but Cashman is well and truly practising what he preaches. The chef talks to Hospitality about his formative years in the kitchen, collaborating with New South Wales farmers and creating dishes that bring a whole new meaning to the phrase “locally sourced.”
Dylan Cashman
Dylan Cashman first stepped foot in a professional kitchen in high school when he worked for a local restaurant in his hometown of Crescent Head. “I was a kitchenhand at The Curl and I used to work at Red Rooster as well,” he says.
Becoming a career chef wasn’t on the cards for Cashman at the time, who moved to Lismore to study human movement science at university. He switched cooking for cocktails and worked as a bartender while studying at uni. “I also helped out a mate who ran one of the kitchens at a bar,” says Cashman. “Once I finished my degree, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do anything with that’.”
Making a more permanent move into the kitchen was a natural step, and it wasn’t long before Cashman started his apprenticeship at Bangalow Dining Room. “I started working at Bangalow and then went to Fins and went back and forth between [the two] and a few places around Sydney,” says the chef, who also picked up shifts at Sean’s Panorama and Cottage Point Inn.
Cashman fast developed a network within the industry, which would go on to broaden beyond Australia to Europe. “I went to Germany for 16 months and worked over there at a few different places from a pizza to a hamburger store,” he says. “Then I came back and worked at Paper Daisy with Ben [Devlin].”
A reappearance at Fins led to a head chef role where he would learn from and work closely with Owner Steven Snow. “I worked there overall for more than four and a half years, and I was around when they needed a head chef,” says Cashman. “I’ve known Snowy for 15 years now (I cooked at his wedding), and everybody always stayed in touch.”
Cashman opened the first iteration of The Blue Door (The Blue Door on 5th) in Palm Beach on the Gold Coast. At the time, the chef was cooking for a different market of diners. “It was super producerfocused, but it was a different concept,” he says. “Obviously, the Gold Coast is a different beast; people didn’t really understand it so much.”
Cashman closed the venue due to leasing issues, but quickly bounced back and forged ahead. “I helped open a few different places up in Brisbane for a year and then I went back to Europe and worked at a three Michelin star in Germany called Vendôme,” says the chef.
Working in top-tier restaurants taught Cashman a valuable lesson about the importance of seasonal produce. “One of the biggest things I learned is what not to do,” he says. “You learn a lot of things you don’t like from places. What you’re doing now is what you liked the most. But at three Michelin stars in Europe, you see everything that’s wrong with restaurants, like spending four days trying to figure out how to make a tomato taste like a tomato when they are just not in season.”
The experience would go on to become a defining pillar of Cashman’s cooking style, with the chef recalling wise words from a friend. “Snowy once said to me, ‘If you buy the best, it takes a lot of effort to stuff it up’.”
The ethos is at the core of The Blue Door, which Cashman opened in Surry Hills late last year. While it still bears some similarities to its Gold Coast predecessor, the concept is firmly centered on provenance, with almost all ingredients sourced from farms located within state borders. “[The Blue Door on 5th] was based on the same principles, but this one is a little more refined and pretty much everything is from New South Wales,” says Cashman.
When opening the new venue, the decision was also made to scrap traditional à la carte dining. Instead, the chef has taken a more fluid approach to the experience. “We don’t have a menu per se, all seven courses change every single week,” says Cashman. “Our style is very reactive. We try to do the best we can with what we have and reconnect people to why we have it and why we are doing it.”
The ever-changing offering has given the kitchen more flexibility and ensures nothing goes to waste. “A tasting menu is so much more flexible,” says Cashman. “Some weeks, we’ll change one of the courses every day depending on how we’re working through the whole animal in the most appropriate way rather than being locked into pork belly. We do pork belly for one day and then we change it to shoulder with a different garnish the next.”
The use of whole animals is just one sustainable practice that has led to the creation of memorable dishes. Cuts such as tail and chuck along with bone marrow were core components of a beef course that championed the farm the cow came from. “When we were finishing off our half cow from Gundooee Organic Pasture, the beef course had beef marmalade (tail and chuck that we braise down), bone marrow sauce and eye fillet,” says Cashman. “We used everything that was left after the ageing process in the one dish.”
Gundooee beef was also used in another course that was more relaxed in style. “We did a Wagyu cheeseburger tartare with Gundooee beef, sauce with cheddar from Port Macquarie and potato crisps,” says Cashman. “People went nuts for it. It sort of sums us up because we don’t want to be known as fine dining, it’s ‘fun dining’.”
Evidently, each dish is determined by the farmers and the produce that’s available. “We cook the opposite to how everybody else does; we sort of work backwards,” says Cashman. “We work directly with the farmers, and we only work with farmers who we know.”
The Blue Door cooks with ingredients from farms the team has personally visited, with the entire staff brought along for field trips from the restaurant manager to back of house. “You can really see the difference, especially with front of house, when somebody has been there and they understand what the farmer is doing,” says Cashman. “They have a connection, so it’s easier for them to [explain a dish] to customers.”
The chef is all about educating diners as well as serving them, which means there’s a lot more served at the table besides the food. “It just makes sense you should want to know where your food comes from,” says the chef. “No one does it, and I don’t understand why people don’t do it. Everybody wants traceability with everything else, but they seem to turn a blind eye for restaurant dining.”
The Blue Door is only open four days a week and sustainable rostering has created good work–life balance for staff. Running a smaller restaurant also means the team can focus more on execution when they are in the kitchen or on the floor. “I think the future of our industry is small restaurants; the time of the 300-seat fine diner is gone because the workforce just isn’t there,” says Cashman. “We seat 36 people a night and do seven courses with two chefs who make every single thing in-house and it doesn’t kill [us].” The chef hopes The Blue Door can set a precedent for guests and usher in a different way of thinking. “It makes people see that they can buy produce and support the farms to do more, which sets a new standard,” he says. “Maybe they’re a bit more conscious about where they purchase big products from … it can help create a better environment and a more sustainable industry.”
For now, Cashman is content with the room for a spin-off concept later down the track. “I’d rather stick to what we’re doing and do our very best,” says Cashman. “The bigger thing would be starting to use more whole animals and giving other chefs access to them, but that’s a while away.”
The Blue Door’s “produce is king and always will be” approach has been a gamechanger in the local dining landscape, with the restaurant firmly focused on relaying the stories behind the ingredients it uses. “For us, it’s more important to tell them why they are eating what they are eating and why we’ve chosen to use that farm as opposed to what the dish is,” says Cashman. “The dish is supplementary.”
-Cashman has made apricot chicken with Nimbin Valley brown rice
-95 per cent of the wine program is from New South Wales
-The restaurant uses fish from Chris Bolton
-Gundooee was the first certified organic Wagyu beef producer in Australia
