6 minute read
No more cock-rock
Ben Shewry on the Instagram message that made him question everything, gender inequality in the industry and why Attica’s food and culture is the best it’s ever been. Here, a transcription of his interview at MAD Symposium in Copenhagen with journalist Lisa Abend.
I got a direct message from a very misguided young man, denigrating women in relation to a friend’s dish I had posted. I had never got a message like this before and I was really shocked by it. I know it’s nothing shocking to women. But for me to be confronted with this young man who thought I would be impressed by this message really made me question everything — my leadership, my community. Had I been doing enough publically?
Clearly, this guy had never heard of all the things we had been working towards at the restaurant. If he had, he would have never sent this horrible message. I sat on it for a week and thought about what it meant, I thought about shaming him and reposting it. Ultimately, I came to realise that it’s a much bigger issue and I didn’t feel addressing the individual proved anything.
So I posted that [screenshot on the right], and it was somewhat difficult to write. To be honest, I was so deeply ashamed by what he said that I broke down. It’s unacceptable on the deepest level to me and I wanted to express that — and this is the only way I knew how.
It’s very hard for a man to understand what it’s like to be a woman — it’s impossible, especially for a white man. It’s impossible for us to understand because we will never experience gender inequality. We have to talk about what’s happening and confront it. I think for men, they’re very scared of that.
I had a job for a year in Wellington which was an incredibly volatile environment. If you tried too hard to make your cooking better, someone older and bigger than you would want to physically harm you. I remember being chased in the kitchen and close to being beaten, but a friend who was one of the head chefs saved me.
The same person who wanted to beat me because I made a duck sauce properly was the same person who would have beaten a young woman in the kitchen had it not been for the same head chef who saved her as well. Sadly, that head chef passed last year … he took his own life. He was someone who shielded us from the horrible environment I endured for a year and a half where drug-taking was common. In fact, it was uncommon not to, and I was one of the only people who didn’t. But even more horrific was working from 7am till midnight with no breaks and dealing with the constant fear of trying too hard, otherwise someone would want to beat you for it.
I wasn’t such a good guy that first year at Attica. I was very insecure. I was a 27-yearold head chef who had no idea about how to behave. I couldn’t meet my own expectations, I couldn’t meet my own goals and there were just two of us in the kitchen — me and my best friend. I recall bollocking him for overcooking the fish. But it was me overcooking the fish, not him, because I hadn’t taught him properly. He’s such a good friend that we were able to get past that, but I live with the guilt of yelling at him like that.
I started to learn that performance was based on the way the team feels. When you’re unhappy in cooking, it’s hard to reach your potential. When something goes wrong during service, the automatic response is to rage. Nothing is getting better or fixing the problem for the customer. You need to create an environment of honesty. If you have a system of fear in the kitchen, as soon as that person makes a mistake, they will hide it. If you have a system of fairness and honesty, you implore them to come to you with the mistake and you can help fix it.
When I had the opportunity to buy Attica, I wanted to look at it as trying to be the best small business in Australia, not the best restaurant. I wanted to set a moral agenda from the beginning because I have a conscience and I can’t sleep if the culture is bad. There’s never a day that we don’t try to be better.
We hire people on attitude and heart, not generally on skills. It’s not easy to teach someone to be a good person; it’s easier to teach them how to make a sauce. I want them to be kind, have a positive attitude and treat people with respect. We’re a team of 40 and it’s critical to the culture of the restaurant it’s that way.
About six years ago, I felt there was a disconnect between front of house and the kitchen. They’re quite different jobs in the business but they’re of equal importance. I came up with the idea of staff speeches where someone is assigned to do a speech. The only real rule is that it has to be constructive. It can be something hard in your life, and we’ve heard conversations about suicide and mental health issues that sometimes leave you feeling deflated.
I hated feeling like I was a number in a business. I really felt like it stripped my identity a bit and no one likes to feel like they don’t count. I wanted to avoid that in our workplace, so I wanted to give every person the opportunity to stand up and say something about themselves.
The business operates best when it’s an even split of men and women. When there are too many men, I don’t like the feeling. Right now, there’s a 50/50 split exactly which feels good. We don’t employ people based on their gender, but we always want to have a good balance.
We have a management team that’s two women and two men. Early into my ownership, our operations manager Kylie [Staddon] came to me with a problem. A person in our team physically man-handled men and women. He threatened female members of staff and he intimidated our manager. It happened while I was on holiday and I learned of it the first day I was back. To cut a long story short, that was the last day he had at Attica. There’s no other thing to do. The behaviour was outrageous and goes against our culture. I can’t tolerate [it] and I didn’t care about the risk to my business. We needed the position filled and we didn’t have anyone, which led to Kylie pitching in and me being on the floor for six months. We were so scared we were going to lose a hat or a star and we came close because of what he did and the decision I made. If you don’t draw a line and say people are more important than a star or a hat, how can you look anyone in the eye?
I’d like to think any woman could come to me with a problem without fear, but I know that’s not the way it is in our society. It’s important to have women in senior management and empower them and allow them to make decisions — and that’s what happens at Attica. Kylie helps set the moral agenda and that’s been hugely influential to me as a man. I had an idea about another person not connected to the restaurant; someone [staff] can go to, kind of like a restaurant ombudsman. You could talk to them about the problem, and that person would hold the restaurant accountable if the right action wasn’t taken.
We are working at most 48 hours in the kitchen or less a week and front of house are working 45 hours or less across four days in the kitchen. Staff have three days off and the quality is better than ever. I need an elite 48 hours from staff, and then I need them to go and forget about work and concentrate on stuff that’s important to them. Have breakfast with your partner or whatever, just don’t be here.
At the start, we had to police it. I’m there first with Kylie, and we would see staff on camera coming in two hours before their shift. We had to go out there and say, ‘Go away, please — go have a coffee’. It was a really big cultural shift for staff because they had never worked like that. Everyone subscribes to doing the hours otherwise you’re not hardcore. What if you did less hours and you did them a lot better? I think there’s something in that.
The food is better than it was, but the culture, the environment and the atmosphere is the best of all time. It’s not like I’m sitting here saying we’re perfect, we’re affected by the same things, but the culture is excellent and people are genuinely happy.
MAD is a non-profit organisation that unites a global cooking community with a social conscience, a sense of curiosity and an appetite for change.
