On fire — Local Paddo

Lennox Hastie has been chef of the year, won national awards, been on the cover of magazines, has appeared on MasterChef and could quite reasonably be labelled one of Australia’s most recognisable culinary faces. But when a 47-minute documentary about his career surfaced on Netflix in September, something in his business changed, probably forever.

“I always knew it would have an effect but I thought it was going to be on an international level,” the Firedoor chef and owner says, with an almost rueful chuckle.

“But the immediate impact has been local. People who have not heard of the restaurant somehow after six years have finally found us. We have had so much press over the years but with this, and with people staying home a lot and watching a lot of Netflix over the past year, we have accessed a new category of customer. We’re booked out now for eight months to a year.”

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Such is the power of the documentary series Chef’s Table, a Netflix original series that takes in-depth looks at intriguing chefs from around the world, specifically their culinary inspiration and dedication to craft.

Hastie’s episode — which appeared on a four-part spin-off called Chef’s Table BBQ — was filmed during the NSW bushfires in the summer of 2020 in the weeks before the COVID pandemic broke. It was released at an extraordinarily fortuitous time, when viewers were trapped at home in lockdown or quasi-lockdown with nowhere to go and nothing to do but stream quality television.

“People will come up to me and say, ‘I have watched it eight times’,” Hastie says. “And their kids will get into it and their kids will want to come to the restaurant. The kids will be watching it every two weeks and then rewatch it.

“People are approaching me from around the world, and people from here who are in industries who might not have known about us are finding the story really impressive.”

If Hastie sounds bemused by the fuss, in some respects he should be. After an early career in some of Europe’s finest restaurants, including five years at Spain’s lauded Asador Etxebarri, he opened Firedoor in partnership with the Fink restaurant group, on Surry Hills’ Mary St, in 2015.

The premise of the restaurant is unique — every piece of food is cooked entirely over fire, with absolutely nothing cooked on gas or electricity. The result is a venue that is one of the most beguiling in Australia, if not the world, and that rare beast which impresses food critics and diners alike.

The fact that Hastie is a modest and thoroughly decent man, entirely disinclined to sing his own praises, might contribute to the fact that he seems rather surprised by the outpouring of affection for him and his restaurant brought about by Chef’s Table.

He says the process of filming the show was both deeply rewarding and very challenging, especially as the process was nearly cancelled on several occasions due to the bushfire threat. It did proceed, however, with the film crew flying in from Los Angeles for an intensive series of shoots that resulted in a postcard-like depiction of Sydney and Australia.

“I have done some filming before but this was two weeks at a very different kind of intensity, with back-to-back shoots,” Hastie says. “The attention to detail was incredible and then they went in for two months of editing for 47-minutes of TV. It was insane.”

The result is an incredibly beautiful and moving piece of taut television that tells Hastie’s journey from an awkward child growing up in the south of England to his heartbreaking falling out with his mentor, Victor Arguinzoniz, the maestro of Asador Etxebarri, and his eventual move to Sydney and search for a restaurant of his own.

The show was shot around Surry Hills, at Firedoor itself, at Carriageworks, in the Shire, in the NSW Southern Highlands, on the Hawkesbury River and even in far-north Queensland, where Hastie hunts for mud crab with an indigenous hunter and cooks on the beach. And there are sequences shot in the Basque region that feature Arguinzoniz, though he does not offer commentary.

Hastie agrees the popularity of the show has put extreme pressure on the restaurant, not only due to the intensity of the demand for bookings, but because it has raised customer expectations of the experience.

He has decided to hold back some bookings from next month so that regulars will have a better chance of securing a table. At that time the restaurant will move to a new system where a portion of bookings will be opened at the beginning of the month so people can book more closely to the date they want to dine.

“I always keep a few tables free, too, for our regulars,” he says.

Hastie laments that at the time when the restaurant is at the peak of its popularity, the staffing issues dogging the Australian hospitality industry are keeping his doors closed more than he would like, with a dinner service only able to be offered four nights a week.

“We’re not a big kitchen but I need three or four people and I could open again on Tuesday nights, which would not only bring value to the business but also get more people into Firedoor.”

For Hastie, though, the opportunities presented from Chef’s Table could last for years, especially when and if international borders reopen. He says he now constantly fields inquiries from around the world about his food, with his social media flooded with fan mail “and the occasional dick pick, but that’s what’s out there”.

“We now get so many requests from around the world, from Mexico, South America, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, it’s huge. And it’s really cool when people send you a picture of their grill set up, or what they’re cooking. It’s amazing that someone watched a show from the other side of the world and now they’re cooking lettuce on a barbecue.”

FIREDOOR

23-33 Mary St

firedoor.com.au