Lyndey Milan’s smoked salmon souffles

Over the past six years, Sixpenny, found on a humble street corner in the inner-west suburb of Stanmore, has become one of Sydney’s favourite restaurants, and for good reason. The food, served as a six- or eight-course menu, is exquisite, the wine list a delight and the sunshine that streams in the windows on a Sunday afternoon is entirely ethereal. It is a beautiful place to dine. The fact it’s named after sixpenny restaurants, small diners that populated Australian cities in the gold rush era of the late 1800s, where you could get a ‘square meal’ for just sixpence, speaks volumes about its identity. The title was the perfect middle ground for co-founders and chefs, Daniel Puskas and James Parry; it was not as simple as the fourpenny restaurant, not as fancy (or expensive) as their ‘posh cousins’, the shilling restaurant.  Since James’ departure two years ago, Daniel has headed up the kitchen (and run the restaurant) alone. Moulded by many years of experiences and friendships, as most creatives are, he has carved out his own culinary niche. A very successful niche. He was awarded the 2018 Good Food Guide’s Chef of the Year, with the restaurant consistently praised for its modern simplicity. “Over the years I have learnt I want to keep it simple but elegant,” says Daniel of his cooking and plating. “I don’t think it has to look a particular way, it just has to taste delicious. Some people eat with their eyes, but people who really taste the food, will see beyond it.” Life lessons For most successful chefs, it is the time at someone else’s apron strings that creates their style. For Daniel, it was discovering what he didn’t want that taught him valuable lessons. It was an early start in hotel restaurants and function rooms that gave him the impetus to seek out something different, and so, in 2000, he bought a copy of the Good Food Guide, found the best restaurant on the list and applied for a job. The restaurant was Tetsuya’s.  At this revered hot bed of Australian talent, Daniel not only worked under the inimitable Tetsuya Wakuda, but also Martin Benn, who was head chef at the time before going off to open the amazing Sepia, Dave Pegrum as sous chef, and a veritable line-up of Australia’s best talents toiling away as chef de parties and apprentices. He had landed well.  “There was a great bunch of people in the kitchen and on the floor” recalls Dan. “Tets was always in and out of the kitchen. He brought an energy. ‘Taste, taste, taste’ was his mantra and that’s stuck with me.  “But in the end, it was about working in a fine dining restaurant. With so many people you were not doing a magnitude of jobs, rather a large quantity of small jobs.” New world views Like many chefs of his generation, Daniel chose London to expand his culinary horizons. However, the combination of  long hours and long drinking sessions, curtailed any real creative stimulation. Rather, it was time spent in Spain, Italy and Jerusalem that gave Dan food awakening moments. Living in Jerusalem for five months was a change of pace. He started to learn Hebrew and would practise while bartering in the souk and buying his groceries for dinner.  Making his way back to Sydney, he found himself in another highly acclaimed kitchen, Marque. While learning from another incredible line up of chefs, he also mastered how to cook in a tiny kitchen,  work in a smaller team and multi-task. While at Marque, he won the prestigious Josephine Pignolet Award, which provides one young chef each year the financial support to travel. Daniel took off again. This time to America, and into the kitchens of cutting-edge restaurants WD50 and Alinea. Again, an awakening. “I learnt a lot of how I didn’t want to cook,” says Dan of his journey. “I thought I needed to learn all the modern techniques. In fact, it taught me that I didn’t want too much of that in my kitchen.” An Australian identity Back home, Daniel teamed up with James Parry for the first time at Oscillate Wildly in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was another growth moment. “James’s training had been at Bird Cow Fish and Billy Kwong. He had a very different approach to cooking,” says Dan.  “He had the skills to make food delicious, where I was trained on how to work in a kitchen. I started to feel I had so much more to learn, again. But I think he found that balance in me, too. So we decided to create something together and Sixpenny was born.”   With this delightful suburban restaurant, Dan has carved out his own identity in the heart of Australia’s culinary landscape. It is somewhat to be expected, given his stunning pedigree. Although he calmly tempers that fact. “It’s about relationships, the people, not the resume,” he says. “We’re only a small restaurant, but we all have big dreams.”  A bit like those folk who ate at the original sixpennys all those years ago.

As far as chefs go, Tobie Puttock is far from being on the list that needs to look at his health. He’s always been fairly lean and away from the kitchen is pretty active. Admittedly, over the past years he noticed a slight spreading around his middle, but it didn’t worry him too much. What did motivate him to make a change in his life was love. His wife, Georgia, wanted to get fit, not that she was overweight, but, as Tobie says, “she wanted to achieve a body image that she was happy with.” She hit the gym, was working with a trainer and getting really good results, but then she plateaued. No matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t get over this hump. A meeting with nutritionist Donna Ashton was the key to the change. “She asked Georgia what her diet was,” says Tobie. “When she replied that her husband was a chef, Donna suggested that I go in and have a chat. “I was a bit apprehensive because I thought what we were eating was healthy food. However, Donna showed me that what I thought was healthy and what was needed for weight loss, were two different things. My idea of health food – things like quinoa salad – was heath food, but it was not ‘weight loss food’.” After reading a pile of recipe books penned by dieticians, Tobie realised that while the recipes might be great for weight loss, they were pretty bland and tasteless. So he set himself a personal challenge to create healthy dishes that also taste great. It was a process that reawakened the chef inside him, found him a publishing deal and led to a whole new lifestyle. Sitting down with Donna to devise a weight-loss plan for Georgia, Tobie created three lists – foods that you can’t eat ever, foods you can eat sometimes and foods you can eat as much of as you want. “I started cooking some dishes and, as you do these days, I put a picture of them up on social media. I got a call from Julie Gibbs from Penguin who said, ‘What the hell are you cooking here? I’ve not seen you do this before because you normally do Italian food’ Then she said, ‘Let’s do a book’. Then the fun really started.” A new horizon Tobie had been a chef for almost two decades and had graduated to the point of being a restaurateur. But the hassle of running a business coupled with the pressure of managing people had quashed his creativity in the kitchen. Taking a hiatus from the restaurant game and working on this project gave him back his culinary mojo and opened up doors he’d never considered walking through. “I realised I didn’t have to cook Italian food anymore, I could do whatever I wanted,” says Tobie. “It really took a while to get my head around trying to make things taste good without using heaps of butter and olive oil and without the deep fryer. I haven’t reinvented the wheel, but for me personally, it was a huge learning curve and a big thing to happen in my cooking. “So I found writing this book to be a huge creative process and I really enjoyed it. The most satisfying part was seeing the results for Georgia. She lost 10 kilos of body fat through the writing of the book – she wasn’t big to begin with, but she managed to smash through her plateau.” Don’t mention the word diet There is a saying that dieting is like holding your breath – at some stage you have to let it out to breathe. Tobie affirms his recipes are more lifestyle than diet. “I still love eating chocolate, I still drink beer, but now I do it in moderation,” he says. “All I have done is take dishes that are familiar to us and re-jigged them by lowering the fat and carb levels. “This means that in the book, there are basically no carbs, there is not a potato in the whole book, but there are beautiful sweet potato dishes in there. I tried to make dishes that taste good to try to over-ride the desire for things like potatoes.” As well as healthy recipes that taste great, another important aspect of the book, and his change in eating, is the fact that ingredients are accessible and cheap. “I want people to be able to cook most of the recipes in this book from your local supermarket, so the ingredients are accessible and dishes are easy to make. “I am not trying to get people to give up everything, because the most important thing is to be happy, and happiness comes through balance. But if you cook from this book a few times a week, you are going to get results.” The Chef Gets Healthy by Tobie and Georgia Puttock is out now on Penguin (RRP $39.99).