Cinco is a great modern Australian bistro with a really friendly kitchen team who gets along really well and has lots of fun. I gave the executive chef Peter Stubbs an email and told him how close I am to his restaurant (down the street) and asked him if I could do a service with his team… he said “Yes!”

Peter Stubbs is the executive chef and owner of Cinco who has been a Private Chef for people like Vincent Fox (current prime minister of Mexico), David Bowie, Mick Jager and Mexican billionare Alberto Bailleres working on Private Yachts that he says was the best experience of his life and recommends it to any chef in the world.

A quick note that I am shortening my work experience due to the fact that I need to spend more time writing reviews and recipes. I will be dot pointing what I did.

Day 1

• Arrived and broke down chickens into separate cuts with head chef Andy. Then cryvaced (vacuum sealed) each part.

• Portioned risotto into 110g containers.

• Prepare greek salad for pizzeria with Megan which had feta, tomato, cucumber, olives and red onion.

• Also portioned deep fried chicken wings for pizzeria.

• For dinner service I started in the entree section with Ben when Peter came in. I plated up a couple of dishes and helped whenever necessary.

• Then went to Andy and Jake to watch mains go out.

• I salted the meat and took off any bits of rosemary, thyme or whatever herb was stuck to the cut of beef. They were running out of pre-seared beef so I was in charge of searing the beef before it is put in the oven to cook more.

• I cooked a couple of salmon pieces with Peter.

• Near the end of service I went to the dessert section and helped plate up some desserts.

Day 2

• Learnt how to smoke tomatoes.

• Made lavosh (biscuit).

• Filled containers with chips, aioli, spaghetti, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

• Started dinner service with Ben in entree section. Learnt his way of chopping eschallots with Japanese knives.

• Helped Megan make the Cinco Rocky Road. It is a layered dessert with marshmallow, hazelnut mousse, raspberry jelly and honeycomb with chocolate. I helped temper the chocolate (more on this in the <a href=”ReviewUrbane1″>(second chocolate appreciation night</a>).

• Plated mains with Andy and Jake.

• Refilled ingredients from fridge to chefs.

• Megan gave me taste test of all the ice creams in the dessert freezer. Included: ginger, vanilla (made by reusing the beans after cooking and blending to maximize flavour creating a more brownish ice cream), coconut, raspberry and a greek one.

• Coated doughnuts in cinnamon.

• Cut apples.

• Cut bread.

Day 3

• Worked on entrée and dessert section for service with Ben.

• Worked on deep fryer, frying hot chips (which went through 4 cooking stages) and potato cakes.

• Watched Ben make a not so traditional carbonara.

• Helped plate soup of the day, which was potato and leek with a dollop of crème fraiche and chives, cinnamon doughnuts, treacle pudding and bread platter.

• Helped a little in the pizza section with the chef Smarty.

I have had a fantastic time at Cinco so far and I hope to continue into the future and maybe get a part time job there. I highly recommend eating at Cinco so give it a try!

After being introduced to Alastair McLeod (Brett’s Wharf, Tank and Ready, Steady, Cook!) at the Noosa Good Food & Wine Festival, I was lucky enough to be asked to spend a service with him at Tank.

Tank’s cuisine is modern Australian with Japanese influences. These influences are evident through using ingredients such as shiso (Japanese mint), yuzu (citrus fruit), tosaka (seaweed), shishimi (spice mix), miso (seasoning) and kinako (soybean flour).

I arrived in the city and met up with Mum and Dad for lunch at their local Malaysian restaurant Nudo’s. After gobbling up delicious Beef Rendang and Roti, I walked to Tank.

After changing into my chefs whites and meeting the team, Darren showed me around the kitchen and dropped me off to Ollie who ran through a dish with me. He said that his main job was to crisp everything. He crisped duck leg and breast for this dish.

I worked with Darren and Eddie for the day in the cold larder/dessert section. First I picked mint and made a mint sauce using the thermomix. This was being served with roast lamb shoulder and finished off with a pinch full of shiso in the sauce.

While the boys were on break I scooped out the insides of half of a watermelon. With the chunks I blitzed them up (in the thermomix) and added some other secret ingredients to make a watermelon granita. I love to make strawberry granita at home so I knew the steps except this version was icier and not as sweet as mine.

Darren then ran me through the pickling process using a specific formula: half part sugar, one part vinegar.  With this I pickled chilli and red onions.

I also vacuum sealed cuts of meat, cut bread, segmented lemons, refilled oil, picked endives and other small jobs.

When the dinner service began I plated up with Alastair and watched him organize the kitchen. He also offered me a back stage pass to the Good Food and Wine Show, Brisbane in November which I will definitely accept!

I was really fascinated with one of the entrees – smoked ocean trout, crisp oyster, crab and tapioca salad, parsley. Alastair would put smoke inside the glass trapping it and infusing the trout. I even went with Alastair to the table the dish was going to be presented. The waiter lifted up the glass and poured a sauce around the trout (I can’t remember what sauce it was).

The big news was announced that Kym Machin (executive chef), Brendan Gradidge (head chef) and a couple of others from Urbane and the Euro were departing Urbane to further pursue their cooking career. It was the last full day that Kym was working at Urbane and the Euro and he asked me to help out with the Delicious Event they were holding there that night.

I arrived at 10 am and started in the cold section segmenting oranges and peeling a large bag of onions. Kym arrived and asked me to help him with plating up for a tasting at Restaurant Two in preparation for a Variety dinner to be held soon at the Hilton. We entered through the large doors at the back of Restaurant Two and all the people turned around to look at us. The likes of Alistair McLeod (Bretts Wharf and Tank), David Pugh (Restaurant Two), Hajime Horiguchi (Wasabi), Peter Merchant (Sommeliers Australia) and a couple of others I didn’t recognised were looking at us and I was a bit embarrassed. Kym set up his dish because I had no idea what it was and all the chefs and I tasted the entrees. Afterwards we all tried the mains and Kym’s dish was the standout, by far. We moved on to desserts and one of the best bakers in Brisbane made a large box of petit fours. We all took one and without realising I took the alcoholic one. It was so strong I couldn’t taste anything else. I tried another of the petit fours and it was a delicious orange flavour.

On the way back to the restaurant we passed Moda and the executive chef (Javier Codina) yelled out and we came and said hi to him. After we talked we were finally on the way back to Kym’s restaurants. Once back we shared the good news with the team and began preparing for the lunch service.

Brendan demonstrated to me how to fillet a whole king fish. He insisted that I try a raw slice. Surprisingly it didn’t seem to have any flavour but just a soft unexpected texture. Brendan then marinated the raw kingfish slice in lemon juice and fresh herbs for a few minutes. This turned the flesh white which tasted amazingly good. Then I took the rest of the fish fillets down stairs into the cold room.

I then counted all the edible flowers and leaves that a chef had picked from the roof garden to make sure there were enough for the lunch service. There were 109 baby beetroot leaves and 209 other edible flowers and leaves.

Lunch service was under way and it was reasonably busy with a couple of people ordering the degustation and as usual a lot of people at the bar ordering from a large selection of gourmet burgers. I helped Kym and Brendan to plate up the dishes out the front.

After service was over Kym gave me my first chefs’ knife and told me to get a lesson from Ben (who used to be head chef of Cha Cha Char) about the physics of the knife. He explained that if you put a knife under a microscope you could see split metal on the edge. He also taught me how to look after knives by sharpening them and cleaning them. I also learned the difference between Japanese knives and normal knives. Japanese knives are a bit softer so you have to sharpen them more often but they have a sharper blade. Normal knives need a longer sharpen but they stay sharp for a long time.

I then helped Ben truss pieces of Wagyu beef with cooking twine. Afterwards the team went on a break and Kym and I walked around the city in search of lunch. We decided to have lunch at a Japanese restaurant. We were talking about the Noosa Food and Wine Festival and he said that I could be his little helper and go to all the classes and help him out. We then walked back to the restaurants.

Once we arrived the team prepared for the 70 plus people event. I had to count the amount of plates and sort them into sections for the different foods. I then opened all the vacuum packed bags of crab meat that were cooked in a water bath for the crab congee entrée.

All the guests arrived at 7pm, so the team started on the entrée which was cooked marron tails and a crab congee. Five chefs were lined up on the stoves constantly stirring big pans of congee. Once one batch was done and plated up they filled the pans back up with more and repeated. When plating up, drops of dashi and nori were added to the meal.

Once the entrée was finished the team began working on the second course. For this we sous-vide (water bathed) kingfish, made a coconut fumet and paired Yarra Valley petit heirloom vegetables with the dish.

For the 3rd course we cooked Dorper Lamb with baby carrots, fenugreek (kind of has a fennel, aniseed, tarragon and liquorish taste only in plant form), three day old carrots and grilled cauliflower. Sorry I didn’t get a close up picture of the dish but here is the kitchen plating it up. The man on the right is Ben who took me to the markets.

For the 4th course the team created their own hay fired barbeque in the kitchen! They used 9+ Wagyu beef which means it has a larger amount of intramuscular fat then other beef under 9. It was served with cooked bone marrow and charred turnips. Below is the hay fired barbeque followed by the finished product.

For dessert the pastry chef and the team on the entrees worked together to make a refreshing citrus dish. On the plate was a passionfruit ice-cream frozen by dry ice, torched mini marshmallows, ginger tuiles, and lemongrass sauce.

I really enjoyed the day and was lucky enough to be asked to come back next holidays and work in not only Urbane but Spring as well. YAY!

Below is a photo of Kym and I.

After the first chocolate appreciation class, I organised with Kym Machin (head chef of Urbane and the Euro) a day/night for work experience in the kitchen. Kym told me that this would be a presentation of “MoVida’s Guide To Barcelona” by the authors Frank Camorra (chef of renowned Spanish restaurant MoVida) and Richard Cornish (food writer).

On arrival I was greeted by the Urbane and Euro team. My first job was helping prepare caramel popcorn for the usual dessert menu. We then prepared the food that was going to be served on the night. I first worked on preparing skewers that had Spanish anchovies, olives and roasted capsicum. Then a chef taught taught me how to debone a whole suckling pig (a pig that was still young enough to suck its mother’s milk) which was later slow cooked . We also made crème catalana and my favourite dessert Churros. Afterwards I got to meet Frank Cammora and he thanked me for my help. Kym bought me the book and an other of Frank’s cook books.

Lucky Mum and Dad got to enjoy the wonderful food.