John McFadden: how a career in cooking can open doors to diverse roles

This issue Foodservice Rep talks to John McFadden of Select Fresh Providores, whose career path exemplifies the many opportunities that cooking can impart. From starting his apprenticeship in a local restaurant, John’s career has taken him around Australia and internationally and taken him from the kitchen into a sales and customer-focused business development role with his current employer. 

Growing up on the NSW Central Coast, John knew from the age of 10 that he wanted to become a chef. “Travel was the initial attraction – it’s one of the few careers that lets you work anywhere in the world, and that quite excited me. But from my standpoint now, the great thing about cooking is that there are so many opportunities to move into different areas and roles – being a chef opens a lot of doors and gives you the chance to take on diverse roles over your career, and that’s something I try to get across to people thinking of going into this field.”

By the age of 12 John had begun working in a restaurant owned by one of his father’s golfing partners. “I did five nights a week after school as a kitchenhand, then started making the petits fours, moved on to the larder section and progressed through the kitchen. By the time I was 14 I had keys to the place and used to open up in the school holidays and ran my own section. It was originally a French restaurant and eventually changed hands and turned into a tavern.”

Taking up the challenge of the kitchen

When John finished year 10, his parents delivered a challenge – “they said, if you really want to pursue cooking, you need to find an apprenticeship by the time year 11 starts, because if you don’t you’re going back to school. So I contacted probably 50 or 60 places and got a job in a Chinese restaurant.” John found it quite a challenge cooking Asian food while at the same time learning classical cuisine at TAFE – “it was an experience working with the Chinese implements, so it pushed me and I enjoyed that. Then Peppers on Sea opened up at Terrigal – it was the Central Coast’s first five star property, and I landed a job in the French fine dining restaurant. Going from Chinese to French fine dining was a massive step up but I was fortunate enough to work under Bruno Cerdan, who was executive sous chef of the hotel and ran the restaurant. It was an amazing experience and by the time I was a third year apprentice I was running the fish section.”

As John finished his apprenticeship, Bruno Cerdan took up the executive head chef position at The Windsor Hotel in Melbourne and asked John to join him there. “I went down and worked with him at the two hatted fine dining room which seats 160,” John recalls. After working there for 12 months, he moved to the Fairmont Resort in Leura. NSW – “which was pre-Lilianfels, so at the time it was the only resort hotel in the Blue Mountains. I worked in Jamison’s, the a la carte restaurant there. The weekends were phenomenal, we used to get 12 tour buses a day and it was all day dining, inbound tourism was pumping.”

Fate steps in to change plans

Next step on John’s culinary journey was Hayman Island Resort in the Whitsundays – from which point he’d hoped to move to Asia for work, but fate stepped in with other plans, as it was here John met his future wife. “I was working in Planters restaurant on Hayman, which was a Polynesian restaurant, but by the time I left it had changed to Australian cuisine with an emphasis on native ingredients. When I got married I moved to Sydney which was where my wife lived, and I’ve been here ever since.”

John started his Sydney stint at the ANA Hotel, then went to the Hyatt Regency in Kings Cross for his first sous chef role. “I was tasked with turning around a restaurant that had had a really bad review. It was a game changer for me – I had a brigade of 16 chefs and within six weeks I realised I needed to recruit a new team because they’d all gradually resigned. It was probably one of my biggest challenges as a young chef – it’s quite overwhelming when you a lose a whole brigade and have to start from the ground up rebuilding it. I was fortunate enough to recruit a young team and we built up a solid camaraderie. I wanted them to have a sense of autonomy and we created a buddy system so if anyone called in sick they had to find someone who would cover them with double shifts and then work out how that favour would be returned. For me that was priceless. My aim was to get us in Gourmet Traveller by the end of the year, and in fact we won Best Fine Dining Restaurant in Australia – we were doing a lot with Lyndey Milan and Peter Howard, and Carol Selva Rajah took me under her wing which was wonderful. 

“We went to the James Beard Foundation in New York and did an invitation-only eight course degustation menu highlighting Australian produce for 80 NY food critics, and that really put us on the map. Looking back, it was a lot of work, six days a week from open to close to build the team, the menu structure, the consistency, the development plans – but at the end of the day, to take that restaurant from 6/20 to restaurant of the year was pretty remarkable.”

Once John’s contract with Hyatt finished up he moved into working with catering companies. “I started off with Blue Rock Catering, who had been quite small but just exploded onto the scene and became a very large business within a tight timeframe. Then I was offered a role at the Sydney Club, which had invested $4m in a new downstairs restaurant, and I ran that for a year and a half, followed by four year as executive chef and F&B director for the University and Schools Club which took over the Sydney Club.”

John next moved to Trippas White Group where he worked on food concepts, team recruitment building and food safety plans for Brian Trippas, a period he remembers fondly, before joining Crinitis as a group executive chef. “At that time they had nine properties with six more in the pipeline and I was looking after menu development as we rolled them out.”

Moving to the sales side

From here he moved to his current position with Select Fresh Provedores – “Dominic Barba, who is the CEO, had known me through industry connections and said he was looking for someone in a business development role, and I was looking for a change after having spent 36 years in kitchens. So I went and looked at their warehouse and their HACCP certified processing and at the time they were putting in a demo kitchen and the idea of doing this just captured my imagination. I’d never been on the sales side before and it was something different for me.”

John has been with Select Fresh Provedores for 15 months now. “We service anyone in hospitality – airlines, pubs, clubs, schools, cafes, shipping – we contract to P&O Australia wide – so overall it’s quite a big business. We source fresh produce from across the country and have built up strong relationships with farmers and growers.”

The joy of the business development role for John is that it’s customer-focused and based around relationships and new business opportunities. “It’s important for my work that I stay connected to the industry, so I still do masterclasses, I assist with student assessment at Le Cordon Bleu school, I’m head judge for Chef of the Year for Foodservice Australia and I’m a member of the Australian Culinary Federation.

“I do stay closely connected with all that because after 36 years it’s not something you can turn your back on. And in this role I’m selling back into the industry so it’s vital that people see I haven’t lose touch. I’ve dealt with produce all my life so I have a good knowledge of what I’m talking about and I can provide genuine help for people in the kitchen. I’m quite fortuitous in having had all the roles I’ve had over the years as all that experience helps me value-add to foodservice professionals’ business – whether it’s profitability, changing up the menu and so on.”

The road to success

John is also keenly focused on training and assisting foodservice professionals in developing policies and procedures to boost efficiency within the kitchen – a skill he uses both within his role at Select Fresh and in consulting services. “Recently I was doing a kitchen leadership training course and I pulled out a training program that I had developed back when I was group executive chef at the Sydney Collective Group. The challenge there was delivering consistency across multiple outlets and often this is difficult because we have unrealistic expectations.

“Foodservice staff are often time-poor and we need to take the initiative to develop people if we want them to achieve the expectations of the business. This is essential if you want to ensure a consistent standard of food. Staff need checklists they can refer to on a daily basis and the employee needs to be able to give feedback to the trainer as well so the whole process is transparent and everybody has a voice.

“I’m working with a few training companies at the moments and we all think there is an opportunity within our industry to explore this more and present these types of training modules to foodservice teams. It can also benefit front of house – checklists of criteria to cover expectations for each role. Whether you want to move up through the kitchen or in front of house, there are core competencies you need to demonstrate. The old days of ‘I’ve been here for five years so I deserve a promotion’ are gone – we should be benchmarking roles and say, you need to be able to demonstrate these skills to achieve this position. When you have those kinds of processes in place you’re on the road to success.”