Beaconsfield’s Cardinia Park Hotel head chef Colin Rafferty was recently named Chef of the Year in Victoria. The good natured Scottish chef left Gazette journalist SHELBY BROOKS in stitches of laughter when she visited the hotel to learn more about Colin’s food journey.
Haggis is really good if you’re used to it, but it’s like Vegemite, I can’t stand the stuff.“
“Never trust a skinny chef,” Colin Rafferty says, as he holds his belly laughing at the number of donuts he ate over the weekend.
The fresh hot jam donuts served with chantilly cream have been a huge hit at the Cardinia Park Hotel since they appeared on the specials board.
“I put the donuts on the menu… it’s so bad, they’re too alright, it’s a shocker,” Colin said in his thick Scottish accent.
Colin, who is the head chef Cardinia Park Hotel, was awarded the Chef of the Year in 2021 Australian Hotels Association (Victoria) State Awards for Excellence in May.
A combination of his love for food and humorous personality were surely factors in receiving the award, one for which he has been vying for years.
“The hotel always goes into the awards, I’m three times runner up and I finally won, I got lucky,” Colin said.
“I don’t think I take compliments well. I just keep plodding on, that’s the Australian way isn’t it?”
His award was jointly received with Damien Quinn, head chef at Kelly’s Hotel in Cranbourne.
“We get on quite well with them so it was good to win with them this time. It’s good for me, good for the hotel,” Colin said.
Adjudicators interviewed Colin, checked out his menu online and also came to taste some of his meals.
Colin thinks some videos taken during lockdown may have played a part.
“The hotel made these videos in lockdown of me making ribs and beef cheeks. I got lots of good feedback on that,” he said.
“No-one could understand what I was saying but anyway, they can look at the food and go ‘oh food!’”
Colin became a minor celebrity in Beaconsfield, with people stopping him in the street to compliment his videos.
“They’d be down the street in the shops saying, ‘how’s it going chef’ and I’m going, ‘I have no idea who these people are’ and they’re asking what I’m doing next week,” he said.
“It was quite funny, I got a phone call from my mate and he said ‘my mum made your beef cheeks recipe and she said it was fantastic but it needed more salt’”.
As head chef for eight years, Colin has been focussed on supplying diners with only fresh ingredients, something he has been passionate about since moving to Australia 14 years ago.
“You’re spoilt over here for freshness,” Colin said.
“When I first came here, the freshness was just fantastic.
“I phoned up the fruit man and said ‘I need a box of tomatoes’ and he goes ‘yeah I’ll just go get them picked’.
“And I laughed, I thought he was just winding me up. He said ‘what are you laughing at? No I’m serious we’ve got a farm we go pick them’.
“That’s fantastic! In Scotland, you order fresh fruit, it comes from Spain or Europe, it’s too cold in Scotland.
“Though your potatoes are beautiful in Scotland, your turnips, leaks, winter veg just beautiful and that’s why everyone eats vegetables because they’re grown there fresh but you import tomatoes, fruit and all that.”
Colin keeps everything fresh on the menu, refusing to buy frozen salmon or fish.
“And we cut our own steaks, we do everything properly, which is hard to do with the numbers we are getting but we’re pulling it off,” he said.
Coming out of the latest lockdown, the Cardinia Park Hotel has been extremely busy, Colin said.
“We’ve been absolutely hammered! It’s great because people want to come out and not sit at home so they can come here for an hour and a half and get away from everyday life,” he said.
“Over the weekend they turned away 100 people on Saturday night. It’s really good for us but a shame we have to turn them away. And we had 300 at lunch- it’s hard going but good they’re coming here.
“We’re in the middle of fields here, so we’re doing really well and pull a couple of thousand meals a week.”
Colin has tried to put his Scottish heritage on the menu but hasn’t had too much luck yet.
“I tried putting haggis on here but nah it didn’t work. It’s sheep’s insides, its actually really tasty, but you’re right it’s disgusting,” Colin said laughing.
“But you eat lambs brains here! Lots of the older generations do. Haggis is really good if you’re used to it, but it’s like Vegemite, I can’t stand the stuff.
“My kids eat Vegemite, they say ‘just have a little smear Dad. You make us eat everything’ but no I’ve tried it, ‘stop trying to convert me!’”
Colin’s two sons, who attend St Francis Xavier College in Officer, have inherited their dad’s food passion.
“They love my food. They like everything, as long as they don’t have to clean it up,” Colin said.
“But it has got its downsides actually because if my wife cooks, they complain to me saying ‘she never puts any seasoning in it Dad!’ But I say ‘don’t say anything! Be brave. Just add salt!’”
“Your kids and your family are the biggest connoisseurs in life, you make something to eat and they go ‘eh that was alright I guess’. You don’t get too much praise.”
Colin does love cooking soups and sauces, though he said soups never sell as well in Australia as it does in Scotland.
“I always make soup for the staff and they say ‘oh that’s brilliant’,” Colin said.
“I’ll do a Thai chicken soup and they’ll be like ‘oh that’s different’, because everyone has pumpkin soup. Soups just aren’t big over here.
“The gaming room girls and the oldies they’ll come in and say ‘what soup have you made for me today’…I’ll say, ‘well it’s not your personal kitchen…but I have made this for you!’
“We don’t mind them coming in and saying hello. It makes the place more friendly when customers can come in and say hi, we’ve nothing to hide here.”
For Colin, a good atmosphere is the key for a successful kitchen.
Watching him interact with his kitchen staff, who were busy preparing for the Monday lunch rush, it’s easy to see everyone enjoys working under Colin.
“It’s a great place to work, everyone is so happy here, everyone has a joke and a laugh but when you have to be busy, we’ll be busy,” Colin said.
“If the staff are happy to be here, they make good food and that’s what we want. If you’re happy at work, you’ll do a lot better.
“You play to everyone’s strengths, we don’t care about their weaknesses, everyone is different. They’ve got so many strengths, you can’t expect everyone to do the same thing so we just use what we can do and just help them get the rest.
“This is a fast-paced job. We’re pumping out meals so fast so we try to get them doing good quality food at a fast pace, it’s really hard!
“I’ll say ‘sorry guys, we’ve got 400 tonight. But we’ll be right! Ok mushroom! Let’s go!’
“Though it can be hard when I sound angry all the time because all Scottish people sound angry.”
Colin’s journey with food began at a young age in his mum’s kitchen in Scotland.
“After school I had a couple of options of what I wanted to do, I wanted to become a car mechanic,” Colin said.
“But I always loved cooking. I have three brothers and three sisters, so a huge family and I always watched my mum cooking and I just thought it was fantastic.“
The adaption needed to feed his sibling’s allergies inspired Colin to pursue cooking.
“Mum could make five different meals for 12 people because they all had different allergies. Which is brilliant. That always inspired me, I thought maybe I could do that,” he said.
“Allergies are huge these days, but we only know about them because we’ve been taught. Before that we didn’t really know about them and people are dropping down dead from anaphylactic shock but now we know there are just certain things people can’t eat, and I love that, I love that fact there are certain things you can’t eat and you just adapt.
“I love that adaption, that’s what food is all about. Making the dish different for someone else, while still having the same dish.”
Colin has also found inspiration in Australia’s multiculturalism.
“I worked in Springvale when I first started in Australia and there is just fantastic variety. You dinnae have that in a lot of places,” Colin said.
“We’re spoilt but we don’t even know it. You go to the supermarket and look at the variety compared to a lot of places around the world.
“You can have a diet that suits you because you have the choice. That’s what food is all about, having that choice of what you want to eat. I love that, I really do.”
The Australian classic parma is a prime example of Australia’s amalgamation of food cultures, Colin said.
“Before coming to Australia, never in my life had I ever had a chicken parma. I could not believe it, it should be German or Italian something shouldn’t it? I love it.
“That’s what Australia is all about, all these different cultures coming together here.
“I tried to bring it back home to Scotland, but they wouldn’t go for it! I couldn’t believe it. All my mates said ‘we don’t want chicken burgers’ and I’m like ‘it’s not a chicken burger!’”
As a lot of chefs are, Colin is a MasterChef fan
“It would be nice to have time like they do. On Masterchef they cook three meals, a starter, main and desert,” Colin said.
“If I’m cooking one dish, I’ll allocate myself two hours to do that dish but then got nothing else done.
“You’ve got to work smart, you’ve got to do five things at once, that’s hospitality. But no-one tells you that when you first start.
“You can’t just say ‘I’ll just do the garlic bread’, no sorry you’ve got to do the garlic bread and that fish and that pan and that as well… And if you burn the garlic bread I won’t be happy!”
And speaking of burning something, how many kitchen disasters has Colin had to deal with in his time?
“There has been so many,” Colin said, laughing.
“Fires are probably the worst ones. Everyone’s been shown what to do if there is a fire, but as soon as there is a fire, everyone just goes ‘ahhhh’ like a bad panic like you see in the movies, screaming ‘what do we do!?’
“And I’ll just stay calm and go hmm maybe switch the gas off?”
Colin shared a story of a time when a whole street in the heart of Edinburgh had to be shut down after a fire started in the kitchen he was working in.
A cook was tossing a pan of duck stir-fry underneath a four story high kitchen canopy when the whole thing caught on fire.
“I was like ‘this is well above my pay grade, there is no gas up there to switch off!’” Colin recalled.
“I’m thinking this doesn’t look good on me, I was the head chef at the time.
“The reporters came up and asked if I was cooking frozen chicken. And I thought ‘who said that?’ I got a bit of grief after that, ‘oh how’s that frozen chicken?’ But it wasn’t frozen chicken! That doesn’t catch on fire! It was an ongoing joke.
“So many things go wrong in kitchens, but as long as you can keep feeding the customers and they walk out happy, that’s all that matters.”
