Ben Shewry – Attica

Ben Shewry's Attica is ranked #32 in the World's 50 Best Restaurants list and it's Restaurant of the Year in the first national Good Food Guide – but according to his son Kobe, Attica is "not bad" for a restaurant that doesn’t have a burger on the menu.
 
Many years before Ben gained international acclaim for Attica's uniquely Australian dishes (from his inventive take on avocado on toast to a savoury pavlova), he was shaping margarine sculptures for hotel buffets and cooking New Zealand's biggest nachos for drunk students. 
 
While living in New Zealand, he met his wife Natalia over scones and they eventually moved to Australia together. After a memorable honeymoon in Sydney (a highlight was Janni Kyrsitis's “punk” dessert at MG Garage), he worked in Melbourne before eventually becoming head chef at Attica in Ripponlea.

“When I took over, the restaurant owed $250,000," he says. "It was just in a dreadful situation. We had nothing."

He was only 27 and a new dad – and starkly aware of the restaurant's debts, the need to make the restaurant viable and provide for his family.

"That’ll make you do crazy things. It really will. It’ll make you do things that you never thought you were capable of. Good things as well," he says.

The next five years involved "having no customers, having wolves at the door all the time, taking out all of the credit cards under the sun to pay people".

Some key things turned around the restaurant's fate – Ben's determination and invention as a chef, endorsements by influential people such as David Chang and Rene Redzepi and Attica landing on the World's 50 Best Restaurants longlist.

"Man, did it have an impact," he says of the moment that Attica appeared in the 51-100 rankings.

“That was the moment from when it went from being a little neighbourhood restaurant in RIpponlea to this global thing.”

The runaway appetite for Attica reservations meant that bookings were filled for nine months out.
 
It took me 14 hours to edit this podcast, and I spent most of that time with a smile on my face because Ben is so enthusiastic, inspiring and full of life. He shares so many fascinating stories about his career's highlights and true lowlights – and how they've emphatically shaped him. 

He talks about the three times he almost drowned – and how he was inspired to recreate one of those near-death moments into a dish that was pivotal to Attica's history.

We also cover the time he "married" Danny Bowien from Mission Chinese, Ben's unsinkable enthusiasm for prepping dishes (even when handling bunya nuts is like "cracking concrete" and his sous chef Matt Boyle jokes the walnut amuse should be "illegal") and his love for his staff is a refreshing counterpoint to the cliche about chefs who punish their employees. For instance, "An imperfect history of Ripponlea as told by tarts" takes 12 hours to make solo, so he gathers a "tart gang" of his employees and they create this tribute to the suburb's indigenous population, English ancestors and Jewish locals together.

He also talks about harvesting murnong – yam daisy – and how he feels about chefs incorporating indigenous ingredients in their menus. Ben is pretty forthright about how we treat Aboriginal people in Australia – and how poorly it compares to how the indigenous community is celebrated in New Zealand.

Ben's unstoppable passion for Attica is inspiring and his devotion to his colleagues is hard to shake. "It’s such outrageous luck that it worked out like this because it often doesn’t. And just to look every one of them in the eye and feel good about being their boss."
 
Catch him at Attica, or upcoming events in Sydney at Rootstock and The Dolphin Hotel in Surry Hills.