Jarrod Smith

 

Newcastle, NSW.

 

I started my apprenticeship after a year of university straight out of school.

Another four years behind a desk looking at a board just wasn’t for me and I was lucky enough to be working part-time in hospitality at a large venue on Merewether Beach when an apprenticeship with Newcastle icon Lesley Taylor became available and that started the whole journey.

From there I landed at Muse Restaurant with Troy Rhoades Brown in the heart of Pokolbin, as a small fish in a large brigade of great Chefs all in their own right.

After a few strong and educational years, I moved onto Margan Restaurant in Broke in a senior role and that helped define what I really wanted to do in food and the whole nose-to-tail approach with our own estate-reared lambs and a 1-hectare kitchen garden, being like a toy store to a young Chef.

Thom Boyd was Head Chef there at the time and he is the Chef who made me the man I am today - all technique and class without the ‘fluff’ so many people get mixed up in.

Fast forward a few years and I found myself running a farm supplying restaurants all through Sydney, Newcastle and the Hunter Valley with produce grown, harvested and delivered all by our small team.

A few years there proved pivotal with creating relationships in hospitality and understanding how the best of the best can see things in ingredients the vast majority cannot.

The passion still burnt to return to the kitchen and the opportunity came in 2020 to build a brand new restaurant from the ground up in the Hunter, that in itself was such a great learning curve and brought me full circle as a fully rounded operator, not just a Chef.

My partner being from Tamworth and us getting itchy feet to be back on the land and out of our comfort zones brought us to settle down in Tamworth at the start of 2022. 

Ingredient-focused and cooking to the region we are serving. Having gone full circle from cooking to growing the produce for high-end restaurants back to cooking, the vegetable always has the same respect as the Wagyu fillet.

I’m a big sucker for white chocolate, it can get a bad wrap from time to time, but the     richness it can bring to dishes I love. Definitely a very good Chef snack too. 

 

 

Folded tea towels and clean aprons! The simple small 1% details are the difference at the end of the day between the top 1% and just falling short - 1% a dayis all it takes.

Thomas Keller, his name just speaks for itself.

The culture and camaraderie - the thing we work on hardest here is our culture and staff rapport. If I have happy Chefs, kitchen hands and management that all look forward to coming to work and enjoy the atmosphere, I feel that spreads to our guests tenfold. 

 

Definitely, cream! Sweets, savouries, hot, cold - you name it, cream serves a purpose!

 

We try to keep everything pretty simple out here. Knowing we have such a vast array of 

clientele and knowing our locals are our bread and butter, we play a nice balancing act with keeping things interesting but also approachable.

The closest ‘city’ house in 25 km away and all our neighbours are on vast amounts of acres, so we like to keep it both approachable and interesting.

Strawberries and cream. We make a white chocolate cremeux, fill it with compressed strawberries in strawberry syrup, covered in caramelised white chocolate then finished with a strawberry ‘cloud’, which is a whipped parfait we freeze in nitrogen and smash into small cells and cover the whole dish.

It’s refreshing, creamy and just a little bit special all rolled into one. A great crowd pleaser for the table. 

The downtime I do get, I enjoy putting time back into our livestock and horses. We currently have a mare in foal and are bottle-raising poddy calves, which keeps me on my toes before the early starts up feeding them and mucking out stables.

I would love to see the Glasshouse as the benchmark standard in the North-west region of NSW and a true dining destination.  I want to help young apprentices through scholarships and hosting seasonal culinary lunches to engage businesses, suppliers and consumers alike further to forge greater bonds in this great region.