Infuse Infuse 10 December 2019 | Page 25

Chef and myself, as the restaurant manager. Restaurant CBD won multiple awards
and was highly acclaimed and this led to Luke and I owning and operating three
award-winning restaurants in Sydney.
By 2004, we had over a 100 staff across three restaurants and we were keen to find
a way to inspire and motivate our team; what started as an internal conversation
around incentivising our staff quickly developed into a bigger idea and in February
2005 we launched Appetite For Excellence, a program that is now recognised
as Australia’s leading and most prestigious national awards program for young
hospitality talent.
As part of the annual awards program, we created a produce tour for the national
finalists, to educate them on Australian produce and ingredients – where they
are from, who grows them and how they were produced. That was the first time
anything like this had been done for young hospitality professionals and I quickly
realised that this type of experience was a great source of
inspiration for both growers and chefs.
I am also the project manager for the Delicious Magazine
Produce Awards, a role I have held for 10 years during
which time I’ve witnessed the rapidly growing interest in
food provenance.
What inspires you to do the work that you do at Straight
To The Source?
T: We never stop learning no matter our age or experience.
If a chef discovers something new or comes back from
one of our tours inspired, refreshed, energised and having
learnt something they didn’t know prior to coming along,
then we’ve done our job. Equally, if the producer gets
insight from the chefs and has a platform to share their
story and educate the chefs using their ingredients, then
we’ve done our job. These positive outcomes give us
inspiration to keep creating tailored regional tours and
managing the movable parts to make the experience come
to life both financially and logistically.
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© Dietitian Connection
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Infuse | December 2019