Sean Connolly

By Franz Scheurer

Sean Connolly was born in 1967 in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire and spent a lot of his very early years in the kitchen with Grandma Esther who not only passed on the family recipes but also managed to make the kitchen fun, the place to be. She was a jovial, knowledgeable woman who instinctively knew how to capture the young boy’s imagination. These recipes and family secrets were mainly slow braises, pies and cakes but they made young Sean feel at home in a kitchen and laid the foundation for his future love of cooking and food.

“By the time I was in high school, and I was in a mainly boys’ class, we had options: Metal work, wood work or home economics. I was the only one to stick my hand up for home economics and subsequently I was the only boy in a class full of girls, and geeez they have a lot to say to themselves and they gave me a lot of grief in the kitchen”.

Sean’s father was an engineer and a very smart man, who put himself through university getting a degree, became a teacher and eventually became the head technical engineer at the local technical college. Although he was an academic, he saw the potential in cooking for young Sean and managed to get him a job, working for free every Friday and Saturday night at the local hotel, the Pennine Hilton (the Pennines are the mountains running through Yorkshire). The chef was a mountain of a man called Nick Snooke and he was an old-fashioned type of chef who ruled with an iron fist, but Nick took Sean under his wings. Sean worked there until the age of 15 and he went out and bought his first set of knives at the tender age of 13, proudly showing them off at the home economics class and he confided in his grandfather telling him that he would eventually work on a big ship and be a chef.

Sean then started a hotel management course at the Huddersfield Technical College and his infectious smile and easygoing matter worked against him. “I think I was a bit of a wild card and my cheeky grin pissed people off a bit”. Not being academically minded he was basically asked not to come back for his second year, which did not go down well with his father, a senior lecturer at the same college.

“I went and worked full time for Peter Midwood and he was basically the Gordon Ramsey of Yorkshire; gifted but arrogant and rude. He was notorious and had no problems walking into the dining room and pull the table away form seriously wealthy customers if he thought they said the wrong thing to his restaurant manager. He was a wild man, but he was good to me”. After a year Sean went back to the Pennine Hilton who offered him an apprenticeship and it was then that he realized that practical work in a kitchen, fitting into a team, was what really gave him the necessary knowledge to cook, not simply going to school full time. “It was then that I realized that you can’t beat ‘on the job’ training. I’m crap with figures, I’m crap with writing but I can cook”. He went back to college one day a week as part of his apprenticeship and actually won apprentice of the year. He was about to embark on the diploma stage when he and his friend noticed an add in the Yorkshire Post, which said: Sail into the 21^st Century with the QEII. He and his mate went to Leeds for an interview, so did hundreds of other hopefuls. He asked the principal of the college what he should do if he happened to get the job on the QEII; see the world or finish his diploma. The advice was: Forget the diploma, go to sea.

Sean waited for a response form the people at the QEII and his friend was hired as part of the first intake of people, some 200 chefs. The QEII was coming out of Bremerhaven, having a refit as it was used as a troop carrier to and from the Faulklands. It was in a pretty sorry state and the working and living conditions on board left a lot to be desired. The ‘maiden voyage’ was to be from South Hampton to New York but during the journey from Bremerhaven to South Hampton about half of the chefs dropped out due to bad working conditions and long hours. “This is when I was asked to go to South Hampton and take up my post. My father took me and it was probably the saddest day in his life, taking his 18 year old son to the dockside, but it was nothing compared to my girlfriend, Jan, now my wife, who was utterly devastated”.

Sean stayed on the QEII for about 20 months and saw a lot during that time. His first stop in New York obviously made a lasting impression on the 18 year old. To be eligible to go on the world cruise he had to work seven month straight; that’s seven days a week for seven months! But it was worth it. “I went to South America, down to Panama, did the Caribbean, saw Asia and when I came to Australia I couldn’t believe that you could sail halfway around the world and the people still spoke English. Although shore leave was always incredibly brief I did see a lot and I had many journeys slipping the taxi driver fifty bucks and asking to be driven anywhere that was worth seeing, as long as I was back on deck in three hours. It was an amazing journey of discovery; coming from Yorkshire in the 70s I had never seen any fresh herbs (except parsley) and to travel around the world and seeing all these foreign ingredients was an incredible education. We always bought local and some of the seafood that arrived on board was amazing. I started in the Mauritania, the largest restaurant on the ship, as a ‘veg boy’, doing about 600 covers a night. I ended up in the Princess Grill, the premier restaurant on the QEII, working alongside all these great, hardcore hotel chefs. I was also in charge of the caviar on the ship and at one stage we had a third of the world’s caviar on board. You walked into a huge fridge and it was just wall to wall caviar, you name it, Oscietra, Sevruga and Beluga and that’s what has given me my life-long passion for caviar”.

In retrospect it is interesting that Sean ate some fabulous food and drank superb wines during his stay on the QEII, but did not realise what it was he had. It no doubt shaped his palate but it was only later that he really appreciated what was on offer at the time.

“I did however take a real pummelling, both physically and mentally. It really was the school of hard knocks with lots of that old school bullying going on so when I got back to Yorkshire I was over cooking”. Sean took a job in the local cloth mill (Huddersville is world famous for its cloth) and worked there for six months. It might have been a good break for him, but also pretty demoralising. I did a couple of jobs, cooking for the army in Scotland and North Yorkshire for two months, and when I finally came back I decided to emigrate to Australia.

Sean’s first job was at the Boulevard Hotel, in the restaurant on the 25^th floor and after a few years he realized that his career did not go in the right direction. He moved to the Park Lane, which was one year old by that time, and its restaurant, Gekko, was probably the most revolutionary in Australia. Designed by Michael McCann, with Dietmar Sawyere as head chef and Liam Tomlin as number two, Gecko really changed the perception of dining in a hotel with its cutting-edge design and the first open kitchen and wine cellar on display. Many of today’s great chefs came from there: Sawyere and Tomlin, Mathew Kemp, Justin North, Detlef Haupt, David Bitton and of course Sean Connolly. “I left the Boulevard as a junior sous-chef and I thought I knew it all and I managed to get a job as a chef to partie at Gekko, and I got my arse kicked in such a big way, but you know, you just gotta do these things. I went from cooking 10 hours a day at the Boulevard to cooking 15 hours at Gekko and I learnt about cooking all over again. I came from a meat and three veg background and Gekko was quite multicultural and I had to learn about different cuisines. I learnt how to make pasta and gnocchi, something I had never done before”. Sean also cooked with Olivier Massart, then head chef at Peter Doyle’s Le Trianon (now running the Belgian Beer Café) at the time and he learnt how to manage a kitchen and deal with people from him. “He was a really cool guy, a real new age chef, and I learnt a lot from him”.

After a couple of years Sean was offered a job at the Star Casino and, although his first thought was ‘den of iniquity’ and nothing for a good Catholic boy, he overcame his prejudice and joined Star City, knocking back an opportunity to work at Banc with Liam Tomlin. As he had a terrific relationship with Matt Kemp and Justin North, he had to make the decision to either go with them or his way to Star Casino. During an interview with Deitmar Sawyere, who sat with the sun at his back so the interviewee was facing the glare, Dietmar asked what Sean’s ambition for the future was and Sean answered: “To sit where you are sitting and letting someone else squint into the light, and I want your job”. Sean understood this was not going to happen at Banc, so he opted for Star Casino instead.

 ¬It turned out to be a job that enabled him to spend time with his first two daughters and it was only when his son came along that reviewers started to take notice of Sean’s ability and the rest is history. Connolly’s Astral was first taken seriously about five years ago and two years ago the Sydney Morning Herald awarded him the Chef of the Year, a very deserved accolade. A year ago, Connolly opened Sean’s Kitchen, a more casual dining venture downstairs at Star Casino and both restaurants are humming along splendidly.

Asking Sean what the crystal ball held for him, he answered: “I would like to cook, write books and live in France”… and with a cheeky grin he adds: “I think it’s been done before”.