A cooke’s tour

It’s 5.30pm on a Saturday at The Atlantic at Melbourne’s Crown Entertainment Complex. The open kitchen is a blur of moving white figures. A faint smell of butter lingers lightly in the air. The staff are anticipating a full-house today in their 300-seat establishment, one of Melbourne’s newest tables. The food is modern European, focusing on seasonal seafood, especially fish.

“We are the biggest fish restaurant in town, and maybe in Australia, so our menu has to appeal to a lot of people. I serve dishes from Grilled Kingfish to Fish & Chips,” says executive chef Donovan Cooke, 43. Smiling, he quips that the latter dish, served with Russet Burbank chips, is better than the traditional British style because it isn’t soggy.

Cooke should have eaten his fair share of lousy chips. After all, he hails from the U.K. Born in Yorkshire, he left school at 15 to enrol himself in a youth training scheme to learn a trade. After working as a trainee in the canteen of an industrial chemical company, he landed an apprenticeship at The Savoy in London, opening the first chapter of his culinary career.

Excerpt from the November issue of epicure.