FA I L F A S T, FIX FAST
Master chef Simon Gault tells Sarah Catherall what he has learned from life’s failures.
When he was running restaurant kitchens, the celebrity chef, Simon Gault, had a mantra: fail fast, fix fast. For three decades, Gault – inaugural MasterChef NZ judge, television personality, cookbook author, chef and restaurateur – lived and breathed restaurants. He opened his first restaurant at the age of 22, selling his last one – Giraffe on Auckland’s Viaduct – 30 years later.
In his autobiography, No Half Measures, written with journalist Kim Knight, Gault opens up about his life, sharing everything from his love of flying planes, his time on TV, his diabetes battle and the opulent lifestyle he loved while cooking in and running restaurant kitchens in New Zealand and around the world.
The 57-year-old is quick to move on from failures. He introduced a healthy menu at his swanky Auckland waterfront restaurant, Euro – no refined sugars were allowed in a dish – and the idea bombed “because diners go out to indulge”. Then there was the short-lived tomato ketchup venture, the night Euro diners got poisoning from bad tuna – “the worst night of my cooking career,” and the power crisis in 1998, when for five weeks Gault cooked on an outdoor kitchen and barbecue at his second restaurant, Gault’s on Quay. “We don’t have any electricity but I am not failing. I have to stay open,” he writes.
He tells Your Weekend: “The minute I fail I recognise it and I work out how to fix it and then how I can move on fast. I say to my team all the time: fail fast, fix fast. It’s OK to fail. If you won’t try, you won’t fail. There are so many times I’ve tried things and they haven’t worked.”
Gault has reinvented himself more times than most in the industry. Known as a pragmatic perfectionist, he says every major decision he has made has been of his own choosing. Walking away from the Nourish Group after 12 years as executive chef of its nine restaurants, leaving MasterChef NZ and then selling up his last restaurant, Giraffe, after a short stint – he says all those decisions were his alone. “My absolute focus is to evolve, stand out and be remembered. That ethos is top of mind with every new venture,” he writes.
The more theatre, the better
We meet in a chain cafe in Auckland’s Wairau Valley with a cabinet chokka with high-carb food and sugary treats, the very type of food Gault no longer eats or wants to eat since he tackled his type 2 diabetes some years ago. Our meeting place is an unusual choice for a chef and food entrepreneur who hopes his next cookbook – his fifth – will be a New Zealand take on the Mediterranean diet, but Gault is in the area to meet a meat supplier.
Next month, he will open a delicatessen in St Johns, Auckland, Gault’s Deli, which he hopes will be like walking into a domestic kitchen, where he will run pop-ups, cooking classes and corporate team building. He will charm visitors in usual Gault style, and he wants to sell specialty oils, cheeses and meats, to get CEOs learning to make pizza alongside their junior staff.
“I’m excited. Once I get it in my mind, I can’t stop thinking about it,” he gushes.
He spent the morning making his latest cooking video on his YouTube channel: a crunchy vegan burger. He laughs about some of the failures he has made with his food videos. He demonstrates holding his phone above a lentil soup he was filming in his home kitchen when the phone dropped into the soup.
“People are looking for new experiences. This is where my Gault’s Deli is going to come in. We’ll have some fun, eat some great food, drink some great whatever. The more theatre that comes into a restaurant the better.”
MasterChef – and Kevin Roberts, the former Saatchi and Saatchi ad man – made him a household name. Does Gault have any regrets? Roberts wanted Gault to open a restaurant in New York in 2000 but he refused. “I would have loved to have done that. I kind of wish I had done that. I should also have got a gym membership.”
His role at Nourish was tougher than he expected because he wanted to make the staff feel like they were part of a family. “But you
“The minute I fail I recognise it and I work out how to fix it and then how I can move on fast. I say to my team all the time: fail fast, fix fast. It’s OK to fail. If you won’t try, you won’t fail.“