 Josh Nyland, our last speaker tonight, is one of the current stars of Australia's restaurant industry, as I'm sure you all know. As the chef responsible for Sydney's St Peter, he is the face of its philosophy of sustainability and of using every part of the catch from gill to tail, including blood, skin, eyeballs and calamari semen. And you may, when the lights go up, also notice that he made a John Dory chandelier, which is a John Dahlia, he's calling it, above that beautiful food display from the wayside chapel. So I suggest that you shine your phone torches at it later. Behind that story of success and awards, all achieved by the age of 30, there is another story that may surprise you and is much less shiny. Please welcome Josh Nyland. I too would like to acknowledge and pay respects to the traditional owners of this land. Resilience can be best described as the ability to cope when things go wrong. Things went very wrong two days after my eighth birthday when I was diagnosed with a Wilms tumor. The intensity of being met with the news of having cancer was overwhelming. I still remember the drive home with my mother stopping at the traffic lights and bringing herself to tears. As a father now of two children, I can't even begin to put into words how my mother must have felt in that moment. It's truly remarkable that a moment like this in the early stages of life, let alone at any stage, can give you such purpose and direction. Since the last day of chemotherapy over 20 years ago, every day I have felt as though I must achieve something purposeful. I keep notes on my phone with certain things that I want to achieve in a certain timeframe and until they get crossed off, I work as hard as I can to do so. I've been professionally cooking now for 14 years and in those years I've been very fortunate to have worked with some profoundly talented people. A few more so than Stephen Hodges. Stephen gave me the gift of his knowledge of fish. I first met Stephen at a cancer foundation sponsored event called Crabfest, where chefs met to eat crabs as quickly as they could to raise money for kids with cancer. It's a good excuse to eat a lot of crab. Tetsuya, Matt Moran, Yanni, Christie, Stephen Hodges, many more were there that day. Stephen actually donated a voucher for a meal at Fishface and I was lucky enough to get that at the event. That first meal at Fishface was one that I would really like to share. I arrived knowing that Fishface is an extremely popular restaurant at the time and only had 34 seats. So I arrived at 5.20pm knowing that they arrived at 5.30pm. I walked up Darlinghurst Road and there was a few chairs set up out the front and there was a man sitting there with tracksuit pants on, a white t-shirt, it was a bottle of coke on the table, box of panadol, cigarette in the mouth and a bowl of tomato pasta between his legs. And I ran up to him and I said, Steve, I'm coming to have dinner tonight. I'm really excited. Then he goes, what happened? You wet the fucking bed? And I'm like, oh, no, I, okay. And so I ran back 10 minutes and then I came to, I came to Fishface and Stephen had changed in the 10 minutes into the most hospitable, you know, lovely man that you'd ever met. So I suppose from that moment of interacting with Steve was really the kind of the hook, I suppose, of why I wanted to pursue working there. So on my first day at Fishface, it was my trial. I basically got told that I would observe the service. So I stood where the wash-up was, I suppose, and Stephen was in front of me opening oysters. We had a sushi chef. We had a young girl on fryer and then the head chef cooking. Service had started, it was manic and dockets everywhere. A piece of fish had been brought back to the kitchen by the manager and it was overcooked and the chef didn't like that. He threw the plate. A few heated words between him and the manager and then at the young girl in the corner and then at Steve and then it ended up in this triangle of horror and I was just watching it happen and the head chef threw his towel down and walked out and then Steve left and then I was standing there wondering what to do with a full set of dockets. A young girl crouched down beside her bin in the corner crying and then a sushi chef unfazed by anything and basically I decided to take it upon myself and cook. So we had a whiteboard on the wall and I just decided to follow what it said and having done my research I had a vague idea of what Steve was doing. So I got through the service. It was about an hour before anybody emerged and when he did come back there were a few dockets left and he said all right what did you think? I'm like yeah it was it was a good night I think like most people got what I was yeah it was fine. Then he goes all right you want the job and I'm like well okay yeah I'll take it. So at 19 then I was you know in that world and it was amazing and for a man like Steven to be plagued by you know so many of his own personal adversities he basically shared his life's work with me from how to scale and gut a fish correctly to the minuscule details of flavor profile between species of fish. Working at Fishface was extremely hard not just your typical physical services and a lot and clean downs hard but emotionally and mentally exhausting. I felt completely indebted to Steven that he was investing so much effort and time in me that when I failed a task or it wasn't achieved to the standard that he or I wanted the anxiety of that for weeks I would carry until basically he'd bring me back back to the pedestal that I was on to then carry on and I suppose that wasn't an overly healthy pattern to be in but that was my work and I loved what I did. At the same time my wife Julie and I we just had our first child and obviously being a new family every day was extremely challenging. It reached a point with Fishface that I personally wasn't coping with how things were going so I decided to lift sorry I decided to leave Fishface to spend time with my wife and son and wanted to slow down. Looking back on my time at Fishface it's only now that I see the importance of the basic lessons that Steven would tell me daily from cleanliness of the whole restaurant inside and outside to then cooking yourself a piece of fish every day as you would a customer so you can determine the travel time from the past to the table and then what the doneness is depending on the heat of the garnish on the plate. It was basically time for me to do my own thing and it had to be fish. We opened St. Peter and we had a manager in place and basically we lost that manager on the first service. We call it a mishire but we yeah we we had a few mishaps that evening it was a soft opening and so I didn't have the courage to do it so Julie handled that and the very next day we were very fortunate that we had Wimmy Winkler join us at St. Peter and she basically walked in on day one and owned the restaurant and gave it the maturity that we needed it to have. We started St. Peter with three chefs and then we worked as hard as we could because we knew that you know this was everything like if we dropped the ball it's kind of lights out and it got to a point about five months in that the three of us were really on our last legs so Julie and I decided that for the longevity of our staff in the business we would employ more chefs to accommodate a more hospitable roster that allowed chefs to have a life outside of work. Within a week we went from three chefs to six. Two weeks after making this decision our numbers showed us that we were faced with an 8% increase in labor. Everything was new to us and basically we were making decisions as issues arose to act quickly. I stayed firm in my belief that our numbers would pick up and we would just have to be patient. During this time of having the luxury of having six chefs in a 34-seat restaurant we managed to develop a recipe for nearly every part of the fish. This meant we managed to reduce the food cost by close to 6% and see it sitting under 30% where it continues to be today. The national award season came upon us and we were met with a string of very flattering awards that our team and I are still very proud of. Our numbers increased and St. Peter had finally realized its potential. Fish butchery, our other business, was born out of a necessity that we needed more space because we'd outgrown St. Peter to a degree there's only so much fish can fit in that cubicle and we basically wanted our customers that came to St. Peter to have access to the kind of fish that we're getting our hands on. Fish butchery basically is championing the sustainable fish that we get our hands on. We work with some fantastic fishermen and I suppose it's our job as a chef like my job as a chef to realize the amount of effort and work that goes in on their end to go out every morning or every evening and go out and catch the exact fish that we're after and then put it on the back of a truck put it in the air and then some 12 hours later we get to pull the lid off and it's our responsibility then to do justice to that product and I think that's a lot of the mantra of what we're doing at St. Peter and a lot of the reason why we're focusing on pardon me we're focusing on the 60% so you look at any kind of education that a chef gets and it's always 40% yield 60% loss what is that what's the 60% loss we're all getting educated on the 40% and I find it far more you know a useful skill set for young chefs coming through to learn about that 60% so that then you know you're not running at a loss you are actually you know training the next wave of chefs to better understand the product and have respect for it it's been nearly two years now that I have owned and operated a small business I've learned a lot about myself as a person I know I can be very impatient and I know that I often bite off more than I can chew but what I can be sure of is that I give all of myself all the time I strive to be a good husband a good father and a good leader as a chef the highs are an extreme high but the lows come quite frequently and you know affect you in a similar way just in a polar opposite and I believe that as a chef resilience really is the only option thank you