24 Hours with The Lucas Group

It’s a Friday night at Chin Chin, the Thai no-bookings restaurant in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane. A queue winds its way from the heavy green door down the footpath outside. It’s 7pm and the restaurant is full. Greeters politely take phone numbers and estimate for anxious diners how long it will be before a table becomes available. It should be crunch time, but something is different. The 100-seat venue’s relatively small kitchen is humming. Wait staff smile. Orders fly out.

Chin Chin has been one of Melbourne’s busiest restaurants. Brash, loud and fun, it is slick without being expensive and has built a huge following among a population not phased by wait times of up to four hours. More impressively, the hype around the restaurant has not faded since its earliest days. It seems to always be buzzing, drawing people for the experience as much as the food. So, how do they do it?

The no-bookings policy helps, making demand more constant and even. There’s good systems and workplace culture, and of course there’s Chris Lucas himself. But there’s something else that sets this restaurant apart from most other mid-sized eateries in Melbourne: a huge production kitchen. But you won’t find it in Chin Chin. Located 20 kilometres away in Moorabbin, the facility known as Factory One operates non- stop, 24 hours a day.

Staffed by 45 rotating chefs and 15 kitchen hands, admin staff and storemen, Factory One is the pulsating production heart of the Lucas Group, the three-restaurant (and counting) empire that includes Italian eatery Baby, Korean barbeque joint Kong and the soon-to-open Hawker Hall. Beyond the world of catering and fast food, there’s nothing quite like it in Australia’s restaurant scene.

In an average week, Factory One will process, make or dispatch 12,000 litres of stock, two tonnes of slow braised meats, 400 litres of milk, 400 kilograms of mozzarella, two tonnes of washed vegetables, 800 kilograms of flour and 15,000 litres of beer, wine and spirits. If this amount of food sounds outsized; it is. To put the numbers in context, Chin Chin, Baby and Kong feed the equivalent of a small regional city the size of Bairnsdale or Horsham (12,000 to 15,000 people) every single week.

As well as doing all the prep for the existing three Lucas Group restaurants, Factory One is also the group’s central warehouse and larder. Another nearby building houses the group’s astonishing booze collection. In short, it’s a production and logistics hub that would be the envy of many, and a day in the life of Chin Chin starts here. 

The cycle begins at midnight, when head chefs from each of the group’s three restaurants email their orders for the next day to Moorabbin’s general manager Dave Riccardo (the former executive chef at Pearl). Once Riccardo has checked the orders, the machinery of the organisation grinds into life.

When Broadsheet arrives at 6am on a recent Friday, more than a dozen chefs and kitchen hands are already at work. In one corner, head pastry chef Vince Micalizzi extrudes fresh tagliatelle. In another, Baby’s head production chef Daniele Colombo throws the final touch of seasoning into several trays of wild mushrooms destined to become pizza toppings.

At a stainless steel table, four ‘pickers’ are working their way through several bowls of freshly washed coriander, which arrived (even) earlier today from a farm in Werribee South (Lucas’ chefs prefer this sandy soil-grown coriander because it bruises less- easily than the hydroponic variety). The herbs will be bagged, weighed and tagged before storage, so chefs can keep track of them.

Behind the herb pickers is Kaneshka Qasim. Cleaver in one hand, whole braised duck in the other, Afghani-born Qasim is methodically chopping and deboning a rack of cooked birds, one by one. By the end of the day the kitchen hand, who started as a dishwasher in 2011, will have cooked, cut and deboned 50 ducks, destined for use at Chin Chin tonight. Factory One takes care of anything that requires lengthy cooking, such as slow braises and the popular pork hocks, and produces stocks and curry pastes for all three restaurants.

By the time delivery driver Sammy Sharma sets off for Baby, it’s 7.42am. The Lucas Group owns four three-tonne refrigerated trucks. Bringing the delivery system in house has helped reduce the disruption caused by external deliveries, and means that schedules can run much tighter. It takes Sharma a little less than 50 minutes to drive the 21 kilometres to Baby. “Pretty standard”, he says. Each restaurant has a dedicated truck, and the Lucas Group’s drivers average between 80 and 100 kilometres every day. [endaside-01]{Expensive bottles like this are rare on the group’s wine list, which they say could help explain the error.}

I’ve got 22 staff here in my crew and we operate breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week,” Alston says. “My role is to support and train the team, develop senior chefs that go on to our new venues, but most importantly, look after the food here at Baby.

Among the four chefs and five floor staff on shift this morning is 16-year-old Mackenzie Wust. The teenager left high school six weeks ago and found work here, which this morning involves learning one new skill (making gnocchi) and one familiar one (cleaning squid, which he’s had to do every day he’s been here). “Obviously it’s not considered a good idea to leave school, particularly at my age,” he says, hands deep in a bowl of cephalopods, “but I think this is a better path for me.”