Season 4 Episode 1
Kevin O’Connor
Raised in the Sierra Foothills, Kevin O’Connor developed a love for gathering, hunting, foraging and cooking at a young age. Starting in fine dining at the age of fourteen, he has over twelve years of experience in some of California’s best restaurants. No matter his venture, he strives to find a real connection to the food he cooks and the places it comes from. An avid forager and adventurist, he always prefers an open fire to a stove. He cooks from the heart, with respect for the ingredients, keeping his flavors simple, clean and delicious. Now as Cobram Estate’s Chef at Large, Kevin follows the harvest between California and Australia, cooking with super fresh olive oil.
Kevin O’Connor is the Chef at Large for Cobram Estate, the renowned Australian olive oil brand that is branching out into the American market. It’s Harvest time in California, and Kevin has been working the festivities. He joins us today from Woodland, I imagine, right Kevin?
Yeah. I’m in our headquarters in Woodland.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you?
Doing great. Thanks for having me.
What does a chef at large for an olive oil brand do at harvest time?
Oh gosh, quite a bit. We do a lot of harvest festivities and sales and marketing tours. That obviously comes with feeding everybody, so during harvest I’m busy cooking and focusing on all these different fresh monocultivars and highlighting all these great oils that we make through lunches, dinners, breakfasts and different events. Generally out in the olive grove, so we can show everybody the full process. We take them through the office, our lab, the tasting room, through processing obviously, out to the groves, take them up on the harvester so they can see every single process. We finish that with a long table lunch in the grove. They can see everything from harvest to processing, to enjoying these fresh oils.
Are these organized tours, or are they journalists, or customers, or all of the above?
It’s mainly press and media. We’ll do a couple of large trips for press and media, and they’ll generally stay a night out here, or two. We’ll entertain them a little bit in Sacramento and just kind of show them our culture, and our growing California olive oil culture, and kind of how we roll over here in short. Then we did a ‘glamping’ setup. After going out through the groves, and spending some time out there, and doing the lunch out in Yolo County, we had some awesome tents set up. When I say tents, I mean like-
Oh, I know what you mean.
These are beautiful safari tents with queen size beds, and just really enjoyed the awesome harvest scenery. Then the following morning they had a nice breakfast, and sent them on their way. We did two of those trips with press and media, and social media influencers, and then that was followed up with six or seven events that we did, that the sales team put together, as we’re growing. I mean, we’re established in Australia, but we’re still very much a startup here in the US, getting those sales contacts in and showing them our processes and how good the olive oil can be in a meal is crucial.
Do you get good press from something like that, or do the social media influencers pay off for you when you do something like that? I’m just curious.
Yeah, they definitely do. It’s been interesting seeing that industry, if you will, kind of mature and get us a lot of recognition.
You grew up in El Dorado Hills, California, not far from Sacramento. You’re not far from Sacramento now. I understand one of your first jobs was a teenager in a wine bar.
Yeah. I was a dishwasher in a little mom and pop wine bar and bistro, which was very Americanized, kind of French California cuisine. That’s what I aspired to do when I was 13, 14, was to be a dishwasher in a restaurant, to get my foot in the door.
I read somewhere that you had your big break in high school when you got hired at a restaurant in Sacramento. You’d get out of school and you’d cook all night. I mean, how did that go? Tell us about that.
That restaurant was up in El Dorado Hills. Growing up in El Dorado Hills, it was kind of pre-development when I moved up there, and then development came along and it started to grow. We started to see more restaurants come up there and more restaurateurs come from the Bay Area, and even LA, and open some restaurants up there.
So, after dish washing and kind of working my way through some Mom & Pop shops, if you will, and a country club, the big break was at a restaurant called Masque. M-A-S-Q-U-E, which is now closed. It lasted about three years up there, actually. A Michelin star chef from LA came up and helped launch that restaurant, so obviously I was foaming at the mouth to work there and was just kind of bugging them all the time, bringing in my horrible resume, kind of just banging down the door. I want to say that persistence, basically, is 90% of the reason why I got a job there.
So, yeah, I was lucky enough to have a work experience program in school, so I’d get out a little bit early. I’d get out at about noon and start my shift at one, and then get off at 11 p.m. I loved it, you know? Being tired at school the next morning was kind of like a badge of honor, almost. That’s kind of the job that put things into perspective for me. It was very much a fine dining restaurant, which was so many levels above what I had been doing. That’s when I knew that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s when I started pursuing the fine dining and Michelin star path.
What was it though about the food business that drew you in?
Initially, I mean, what I fell in love with, even before I was old enough to work, was the theater of dining and the gift giving. I mean, making people happy. It started with making my parents breakfast in bed and opening fake little restaurants in my bedroom just so I can share a passion, share something I love and share something that can transform people and just bring happiness to the table. I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty hospitable person, and I realize now that that started at a very early age.
I read about your summer in the South of France where you tooled around on a Triumph.
Yes.
Did you happen to see chef Marc Pavlovic’s hand-built Bonneville at the Culinary Center when you were there?
I did see that. I didn’t know that was chef’s. Now I’m even more jealous. I actually stopped to take pictures of that Bonneville. It was beautiful.
Yeah. I happen to have a Triumph too, a Bonneville T100.
Awesome.
So, it’s going around. Where were you in the South of France?
I hopped around quite a bit in the South of France. I lived in Nice for a little while and worked in Monaco. I was in the Dordogne for a little while, but predominantly just outside of Montpellier, in a small village-
Working as a chef or-
Yeah, working as a cook. I went through the organization WOOF, Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. I kind of pinpointed farms that were connected to restaurants. WOOF is a work exchange. You’ll go work on a farm, or a brewery, or a winery, and in exchange they’ll basically make you part of the family, put you up, feed you, sometimes they give you a small stipend. In this case it was a motorcycle to ride around on and go visit all the markets, and a stipend for these markets. They had kids my age and we just became part of the family and worked in their restaurant. I did some work in the vineyards too. My dad is a winemaker so it was great to see that. I also did a lot of work on the farm, which is translating into the garden I have at work, which we can get into.
Alright. That’s not anything like the jobs that I had when I was that age. I’m feeling a little gypped. How did the food there influence your cooking, or what do you think the biggest take away is from that period of your life?
I think the largest take away was just to slow down. There were these dinners that we would have, that I’ll never forget. Every Sunday, cousins, uncles, neighbors, everybody would come. We’d be at the table for six hours. I eventually started cooking these dinners, which is kind of how I started to find my style of cooking. Gosh, just the attention to detail and the importance of great product really was the main take away. I didn’t go there and learn a ton of techniques or learn how to cook, it was more just a finer focus on what’s important and great food ethics.
And then you return to Sacramento, you opened up that underground pop-up restaurant where friends and people you knew came and brought food and brought wine. I understand you were chosen as a chef at a well-known place in Sacramento, Blackbird Kitchen and Bar.
Yep.
Then you got burnt out and you went into exile, roaming the countryside in Montana, eating strange mushrooms and anything else that you could find.
Pretty much, yeah, in short. After opening that pop-up, which kind of happened accidentally … It started with just having people over and then more people asking about it, and then Sacramento Magazine asking if they could write an article on my pop-up restaurant. I had to Google what a pop-up was, ’cause at the time, this was 10 years ago, I didn’t know what the hell a pop-up was. So, that kind of got me some great recognition and, yes, went on to open Blackbird a few years later. There were some restaurants in between. Being a 23 year old executive chef at Blackbird, it was 100% art for me. It was just go, go, go and push, push, push. I burnt out completely.
I kind of just, exactly what you said, roamed the countryside. I started in Carmel Valley on a ranch for a while, just gardening and riding horses, then made my way to Montana, to another ranch actually, and just really got into wild foods out there. I got to work closely with Yellowstone Foundation, forging, and doing dinners with probably 90, 95% wild foods. Montana in the summer is just teeming with awesome wild products. I mean, you go on a walk and there’s six different kinds of currents. Here in Northern California, there’s a lot of great stuff, but, I mean, I was just blown away with how much stuff was just growing out there that we could eat.
How do you know what to eat? I mean, aren’t you afraid of picking a berry and poisoning yourself to death?
Absolutely, yeah. A lot of the things I’ve worked with in restaurants before. Currents, I know what currents look like. You get into a field guide and start reading, and say, “Oh, yeah. This is a different kind of current.” It has the same qualities as farmed currents I’ve used in the past and so on. The mushrooms are a little trickier. I always tell people that I don’t eat a mushroom unless I’m 110% sure that that’s what it is. There are certain ways of identifying things like mushrooms. For instance, you can do what they call a spore print. You’ll take off the stem and lay the cap on a piece of paper, and each mushroom has a unique spore print, almost like a thumbprint. You can look at that spore print and match it up. But just tons of getting into field guides. I mean, we were in Montana, so we had a ton of time to just dive into books and learn. After reading for three hours in the morning, hop on the horse and then go apply that knowledge in the wild.
And then I guess you had kind of a rebound from that experience and you dove into a place in San Francisco. I have to credit, by the way, a great article in The Observer about you, saved me a lot of research, where I picked some of these things up. You cooked at a place called Saison in San Francisco, right?
Yeah.
Talk about fine dining. Tell us about that.
While I was in Montana, I was pretty much ready to leave, and I had an opportunity to go work an event with the crew from Meadowood, which is a three Michelin star restaurant in St Helena. I went and worked that event, and I was, you know, “Holy cow, this is what I should be getting into. Screw coming back and opening another restaurant. I want to learn more and I want to learn from these guys.”
So, I landed at Coi, before Saison, doing estage, which is basically an unpaid internship. I did estage for about two months, working unpaid in San Francisco, which got my foot in the door as well as a connection into Saison, which at the time had two Michelin stars. Shortly after I joined, they were awarded their third Michelin star, which, if you’re not familiar with Michelin stars, I mean, is the largest accolade that you could receive in the world of restaurants. There’s four restaurants on the West Coast with three Michelin stars and just a handful in the United States, including The French Laundry, Per Se, Meadowood, Benu. I’m probably missing a couple.
That was huge. It was great to learn at that restaurant, and then also learn what I didn’t want to do. I spent a huge part of my life chasing Michelin stars, and that lifestyle and that level of cooking, and I’m glad that I got to the very top because I kind of realized that it wasn’t for me.
How so?
Those restaurants are just very, very cutthroat, and I’ve kind of built my career on following what would make me happiest. I was happy to be working in one of the best restaurants in the world, but at the end of the day I wasn’t happy. Yes, we’d receive accolades, and flawless dinner service was the most accomplishing feeling that I possibly have ever felt, because it was so hard and so difficult. But, I mean, if you’re on the verge of tears almost every day, then how happy can you really be, even after all those accolades?
Yeah. There’s nothing that I resent more than paying $1,000 for two people to have dinner, there’s that aspect of it too. You know, at that point it’s not about food anymore.
Exactly. You’re never going to see a family of four in a three Michelin restaurant enjoying a family meal. That’s what made me fall in love with food, so I kind of had to take a step back and look at my roots. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love fine dining. It’s comparable to the fashion industry, right? That’s where everything starts. It’s similar to high fashion. But, you know, at some point you’re going to want to come home and wear sweatpants.
Well put. How did you meet the people at Cobram Estate?
After Saison, I came home to open another restaurant called Saddle Rock. I was approached by a group to open this place in Sacramento, and it was this kind of great homecoming after being gone for a while and being in San Francisco. I was really excited to bring back a lot of knowledge that I gained in these restaurants in San Francisco.
During the opening conceptual stages of this restaurant, Cobram Estate reached out and said, “Hey, we’re doing our very first Harvest lunch in California. We’ve got these people coming – which were some heavy hitters in the food media world – and would you like to cook the lunch for us? Can we hire you?” I guess they had done some research and asked a few different chefs to submit a menu. They liked my menu and I was like, “Hey, yeah, that’ll be great. I’ll go out and get some publicity for the restaurant and probably some free olive oil, and cook in an olive grove. Should be a great day.”
Did this lunch, hit it out of the park, had an amazing time, and started talking with some folks from Cobram. They were real keen to continue working together. We weren’t really sure in which way. It’s not like Cobram Estate had this opening for chef at large and put it up on LinkedIn or something like that, it just kind of grew organically. I continued to do some freelance work for Cobram on the side while I was opening this restaurant. We went and did Fancy Food Show in San Francisco together, I developed some recipe content for the website. All the while, falling more in love with olive oil and tasting these awesome fresh oils.
One thing kind of led to another after an event, you know? Kicking back some beers and hanging out and saying, “Wouldn’t it be so cool if we could …” When I said, “Kicking back some beers,” we had been doing that for a few hours, so you can imagine where we’re at. Just going off, “Man, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this?” and, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that?” You know, we could travel around, and cook, and [inaudible 00:16:53] Harvest, market the oil, and build content. It kind of got to a point where I just said, “Well, can I? Can I do that?”
In the background at that time, things weren’t going so great with the restaurant opening. I won’t get into that too much, but there were kind of changing directions and I wasn’t getting these warm and fuzzy feelings anymore. There wasn’t too much going on in Sacramento at the time, so I was just kind of stuck opening this restaurant that I was slowly realizing I didn’t want to open anymore. I left that job, and the same day I came down to Woodland and signed papers with Cobram. About a week later, two weeks later, I was getting shipped off to Australia to kind of familiarize myself with the Aussie culture, and then I was out there cooking for Harvest.
Wow. Now you’re in the thick of it with olive oil and you’re surrounded by people who are talking about olive oil 24/7, and, you know, you’re a chef who’s been around, is it interesting to you to look back now at your perception of olive oil in France, in the various places that you’ve been, and compare that with your understanding of the ingredient now?
It’s opened up a whole new world for me. It’s been amazing. I really thought just starting with Cobram, honestly, years ago, that it was just another ingredient, but now it’s become the star of the show in all my cooking. I’m just enamored with olive oil, and its history, and its culture, and culinary uses have just … it’s made my cooking so much better. You could say that using great olive oil obviously makes my food taste a lot better, and it’s been interesting to kind of look back and think about how olive oil has kind of progressed in the industry.
We still have so much work to do in the restaurant industry, especially in the US, and so much education to do still. We encourage so much more every day, and the layers and layers just keep unfolding and unfolding. I realize how much we still have to learn and how we’re still pioneers in this industry. You don’t really get a sense of it until you’re really in the thick of it. You don’t think of something so ancient as olive oil still being so undiscovered, you know? You feel like the only pioneers in any kind of industry, could be tech or something like that, but there’s still so much to learn. I’m just so excited to really plant my roots here, and help educate people, and just continue cooking with these awesome, awesome oils.
Yeah, you were there at the week long olive oil sommelier certification course in California a few weeks ago, among an incredibly diverse group of people from all over, who took the time out of their busy lives to deepen your understanding of olive oil. What do you think about the way olive oil has this way of bringing such interesting people together?
You could say that again, interesting people. At that course, there was such an awesome variety of people. I mean, we had importers, and producers, and journalists, chefs. I mean, people from all around the world. So to kind of have this panel of all these great minds in the industry all in one spot really put things into perspective for me, and got me even more excited about being in this industry. It’s not just something I’m doing with food anymore. It’s all about olive oil now. Sometimes you don’t realize how exciting it is until you meet other people who share the same excitement … kind of like, “Isn’t this so cool?” kind of moments with these people.
Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the course is the open forum, where over lunch we share ideas and we just brainstorm in different directions on whatever comes to mind.
(Speaker 3)
For me, I was more open to other kind of olive oils now. Before, it was like I’m so used to the robust and I considered all the mild and delicate olive oils are just watery and buttery and not real olive oils and all. Throughout those five days, or six days, I learnt to appreciate the characteristics of the mild and delicate, and really be able to taste the fruitiness, the olive green in those too, as much as they exist in the robust olive oil. So, that was like a big shift in my mind.
(Speaker 4)
It seems high to a lot of people in the US because they still think of olive oil as a condiment, something that you put on top of something else, something that’s the supporting cast, but if we could start to change the view of olive oil, is it’s the star of the show.
(Speaker 5)
Well, one of the things which I’m looking at, as anyone know here, the palate of Korean food is much different from the European food. Therefore, olive oil is very … it’s very hard to blend into the Korean diet. However, there are two things which I’m looking at. One is the development of kind of a fused type of Korean food to olive oil. The other side is, of course, bringing the European diet directly into the Korean market.
(Speaker 6)
One of the questions you asked before about what I learnt most was about how do you market the Oleocanthal and the health and wellness so you can tie it into a higher cost category of olive oil. In the US, we don’t have that level of appreciation or common knowledge between consumers and the grocery store. Extra virgin, you know, is everywhere. Why spend, for true extra virgin, for $25 a bottle? How do we bridge that gap so we can make people who are bringing in really good olive oil from these great places, who are true to having Oleocanthal or freshness, or the high level polyphenols, for those benefits, to the average consumer in the US?
(Speaker 7)
In terms of marketing, I mean, we can always show good examples and the benefits of olive oil and extra virgin olive oil. A lot of times, most of you probably have seen documentaries … There’s a Greek island, [Icaria 00:23:26], that the longevity of the people that they live there – and their diet is based on extra virgin olive oil – far bypasses any other place in the world. It’s like-
Yeah. I mean, the average age there is like 95. I mean, you see everybody is going 95, 100 years old. That, itself, if that doesn’t give value to extra virgin, I don’t know what else could possibly do.
Yeah, same. That was awesome to hear everybody’s story. It’s like after that open forum, it’s like holy shit, everybody here is really cool, very interesting, and doing some really great stuff. I mean, on top of everything I got out of the course, which was so much, at the end of the day, it was also a great networking opportunity. I’ve got friends in the industry all over the world now. I mean, that happened within one week. I mean, those are connections that take sometimes a career to develop.
What’s next? What are you going to do today, what are you going to do tomorrow? What are you looking forward to now with Cobram Estate?
After Harvest, I generally lick my wounds for about a week and then kind of pick up where I left off. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening with what I’ll be doing with Cobram. We literally wrapped up harvest, and within that day I got my first email talking about 2018 harvest in Australia. On the back burner, we’re gearing up for 2018 harvest, and then here, we’re just building our infrastructure. What I’m most excited about right now is the garden that I’m putting into place. I’ll be building a sensory garden coming out of this olive oil sommelier certification course. I’m really keen on educating people and getting people as excited as I am, so having the sensory garden, we’ll be able to … When I say garden, it’s on premises at Cobram, where we process, where we have our lab and everything. We’ll be able to go through and taste these fresh oils basically coming off the separator, and then also go through this garden where I’ll be growing things to use in the kitchen, but also things to just go up and smell. I mean, to kind of internalize what an artichoke smells like, to know what a-
The elusive green almond.
Yeah, I’ll be growing some almonds. I was lucky enough to grow up in an almond growing region, so I knew exactly what a green almond smelled like. But nobody else does, so to be able to offer something where we can kind of go through and internalize these smells, and kind of just hone the senses, then people will be able to enjoy olive oil that much more, and to be able to discuss it and say, “Yeah, I do get some tomato leaf on this and some herbaceous notes. I know what that smells like because I just rubbed my hand on a tomato bush and picked some herbs from the garden.”
That’s fantastic.
We’ve got the garden going, and just building a ton of content is my main goal right now. We’ll be blasting out a ton of recipe content showcasing the culinary applications, and even pairings with this awesome product. I tell people, “You’re not going to have one wine in your house,” right? You’re not just going to have some buttery Chardonnay sitting in the fridge, you’re going to want a variety of wines for different occasions and different dishes that you’re eating. Same with olive oil. There’s so many different applications for so many different oils and a wide range, so showcasing that to the world is my next big goal, getting other chefs onboard, other producers to collaborate with us. And when I say producers, I mean farmers, cheese makers, people that also make great product, and just kind of building that culture in California, that community and that culture.
You know, in Greece, and Italy and Spain, there’s such a rich olive oil culture, and what’s so exciting about being here in California is we can help build that culture. We can be a part of it. We can set the tone for the next generation that will be enjoying this product, that will be learning more about it than we ever knew, that will be reaping the health benefits for a longer life than we’ll be able to live. So to kind of set the tone for this olive oil culture in California is my next main goal.
That’s fantastic and that’s a great goal to have. We appreciate the work that you’re doing and wish you continued success. Chef Kevin O’Connor is the chef at large for Cobram Estate. Thank you for joining us today, Kevin.
Thanks for having me, Curtis.