Daryl was a young boy from the country in the 1960s working in some of Melbourne’s best fine dining restaurants – The Ritz as an apprentice, and The Legend as second chef. He came down to the city and just missed a job at the newly opened Southern Cross Hotel. Daryl was released from work one day a week to attend classes at William Angliss and he remembers starting on Valentine’s Day in 1964. He loved this as he always got the night off work on this day. He loved his work and felt ‘looked after’ by the owners and the staff. This was the era of fine dining in Melbourne. Daryl explains:

The Ritz was Italian but menus were mostly French. We served oysters, whiting caprice, beautifully prepared and cooked filet steak, Canard a l’orange … We also did some Guerdon work … things like crepe suzette and pepper steak and all vegetables were silver served. Menus were basically the same everywhere you went in Melbourne in those days. The Ritz only had male waiters and they were mostly European – I was the only Australian in the establishment!

He remembers being interviewed by Graham Dodgson and in his class was the first female apprentice chef. She was an apprentice at the Austin Hospital. To learn butchery the class visited the abattoirs. The subjects covered in his course were food theory, art – which he guesses was for designing menus – and business studies. “There was a lot of maths in Business Studies”, Daryl commented. He also studied Food Science and later in career he realised just how important food science was: “It is the hows and whys of cooking … Food science is not just about hygiene.”

Thinking back I applied myself diligently at work place but not here. [at William Angliss]. I regarded coming here as a day off. If I had missed a day at work I would have had my backside kicked … I found it hard to come off a heavy work shift at night then come to school in a white freshly ironed uniform at 8.00 am. It was hard to turn on learning capacity so early in the morning.

He attained a Certificate of Proficiency in the Trade of Cookery and stayed at The Ritz for two years. When it closed he went to work at The Legend along with most of The Ritz staff. At the Legend he served Australian artist Leonard French, a young Johnny Farhnam who was in the musical Pippin, Joe Cocker dined there and so did Pixie Scase. Jackie Onassis almost did …

After honing his cooking skills, marrying and starting a family, Daryl was asked by a friend who taught at William Angliss to come and teach commercial cookery one day a week. He stayed a year and really enjoyed teaching cooking.

When I was in a position where I could assist people I was happy to help – maybe it was because I was left behind as a kid … I loved teaching.

At the end of the year a job came up in Dandenong at the Tafe and he left to teach full time there.

Daryl’s daughter Renee who works at NLA in the Oral History and Folklore department, remembered being phoned by her father when he was working here on quiet nights and the family going in and dining at the Restaurant. When I met Daryl he and his wife were semi-retired and managing a property just out of Seymour. He was a student here in the 1960s and came back for a short time in the 1980s and taught.