Sean Connolly: The Yorkshire-born chef who is making waves in Australia's restaurant scene

Connolly, originally from Huddersfield, now divides his time between his home base of Sydney and New Zealand overseeing a collection of international restaurants including Esther at QT Hotel in Auckland, Sean’s Kitchen in Adelaide and Steak & Co by Sean Connolly at West HQ Sydney and his fine diner, Gowings Bar & Dining, at QT Hotel Sydney, for which he was recently awarded a coveted Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Chef’s Hat (he’s won 26 at his various restaurants over the years.)

“We're so pleased,” he says. “Like Michelin stars, it’s so hard to pinpoint how to get our Australian equivalent and there’s not a particular science. I think the judges need to see passion in the (dining) room and on the plate to get it across the line. You need to be very caring, matching high-quality food with exceptional service and doing that consistently.”

Parlour, where we’re enjoying dinner, is Connolly’s latest snazzy new diner ensconced next to Sydney’s State Theatre. The wine room is in the old box office.

“I’m bringing my greatest hits to this new restaurant. This is like my ‘Best Of’ album,” laughs Connolly, (who is also mad about music). And judging by the avante garde French offerings like crumbed lambs’ brains with anchovy aioli, buttered escargot, and steak Hachette on the menu at this glittering venue, he’s not wrong.

Yet despite this culmination of classy dishes borne out of a career spanning some 30 years, it’s that same warm, fuzzy feeling of granny Esther’s kitchen that’s the secret ingredient to his success and creating happy teams passionate about serving quality food. “I like my kitchen to feel like a home,” he says.

This man knows his onions and while classically trained, Connolly learned his best cooking tips from Grandma Esther who he also named his New Zealand restaurant after.

“I still get choked up when I think about her. I have such admiration of her cooking through adversity in the Second World War. She taught me to cook that way too with lard and suet. Every time she’d tell us a story, she’d make the dish we were talking about from her memoir, like steak and kidney pudding.”

Connolly’s brand of down to earth cooking is still present on his product-driven restaurant menus that all hero simplicity: “My art is about minimalism,” he says. “Like serving a great steak, the best duck-fat chips you can imagine, a fantastic salad and my ‘grandma’s carrots’. “The ‘less is more’ approach is how I roll every day. It’s what I don’t do to a dish rather than what I do. I don't overwork it. I let the ingredients speak for themselves. Beautiful produce, provenance and the thinking behind the dish is what makes me tick.”

Home cooking lures him back to Yorkshire like a boomerang too. “I miss good fish and chips, mushy peas and my mum’s corned beef pie, which she still makes for me when I go home and the beautiful green countryside.”

A side order of good humour’s always on the table for Sean Connolly. Through highs and lows of restaurant openings and closures including one above the Opera House in Dubai, Yorkshire wit remains, and you’ll see it on his menus in the names of his best-known dishes, like the blissful mashup of mushrooms titled ‘Orgy of mushrooms’. “That’s been one of my signature dishes for many years,” says Sean, grinning. “Having a Northern accent, you can get away with so much more. You can be cheekier and more irreverent and somehow, being from Yorkshire, you get away with it.”

It all began setting sail aboard the QE2 and hew as 19. “Coming from a kitchen in a hotel in Yorkshire to working with amazing global chefs was life changing. I was lucky enough to travel to about 30 or 40 countries, circumnavigating the globe, while peeling spuds. It was 1986 when I hit Sydney,” he recalls. “We sailed in through the Heads with the Opera House and the iconic (Sydney Harbour) bridge right there in front of me. I thought, ‘this is amazing’. I said to my then girlfriend, now my wife, “Oh, this place called Australia where the sun shines every day and everyone speaks English is amazing.

“But even further back, I remember watching Alan Wicker travel programme documentaries with my granddad Ted when I was 14. There was an interview with a chef working on the QEII and it was on the Level 7 where he had a fridge containing the biggest collection of wild caviar in the world. That was it, I told my grandad I would work on that ship one day and I did.”

Connolly’s father was an academic and realised his son’s passion was food and lined him up some work experience in the kitchen. “He could tell I was never going to follow in his footsteps. So, he got me work experience at the Hilton at Ainley Top working on the prawn cocktail section. My first proper job was at the Golden Cock and where I come from, everyone would remember Peter Midwood. He was like the Gordon Ramsay of Yorkshire back in the day, a real tough guy who would throw customers out of his restaurant if they complained about the food. He was my very scary mentor.”

On arrival in Australia Connolly was taken under the wing of renowned chefs Dietmar Sawyere and Liam Tomlin, before his role of executive chef at Astral in Sydney’s Star City Casino. He won Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Chef of the Year in 2008 before launching casual restaurant, Sean’s Kitchen. Many restaurants and TV shows later, the plan was to dial things down, but retirement is not on the cards just yet.

“I thought I was going to retire but there have been so many opportunities that there’s no time. And he has some tips for the next generation. “Say yes to everything. Don't worry about your failures because they are just battle scars, that make you stronger.”