Hatted chef joins forces with Feed Me

THE owner of Torquay’s only hatted restaurant Samesyn has announced the business will close in April in preparation for a new collaborative venture with food charity Feed Me in the same venue.

Owner and chef Graham Jefferies said the aim of the new Profit For Purpose enterprise was to minimise food going into landfill, raise awareness on sustainability, and generate revenue to support the production of meals for people experiencing food insecurity in the region.

“Food wastage is a huge bugbear of mine,” he said.

“We are going to be donating all the profits that come from the business to charities, a minimum of 50 per cent will go into the Feed Me charity, and the other one will be charities we nominate.”

In return, Samesyn 2.0 – as it is presently known – will have access to Feed Me’s landfill diverted inventory of food for free.
“So we will end up making more profit and that’ll then go straight back into the charity, so it will be a kind of circular economy,” Mr Jefferies said.

The celebrated chef said the new restaurant that will open on the same site later in the year after a fitout will be less formal, more open and welcoming.

“But the food is going to have the same level of quality… or hopefully better, we’re always trying to improve. But, having a different framework to work around. More heart. More respect. More awareness.”

Adding food diverted from landfill to a menu is a logical step for the hatted chef, who only uses free-range meats from farms he has personally inspected and seafood from the Australian Marine Conservation Society-backed Good Fish Project.
Samesyn 2.0 will continue to source protein from these suppliers, but there will be a heavy reliance on using vegetables and dry goods from Feed Me’s network.

“We’ll have a look at everything we serve through a new lens,” Mr Jefferies said.

Feed Me’s Surf Coast expansion since opening in 2019 continues at a rapid pace. Along with its latest partnership with Samesyn, the organisation recently started operating out of its second Torquay premises; the former Modest Folk café on Pearl Street.

“It’s a commercial kitchen that’s being used for food prep for all the events and catering that we do and the senior Surf Coast Secondary students are doing bulk food production out of there for our  meals that we deliver to our families,” Feed Me Surf Coast co-ordinator Brooke Murphy said.

“It will really be a community kitchen, we’ll have community dinners there, take home meals… and you’ll see a flurry of activity with volunteers prepping for major events we’re doing such as the Indigenous Surf Titles at Bells.”