Brian Cole: Chef was close to life as a child soldier; instead, he’s fronting the acclaimed Ritz-Carlton Perth

If not for his mother’s quick thinking, Perth chef Brian Cole’s life would have turned out very, very differently. Rather than turning out dishes blending local produce with European technique as chef de cuisine at Hearth, the Ritz-Carlton’s Perth fine-dining restaurant, the 30-year-old would have suffered a traumatising and most likely brief, existence as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone Civil War spanning 1991-2002. Cole was only three when there was a knock at the door of the home in Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown he shared with his grandfather, mother, aunties and cousins. Soldiers from the Revolutionary United Front, the rebel army that terrorised the West African nation during their craven mission to control diamond mines during the conflict, were hunting for boys to kidnap, brutalise and brainwash into being child soldiers. Cole’s mother, Elsie Davies, hid him and a male cousin, then an infant, under the stairs. “They came to the house, asking ‘Where are the boys’” the chef says during an interview in the alfresco area of Hearth Lounge, the luxury hotel’s bar and cafe facing Elizabeth Quay and the Swan River. “My mum said, ‘There’s no boys in this house, there’s only girls’. “So, they destroyed everything and they left.” Using money sent by family members living in the US, Cole and his extended family fled Freetown in a military helicopter. They subsequently lived in neighbouring Guinea before moving to his grandparents’ birthplace of Ghana, living in a mix of refugee camps and community hubs established by displaced Sierra Leoneans. Cole doesn’t remember much of his narrow escape from a fate arguably worse than death. Perhaps luckily, as a three-year-old, he was more fascinated by the big chopper. “I remember the helicopter flight, I can still see it,” Cole chuckles. “Once mum tells me the stories, it comes back, vaguely. “As a three-year-old kid, you have no idea what’s going on, but there’s things that stick with you.” Blood Diamond, the 2006 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly, was shot on the street in Freetown, where he spent those early years. Cole laughs that, when they watch the film, his mum likes to share stories of their neighbours, pointing out who lived in which house. After several years in Guinea and Ghana, Cole’s family came to Australia in 2004. “We applied for different countries to seek asylum. You get sent wherever,” he says. “We wanted to go to America. We applied for America because that was the place to be. Everyone wanted to go to America.” While family friends were settled in Norway, Cole’s family were packed up and sent Down Under, where his step-father Gabriel Davies had immigrated a few years before and was working on the necessary visas and other paperwork. “I had never heard of Australia, my mother had no knowledge of Australia,” says Cole, who was 11 years old when his family relocated to Perth. “It was a huge shock,” he adds. “We moved to Hamilton Hill. Everything was completely new to me. The first thing we thought was, ‘wow, there’s fast food everywhere’. “In Africa, those fast food places were a special occasion for us.” Both Cole’s mother and grandmother loved to cook, especially West African “swallow” dishes fufu and banku, tuo zaafi stew and, especially, waakye (beans and rice with sorghum leaves or stalks and limestone). The starchy foods cooked to a dense paste and eaten with soup are called “swallows” because you take a morsel of paste with your fingers, dip it in soup and swallow it. “Mum makes (waakye) every now and then, but the ingredients are very hard to find in Australia,” Cole says. He inherited a love of food, recalling a cooking exam at Como Secondary College where he set himself the highly difficult task of making a chocolate soufflé as part of a three-course dinner. “I messed it up, it was a complete disaster,” laughs Cole, who adds that his teacher gave him good marks for ambition. He left school during Year 11 to complete an apprenticeship at Burswood Entertainment Complex, now Crown Perth, in 2009. What started as a two-week placement turned into a longer stint making soups and stocks for the hotel, then working in various restaurants before shifts in fine diner (A)lure. “That was it for me,” Cole says, “fine dining was what I wanted to do.” He also worked at the luxurious city hotel COMO The Treasury, where he was offered the position of sous chef at the acclaimed rooftop restaurant Wildflower. Cole, however, felt he needed more experience and took some time off to study business, leadership and management. He singles out Robert Ryan, who took him under his wing at Crown Perth’s pub, the Merrywell, for more than two years, as being a formative influence. “Every kitchen I’ve worked in, I’ve taken the good and the bad from each chef,” Cole explains. “But the chef that shaped who I am, as a person as well, is Robert Ryan. “I was a very troublesome kid, you know. I liked to instigate things. “He said, ‘If you want to get further in this career, you need to build bridges rather than burn them’.” While Ryan steered Cole towards American-style dude food, the younger chef gravitated back to fine dining, landing a role under executive sous chef Danny Feng at Hearth. Since officially taking over in March 2021, Cole has embraced the restaurant’s brand of modern Australian cuisine. His spring menu stars local produce, including Shark Bay scallops and cuttlefish, Wagin duck and Amelia Park lamb, plus native ingredients such as Geraldton wax and lemon myrtle. Cole, who has a two-year-old daughter, Akilah, with his girlfriend, has grand ambitions to open an upmarket bistro, something combining high-end food with Ghanaian cuisine. “I would probably move towards my culture a lot more,” he says. “I feel like I’m not tapping into that enough. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone doing West African fine dining.” Opening his own restaurant, he says, has been his dream since he turned 21. “I wrote down two goals: to be head chef in a fine-dining restaurant by 30,” Cole says, “and to open my own fine-dining restaurant by 35.” Chatting about his life and family has inspired Cole, who has convinced the top brass at the Ritz-Carlton to let him collaborate with his mother on a special one-off dinner at Hearth next year showcasing West African cuisine. “What it is,” he says, “and what it can be.” Interestingly, the flavours of sub-Saharan West Africa are so hot right now in London, where the tasting menus at restaurants such as Akoko and Ikoyi can cost hundreds of pounds. While his own West African fine dining experience is still in the development stage, Cole recognises that working at the pointy end of the hospitality industry is a world away from what have happened if those soldiers snatched him. “I would have been sent to a war zone,” he says. “I’d be dead.” Cole doesn’t think so much about his own sliding doors moment as the impact his death would have had on his mum, who had already had a male relative murdered by rebels. The other men of military age, including his step-father, had escaped the war-torn nation. “I have spoken to Mum about it and how it would have destroyed her, destroyed the family,” Cole says. And now that little Akilah is nearing the same age as he was on that fateful day, the chef can’t bear the thought of having her wrenched away from him. Not that Cole dwells for too long on such traumatic thoughts. He’s far too busy running one of Perth’s most acclaimed restaurants. Unsurprisingly, his mother is “super proud” of her hard-working son. “Every time there is something, like a post or an article, my mum posts it on every social media … she even sends them to me,” Cole laughs. “Mum is just over the moon and very excited about what’s happening.” Hearth is at the Ritz-Carlton Perth, 1 Barrack St, Perth. Visit hearthrestaurant.com.au for bookings.