Aryn Hala on Building Sustainability Into a Kitchen From Day One

Aryn Hala is head chef at Patio Season on Queensland’s Gold Coast, where she leads a team of fifteen and builds seasonal menus around local produce and the restaurant’s own herb garden. Fifteen years into a career shaped by sustainability, she talks about what changes when you treat responsiveness to community as part of the job rather than separate from it.

On a quiet night during the darkest stretch of the pandemic, Aryn Hala stood alone in her empty dining room and understood, more clearly than she had before, why every decision she made mattered. The kitchen at Patio Season had gone quiet. New safety measures were still being worked out, the staff had cycled through a schedule that felt improvised even when it worked, and the restaurant itself, usually loud with the overlapping sounds of service, had emptied out early. She walked into the dining room and stood there for a moment, not doing anything in particular. The easiest thing would have been to go home. Instead she paused among the empty tables and thought about what the last months had actually required of her: not just keeping the business alive, but protecting the people who worked for her and the community that had come to depend on the restaurant.

Aryn Hala is head chef at Patio Season, a modern Australian restaurant known for al fresco dining and menus that shift with the seasons. She was born on April 12, 1988, and grew up on Queensland’s Gold Coast. She earned her diploma in Culinary Arts from the Culinary Institute of Australia in Sydney in 2008, where she co-founded the Sustainable Cooking Club. She spent nearly twelve years as sous chef at Oceanside Seafood before joining Patio Season in November 2021, where she now leads a team of fifteen chefs and kitchen staff.

How did you first understand that cooking and responsibility to place were connected?

I grew up on the Gold Coast, and my earliest memory of food is standing beside my grandmother, helping prepare dinner. She worked with ingredients that were fresh, local, and unfussy, and I absorbed without quite realizing it a respect for that approach. It was not a restaurant meal that shaped me. It was a family one. That sense stayed with me: that a dish should be a tribute to where it comes from rather than a display of technique for its own sake. When I went to culinary school, that instinct took a formal shape. I co-founded the Sustainable Cooking Club while I was at the Culinary Institute of Australia, and I took part in an international exchange program that sent me to kitchens in Italy and France. Both experiences widened my sense of what was possible on a plate, but they reinforced the values I had carried since childhood. Good cooking starts with where the food comes from.

What do people consistently get wrong about your work?

They think sustainability is something you bolt on later, once you have mastered everything else. That treating it as an afterthought is fine as long as you get to it eventually. I have spent fifteen years arguing the opposite. Sustainability should be built into a young cook’s habits from the start of a career, not added once other things have been learned. It is not a separate skill. It shapes every decision you make in the kitchen, from how you source ingredients to how you design a menu to how you handle waste. If you wait to think about it until you are already established, you are working backward. You are trying to retrofit values into systems that were built without them. Start with them instead, and the cooking that follows will be stronger for it.

Sustainability should be built into a young cook’s habits from the start of a career, not bolted on later once other things have been mastered.

You spent nearly twelve years at Oceanside Seafood. What shifted during that time?

I joined as a sous chef in December 2008, right after I finished culinary school. Over those twelve years, my philosophy moved from student ideal to working practice. I helped reshape the restaurant’s menu around seasonal produce and environmentally conscious sourcing, work that contributed to the restaurant earning recognition within the culinary community for its sustainability practices. Just as significant, in retrospect, was the mentoring I began doing during those years. Junior chefs who passed through the kitchen came away with more than technique. They absorbed a culture that treated innovation and environmental responsibility as inseparable rather than competing priorities. My tenure lasted until October 2020, spanning the early, most disorienting months of the pandemic. By the time I left, I had built a reputation that combined culinary skill with a clear ethical throughline.

What did that pandemic stretch actually require of you?

It required me to distinguish between surviving and leading with care. We introduced takeaway service and expanded outdoor dining just to stay open. The staff cycled through schedules that felt improvised even when they worked. And there was a night, at Patio Season, when the dining room had emptied out early and I stood there among the tables, not doing anything in particular. I thought about what the last months had demanded: not just keeping the business alive, but protecting the people who worked for me and the community that had come to depend on the restaurant. That distinction stayed with me long after the pandemic eased. It shapes how I lead now. Responsiveness to the community is part of the job, not separate from it.

How do you build menus at Patio Season?

We source heavily from our own in-house herb garden, and our menus are built around the freshest local produce available at a given moment rather than a fixed set of signature dishes. The restaurant is known for al fresco dining and menus that shift with the seasons, and I use that structure to push further on the ideas I had been developing for over a decade. The role gave me the chance to build a culinary vision from the ground up rather than adapt an existing one. I oversee a team of fifteen chefs and kitchen staff now, and the kitchen culture favors collaboration and personal development over rigid hierarchy. That approach to leadership, encouraging creativity while keeping the operation disciplined, has been central to the restaurant’s early success and to the loyal following we have built.

Good cooking and responsible cooking were never really two different things.

What brings you more satisfaction: a dish leaving the kitchen, or watching a team member grow?

Watching team members grow and take on new responsibility brings me as much satisfaction as any dish leaving the kitchen. That is not a deflection. It is the truth. I run workshops for aspiring chefs built around a simple premise: that sustainability should be built into a young cook’s habits from the start of a career, not bolted on later once other things have been mastered. Mentorship has remained constant throughout my career. I started doing it at Oceanside Seafood, and I continue it now at Patio Season and through the workshops I run. When junior chefs absorb a culture that treats innovation and environmental responsibility as inseparable, that matters as much as anything I put on a plate.

What was the strangest request you have ever received?

I was asked to design a menu for an event themed around Australian wildlife, incorporating native ingredients in the strangest ways I could manage. I made emu tartare, crocodile sliders, and a dessert built around wattleseed and Kakadu plum. On another occasion, a customer arrived with an enormous pumpkin grown in a home garden and asked whether I could do something with it. I built a three-course meal around it instead of turning the request away. Those stories are lighter than the pandemic reflection, but they run on the same current: a willingness to treat unexpected constraints as material rather than obstacles.

How do you handle negative feedback?

I try not to take it personally. I work through it with my team to identify what specifically needs to change, then I follow up with the person who raised the concern so they know their input led somewhere. It is a small, procedural habit, but one that reflects the same underlying belief that runs through my larger choices: that responsiveness, to critics and to the community alike, is part of the job rather than separate from it. Feedback is material. It tells you where the gap is between what you intended and what someone experienced. If you close that loop, you learn something. If you ignore it, you miss the chance.

What was the hardest moment in your career so far?

The loss of a key team member early in my career forced the kitchen to reorganize and lean on each other through a difficult stretch. That was hard. The pandemic itself was hard in a different way, forcing us to introduce takeaway service and expand outdoor dining just to stay open. Both experiences left me with the same conclusion: that adaptability and teamwork matter as much as any recipe when circumstances turn difficult. You can have the best menu in the world, but if your team cannot adjust when something breaks or someone leaves or the entire industry shuts down, none of it holds. The kitchen has to be built to flex.

Adaptability and teamwork matter as much as any recipe when circumstances turn difficult.

Where is the culinary industry falling short on sustainability right now?

Individual restaurants are solving problems in isolation. What we need is more collaboration across the culinary community on environmental challenges, a shift toward something closer to a shared standard. I appear at industry conferences and seminars to talk about sustainable practices and to press the case that chefs carry a responsibility to lead by example. But that only goes so far if every kitchen is reinventing the wheel. If we coordinated on waste reduction, on sourcing, on what responsible practices actually look like in practice, we would move faster and further than any one restaurant can manage on its own. It is a modest-sounding goal, but it fits a career built less on singular signature dishes than on a consistent argument, made meal by meal since a childhood evening in my grandmother’s kitchen, that good cooking and responsible cooking were never really two different things.

What technology are you bringing into your kitchen?

Until now, we have relied mostly on established methods refined over years of practice. I want to go further on waste reduction and sourcing at Patio Season, and new technology will be part of that. I have not settled on specifics yet, but the goal is clear: to reduce what we throw away, to tighten the loop between what we source and what we serve, and to make those improvements without losing the collaboration and personal development that define the culture we have built. Technology should support the values already in place, not replace them.

You are working on a cookbook. Who is it for?

It is aimed at home cooks who want to bring sustainable practices into their own kitchens. The project mirrors the mentoring I already do with young chefs, but it reaches toward a broader audience. I want people to understand that sustainability is not just for professional kitchens. It is for anyone who cooks. The habits I learned standing beside my grandmother, the ones I formalized at culinary school and refined over fifteen years in professional kitchens, they translate to a home kitchen just as well. You do not need a team of fifteen or an in-house herb garden to cook responsibly. You need to start with where the food comes from and build from there.

What advice would you give someone starting a culinary career today?

Build sustainability into your habits from the start. Do not wait until you have mastered technique or earned a certain title or landed a role at a certain kind of restaurant. Start now. Learn where your ingredients come from. Understand the environmental cost of what you are putting on a plate. Treat innovation and environmental responsibility as inseparable rather than competing priorities. If you do that from the beginning, everything that follows will be stronger for it. The cooking will be better. The culture you build will be better. And the community you serve will feel the difference.

What stays true in ten years, no matter how the industry changes?

Good cooking starts with where the food comes from. That was true in my grandmother’s kitchen on the Gold Coast. It was true when I was a student at the Culinary Institute of Australia. It was true during my twelve years at Oceanside Seafood and it is true now at Patio Season. It will be true in ten years, whether I am still at Patio Season or building something new. The tools will change. The technology will improve. The menus will shift. But the underlying principle, that a dish should be a tribute to where it comes from rather than a display of technique for its own sake, that does not move. It is the foundation everything else is built on.