March in Melbourne is food and wine festival time. Over the past few years we’ve been down in Port Fairy! Not this year – time for some culinary indulgence instead of the more limited offerings of the Guinness tent. (Not that the latter wasn’t enjoyable at the time!) As it turned out, our experience of the MF&WF was mostly cerebral rather than sensory. The highlight was our time – two full afternoons – spent at what was called, a bit portentiously, but accurately as it turned out, the Theatre of Ideas.
Held in the Convention Centre (a barn of a place that makes 1,000 people feel in need of friends) I was not sure what to expect. First up was Ben Shewry of Attica fame. I’ve always been keen to visit his restaurant and am more so now. He treated us to an old-fashioned show and tell. While he talked, without artifice, from the heart, about the things that were important to him, and that inspired his dishes, other people on stage portrayed what he was describing. His Dad painted the wild ducks that inhabit the part of New Zealand from whence Ben comes. His chocolatier (who left a high flying corporate job to pursue his passion) made eggs, with such care and precision: filling the moulds, tapping them down, speckling the cooled shells. Two young chefs then filled the finished eggs with something delicious. Ben described how these were served to patrons with a note saying they were from the endangered species being painted by his father. Staff enjoyed the resultant confusion, followed by delight as eggs were finally consumed.
Lots of threads in that story, childhood memories, care and attention to detail, giving pleasure. Later we saw a potter crafting one of the beautiful pieces of crockery used in at Attica. Then beekeepers displaying their skills while Ben described the critical role of the European honey bees in agriculture and his chefs created a beautiful dessert based around honey. Other memorable bits saw Ben placing a walnut carefully in a carpenter’s vice and methodically sawing it in two, so the two halves could be put perfectly back together again, enfolding another delicious filling. His Dad came back to create perfect little wooden boxes to encase one of the desserts. A video of mussel farming in the bay and a lesson on why farming them is more sustainable than scooping up scallops. Finally a bit of fun, people in moon suits reshaping watermelon slices into strawberry shapes along an industrial processing line. A great presentation, surprisingly moving, I suppose because it took us right into Ben’s life and the things that are deeply important for him, that make him the sort of chef he is.
Rene Redzipi, who followed agreed. What a bastard Ben Shewry is!, he said as he bounced onto the stage in his eco-sandals. Wondering how he was going to engage us as deeply with a more traditional slide show presentation. He need not have worried. He talked about his approach to cooking and it pretty quickly became apparent how he comes to be running the best restaurant in the world, Noma. Very down to earth: all food ends up as shit, number one is a very subjective judgement buthey! if they give it to us, we’ll take it. Over the course of his talk, his passion for produce, flavour and creativity shone through. Beautiful photographs of dishes, that I have beside me now because I bought his book, only for those who want a book you will never cook from, he warned. Each dish a work of art with every element playing its part. Things like Milk Ice and barley poached egg and liquorice or Sweetbreads and seaweed, bleak roe and seashore herbs or Cloudberries and pitea, burnt meringue and herbal tea. He explained his approach by comparing two different ways of cooking a duck. He asked his staff, people from all over the world to name a duck recipe. They all knew Duck l’orange. Rene was amazed, and you gathered a bit cross! Why would people from such different cultures – Mexico for goodness sake! -want to cook bloody Duck l’orange. There was a photo of the offending dish. (Looked delicious). He then described hunting for duck in the woods around Copenhagen, and imagining what the duck would see on being shot: falling on to wild grass, near the soft bark of the trees, lying beside wild flowers. Then he showed us a photo of the dish he had created based on these ideas. It looked amazing! Wonderful.
He described developing relationships with local farmers, a commitment to using local ingredients, even when the ground is frozen for months every year, of valuing his chefs’ creativity, of having them serve the dishes they cooked to diners in the restaurant and how these things had improved the quality of their cooking. All wonderful. One of the first questions to Rene was from an apprentice chef who asked whether there was any likelihood of a job in his restaurant. We were all agog and pleased when he said yes, and took her details!
Next day could have been an anti climax now that our expectations had been raised. But this was not to be. We saw David Chang who described how he created the menu for his Australian restaurant, Momofuku Seiobo, which is at Star Casino (a pity) in Sydney. Sounds a bit boring but was quite riveting: how do you decide what to leave out (quality meat cuts was an interesting one), differences between American and Australian ingredients (flour) and amenities (space) and much more. Interesting to hear the incredulity expressed by his American friends,why on earth would you start up in Australia – so far away! He also thinks dismissing MSG in cooking is a bit racist. A larger than life character and good fun.
David was followed by Massimo Botturo who runs the Modeno restaurant Osterio Francescano. A hard gig, coming fourth in a row in our series of presentations but he was great too. His father didn’t talk to him for three years when he decided to be a chef! And he was nearly run out of town when his restaurant started. That was a bit of a theme for all of these chefs who have risen to the top – all suffered plenty of slings and arrows, ridicule, harsh reviews – out of adversity!
There was a wonderful video of some of Massimo’s family, ferocious looking older women, his mother reading something, an Aunt, old men, playing cards, cooking and eating around a kitchen table. Then another of a man fishing for eels in winding freshwater canals around Modeno. A passion for sustainability and conservation was another theme shared by all of these chefs. Massimo has been instrumental in a campaign to get these waterways reclaimed from a degraded state.
Massimo had his Japanese sous chef on hand to do some cooking while he described his approach to cooking. One of the elements was to capture the basic components of great art and design. His presentation concluded with the making of a dessert based on an abstract painting that hangs in his restaurant – looked fantastic and exactly like a painting, colours – chocolate, rasberry, meringue, something yellow – smeared in big stripes across a big white chopping board. Audience members were invited to come forward and eat it with their hands, Rene Redzipi was one of the first up!
Here is a picture of Massimo’s dessert, via MattsCravat on twitter.
And this is a photo of Dessert Flowers from Rene’s beautiful book.
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