This special episode was recorded on the night of the Electrolux Appetite For Excellence Awards last year. For the podcast, I was lucky to be able to talk to competition judge David Thompson about everything – from the century-old Thai cookbooks he's collected to the time he recently won Best Restaurant in Asia (an experience that actually annoyed him, surprisingly)! I also got to chat to Katrina Birchmeier of Garagistes, who won Young Restaurateur in 2012, and returned as a judge in the Young W...
Feb 01, 2015•51 min
Massimo Bottura is considered to be the greatest living Italian chef. He runs Osteria Francescana in Modena, in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, which is currently ranked #3 in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards list. His brilliant new cookbook, 'Never Trust A Skinny Italian Chef' (out through Phaidon) covers 20 years of his iconic dishes, which include items such as Tortellini Walking On Broth, Memory of a Mortadella Sandwich, A Potato Waiting To Become A Truffle, Oops I Dropped The Lemo...
Jan 08, 2015•37 min
Kylie Millar has a masters of physiotherapy – and has even worked with the Sydney Swans AFL team ! – but that’s probably not why you’ve heard of her. She’s done time at Mugaritz in Spain, which is ranked no. 6 on the World’s Best Restaurants list , and also has worked as a pastry chef at the sugar-laced wonderland that is Burch and Purchese in Melbourne and is currently turning out desserts at the acclaimed new Sydney outpost of Pei Modern . In 2012, she also was a contestant on a TV show you ma...
Dec 03, 2014•42 min
As a 15 year old, Kerby Craig was fascinated by the world of restaurants – seeing a chef breakdancing in the middle of service (!) confirmed for him that this was the industry that he wanted to work in. By accident, he ended up at the original Tetsuya's as a teenage apprentice chef and, after stints in Sydney and overseas, later helped Koi earn a hat in The Good Food Guide. To mark this achievement, he actually got a chef's hat tattooed on his neck – an act that was memorably referred to in Terr...
Nov 03, 2014•50 min
Hetty McKinnon is the creative force – and salad-making ace – behind Arthur Street Kitchen . Her one-woman business saw her taking lunch orders from locals, creating meals from scratch at her Surry Hills home, and personally delivering these salads every Thursday and Friday on her bike. To pull this off, Hetty had to single-handedly cook 100 salads a week in her domestic kitchen, playing a game of ingredient Tetris just to fit all the required produce into her very normal-sized fridge. And even ...
Oct 07, 2014•47 min
Nick Smith's early fascination with food was marked, literally, with a bang. A childhood cooking incident – which led to an unexpected visit from the bomb squad – did not deter his culinary interests, nor did a 10-year career in stockbroking. Along the way, he started his own catering company, became involved with Single Origin Roasters and, most recently, is the reason why people have been blitzing through bowls of ramen at the Rising Sun Workshop pop-up noodle bar and communal motorcycle garag...
Sep 08, 2014•40 min
Chui Lee Luk grew up in Malaysia, visiting the markets early in the day – fascinated and repelled by how "gruesome" they could be. When she moved to Australia, she was introduced to French food, thanks to "one of the weirdest competitions I've entered ever". After a career dealing with stamp duty and commercial transactions, Chui found herself switching paths to work in restaurants – there she was, a former commercial lawyer learning how to cook from teenagers who had more culinary experience th...
Sep 04, 2014•36 min
Ambrose Chiang 's love of food started early on – at the age of six, he was already handling big knives and other serious kitchen hardware in his family's kitchen in Hong Kong. Later, he moved to Australia, and after battling early alarm-clock starts and hill sprints, he moved on from the world of football to the world of hospitality – which proved just as gruelling as any contact sport, particularly when working at Cafe Sydney, where you could be juggling 600 covers a day. In this podcast, he a...
Aug 24, 2014•34 min
Hanz Gueco has discovered some pretty surprising things as a chef. Orange juice can be the best part of a $300 meal. You can get sent home for the most unusual reason when working at an establishment in Japan. And there's a sneaky way to get around America's legal drinking age of 21 that does not involve a false ID. In this podcast, Hanz also describes what it's like to be the sous chef at one of Sydney's most inventive restaurants – Cafe Paci – which is run by acclaimed chef Pasi Petanen (who, ...
Jul 21, 2014•35 min
Andrew Bowden is the "lord pastry master of Hartsyard ". You may know him as Andy Bowdy if you follow him on social media, where you can see the next-level desserts he makes for the hatted Newtown restaurant. This includes his ever-changing soft serves and pies – which incorporate everything from deep-fried cheesecake, wasabi peas, toasted bourbon marshmallow and duck fat choc chips – and his spectacular bespoke cakes (one particular creation was bartered for 18 cheeseburgers from Mary's). One o...
Jul 02, 2014•37 min
When Ferran Adria – one of the world's greatest chefs – was recently in Sydney for a day, I was lucky enough to get a chance to interview him. In the car ride from the airport to his hotel, I got to ask him about whether he actually eats plane food; we went into detail about elBulli 2005-2011 , his spectacular seven-book set about the ground-breaking restaurant's last chapter; whether he still considers himself a punk (he used to blow up tomatoes and claim it was a "punky" phase he was going thr...
Jun 19, 2014•20 min
Not many people look into a wine glass and see a career. When Richard Hargreave was at Quay in his first-ever serious sommelier role, he was juggling a business degree – with plans to graduate and land a "grown-up job". He never ended up going down that road and ignoring the "grown-up" path has definitely paid off. In fact, Richard was named Sommelier of The Year at the latest Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Awards for his work at Momofuku Seiobo – a restaurant so great that people have forged c...
May 30, 2014•44 min
Renee Creer is doing something unusual in Australia – she's selling locally grown green tea under her label Perfect South. She's taken an unusual route to get to this point – a journey that involves a visit to an 800-year-old tea shop in Kyoto, becoming a tea master, and enduring the occasional "tea high" from too many tastings in one go. Renee's teas are now served at Rockpool and Cornersmith and she's also one of the organisers of the Sydney Tea Festival, which takes place at Carriageworks on ...
May 08, 2014•34 min
O Tama Carey grew up "eating nothing, refusing all food", so it may be surprising that she ended up as a chef. In fact, she jokes that she was "tricked" into this career. She's made a name for herself in Sydney, through working at Billy Kwong, running pop-up dinners with Billy Kwong co-conspirator Hamish Ingham (who now heads Bar H) and for the last three years, she's been adding a contemporary twist to Italian food at Berta in Surry Hills (her Sri Lankan background leads her to sneaking some cu...
Feb 13, 2014•48 min
Mike Bennie was studying law and looking for a no-brainer job that wouldn't interfere with his late nights out. He found one stacking shelves and driving a van for a local bottle shop – and it ended up being the gateway into his interest in wine. After run-ins with E Annie Proulx, the world of radio, and ditching law, he ended up as an award-winning wine writer. He's travelled the world via his wine glass – literally and figuratively: he's physically climbed a Swiss mountain - conquering 600-met...
Jan 28, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Andrew Levins once got offered a cookbook deal during a DJ set. This happened after he opened The Dip, the popular American-inspired eatery that he runs in Sydney with his wife, Bianca. It was namechecked for its hot dogs by Gourmet Traveller when it first launched and Levins' "hot dog expertise" has also been flexed on his TV show, Levins Eating Food , where he highlighted the most interesting dogs in Sydney (including a deep-fried Korean creation that could very well protect you from a killer ...
Jan 21, 2014•49 min
Elizabeth Hewson gets her inspiration from everywhere: one of the recipes in her new cookbook, "Moving Out … Eating In", comes from an incident involving a hangover. And while her cookbook tackles the reality of creating meals when you've just left home and you're nervously counting down until your next pay packet, her day job can seem like the flipside of producing inventive budget-watching cuisine. Working in PR for Black Communications, she looks after luxury food brands such as Simon Johnson...
Jan 09, 2014•35 min
"You should be dead." That's what Adam Humphrey's doctor once told him. Despite the physically exhausting nature of his work, the co-head-chef and co-owner of Sydney's Arras has survived life in the kitchen with some pretty amazing tales to tell. Early on, his achievements include scoring against a famous UK goalkeeper, being a pastry chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant at 18 and denying Antonio Banderas some requested carbs. He currently runs the hatted restaurant Arras with his wife Lovaine,...
Dec 30, 2013•39 min
There's no doubt that Jaime Wirth has rebooted the idea of Sydney pubs. Via his Drink N Dine empire, he's transformed many old-man drinking holes into places where you can find a deep-fried Golden Gaytime, Kingston Kreme donuts and someone under the age of 55. It hasn't been an obvious – or easy – career path for this former DJ. He's weathered drive-by shootings, firebombs and some seriously unappealing encounters with greasetraps to ensure that places like The Norfolk, The Abercrombie and The F...
Nov 28, 2013•41 min
Here's an interview I did last year with Joanna Savill, editor of the Good Food Guide and director of Good Food Month (previously known as Crave International Food Festival).
Oct 10, 20130
What's it like to stage a dinner in the back lot of Opera Australia? Or throw a random soup party in a park and hope you don't get busted? Kristen Allan would know, as these are some of the guerilla culinary events she's organised with Full Circle (the team also behind The Eat-in pop-up restaurant in Chippendale earlier this year). She also runs excellent cheesemaking workshops at Cornersmith, so she's also an expert on ricotta, labne, and all things curds and whey – and in fact, can personally ...
Jul 08, 2013•40 min
Christina Tosi is a James Beard Rising Star Chef and the creative force behind the popular Momofuku Milk Bar bakeries in New York. But she's taken an unusual path to get to this point. She studied electrical engineering and, even when she ended up in the kitchen of the award-winning WD-50 (as a pastry chef, not an engineer!), she chose to take an unexpected next step: working as a cashier and resolving unsexy problems – such as unclogging toilets – at the newly started Momofuku. In fact, it was ...
Apr 04, 2013•30 min
Naomi Hart ended up in hospitality by accident. But her unintentional career path has taken her to some interesting places – such as a New York restaurant where she almost dropped a table on Tom Hanks (he was very nice about it) and the stylish coat-check woman was straight from a Bill Cunningham photograph (in fact, she was often the subject of his lens). After working in LA, she came back to Australia with her husband Gregory to start Hartsyard, a Newtown eatery that quickly became known for i...
Dec 19, 2012•30 min
Elvis The Fat Years, Tiramisu, Hansel He’s So Hot Right Now, Sage and Burnt Butter, Risotto Milanese, Breakfast of Champions: The Sequel, Pavlova and Raspberry & Rose Gelato with Pomegranate Brownie – these are just some of the attention-seeking flavours that have made Gelato Messina famous over the years. Nick Palumbo, who opened the original gelato parlour in Darlinghurst more than a decade ago, chats about the very first scoops that launched Messina, how he and his team come up with such ...
Nov 11, 2012•33 min
Jack Hanna knows his coffee. He has been awarded national roasting competition and won the world latte art competition. He's also one of the people behind The Grounds, the many-things-in-one cafe that opened in Alexandria earlier this year. He talks about the coffee-related adventures he gets up to in the “research facility” at The Grounds, his feelings about coffee snobs, and what latte art he's gotten away with "drawing" (you'd be surprised). Oh and there was the time he fitted out a vintage c...
Oct 11, 2012•46 min
Myffy Rigby's pathway towards being Chief Food and Drink Critic at Time Out Sydney magazine was not so obvious: she grew up as a vegetarian, dropped out of school early and soon found herself producing kilos of batter a day for Pancake At The Rocks. It took her a long while (and a few career detours) to figure out that she wanted to be writing about food. As someone who covers the most noteworthy places to drink and dine in this city, Myffy talks about the upsides and downsides of being a food c...
Sep 16, 2012•48 min
Japanese cuisine and Australian bush tucker don't usually go together, but chef Josh Nicholls made this culinary mash-up his signature at Cafe Ish, the popular Surry Hills eatery he opened with his wife, Ai, in 2007. It later morphed into an izakaya and, recently, has transformed into The Milk Bar by Cafe Ish in Redfern, with its menu of $5 burgers, Malteser pies and killer shakes (think Miso Caramel or Rosewater, Berry and Rosella). Josh chats about his accidental career as a chef (mainly inspi...
Aug 13, 2012•27 min
In the first episode of the Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry, Lee Tran Lam catches up with David Ralph, a chef who has worked at diner-impressing restaurants in Sydney (Quay, Flying Fish and Sails at Lavendar Bay) and London (Michelin-starred La Noisette and Kensington Place). David's an expert at placating anyone with a sweet tooth as he currently runs Kakawa, the best chocolatier in Sydney with his partner Jin. He chats about his kitchen war stories (he once had to break up a fight between...
Aug 01, 2012•38 min
