Turning unwanted coconuts into 2000 curries, 10 tonnes of donated squash into soup, leftover egg yolks from 16,000 Black Star Pastry watermelon-strawberry cakes into banana curd and working out what to do with 800 kilograms of airplane food picked up from the domestic airport gate – these are just some of the things that Travis Harvey handles as executive chef of a food-rescue charity. Working at OzHarvest means he's had to be pretty creative: for instance, he takes the most wasted ingredient in...
Aug 04, 2018•46 min
Joe Beddia makes "America's best pizza", according to Bon Appétit magazine. The chef/owner of Philadelphia’s Pizzeria Beddia has also been referred to as Pizza Jesus and the Jiro of Pizza. He shrugs off what he does as "just pizza", but people would line up many hours (sometimes even arriving before Joe got to work!) just to try his pies. He only made 40 pizzas a night – and he produced each one from scratch over the restaurant's five-year run. Joe is currently on a world tour that he hopes does...
Jul 20, 2018•38 min
It's not surprising that Sharon Salloum would pursue a career in food – her dad has a thing for DIY cooking devices and even pioneered a shopping trolley/fridge shelf/lawnmower barbecue. Her mother and grandmother taught her the power of food around the family table, and their recipes inspired her Almond Bar cookbook – which landed her two international Gourmand Cookbook awards. Just hearing Sharon talk about Syrian dishes is the very opposite of a hunger suppressant; it will make you want to or...
Jun 11, 2018•53 min
Samin Nosrat has written one of the most-talked-about and celebrated cookbooks of the last year, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat . Her trophy shelf includes a James Beard Award for General Cooking and the Julia Child First Book Award. It's an amazing effort for an "uncookbook" that she's spent 15 years working on. While in college, she saved for seven months to eat at Chez Panisse, the Californian farm-to-table restaurant run by Alice Waters – this life-changing meal convinced Nosrat that she needed to wo...
Jun 03, 2018•1 hr 2 min
The first restaurant Eve Yeung ever worked at was Noma - yes, the Copenhagen establishment named the World's Best Restaurant four times . So how did she end up in René Redzepi's renowned kitchen at the age of 18? The young pastry chef actually considered becoming a competitive hockey player (a path she pursued while working at Noma) and before she was preparing desserts in the high-profile restaurant, she worked at Long Island's best bakery – making extravagant cakes to celebrate people's milest...
Apr 06, 2018•51 min
They're two of the dining capitals of the world and they're explored (and beautifully photographed) by Alexandra Carroll in her books, New York: An Inspired Wander Through Manhattan and the Brooklyn Boroughs and Paris: An Inspired Wander Through the City of Lights . So it's no surprise that we talk about memorable bagels and croissants, the fact that Alex had to eat a lot of cheese to get the job done, as well as remarkable venues that are not Michelin-starred institutions – from Clown Bar, with...
Mar 16, 2018•1 hr 5 min
At age 11, Jock Zonfrillo started working in restaurants - initially, as a dishwasher. "I very quickly surmised that I was on the wrong side of the flying frying pan." Only a few weeks in, he became a chef, an experience that would take him from Scotland to the rest of the world: from cooking for Prince Charles in Paris (assisting Marco Pierre White, who attempted to enter France by sticky-taping his photo on top of someone else's passport – true story) to Australia, where a four-hour life-chang...
Jan 19, 2018•46 min
Good Food Guide editor Myffy Rigby, Chat Thai and Boon Cafe co-director Palisa Anderson and an actual legit winemaker, Trisha Nelson who runs Ajola in Lazio, Italy, joined me for a chat recorded live at the most recent Rootstock food and wine festival at Sydney's Carriageworks. So, we talk about memorable experiences with booze, totally nerd out about agriculture (given that Trisha produces organic wine via a vineyard in Italy and Palisa runs the Boon Luck Farm in Byron Bay), how to deal with pe...
Dec 30, 2017•36 min
Morgan McGlone's fried chicken has scored a standing ovation. At an event run Noma's Rene Redzepi, no less. Feeding the top chefs at MAD, the famous Copenhagen food symposium, is just one of many memorable instances of Morgan's eventful career. Long before he launched Belles Hot Chicken, Morgy started out cooking for huge volumes of Japanese tourists at a revolving restaurant in Sydney as well as working for Luke Mangan and Merivale. He staged for Pierre Gagnaire in Paris and assisted fashion ph...
Dec 21, 2017•1 hr 31 min
Ben Shewry's Attica is ranked #32 in the World's 50 Best Restaurants list and it's Restaurant of the Year in the first national Good Food Guide – but according to his son Kobe, Attica is "not bad" for a restaurant that doesn’t have a burger on the menu. Many years before Ben gained international acclaim for Attica's uniquely Australian dishes (from his inventive take on avocado on toast to a savoury pavlova), he was shaping margarine sculptures for hotel buffets and cooking New Zealand's biggest...
Nov 18, 2017•1 hr 52 min
Sarah Doyle has played a pivotal role in Sydney's hospitality scene. But there was a time she worked three jobs just to help keep Bodega running. It was the first restaurant she opened with husband and chef Elvis Abrahanowicz, fellow co-owner and chef Ben Milgate and their business partner/sommelier Joe Valore. And it was a game-changer – its fun, punk, loud focus on good food and good times was a contrast to the mannered French fine-dining scene that was reigning in Sydney hospitality at the ti...
Nov 11, 2017•58 min
David McGuinness has frequently taken his sourdough starter on holidays with him to keep it alive. "You have to feed it regularly, like a baby," he says. This dedication to bread is not surprising, given that he's the co-founder of Bourke Street Bakery, the Sydney institution that is loved for everything from its chocolate ganache tarts to its meat pies (Amy Schumer famously stopped by, straight from the airport, to try one during her Trainwreck press tour). Along with the bakery's co-founder, P...
Nov 03, 2017•43 min
"The chef said he was going to the bank and never came back." Shannon Martinez was working as a bartender at The East Brunswick hotel in Melbourne when she was asked to take over the kitchen. She happened to put a vegan parma on the menu and it blew up – the pub sold close to 300 portions on a Monday night, attracted huge queues and Pink even turned up with her security detail to try the dish. It proved to Shannon there was a massive interest in vegan food and it led to her running Smith & D...
Oct 19, 2017•37 min
"It was an old smashed-up pub that had no floor and no ceiling and no roof." It wasn't the greatest site, but Brent Savage and his business partner Nick Hildebrandt (somehow) transformed it into Bentley, the first restaurant they'd ever open together. 11 years later, they now run four acclaimed Sydney venues: Monopole, an award-winning wine bar; Yellow, a popular fine-dining vegetarian restaurant, and Cirrus, a well-reviewed seafood establishment. Brent got his start in the kitchens of renowned ...
Oct 17, 2017•51 min
Duncan Welgemoed has the most incredible "becoming a chef" origin story I’ve ever heard – it's a crazy tale that also involves George Clooney and ends with Duncan quitting his job by escaping through a window. Duncan was prepping chicken intestines from the age of eight in South Africa, so maybe it's no surprise he ended up working at Michelin-starred restaurants run by Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsay and Raymond Blanc. As a chef at the Adelaide Showgrounds, Duncan dealt with riders for Rammste...
Sep 30, 2017•52 min
Some people have tattoos of Katherine Sabbath's desserts – that's how committed they are to her cakes. Given that the self-taught baker has around 400,000 followers, it's not a surprise that fans are so dedicated. Katherine's blockbuster creations range from a Palm Springs wedding cake to a cantilevered cake she made for an architect that involved actual hardware parts. She's also made birthday cakes for Andy Bowdy and Ken Done – and she's collaborated with fashion label Romance Was Born, too. E...
Sep 21, 2017•57 min
Massimo Bottura once cried while eating Lennox Hastie’s food at Firedoor . When the chef behind Osteria Francescana, named world’s best restaurant in 2016, tears up while eating your steak, you must be doing something right. Perhaps that’s why Lennox was compelled to smuggle his signature dry-aged meat all the way to Italy when he visited Bottura recently. Also on Team Firedoor: Pete Wells , who is probably the most important food critic in the world. The New York Times journalist’s write-up of ...
Sep 21, 2017•54 min
Yes, Donato Toce has gelato for breakfast. And he actually gets paid for it – it's part of his job. He is the "cow milker, sugar hauler, head chef and gelatiere" at Gelato Messina, the much-loved Sydney institution that sells desserts such as Elvis The Fat Years, Robert Brownie Jr, Biggie S’Mores, This Is How We Scroll and the Game of Cones range inspired by the seven kingdoms of Westeros. (There are also great non-pun-related flavours, too, like tiramisu, apple pie and pistachio – the latter ma...
Aug 23, 2017•57 min
Jill Dupleix grew up as the daughter of a sheep farmer and took an unusual route to becoming a food writer – it involved a phone book, a bike ride and a stint in the world of advertising. And meeting Terry Durack: “We hated each other on sight.” They not only married each other, they ended up reviewing restaurants together. Since those early days, she's written 16 cookbooks, been the editor of the Good Food Guide, food curator of TEDx and currently she's the co-director of the Australian Financi...
Aug 06, 2017•46 min
“It was pretty crazy, actually,” says Clayton Wells about opening Momofuku Seiobo, but he could also be describing the incredible response to his solo restaurant Automata. Since Automata’s launch in late 2015, Clayton has been named Australia’s Hottest Chef by The Weekend Australian magazine, Time Out Sydney gave him their Chef of the Year award and Automata has been voted #9 restaurant in the Australian Financial Review’s Top 100 Restaurants list for the second year running. Oh and the most imp...
Jul 18, 2017•34 min
Nikki To's first shoots involved helicopters – an interesting challenge as she's "kind of afraid of heights"! Becoming a food photographer was an unlikely progression from her original plans to be a human rights lawyer, but her eventual career path led to her work appearing in Broadsheet, Gourmet Traveller, Qantas' inflight mag and even Swedish "Gourmet" magazine. After assisting industry veterans such as Daniel Boud, Petrina Tinslay and Anson Smart, she went solo: framing portraits of famous ch...
Jul 03, 2017•50 min
Mike McEnearney’s career has been full of surprising turns. Sure, he’s worked for Neil Perry and Gordon Ramsay – but also for Damien Hirst, running the controversial artist’s Pharmacy restaurant, where even the toilets were unlike anything you’d predict. He’s been involved with hatted and Michelin-starred restaurants, but also sold home-made bread in the car park of his kids’ school and nearly been taken out by a life-threatening fireball at a French homewares store while cooking at a pop-up tha...
May 26, 2017•54 min
A cocktail inspired by Charles Dickens? Or experimental beverages that include Weet Bix milk or charred Jerusalem artichoke? These are just some examples of Phil Gandevia's highly inventive work – he's an award-winning bartender who modestly describes himself as “the bar guy” at Bentley, but there's no other person I would trust to include wasabi vinegar and olive brine in a drink and actually make it delicious. You might've spotted him behind the bar at Rambutan, Eau de Vie, The Roosevelt and T...
Apr 17, 2017•58 min
Rob Caslick has designed lights for the blind, been deployed to Iraq as a naval boarding officer (where he intercepted illegal vessels smuggling oil in the aftermath of September 11), but if you like food, you probably know him for running Two Good. The company produces not-so-ordinary meals using recipes by Yottam Ottolenghi, Ben Shewry, Analiese Gregory, Mitch Orr, Neil Perry and other acclaimed chefs. It's built on a charitable two-for-one model, where you pay for two meals: one for you and t...
Mar 20, 2017•52 min
2016 Good Food Guide Chef of the Year (and one-time skilled marksman for the Finnish army) Pasi Petanen was done with pop-ups. He'd scored plenty of acclaim for his one-off Cafe Paci restaurant – which was only meant to stick around for a year, but got extended to two and a half years by popular demand – and he'd also undergone temporary guest stints at Yellow and Auto.Lab , too. But friend and former Gourmet Traveller Sommelier of the Year Giorgio de Maria convinced him to take on one last job ...
Mar 01, 2017•47 min
Danielle Alvarez studied art history, but luckily for us, she realised that it was food that monopolised her thoughts - after all, she can happily identify the “eggshell crust” on a Cuban sandwich and was always prioritising her next cooking project. So she decided to spend her life in kitchens. Danielle's first-ever gig was at The French Laundry, Thomas Keller's three-Michelin-starred Californian institution, where she was challenged by a complicated egg dish that often ended up in the bin. The...
Feb 13, 2017•1 hr 4 min
It was dragonboat racing - of all things - that led to Toby Wilson running his own cafe at 22. The Wedge Espresso in Glebe was a sliver of a space; when it launched, Toby managed to run the whole place with just a sandwich press and a fridge - “that was all my cooking equipment”. Despite the limitations he had to battle, the cafe got a cult following, particularly for The Henry, “the unofficial hangover sandwich of Glebe". So after three years there, Toby ended up opening Ghostboy Cantina - an e...
Jan 06, 2017•1 hr
In the last year, Lauren Eldridge has worked at the world's best restaurant (Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana ), impressed the greatest living Italian chef with fairy bread and a punch to the face, whipped dessert with ropes in India and rolled croissants in Paris with Guy Savoy, the 'magician of French cuisine' . Not bad for someone who thought she'd end up with a psychology career (and occasionally forgot to add key ingredients in her cakes). While working at Marque restaurant as pastry c...
Dec 17, 2016•50 min
In a past life, Mike Bennie used to help famous figures like Russell Crowe, A Tribe Called Quest, Baby John Burgess, as well as (future Prime Minister) Malcolm Turnbull and then Lord Mayor Lucy Turnbull pick wines. The Rootstock Sydney co-founder and award-winning wine communicator takes us on a few flashbacks to that memorable time (the Russell Crowe anecdote is particularly great) and - inspired by this very amusing Herald article that bagged Turnbull’s public wine collection ( 'Malcolm Turnbu...
Nov 19, 2016•1 hr 4 min
Arriving as an exchange student from California, Nancy Singleton Hachisu originally planned a short visit to Japan, but 26 years later - she's still there. A relationship with a Japanese organic farmer is what upended her plans and saw her settling into an 80-something-old farmhouse that's been passed down his family for multiple generations. During this time, she's met fascinating Japanese producers - such as a "salmon whisperer", unique salt raker and a ninth-generation sake brewery owner - an...
Nov 15, 2016•47 min
