Slice of Life

By Peter Gordon - May 2009

Culinary Fellowship, Firstlight in London, Sydney and Auckland, Easter, Dining For A Difference and dining out

April began nice and quietly – just what was needed after the hectic nature of February and March. Thomas Townsend, a young kiwi chef who won the NZ-UK Link Foundation’s Culinary Fellowship in New Zealand, arrived in London to begin his five week stage. I’d arranged for him to cook at five different restaurants as we do every year for the winners and he was lucky enough to spend time in the kitchens of Philip Howard’s The Square, Angela Hartnett’s Murano, Roka (run by executive chef Nic Watt and his head chef Hamish Brown), Gleneagles in Scotland and The Providores. At the same time, the UK winner, Chris White, who’d been cooking at Claridges Hotel for the previous three years, headed to New Zealand to cook at my restaurant dine by Peter Gordon, as well as The Grove, Fresh Taste, Logan Brown and Citron. Both young chefs are experiencing a once in a lifetime opportunity and we have the Fellowship to thank for it, as well as a lot of support and organisation from HSI in New Zealand and The Craft Guild of Chefs in the UK.

At the same time, Jason Ross from Firstlight was in London and we managed to catch up over brunch at The Providores. Jason had been travelling throughout Europe showing Firstlight’s produce to various chefs, butchers and distributors and had, as always, been thrilled to discover how it is held in such high regard for its flavour, quality and consistency.

Easter arrived and with it the first of the long bank holidays in the UK. We benefitted from an influx of mainland European tourists coming to the restaurant, and London in general, due to the favourable exchange rate of the Euro to the £. With the US$ also rising against the £ we have also seen more Americans coming back to dine with us, so with the recession settling rather too comfortably over Britain’s economy, it was lovely to hear all the foreign accents ordering ‘le flat white’ and ‘uno okey pokey’…

I headed to New Zealand on Easter Sunday, somehow managing to avoid even one Hot Cross Bun which I couldn’t quite believe as I am a big fan. I was in NZ for several reasons – the main being to celebrate dine’s fourth birthday and get a new autumn menu up and running with my team, and also to see what lovely new ingredients were around.

A few days after arriving I had one of the best meals I’ve ever had at Michael Meredith’s eponymous restaurant on Dominion Road. I’ve eaten Michael’s food many times over the years, back when he was cooking at Vinnies and The Grove, but now in his own restaurant he has relaxed and evolved into a loving culinary style - producing some stunning dishes that play with molecular gastronomy, but in a subtle sort of way that best suits the often overpowering gimmickry of it. Choose the degustation menu, hoping the ostrich with beetroot, smoked cheese, fig and coffee is on, leave the wine choices to his brilliant floor staff, then simply sit back and have a brilliant night. Merediths, Auckland. Ph: +64 9 623 3140

However, I was also there to oversee the second Dining For A Difference dinner extravaganza at SKYCITY’s Grand Hotel Convention centre. We’d held our inaugural event in June’07 (see an earlier Slice of Life) and so this time we were able to use all that we’d learnt from the first event to produce a very slick charity dinner in aid of the Leukaemia & Blood Foundation of New Zealand. Air New Zealand had generously flown our 13 chefs from around NZ, Australia, San Francisco and China to Auckland to come and cook in one kitchen side by side. The chefs cooked their own individual four-course dinner for twenty people, just two tables of ten each, served with matching wines donated by Lion Nathan and bread specially baked by the wonderful kiwi baker Dean Brettschneider – now based in Shanghai. I have to say at times like that, when my peers comes together to benefit others, it makes me very proud to be a chef – far removed from the tantrums that get too much press on television. Our tables’ second course featured five hour braised Firstlight wagyu short-rib and it was eaten in appreciative silence by both our tables. The night before the big dinner a group of us headed to Northcote Point’s The Engine Room to eat the food that Natalia and Karl cook and serve to the lucky locals who live close by and we enjoyed a hearty and rich slow braised lamb and a bottle of wonderful Pyramid Valley Pinot Blanc amongst other things.

http://www.leukaemia.org.nz/ http://www.nzbaker.co.nz www.engineroom.net.nz

A few days later and I headed off to Sydney with my London head chef Miles Kirby, my dine chef Ben Mills and dine’s manager Sarah McDonald. We were there to cook dinner at Christine Manfield’s Universal restaurant – a restaurant I wrote about in December’s Slice of Life 2008. My crew worked alongside Chris’s team which is led by the talented head chef Jess Muir and her cohort Ian. We served soy-braised tofu with coconut dashi broth, a grilled scallop on a tapioca, crab and ginger fritter with sweet chilli sauce and crème fraiche, our five-hour braised Firstlight wagyu short-rib with aubergine miso salad, cucumber and chrain (horseradish and beetroot relish) and garam masala duck breast on Asian greens. Dessert was a pomegranate panna cotta with pear and basil jelly – which you’ll be able to see in my next cookbook which is released in October this year. http://www.universalrestaurant.com/home.html

The night before our event we ate dinner at Universal with Christine and it was simply extraordinary, a wonderful play of savoury and salty, rich and sweet, crisp and silky smooth. Two favourites were ‘mud-crab pancake, coconut, longan and mint’, and ‘Sichuan spiced duck, chilli blackbean tofu, caramelised blood plum, XO chilli’. Christine’s food is simply divine – no other way to describe it. The day after our event, NZ Trade and Enterprise hosted a lunch at the restaurant and we cooked for 22 of Sydney’s top chefs and some press and media who were there to experience some of New Zealand’s best food and wine. The wagyu was served, alongside Firstlight’s flavoursome and tender lamb racks, Marlborough’s Regal salmon which Chris had teamed up with a green gazpacho, and cheese which came with lovely crisp wafers layered with quince paste. Wines included our friend Michelle Richardson’s delicious Pinot Noir and all in all it was a great event. I got to meet some of the local chefs and those that hadn’t experienced NZ’s produce were really thrilled with it all. Over half of the chefs I spoke to admitted to preferring NZ lamb over the local stuff – so that’s got to be good for NZ. http://www.richardsonwines.co.nz/

Then my eldest sister Vicki and her partner Alana whisked me away to their holiday home three hours south of Sydney to Old Erowal Bay. Their house backs onto a soon to be declared National Park – and I felt I was in a nature programme as the friendly possums came and said hello each night alongside the daily visitations from kangaroos, kookaburras, finches and cockatoos. Of course Australian’s love their native marsupial the possum – unlike those of us in NZ who see them as nasty vermin – so it was good to see them in their own environment. It was a great mini-break and gave me a bit of time to unwind before I returned to Auckland to get our new menus up and running. I also had to prepare for a gourmet hangi fundraiser in aid of the Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre for 600 at Turangawaewae marae. You’ll have to wait until next month’s blog to know how that went though. www.rmtc.org.nz

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