Peter Gordon

Peter Gordon is perhaps New Zealand’s most internationally recognised chef. Born in Wanganui Peter started collecting recipes from the age of four and began cooking not long after. After completing a chef’s apprenticeship in Melbourne in 1985 he travelled throughout South East Asia, India and Nepal for a year before setting up the kitchen at The Sugar Club in Wellington in 1986. Peter moved to London in 1989 and worked at various restaurants until he established his name as executive chef at Mayfair’s Green Street Restaurant then at the Notting Hill and Soho branches of The Sugar Club. Peter opened his current restaurant The Providores and Tapa Room with his partners in August 2001.

www.peter-gordon.net
www.theprovidores.co.uk

Slice of Life 2007

By Peter Gordon - April 2007

As I write this I’m sitting in the office at my Auckland restaurant ‘dine by Peter Gordon’. I head home to New Zealand from the UK 4 times a year to oversee the seasonal menu changes and to work with my hard-working team, namely Head chef Cobus Klopper and Sous chef Fraser Slack. dine turned 2 on April 6th and we’ve now embarked on our 9th menu cycle.

Our menus change quite considerably but we’re also led from the customers who firmly request that we keep certain dishes on all the time. We tweak them here and there but in principle they remain the same.

The dish with most appearances is our seared tuna with deep-fried oysters, crispy karengo and yuzu-umeboshi dressing. The dishes origins began with beef though, not tuna. I was asked to cook a dish using shellfish and meat (surf and turf) and came up with the idea of some chilled thinly sliced and seared beef, a tangy dressing, and hot deep-fried oysters. That may sound a bit odd – but it seemed entirely obvious to me! The thought of rich salty oysters, cooked in a crisp batter, served on top of cold sliced beef immediately appealed to me – and luckily to those who ate it. Umeboshi are salted Japanese apricots (although they’re usually mistakenly referred to as plums – the red colour comes from a natural food dye from the shiso plant) and yuzu is a citrus fruit, of uncertain origins, resembling a cross between a tangerine, lime and grapefruit. Karengo is a native New Zealand seaweed which benefits from toasting – giving it a taste of the briny ocean. I’ve served this dish is London and New Zealand and even have a version of it on page 139 of my Salad cook-book.

A few months ago at The Providores in London we finally received our first shipment of Firstlight Wagyu. Just before it’d arrived I had been made a New Zealand Beef and Lamb Ambassador for the second year running – recognising the contribution chefs make to the promotion of beef and lamb on New Zealand restaurant menus. I was asked to create two dishes – one beef and one lamb. My beef dish finally brought a component I’d been playing with to fruition. I call it ponzu tapioca – tapioca mixed with a citrus soy mixture. I liked this dish so much I then put it on the menu at The Providores and also at dine using Wagyu beef. I use either the sirloin or rump served with sweet miso mustard, pickled ginger and the ponzu tapioca. As a starter it is the most expensive on our menus (the meat is expensive due to the high level of animal husbandry and the nature of the beasts) although it’s been surprising how many people have ordered it as a main course. The meat is absolutely delicious, the marbling of fat making it melt in the mouth.

Late last year The Providores owners (myself, Jeremy Leeming and Michael McGrath) were in San Francisco (a wonderful town) and Las Vegas (a very odd town) promoting New Zealand wines. My good friend Clare Clarke just happens to be head pastry chef at The French Laundry – America’s most feted restaurant. Knowing that the restaurant is booked out up to 18 months in advance I texted her to secure a table with less that 2 weeks notice. We got one! The 6-7 course set menu sits at around US$210 per person – however we decided we’d go for the option of Wagyu beef rather than the regular beef. It added a whopping great US$150 extra per couple onto the bill - but it was amazingly delicious. If you want to try your own, much less costly but more tasty Wagyu then you can buy it off this site. Just make sure you bring it to room temperature before cooking it, cut it about 1.5-2.5cm thick, rub with olive or avocado oil then sear it in a hot pan until golden brown, flip it over and cook the other side. Rest for at least 5 minutes in a warm place and serve immediately with lots of sea salt.