George Calombaris was in an Atlantis restaurant kitchen, making smoked salmon and anchovy butter terrines, helped by Julia Taylor, the runner-up of this season’s Masterchef Australia, of which Calombaris is the stern host.
“We’ve been making these for 300 guests for the last four hours now and still have six to go,” he said, patting down thin shavings of smoked salmon and generous amounts of anchovy butter. With Season 4 of MasterChef Australia having just ended, Calombaris was in town to kick start Victoria Week with an exclusive dinner on Thursday at Ossiano.
Victoria Week is a week-long series of events to boost relations between the Australian state and the UAE, wherein a delegation of 30 organisations from the industries of food and beverage, tourism and equine will participate. Calombaris will also be part of the launch of Emirates airline’s inaugural A380 flight on Monday, October 1, to Melbourne, Victoria’s capital city.
The 33-year-old Australian chef of Greek origin has also been creating headlines this month for landing himself in hot water over an ice-cream copyright with a small-time Australian ice-cream company. However, we were strictly advised to steer clear of the subject — as he gets “extremely upset over it” — and stuck to his favourite subject: MasterChef Australia.
“Season 4 just finished and it was simply fabulous,” said Calombaris. “But it is just one part of my life, one of the things I do. I’ve got seven amazing restaurants in Australia and one on Mykonos, which keep me very busy. I’ve just come from South Africa for a week, then I go to Jakarta and India. Gary [Mehigan], the other host of MasterChef, and I will be in Mumbai and Delhi over a week, not for promoting, but because India loves MasterChef Australia. This is our first visit even though they’ve been asking us to come for years and we’ve just haven’t had the chance to. So I’m really excited to go”.
Calombaris feels each of the top ten contestants are winners. “I look at someone like Poh [Ling Yeow] or Marion [Grasby from the 2010 season]. We all thought Marion would be the winner but she wasn’t. Like Julia [Taylor], she could have been a winner. Any given day it changes. All I know is what’s wonderful about it is it doesn’t matter if you win or come third, you still can do something in food at the end of it. That’s what MasterChef does — it opens doors for people and you don’t have to win it to be successful. When I look at someone like Poh, I think she’s extremely successful. She’s doing great stuff — she’s got her own TV show, which she really wanted to do; she hasn’t lost her passion for paintings. It’s just so wonderful to see all that and I’m so proud. I’m always close to the top ten. I’m there for them. It doesn’t mean the show ends so they can’t come to me. And I get energetic watching them. These people actually have passion for cooking. They aren’t just jobless people who took up cooking because they didn’t have anything else to do. They are people from different fields who’ve given that up to take up cooking. I have a lot of respect”.
We’ve watched Calombaris creating extraordinary dishes from ordinary things. This season he created ice-cream from cauliflower on the show. So, what inspires him and makes him choose ingredients?
“People come to a restaurant to have an experience. I’ve got to put smiles on people’s faces,” he explains. “While in the midst of developing a dish called Sorry I dropped My Ice Cream – yes that’s the name — we literally drop an ice cream in a cone on a plate, smash it and throw deep fried fish around it. The ice cream tastes of tartare. So when you eat it, you go, ‘I know that taste’ — that’s nostalgic because as a kid you eat fish and chips. It’s contradicting of sorts — it’s icy cold, it’s creamy and it’s got hot blue fish on it. I want people to come in and go ‘Wow, where’s the mind of the chef here?’ At the same time I want them to say ‘yum’ because in essence that’s the whole goal, you know, the licking of fingers and being excited. I don’t want to be like everyone else. I want to follow my own path and create my own destiny and if failure comes from that, it’s ok. “I’m very lucky that being a cook is taking me around the world, meeting the most amazing people, being influenced by travel, people and the food that we eat. There’s nothing better and I feel I have a long, long way to go. My journey has just begun”.
Excerpts:
So, what’s your signature dish?
I don’t have a signature dish. They are boring. I’m Modern Greek so that’s my background. I want change; I want to evolve and push the envelope all the time and the day I feel like I don’t want to, I should stop being a chef. That’s what’s wonderful about our craft. We get to create; we get to see reactions on people’s faces instantly, either good or bad.
What does Australian cuisine mean to you?
Australia is a boiling pot of cultures, traditions and religions and with that people bring their heritage. It’s really a cultural mix of everything from Indian to Japanese to Greek to Italian. So, if you go five minutes one way, you’d get brilliant Japanese or two minutes in the other you’d find great Indian. It’s wonderful. That’s what is Australian cuisine. Having said that, we as chefs try and use as much native and local ingredients which we are really proud of and work to sustain.
Why can one not totally recreate a dish a chef cooks on TV or in a restaurant? Is there a secret ingredient which they deliberately don’t share?
The hardest thing about cooking is not the ingredients. It’s the technique and ability. The MasterChef contestants will tell you that. For someone like Julia, who’s helping me this week, the task of making the terrines for eight hours is something she’s never done before. So repetition is what makes you a great cook and the timing and being as accurate as possible. At home we cook like a pinch of this and a pinch of that — and there’s nothing wrong with that. My mother cooks like that and it’s delicious and I would never complain to her or she’ll give me a backhander. But accuracy is important to get better and better. You know for MasterChef, what’s interesting is most people cook all of Gary’s dishes because they are simple dishes and he’s very good at them. Scones, sausage rolls — all the stuff that’s comforting and delicious. Most of the dishes I cook, people go ‘urmmm. You know I’m not going to try that’.
Too tough to cook?
Possibly or that whole mind over matter scenario.
On a recent episode of MasterChef, Calombaris said to a contestant who was working a bit slow: “If you were in my kitchen right now, I’d be putting my boot so far up you’re a**.” How tough are you in the kitchen?
Did I say that? No! Surely it wasn’t me! (laughs)
I’m extremely tough. When I say ‘tough’, I’m tough but fair. However, I’m lucky too because I’ve got some great chefs in my kitchens. I expect the best because you’ve made the effort to come to my restaurant. You’re paying money for that experience; we’ve got to do the best we possibly can. And food isn’t mechanical. You can’t put it in one end of a machine and it comes out the other way. It’s touch and feel. When you have 350 staff, it’s a constant battle everyday. You’ve got to push and push. They need that too to drive themselves.
What does it take to be a good chef?
Cooking is the easy bit to be a good chef. I can teach a plumber to cook. It’s everything else that comes with it — the stamina, the focus you need to have every day, the discipline, respect not just for people around you and for your self but the respect and understanding of the produce, without which we are nothing. It is lots of little things that you got to connect into one and if one of those things starts to veer, that’s when things start to go down. You need to have check-points. You need to allow your mind to create because being a chef is not just about chopping carrots. It’s about dreaming. I dream when I’m awake and when I’m sleeping because I want to remember everything. I dreamt of being a chef, I became one. I dreamt of having a restaurant, I opened one.
People cook to relax. Cooking is your profession. What do you do to relax?
Good question. I don’t quite relax much. I left Johannesburg two days ago and I flew on my own as my staff was flying separately. I was so depressed on the flight. I need people around me. I love it as it gives me energy. I love socialising, talking. I love listening to people. My father taught me, you don’t learn anything when you talk. You need to listen. I love to hit at tennis now and then. But, I don’t go home and cook to relax. It stresses me because at home everything is sort of kiddy. I can’t work in that kind of kitchen. I let my girlfriend do that and she’s a wonderful cook.
Men are the best chefs but each claims to have learnt the craft from their mothers. How many women do we see in the professional kitchen today?
I employ a fair few. I think females are brilliant to have in the kitchen and some of them have been on MasterChef. Marion [Grasby] is my head chef in the restaurant on Mykonos. She whips the boys in the kitchen, you know — even I’m scared of her sometimes. Females are so important in the kitchen for they also control testosterone. Men in kitchen tend to become very bloke-y and I don’t like it.
