On the eve of his deeply personal live show at this year’s Good Food & Wine Festival (tickets here), Pedestrian caught up with our favourite MasterChef judge, George Calombaris, to discuss why we should never dismiss pig’s nipples, the rise of food bloggers and the merits of reconstituted stoner food.
Thanks to the Good Food & Wine Festival Pedestrian is giving away one double pass to George’s Celebrity Chef Theatre (including general admissios to the festival) for both Melbourne and Sydney. To win, comment below with the one dish that best represents your life and why.
Hey George, where are you and what are you up to? I’m standing in a shipping container shooting for MasterChef and just getting really excited for the Good Food and Wine Show this weekend.
What’s the most challenging and rewarding parts of being in front of the camera as well as operating restaurants in the real world? Being able to influence people with the way you express yourself with food. As a chef you’re constantly trying to influence people every time they come into your restaurant. You serve them a dish hoping that they’ll like it, hoping that they’ll go away and talk about it and love it and come back for more. But that’s a small audience. You do 150 a night and that’s about it. But when you’re on tele six nights a week in front of an audience of a million plus or you do live shows, which, for me, is exciting because there’s no boundaries or commercial breaks, I can just go for it. It really gives me the opportunity to express who I am as a person. Especially this year’s live show at the Good Food and Wine show, it’s a real concept in terms of what I’m doing. It’s called The Family Tree and it’s about the tree of life and how my life has influenced the dishes that I cook. That for me is a really exciting thing. A lot of the dishes that I’ll be cooking come from a time, a place, a moment that represents the happiest and saddest times of my life. And that’s what food does, it brings out emotion.
So we’re talking about The Tree of Life the concept, not the movie? There won’t be twenty minute cutaways where you just show nature footage on a PowerPoint presentation. Yeah (laughs) I mean, life is like a tree. You get born. You’re a little seed. You weather good and bad times and I’m not only reflecting on the good times. Life isn’t always about all the sweet things, there’s always bitter as well and with bitter you grow stronger. Sometimes those leaves die but you constantly grow. My tree’s not complete yet, it’s far from that, but I want to express to people that these are the times in my life that influence the dishes that I cook now and the way that I cook now. It kicks off with me on stage with one olive and this olive falls off the tree and creates the first dish. The olive for me is quite significant not only because of the oils that I used throughout my cooking everyday but it was a significant job for me when I was an apprentice cutting olives day in day out. And I kind of extrapolate from that. There’s a dish about my father and his battle with cancer and that dish is influenced by licorice because that is something that he always wanted to eat when he went through chemotherapy. I remember those moments and rather than be sad about them I try and rejoice them through food.
Obviously MasterChef had some part in galvanizing this but what do you think it is about Australian culture which has created this really visible food culture which might not have existed or been as prevalent even as little as a decade ago? You ask my dad that same question or you ask my grandmother who passed away last year. I vividly remember sitting at her house and her telling me the story of when she arrived in Australia in the early 70s they confiscated her mortar and pestle because they thought it was a weapon where now every Australian household has a mortar and pestle in their kitchen. That’s just how far we’ve come. For me, I travel a lot and I eat in a lot of different places around the world and I think our food culture has definitely come leaps and bounds. We grow great produce, we’ve got great chefs, we’ve got great restaurants but we still dismiss the fact that there’s still a portion of the population who buy seven dodgy doughnuts because they can’t afford to buy seven green apples and put them in their kids’ lunchbox. For me I look at that and ask how I can influence that, I’m not Jamie Oliver, but how can I influence people through television or through my restaurant or the live show. We’ve come leaps and bounds but let’s not forget that we’re a young country and we’ve still got a long way to go. We’re in a good place and MastChef I think has been the seed for getting people excited about good food and cooking in their own kitchens again.
How do you see the show moving forward in coming seasons? Will we see tweaks to the formula at all? Is that something you guys are conscious of. Seeing as most reality shows have a very definite shelf life. I don’t know if you’ve watched so far this year but I think it’s really gone back to the essence of season one which was real people, real cooking, real food and real dreams. That’s what the show is about. It’s not about bitchiness, we’re not looking for a drama. That’s not what we’re about and that’s not what I signed up for. I think we stay very true to that idea of real people, real cooking and real dreams. You know, don’t come on the show and tell us you want to be a TV chef because I’m not interested in that. What I want is good people. If we can stay true to the concept, meaning the three judges and the production people, we’re onto a good thing. How long can it last? We’re definitely not rating what we were in series one and two but it’s still over a million people six nights a week. We don’t only go on air two nights a week, we’re on air for fourteen weeks and seven million people are watching it every week. It’s phenomenal. For me I’ve very proud of it and I say quite loudly that it’s the best cooking show, not just in Australia but Australian MasterChef is in 33 countries. I was only recently in Abu Dhabi and people pull you aside and chat to you. That’s exciting. I love the fact that we’re not just influencing Australians but people throughout the world.
From your perspective as a chef, restaurateur and also as a critic of food on the show what are your thoughts on the rise of food blogging and user generated services like Eatability? There’s certainly a lot of food mediums now. I’m all for talking about food. I’m all for people discussing food. Blogs, bloggers, I’m all for that. What I dislike is people who blog or say things anonymously. For me that is coward-like and it’s not what us Aussies are about. We are a country where we are allowed to speak out mind but when you speak it say it loud and proud and deal with it. I say it all the time, I’m not perfect. I’ve got seven restaurants in Melbourne I’m pulling over 300 staff who serve close to 1000 people every night between all the different restaurants and we don’t get it right all the time. We’re not perfect. We’re not mechanical. We get it wrong but just tell us. And trust me, 10 times out of 10 I will go out of my way to make that back up. And if you’re going to talk about food I think it’s important that you know about it. Don’t just look at it in the context of the food on the plate. It’s about everything. Cooking a dish isn’t as simple as whacking a steak on a grill, at least not for my restaurants, it takes a lot of passion, commitment and hard work to work in this business. One of my dishes for the weekend, and I know I’ll cop a lot of flack for this, is called pig’s nipples. It is literally pig’s nipples on a plate. It’s inspired by the birth of my son, it’s inspired by the nectar of life and how important and irreplaceable the female is to a child. It’s also a bit of a statement because I want people to recognize that when an animal is sacrificed for us we should be eating it from nose to tail. Don’t go “eww they’re nipples”. Well yeah, they’re on the animal and we killed it, don’t just eat the sweet tender cuts that we all buy in the super market. I think it shows more respect to the animal and to life.
I think we’re hyper-aware of trends in food now to the point where it could be comparable to say music or fashion. Where do you see it going in the next few years from the food itself, to the way restaurants serve people, to how we think about dining as an experience? Some people point to the death of the white table cloth. It’s gone, it’s dead. And my theory is this: food’s here to be enjoyed. There are lots of trends out there and I definitely like to be on top of my game in terms of what I serve and how I serve it. There’s trends in terms of yum-yuck foods, stoner foods, reinventing fast food flavours in healthy and wholefood ways. And my thing is this: food should be whimsical and childhood like and it should evoke memory and it should create a reaction in people. It should be the same reaction you get when you look at a painting, trying to work out where the creator of that work is coming from. That’s what I want people to do when they come to my restaurants or when they go to the live show on the weekend. I want them to look at every single dish and ask “why”? One of my dishes on the weekend will be served on a mannequin. Why? Well, why do I have to put it on a plate for? Everything I do I ask myself “why”? I’m not afraid of asking questions because I’m still learning and I’ve still got a lot to learn. I just think we’ve got to question everything and lots of chefs are doing that and it’s really exciting. That’s the overarching thing.
So you’re a fan of stoner food reimagined as high cuisine? I think it’s exciting. I’m all for that yum-yuck kind of flavor. I already love the idea of ham and pineapple for example, but if you smoke and braise the ham hocks and pickle the pineapples and do it in a really cool way then I’m going to get down on my knees and bow at that. That’s clever cooking that still harks back to that stoner flavor.
And finally what’s the most annoying thing about your co-hosts? (Laughs) What is annoying about Matt Preston? It’s annoying when I don’t understand some of the words that he says. And I know he’s right whatever he says because he’s a human encyclopedia. That annoys me because it makes me think I should have paid a little more attention in engish class. With Gary I’m annoyed that he’s not into football the way that Matt and I are we can’t involve him in those conversations. But I love the two of them tremendously. We were friends before MasterChef and I love them truly, they’re my mates for life.
I sure they feel the same. Thanks George. Thanks mate.
