Tasting Australia: Chefs on Wheels pioneer a post-COVID recipe for success
Meet the chefs who have gone from creating fine dining to home-delivered meals as part of a raft of COVID-enforced changes which have swept across the food industry.
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At the end of a typically frantic Saturday night last March, Paul Baker put the finishing touches to the last plate he would serve at the Botanic Gardens Restaurant and wondered what the hell he was going to do next.
Baker had put a decade of hard work into turning the restaurant into one of the state’s finest. Along the way, he had missed countless milestones with his young family, sacrificing his personal life for the sake of his career, as many in this most anti-social of occupations are bound to do.
Now, as COVID-19 loomed on the horizon and a lengthy closure looked certain, the future of the business he had put so much into looked as robust as a freshly risen souffle. The following morning, he sat down with wife Annabelle and best mate Jimmy Day and began to work on a plan.
Fast forward a year and that plan, put together over two desperate days, has turned into Chefs on Wheels, a home delivery service that has been a lifeline, not only for its founding trio, but a host of restaurants, producers and other local businesses.
Baker has gone from creating intricate, artful plates featuring ingredients picked from the garden to sorting out the logistics for making meals such as chipotle beef and duck lasagne in extraordinary quantities.
Working from an old pasta factory in the back blocks of Glynde, the COW team have produced a staggering 64 tonnes of food in the past year and filled 12,000 orders from homes around Adelaide and beyond.
Mistakes have been made. Lessons learned. But as the business expands to deliveries interstate this month, there will be no turning back.
Australia’s ongoing pandemic restrictions have had a profound effect across most parts of the economy but, other than travel, few industries have been impacted like hospitality.
Businesses have closed or been forced to drastically alter the way they operate. Employees at all levels, from head chefs to managers to part-time dish-washers, have taken time to reassess what they want to do with their careers and lives outside work.
Given a rare extended break from the anti-social hours of many of these jobs, and a chance to be closer to their loved ones, some have inevitably looked for a change, even if they still seek the satisfaction that comes from feeding others.
The Tasting Australia festival for 2021, then, is significant on a number of levels. First, as always, it is a celebration of the state’s remarkable spread of foods and beverages – and the people behind it. This year, however, it should come with heightened appreciation for the pleasure of dining at a shared table and for the resilience of an industry that makes it possible.
In the lead-up to the festival, which begins on Friday, Baker and three other chefs who feature in the program have spoken about the impact of the pandemic and the subsequent changes in their lives.
Take Emma McCaskill, whose life has revolved around restaurant kitchens since she ditched school to start cooking when she was 16. She has worked in world-renowned establishments interstate, in the UK and Japan, before moving home to Adelaide for a lead role at Magill Estate and, most recently, groundbreaking pub Sparkke at the Whitmore.
Midway through last year she signed up with the Adelaide Institute of Hospitality and, in January, started a new role visiting schools, talking to students and connecting them with local hospitality businesses.
“When something happens (like COVID), it changes your mindset a bit,” McCaskill says. “I feel like I need to do something with purpose … something to help the industry long-term, particularly after what has happened.”
Brisbane-based chef Alanna Sapwell was forced into making a change. The restaurant that she had taken to multiple awards in its first year of trading, Arc Dining, was shut down by its owners at the start of COVID.
“Although I treated the restaurant as if it was my own, this was a reality check,” she says. “Arc wasn’t mine and any decision about its future was ultimately out of my hands.”
With that lesson still burning, she opened a pop-up venue, Esmay, in Noosa, a project that evolved into a national tour.
“I figured that everyone, not just those in hospitality, had been hit financially,” she says. “I wanted to create an environment where everyone could forget about the year with quality food at a very approachable price.”
As well as being in control of her work and job security, Sapwell says she now has more time to balance her life with exercise, travel – and even a boyfriend!
“This year is about rediscovering what I love about hospitality and really having some fun with it,” she says.
For Africola’s Duncan Welgemoed, the big changes have been in his personal life. Welgemoed’s vast network of contacts and creative edge had seen him constantly in demand at food and art events around the world, meaning he was travelling for up to six months a year.
“COVID allowed me to stop living the rock star life and reconnect with my family,” he says.
“All the downside of not travelling pales in comparison with rediscovering my family and that has been a massive thing. COVID has shut out the noise.”
While Africola has been a favoured haunt of hosting celebrity artists and musicians from across the globe, it is the loyal band of local diners who have supported it over the past year. And adopting a compulsory set-price menu has also given the business, its staff and suppliers more certainty, Welgemoed says.
“COVID has been the grand equaliser,” he adds. “It has shown that having three hats or three Michelin stars doesn’t matter if you don’t have a product that your community craves. It has dragged us back to the 1930s.”
Baker is similarly philosophical about the industry and the way the pandemic has created a different set of priorities.
“I think it highlights that restaurants, while we love going to them, are not the most important thing in life,” he says. “We’re not curing cancer, we’re not astronauts, we’re cooking food for people and there are many ways to do that. It doesn’t have to be in a space where you have to be ground down and lose your family.
“Look at how many chefs have gone through multiple wives, don’t see their kids … why is that OK?
“I think what has happened will have a long-term effect on the industry.”
He remembers back to early last year, an eternity ago now, when the Botanic Gardens Restaurant was “flying along”.
Then, as COVID spread through Europe and the US, and the first cases were reported here, bookings dried up and functions were cancelled.
Wife Annabelle and best mate Day were in a similar predicament. Their business Edible Exchange supplied top-shelf local and imported ingredients to Adelaide’s elite restaurants. Within two weeks, every order had been cancelled.
“It was up there with being a travel agent,” Annabelle says. “I think it was the second worst business you could own during a pandemic. We were all shocked. It was terrifying.
“We had a few days of sitting in the office and we just stared at each other trying to work out what to do next. No one knew what was going to happen. We had been told to prepare for a six-month lockdown.”
On Saturday, March 21, Baker completed a busy dinner service and left for the night. He had the next day off, so was at home when Scott Morrison announced national COVID restrictions that limited all restaurants to a takeaway trade.
For the Botanic, hidden from view in the middle of the gardens, that could never work and the entire workforce was stood down.
By then, however, the home delivery concept was already taking shape. Restaurants had food they desperately needed to sell. People were stuck at home, many of them nervous about going to the shops or other public places. What if a new service could offer a curated collection of restaurant-quality meals, at reasonable prices, dropped at the front door?
The Bakers, Day and some of the staff from Edible Exchange split into teams, working on a template for the website, contacting chefs and suppliers, seeking coverage in the media.
Just before 5pm that Monday afternoon, the website went live for orders. Chefs on Wheels was born. Three hours later, in a state of panic, they shut the website down. There was no way they could hope to fill any extra orders.
“We all had apps on our phones that every time orders came through it made a cash register sound,” Annabelle recalls.
“We were sitting there when the website went up and the ka-ching came every 30 seconds.”
The restaurants they had teamed with were warned they would need to cook in quantities they never had before – 500kg of green chicken curry from Terry Intarakhamhaeng at Thai favourite Soi 38, for instance.
In those early days, vans were constantly on the road, collecting the food as fast as chefs could make it, bringing it to Glynde for packing, and delivering orders deep into the night.
The whole process was on a knife’s edge. “It only took one thing not to turn up on time and the whole thing could have collapsed,” Baker says.
“We were in this blur for a couple of months,” Day adds. “It was 18 to 20-hour days for six days a week. We made all the mistakes and had to deal with them and the sudden onslaught. We were very naive and that didn’t sink in until later.”
Some customers preferred to “click-and-collect” their meals from the Glynde factory. “They would use it as their one outing for the day and it became a bit of a ritual,” Baker says.
“We had people in tears, ambulances turning up so the paramedics could grab a meal. It was bizarre.”
Baker says this first version of Chefs on Wheels was a “safety net” for restaurant staff whose world was caving in.
“The money helped but nobody was buying a new car. But it was enough to make sure everyone was going to be OK. It was survival.”
Then, three months into the project, restrictions were eased, people slowly returned to eating out, and the owners of Chefs on Wheels had to decide whether their business had legs beyond COVID. The Botanic Gardens Restaurant was also preparing to re-open and Baker had to decide whether to quit the security and prestige of his full-time job.
“I was very proud of the Botanic and what we had done but I had time to spend with Annabelle and (their daughter) Margot and … it gave me time to work out what was more important,” he says.
“This was a chance to break away and do something different.”
Chefs on Wheels now delivers meals to up to 400 families a week. A white board in the production kitchen shows the quantities required for each of the 20-plus dishes they cook.
No surprises that butter chicken tops the list but other bestsellers such as lamb neck and eggplant moussaka or Italian sausage and porcini lasagne are less predictable.
That is one of the key differences from the restaurant world. “We are at the mercy of our customers,” Baker says. “It is not about what the chefs want to cook. It’s what people want to buy from us.”
The emphasis is now on family-friendly midweek meals, or ready-made weekend dinners to share with friends, all produced at a quality benchmark not normally associated with home delivery.
Along the way, side projects have evolved. When Baker discovered that the global shutdown was a disaster for South-East wagyu producer Mayura Station, he used some of their beef to fill ravioli using the pasta-making machinery already in place.
Not all of the experiments worked. Vegan and vegetarian meals have consistently underperformed. And, despite months spent on product and brand development, recipe kits from leading chefs were a total flop.
But there are no regrets, Annabelle says. “We’ve learnt that if you were going to launch this business in normal times you would have spent six months to a year coming up with strategy plans,” she says, “but really you just need six hours. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Timing is 90 per cent of the battle.”
Baker is upbeat about the potential for delivering meals to major centres across the eastern seaboard, despite some hurdles with trucking schedules and border checks. Trials are under way and orders will open within weeks.
The challenges are all a long way from the adrenaline rush of a nightly restaurant service.
“I miss the kitchen every now and then,” he says, “but I now have a fishing boat and extra-curricular activities so I don’t miss it that much. And I’m fitter now. I’ve lost 15kg. I eat well and have time to train. Service is so intense and the closer you get to 40 the more it hurts.”
For McCaskill, participating in events such as Tasting Australia help give her the thrill of service.
“I started cooking so early. It’s been such a big part of my life,” she says. “I still need it. I can’t just not do it. It’s a part of who I am but I’ve tried to balance it out so I’m not overdoing it.”
Tasting Australia runs from April 30 to May 9 with more than 140 events across the city, suburbs and regions. Tickets are still available to the Monday Steak Out at the Oxford Hotel on May 3, featuring Alanna Sapwell and other chefs, and for Cooking for Your Family with Emma McCaskill at Town Square Kitchen (Victoria Square) on May 2. For all details and bookings go to tastingaustralia.com.au
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