IVF, debt, stress, weight gain, and life changing surgery: MKR winners’ wild ride after reality TV
MKR winners Dan and Steph have revealed the personal heartbreaks they’ve endured since winning the grand final.
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Dan and Steph Mulheron are side-by-side, smiling and striking poses, working as a team for the photographer before sitting down to discuss their travel and cooking show, which launches on Channel 7 today.
It’s just one of many projects they’ve undertaken since winning the 2013 season of My Kitchen Rules in a grand final that was the highest rating television show of that year.
The Mulherons are so in tandem that the Hervey Bay couple had not had a day apart since they got together in 2006, until a few days this year, when Dan was in Tasmania cooking at a fundraiser.
“I was lost,” he says reflectively.
Now normal transmission has resumed, the duo travelling and filming their new Queensland-focused series, the venture just the latest in 15 years of at-times pressure-cooker togetherness that’s seen them undergo IVF to have their only child, Emmy; flourish in the relentless spotlight of reality television; jointly go on a journey to support Dan’s weight loss surgery; build and almost lose a business, then buy into another much larger enterprise; do MKR all over again in the 2020 Rivals series and develop a sausage line with Coles that is going gangbusters.
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Dan, 40, and Steph, 39, each offer an easy handshake and a grin, they finish each other’s sentences, know each other’s stories.
They are down-to-earth with the relaxed but engaged air of a pair who knows life is good at the moment but aren’t taking it for granted.
They haven’t always been in the media spotlight.
When Steph rang Dan in 2012 and told him they were confirmed contestants for the next series of the then ratings blockbuster My Kitchen Rules he recalls being “at Fraser Coast Anglican College painting the toilets”. Steph was working in sales at a local radio station.
Hervey Bay locals, Dan and Steph both attended Urangan State High School at the southern end of the Fraser Coast city, 3.5 hours’ drive north of Brisbane.
Dan was a year above Steph, both were aware of each other and attended the same parties, but did not meet until 2006 when Steph returned from three years working in Perth.
Romance flared on Melbourne Cup day that year when Dan and Steph were at the same function.
The race that stops the nation looms large in their love story, with a Melbourne Cup day proposal the next year and their wedding the weekend before Melbourne Cup the following year.
“It’s always a special time for us,” says Dan.
However the script went awry when the pair’s desire to have children didn’t eventuate.
“After about a year of trying, nothing was happening so we saw a specialist in Brisbane and saved up $16,000 for IVF,” says Steph.
Strapped for cash, the pair was staying in an $88-a-night hotel on the highway in Kangaroo Point when Steph underwent the necessary procedures.
Back home, the pair got a call on a Friday afternoon saying it hadn’t worked and that there were no viable back-up embryos either.
“We were devastated beyond belief,” says Dan.
“Me being me, I said I don’t know about you but I feel like a drink and got us a couple of beers and we sat down to regroup.
“This ad came on TV and it caught our eye … it’s still vivid; ‘Do you have what it takes to be the next My Kitchen Rules champions, for your chance to win $250,000?’ ’’.
They looked at each other and it was on.
“I said we love cooking let’s have a crack,” recalls Dan.
“We got the old laptop out and did the application form.” “It took us about three-and-a-half hours. We’ve gone from negative IVF result at 3pm to applying for MKR at about 7.30pm,” says Steph.
Amid the beer and excitement some creative writing took place about their cooking repertoire but when Dan got a call from a producer the next day to say they would be put through to the next stage, they went straight to the shops and bought the ingredients to cook everything they had mentioned, to make sure they actually could do what they said they could.
This attention to detail and determination not to let the opportunity pass by, to cash up for more IVF and solve their financial woes, meant they worked like demons behind the scenes on the show, buying cooking equipment to keep practising in their hotel room or apartment late at night after series shoots.
“We’d get off the bus at 10 o’clock after filming and there was a Coles below us that was open to midnight and Steph would go straight up and get set up for a cook and I’d go straight into Coles,” says Dan.
“One night I went in and the exec producer of the show, who lived nearby was there getting a heap of chocolate and chips and god knows what, says, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Cooking mate’, and he said. ‘I’d heard this but I didn’t believe it’ and I said, ‘This is what we do every day’.”
With their winners’ cheque the couple paid off debts, opened their Hervey Bay cafe EAT at Dan and Steph’s in 2014, three months later underwent more IVF, and had Emmy in 2015.
“I would never want to open a restaurant without that profile,” says Steph.
“It’s hard, it’s challenging and we did go through tough times in 2016.” “It was brutal,” agrees Dan, who says they made some bad decisions and spent too much time working hard in the cafe rather than on it. The stress of it all led to him piling on weight until he was 165kg.
“I feel as though we did hit rock bottom,” says Steph.
“We thought we were going to have to close the business,” says Dan.
He says crucial to overhauling their lives was his decision to undergo gastric sleeve surgery. “I was beyond repair, it was too much and I needed help,” he says.
“People think it's the easy way out but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He’s now 85kg, up from a low of 69kg as he “looked crook”.
Steph helped Dan prep for surgery and ate the same food in the weeks after, losing 20kg herself.
A “lifeline” from his mother, advice from an accountant, and a desire to not let their dream sink, saw them pull themselves out of a hole.
When COVID hit last year, like the rest of thehospitality industry, the Mulherons had to initially shut down their cafe on the Hervey Bay Esplanade with its breakfast and lunch menu including big flavoured options such as bacon cheeseburger omelette and peanut butter hot cakes with hot fudge sauce. (Unusually, it also offers a six-item weight loss surgery menu.)
“We would sell 50-plus meals a week from it. There is now a surgeon who comes up and does it so it’s more common; there is a Wide Bay weight loss surgery community,” Dan says.)
But once again the pair was on board with confronting a potential disaster and digging their way out of it.
Within 10 days EAT staff were making 300 takeaway meals a day; the couple used the downtime to write another e-cookbook, on weight loss surgery meals, opened another restaurant and now they’ve been travelling regional Queensland to film the new series.
Oh, and they sold a lot of sausages.
The sausage thing grew out of the MKR producers asking early on if the couple had anything different in their cooking arsenal and they admitted to making all sorts of experimental sausages for dinner parties such as a Mexican version that included Doritos.
“You tasted it for three days, it was horrendous,” recalls Dan.
And so Dan “the sausage guy” was born.
A blood sausage on the first MKR series won judge accolades and a fish version was deployed in the grand final. Launched in March last year, their sausage line is under SunPork’s Three Aussie Farmers brand, initially with Farmhouse and Spicy Sicilian flavours, with more added after COVID led to a sales spike.
“People panic bought and meat was something they were stocking the freezers up with, so our sausages just went through the roof,” says Dan, with 100 tonnes a month selling across 800 Coles stores nationally.
In a similar quirk of fate, last year the owner of Coast restaurant, just up from EAT, on the Esplanade with sea views, came to them with a proposal.
Discussion and four months of renovations later, The Bear was born.
The American-Canadian-inspired bar-diner offers a bonanza of slow-cooked meats, pork ribs, burgers, sausages (obviously), pizzas with topping options including Hervey Scallops and pancetta or, in the case of “sweet little piggy”, maple bacon, cider-braised pulled pork, smoked chipotle relish and pork, bacon and maple sausage.
Dan says the 150 seater has been “booked out every night for eight months, with 60-70 for lunch”.
Life is hectic but, according to Dan, “those earlier challenge years taught us that we don’t want to be back there”.
They’re relishing the opportunity and thankful locals have embraced the business. Another COVID opportunity loomed with their travel show.
“We realised that people are missing overseas travel and cuisine so we wanted to travel into these regions and cook international cuisine with the local produce,” says Dan.
Each half-hour episode involves visits to three different producers, some with Emmy in tow, as well as a cook-up.
Home, the Fraser Coast, is the star of this afternoon’s first episode, which has a Balinese theme.
Dishes showcased include curry prawn skewers and scallop ceviche. Rockhampton gets a Texan barbecue theme, it’s Mexican in Bowen with smoky squid and mango salad; Bundaberg turns Moroccan and Kingaroy inspires a touch of Canada with a pig on a spit, sausages and a peanut bar.
Now they’re in talks for a second series.
And despite the rest of their commitments, Team Mulheron seems up for it, ready to get back on the road again, as always, together.
Travel and Eat with Steph & Dan, Channel 7 from 5pm today, nationally on 7TWO
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