Bee Satongun, Ben Bamford, Tommy Prosser: the hottest chefs in the Southern Highlands
It’s time to celebrate the brilliant minds hidden in the region’s kitchens. Meet the culinary geniuses making mouths water around the Southern Highlands.
The Bowral News
Don't miss out on the headlines from The Bowral News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The Southern Highlands has long been considered a destination for food and wine lovers, but it can be easy to overlook the incredible variety of culinary talent available in the region.
From fine dining to food trucks, the Highlands has top-tier food choices for all tastes and budgets. And yet we rarely celebrate the brilliant minds hidden in the kitchens of our favourite eateries.
After a gloomy couple of Covid years, it’s time to celebrate our incredibly talented local chefs and support our local eateries.
Without further ado, meet the culinary geniuses making mouths water around the Southern Highlands.
Bee Satongun
As the Southern Highlands’ resident celebrity chef, Bee Satongun is surprisingly humble.
Ms Satongun is a Michelin-starred chef who was named Asia’s Best Female Chef in 2018 after she and her husband Jason Bailey opened the wildly successful Paste restaurant in Bangkok.
When they decided to move back to Mr Bailey’s home in the Southern Highlands, lucky locals were blessed with Paste Australia.
The restaurant opened in June 2020 after the first state-wide lockdown was lifted. Ms Satongun said it’s been a difficult time to be working in hospitality, particularly with staff shortages.
“I do everything myself,” she laughed.
Ms Satongun said the many accolades creates pressure to maintain the high standards of food, which drives her to continue to innovate.
“Restaurant is always moving forward, so once you stop, you’re behind. You have to keep moving with the times,” she said.
She combines modern invention with traditional methods she learned from her mother and grandmother when she was a child. Ms Satongun started cooking when she was five years old, working at her mother’s street stall in Bangkok.
“When I cooked with my mum, I learned all the old tactics because when I was young, we didn’t come from a family that had money, so we had to cook with charcoal and a mortar and pestle,” she said.
She lost interest in cooking when she went to university to study teaching, but soon realised she missed the kitchen. When she met Mr Bailey, they shared a dream of running one of the best Thai restaurants in the world – and they’ve since made it a reality.
Bee’s top tip for budding chefs: “Just keep going. Keep developing yourself. You cannot stop learning and developing your knowledge.”
Paste Australia is located at 105 Main St, Mittagong.
Tommy Prosser
Nostalgia is the name of the game for Tommy Prosser. It’s what the head chef at Berrima Vault House aims to evoke with his food and it’s also how he came to stay in the Southern Highlands.
The Berrima Vault House was built in 1844 in the image of an English Village, which is exactly what the British-born Mr Prosser thought when he saw it.
“When I saw the venue, the sandstone bricks reminded me of home and I thought ‘I could see myself setting up a bit of residency here’, so I came down, turned into an executive chef and here we are,” he said.
Mr Prosser got his start washing dishes as a young teen before participating in international cooking competitions in England and abroad. After working in Michelin-starred restaurants, he decided to move to Australia and established himself as a skilled chef.
“I’ve always had a really strong foundation in cooking and an understanding of what happens … so I’ve always tried to push the boundaries a bit. (But) I don’t like being too clever,” he said.
Mr Prosser prefers to focus on consistency and quality over saturating a dish with too many techniques.
“My philosophy is all about nostalgia. What flavours remind you of things growing up or experiences you’ve had,” he said.
“I call them memory anchors.”
Like a true Brit, Mr Prosser has installed a Sunday Roast tradition at the Berrima Vault House to tap into existing memory anchors. It was so evocative, he said it made a woman cry in the middle of the restaurant after it reminded her powerfully of her mother-in-law, who she missed dearly.
Tommy’s top tip for budding chefs: “Get involved and ask questions. Take your time to do it right. It’s all about the fundamentals.”
Berrima Vault House is located at 11 Old Hume Highway, Berrima.
Jerad Dunnohew
An American chef who was taught in the French style and moved to Australia, Jerad Dunnohew is nothing short of colourful.
The head chef at The Shaggy Cow had cherished ambitions of being a writer until he realised he was happiest when he was cooking. So he took the plunge.
“I decided I was going to get really serious about cooking and I moved to Australia and started working in whatever fine dining restaurant I could lie my way into,” he said.
Mr Dunnohew was taught in the French style of cooking, “which is an amazing set of skills”, and has a different take on being a chef. He sees cooking not as an art form but as a trade.
“It’s a set of skills and you can be really good at it, but it’s a trade. I take raw materials and I apply a set of learned skills and I turn those into something else,” he said.
The reward comes from figuring out how to make something people want from the raw materials, he said.
Mr Dunnohew has been the head chef at The Shaggy Cow for seven and a half years. It’s a testimony to how much he enjoys the collaboration with the owners, and he joked he’ll be the first ever chef to get long-service leave.
“When I started at The Shaggy, we were essentially a sandwich shop,” he said.
“Over the last seven years, the demographic of the Highlands has changed drastically and we’ve steered the ship around to what is pretty respectable food.”
It’s a humble statement from the head chef of a multi-award winning eatery, which was recently named the 2021 Most Outstanding Cafe in the area.
Jerad’s top tip for budding chefs: Top tip: “Prepare yourself for years and years of hard work with no recognition at all. If you don’t love it and you’re not prepared to work your arse off, you won’t make it.”
The Shaggy Cow is located at 112 Main St, Mittagong.
Ben Bamford
From fishmonger to fine dining, culinary genius Ben Bamford has done it all. The British native spent most of his culinary career in fine dining five star restaurants before he was approached by the owners of Birch to become the executive chef.
“It was back to the tools and a brigade of a tenth the size, which was good for me,” he said.
“I’d become distant from the whole cooking thing and more into the administration side of things.”
Mr Bamford has had a passion for cooking from a young age thanks to his “vegetarian hippie” mother’s encouragement of culinary experimentation.
“A lot of people can be scared about a lot of different ingredients, but she certainly wasn’t – although not everything worked all the time,” he said.
“We certainly had a colourful culinary upbringing.”
Now he has his own children, Mr Bamford hopes to see the same curiosity and engagement with food that he enjoyed as a child.
His mother’s influence is apparent in his enthusiasm for ensuring Birch creates minimal waste and eliminates what he terms “the big gap in the chain” in modern cooking. Birch strives to keep food scraps for reuse as fertiliser or worm food, and Mr Bamford said the kitchen strives to be as environmentally-friendly as possible. This includes a focus on local produce, which he said is beneficial for everyone in the long run.
Birch has been awarded two hats by the Australian Good Food Guide, an accolade Mr Bamford said is due to open and effective communication.
“I have a close relationship with Glen and Renee, the owners, and we do discuss everything. We have the communication that allows us to say our parts,” he said.
“We try to do a happy marriage of all our ideas.”
Ben’s top tip for budding chefs: “Experience is everything. Don’t be afraid to learn things off new people.”
Birch is located at 2/249 Argyle Street, Moss Vale.
Andrew Craker
One of the youngest chefs on our list is also one of the most nurturing instructors for budding cooks. At 28 years old, Andrew Craker is the young gun behind The Hungry Monkey, one of the hottest places to eat in the Southern Highlands.
Mr Craker helped open the store last May in the hopes of providing a cool, fun eatery where young people would feel welcome. As someone who moved to the Highlands, he notes the older-skewed demographic can be isolating for young people.
“It’s something we’ve really tried to work on … is just to have a good culture and have somewhere for the younger generation to hang out and feel a part of a good community,” he said.
“The Hungry Monkey is bringing that younger community in, but it’s also giving that younger generation here different opportunities to start out somewhere in the hospitality industry.
As someone who’s worked in a kitchen for nearly 12 years, Mr Craker knows how stressful it can be – which is why he is so passionate about creating a “family vibe” and ensuring staff can maintain a work/life balance.
“I come to work and provide a good environment for my staff to come to every day,” he said.
“There’s nothing better than coming to work every day and enjoying what you do.”
The head chef is a busy man who is charged with setting the menu for the four The Hungry Monkey locations around NSW as well as running the kitchen. However, his real passion is mentoring and encouraging the next generation of chefs.
“For me, it’s not so much about cooking anymore, it’s more about teaching the younger guys that come through that want to learn,” he said.
Andrew’s top tip for budding chefs: “Put in the hard work. Hard work definitely pays off. If you really love it and you have a passion for it, just completely immerse yourself in the environment.”
The Hungry Monkey is located in High Street Mall at Shop 17/312 Bong Bong St, Bowral.
Raye and Michael Abouchabake
The brilliant minds behind the only Middle Eastern restaurant in the Southern Highlands both have a deep love of food that comes from their family. Raye and Michael Abouchabake are both from Lebanese families who were enthusiastic about cooking.
“Mum would say ‘come and learn how to cook, come and watch me’,” Ms Abouchabake said.
Their restaurant, Leila’s at the Grand, is named after Mr Abouchabake’s mother, who was a “fantastic cook” who learned her skills from his father. However, their old school skills made it difficult to get a standardised recipe for the restaurant.
“You can’t get a recipe off either of them. It’s all pouring and tasting,” Mr Abouchabake laughed.
Both Ms and Mr Abouchabake create the seasonal menus and Mr Abouchabake trains all the chefs in his mother’s recipes. They’re constantly checking the quality of the food to ensure consistency.
Although they’re hesitant to call themselves chefs, Mr Abouchabake said “we’ve done more cooking than most.”
“We’ve been around so long because we’ve been taught by our mothers. We’re not trying to be creative, we’re just trying to make good quality Lebanese food,” he said.
“People always stop us in the street and say thanks for opening a Middle Eastern restaurant.”
Ms and Mr Abouchabake say their business is ingrained in the Southern Highlands by the “loyal locals” and the ties to the community.
“It’s like a family. We’ve employed them and employed their kids,” Ms Abouchabake said.
Family is an apt term, as the Abouchabakes are godparents to five children of previous employees.
Leila’s at the Grand is located in the Grand Arcade at 295-297 Bong Bong St, Bowral.
Nathan West
One of the Southern Highlands’ most creative chefs is Nathan West, the man behind the incredibly popular Boozy Burgers food truck in Mittagong.
Boozy Burgers was the first food truck in the Southern Highlands when it opened in September 2020, but many eateries have since followed in their tyre tracks. It is the brainchild of Mr West and Eden Brewery owner Jacob Newman, who combined their love of food and beer into the innovative Boozy Burger.
The food truck is so-named because every item is imbued with beer, from the pickles to the bacon.
“We wanted to have that edginess to it,” Mr West said.
“It’s definitely one of a kind.”
After more than 20 years of working in fine dining establishments, mostly in hatted restaurants, Mr West decided he wanted to do something different and give the Southern Highlands community something they wanted – but with a unique twist.
“We didn’t want to be driving down the same street all the other burger joints were driving down,” he said.
To that end, Boozy Burger has a whole secret menu just for locals “in the know” and a special burger of the week which changes every week.
Boozy Burgers “tips the cap to American regional burgers” in influence and range, but all of the ingredients are as local as possible.
Since opening, the eatery has been a booming success and Mr West has been in high demand as the head (and often only) chef in the kitchen. It’s been so busy that Mr West joked the truck has taken out half the cows in Robertson.
In the future, the Boozy Burgers founders would like to expand to other breweries or even festivals in the future.
Boozy Burgers is located in the carpark of Eden Brewery at 19 Cavendish St, Mittagong.
Matty Roberts
Head chef Matty Roberts and his wife Cass Wallace took the reins of eschalot in 2018 and they’ve turned it into a must-visit restaurant.
Mr Roberts focuses on using local growers to showcase the best produce the area has to offer and perpetuate a sustainable kitchen. The restaurant’s social media reveals a dedication to growing much of the produce in the on-site gardens and greenhouses.
eschalot has received two hats from the Australian Good Food Guide in recognition of Mr Roberts’ outstanding culinary achievements.
eschalot is located at 24 Old Hume Highway, Berrima.
Thomas Ege
Experienced chef Thomas Ege has had a decorated culinary career across fine dining establishments, five star hotels and international resorts.
Since settling in the Southern Highlands and taking on the role of executive head chef at Horderns, the German native has made an unforgettable impression – particularly with his lobster ice cream dish.
Mr Ege’s remarkable culinary skills were recognised with two hats by the Australian Good Food Guide.
Horderns Restaurant is located within Milton Country House and Spa at 200 Horderns Rd, Bowral.
Join the conversation
Meet the talented young artists from ARTEXPRESS 2025
The annual art exhibition which shows some of the most outstanding and exemplary artworks across NSW by HSC visual arts students has opened. Meet the students and see their amazing works.
Read more
Fatal call to drive through flood made by group, friend claims
The friend of a Sydney man charged with the manslaughter of two mates after he drove through rural floodwaters has told a court about the moments before the ute was swept away by the “ferocious” current.
Read more