By Cara Waters
Anthea Loucas Bosha is trying not to worry but the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival’s signature event, The World’s Longest Lunch, isn’t sold out.
Every other year the lunch sells out almost instantly, but this year there are still tickets for sale.
Anthea Loucas Bosha, head of Food & Wine Victoria, has lunch at Marion Wine Bar.Credit: Chris Hopkins
“It’s stomach churning,” says Loucas Bosha, 52, who heads up the festival as part of her role as chief executive of Food & Drink Victoria.
For the past six years at the helm of the festival, she has helped shape how Melbourne eats, bringing in overseas chefs and curating events to best showcase local talent and producers.
However, slow ticket tales are a more recent phenomenon, one of the perils of running a major event in post-COVID times when commitment-phobic attendees are increasingly likely to leave purchases to the last minute.
Music festival Groove in the Moo was cancelled earlier this week as a result of poor ticket sales and across the events sector organisers bemoan a broader trend of attendees booking late.
The Melbourne Food & Wine festival changed its sales strategy this year to accommodate the last-minute rush and did not release tickets until after the Australian Open rather than in December after taking advice from the festival’s media agency that “late ticket sales behaviour is very much a thing”.
“We very much experienced that in our regional edition in November,” Loucas Bosha says. “Sixty-five per cent of tickets to our Village Feast sold in the last day and a half.”
Loucas Bosha lives and breathes food and wine but selecting one restaurant to eat at out of the hundreds showcased in the festival is a political hot potato.
She tries not to play favourites but settles on Marion wine bar for this interview and lunch as chef and owner Andrew McConnell is headlining this year’s World’s Longest Lunch.
Flat bread at Marion in Fitzroy. Credit: Chris Hopkins
In her role, she feels it’s her duty to get around to as many of Melbourne’s restaurants as possible but Loucas Bosha admits it’s “no hard labour” to be eating at Marion where she knows the menu pretty well.
However, choosing a wine from the wine list is another dilemma, as she wants to select a local producer, and ends up with a glass of chilled red, a Honky Chateau Tankini from the Yarra Valley.
Loucas Bosha says it’s Victoria’s producers that underpin the state’s excellence in hospitality.
“I don’t think we acknowledge [that] enough,” she says. “We can grow or make virtually anything in Victoria and Victoria produces just under a quarter of Australia’s food and fibre exports, in just three per cent of the country’s arable land.”
It’s something Loucas Bosha tries to champion in her role and she is constantly pushing to ensure there are more local wines and local produce in Melbourne’s restaurants.
Loucas Bosha grew up in Melbourne in Vermont South before moving to Balwyn where she went to Balwyn High School.
She credits her love of restaurants and food in general to her Greek Cypriot parents who were “amazing entertainers” at home and also took Loucas Bosha and her brother out to restaurants regularly.
“My parents were both very hard-working people,” Loucas Bosha says, adding her father worked long hours at ANZ Bank and her mother ran her own business as a dressmaker and designer.
Zucchini flowers with romesco sauce at Marion in Fitzroy.Credit: Chris Hopkins
Loucas Bosha and her brother often cooked the family dinner as their parents worked late, competing with each other over who could put the best meal together.
Scanning the Marion menu Loucas Bosha is confident in what we should order: “The flat bread, we have to go there,” she says.
Marion’s flat bread is a classic, a small puffy disc brushed with garlic butter and served with tangy house-made whipped curd cheese on the side to dip it in.
It’s simple and moreish, Melbourne’s food at its best, and something Loucas Bosha tries to showcase in her role.
Anthea Loucas at the start of her career working as fashion editor of The Age. Credit: Jim Lee
Growing up Loucas Bosha wanted to be a sports journalist after a stint in The Age’s sports department working at the Australian Open.
“I wanted to marry [tennis player] Stefan Edberg and I thought if I became a sports journalist I would meet him and marry him,” she jokes.
However, Loucas Bosha missed out on a cadetship at The Age, and her plans to marry Edberg were foiled, so she started a media studies course at Swinburne before getting a role at rural newspaper The Weekly Times.
She covered sport, stock sales and property, despite not knowing what an Angus bull was, before she put her hand up for a role as fashion editor at the Herald Sun.
Anthea Loucas Bosha with chef Neil Perry at a Gourmet Traveller event in 2009. Credit: Edwina Pickles
From here, Loucas Bosha moved to The Age as fashion editor where she remembers travelling to New York for a fashion shoot with Sarah O’Hare, now Sarah Murdoch.
“We photographed her on the streets of New York in swimwear and we stopped traffic as she had just started dating Lachlan Murdoch. It made The New York Post,” Loucas Bosha says.
A plate of raw tuna arrives at our table which Loucas Bosha says has a fantastic “sweet salty” combination topped with white soy and pickled celery.
As we eat, she reminisces about leaving Melbourne to move to Sydney for a role editing a food and fashion section called Good Living at The Sydney Morning Herald.
“I thought I’d give it a crack,” Loucas Bosha said. “It was the Olympic Games, Sydney was amazing and it was a great time to be there.”
Raw tuna with white soy and pickled celery at Marion. Credit: Chris Hopkins
She was the deputy editor at the Herald’s Sydney magazine before being “tapped on the shoulder” to edit Gourmet Traveller magazine at Australian Consolidated Press in 2003.
“It was an amazing time, ACP was flying, the Packers still owned it and John Alexander was the chief executive,” Loucas Bosha says.
She edited the magazine for 13 years and says one of the highlights was convincing British journalist and critic AA Gill to write for the magazine.
“He was amazing as you can imagine and infuriating,” she says. “When I took on the role I said ‘He’s going to write for us’ and everyone thought I was insane and crazy. But I was persistent and didn’t give up.”
Gill eventually returned Loucas Bosha’s calls and said “You know what? You sound like you’ll be fun. Let’s do it. But I’m very expensive, and I’m dyslexic, so you’ll have to work that out.”
Loucas Bosha said that was no problem and so the magazine paid Gill $2 a word and he dictated his copy over the phone.
“I get quite emotional talking about him,” she says, as a plate of stuffed zucchini flowers paired with a fire-engine red, tangy romesco sauce arrives.
She recalls a book launch party once with Gill in Sydney that Anthony Bourdain gate crashed. Gill died aged 62 in 2016, three weeks after revealing in a column he had cancer.
Swordfish with squash, fennel and saffron at Marion. Credit: Chris Hopkins
During her time in Sydney, Loucas Bosha also met her partner Trust Bosha, who she married in 2015.
“I never thought my person would be a beautiful black African man called Trust,” Loucas Bosha says. “We met at a party and we just fell in love really effortlessly.”
However, tears well in her eyes as she describes the “personal trauma” that brought her back to Melbourne from Sydney and led her to leave her long-standing role at Gourmet Traveller.
She suffered a miscarriage at 20 weeks, and the baby who they named TA, after both their names, is buried with her father.
“I speak about it openly as I think it’s important,” Loucas Bosha says. “It’s part of my life. I don’t know how I dealt with it, I don’t know if I have dealt with it. Sometimes it explains some things like why I don’t have children.”
Back in Melbourne, Loucas Bosha took up a role at Mecca doing content marketing. Then Radek Sali, former chief executive of vitamin company Swisse and chair of Food & Wine Victoria, called her and said the board was looking for a new chief executive.
“It took me a while to get my head around it but it kind of brought all my worlds together,” Loucas Bosha says. “My incredible passion for Melbourne and for food.”
Anthea Loucas with Trust Bosha, she says: “We just fell in love really effortlessly”.Credit: Eddie Jim
Loucas Bosha says when she edited Gourmet Traveller she used to drive the team crazy because she pitched so many Melbourne stories.
“They used to say: ‘Are you on the payroll for Visit Victoria? Because there is a lot of Melbourne in this magazine’,” she says.
Our final dish arrives, a fillet of plump swordfish on a bed of slow-cooked squash and fennel topped with rich saffron butter.
“Look at how beautifully this is presented,” Loucas Bosha says, ever the food enthusiast.
“Our mission is to champion the food and drink of Victoria, it’s pretty simple. We do that in loads of different ways, the festival is probably the activity that most people know us for, no questions. But it’s only one piece of work that we do.”
Loucas Bosha points to Food & Wine Victoria’s legends program, scholarships program and Drink Victorian campaign.
Bill for lunch at Marion with Anthea Loucas Bosha. Credit: Cara Waters
“My ambition has been to turn the business more into a year-round organisation,” she says.
This year she’s “supersized” the festival’s global dining series, increasing the number of tickets for the international chef program from 1400 tickets to just over 5000.
The World’s Longest Brunch features the cooking of Harry Mangat, Helly Raichura and Mischa Tropp, who Loucas Bosha says is cooking some of Australia’s most exciting Indian food.
Other highlights include an AI-generated menu at The Estelle in Northcote, Pizzeria Magma doing a pizza buffet inspired by Pizza Hut, performance art as dinner at The Lincoln in Carlton and the free Baker’s Dozen baking showcase at Federation Square.
For now, Loucas Bosha has to get back to the task of selling tickets and the high wire act that running a festival entails.
“It’s looking good, but it will be interesting to see where we land,” she says.
Melbourne Food & Wine Festival runs from March 15 to 24.