For Jess Ho’s first cooking lesson, the seven-year-old was handed a meat cleaver by their father and, then, a live chicken. So it’s fitting that as a commentator on the restaurant industry, Ho has a sharp and bloody wit.
Melbourne diners may be familiar with Ho without knowing the name. Ten years ago, having raised eyebrows as a cynical food blogger, they became a formidable, platinum-blonde buzz-cut presence working front of house in restaurants (as The Age noted back in 2012, “getting a table at Chin Chin means getting past Jess Ho”). Since then, Ho has been a restaurant brand strategist, a bars editor and a wine bar owner, appeared as a judge on Seven Network’s reality show Restaurant Revolution, and most recently hosted the SBS food podcast Bad Taste – most of it before the age of 30.
Jess Ho admits to having bought into the era of edgy chefs and bartenders who enjoyed cult-like followings.Credit:
Their memoir Raised by Wolves traces a line from a childhood marred by horrific emotional and physical abuse (Ho flew the coop at 15), to becoming fully immersed in the dysfunctional but more accepting family of hospitality.
It’s no kiss-and-tell. Despite Ho’s acerbic observations and snappy way with a one-liner (“treat me like the dumb door bitch and you’ll receive the dumb-door-bitch treatment”), names are redacted. Sure, there are plenty of the kind of insider revelations you might expect – women’s toilets are the filthiest; staff enjoy spicy knock-off gossip sessions (the dialogue is so real that I’m assuming Ho took notes at the time); and there are codes in the restaurant’s reservations system to warn of difficult breeds of customer – but ultimately, Raised by Wolves is a take-down of restaurant trends that dilute and fetishise non-Western cultures, and that make those who work in them complicit.
By their early 20s, Ho had become a hospo lifer, which meant fashioning a very different moral code and work mindset (one in which expletives are free to fly) from nine-to-fivers. “I had made myself unemployable in any other setting,” they write.
The cover of Raised by Wolves by Jess Ho.
Ho’s hunger for learning accelerated their rise through the ranks, but at the expense of balance. When, for convenience’s sake, they swapped a share house in the burbs for a sterile apartment box in the city nearer to work, they became even more isolated. Trading night shifts for day brought about an existential crisis that only hospo workers might truly understand: “I heard a faint ringing in my ears. It wasn’t tinnitus – it was the absence of a commercial-grade speaker directly above me blasting overproduced hipster music while people shouted their names and numbers in my ear.”
Unwilling to be left alone with their thoughts, Ho took to haunting hospo bars, waiting for fellow troopers to knock off. A drinking habit blossomed, and with it, depression. Eventually, they were persuaded to take a holiday, which turned out to be a life-changing trip to New York.
Hospitality is like AA or the Freemasons, in that you can find your crowd in any city in the world, and in New York, Ho quickly tapped into a scene. Sheepishly, Ho admits to having bought into the Lucky Peach-magazine era of edgy chefs and bartenders who enjoyed cult-like followings (“showmanship, bold flavours, extremes, intense heterosexuality and meat”) but ultimately, the culinary adventures they experienced on this trip brought about a much-needed epiphany.
To wit: popular food culture was “f---ed” and Ho was part of the problem: “… as soon as that plane landed in Melbourne, I would be that arsehole censoring parts of someone else’s culture and selling the easily digestible bits to a rich, white audience. I was going home to a job where I’d be pushing white faces cooking Thai food and dumbing down an entire cuisine into entertainment. I’d be working in a restaurant that prided itself on ‘elevating’ and ‘reinventing’ food that didn’t require elevating or reinventing in the first place … I wasn’t depressed. I was guilty.”
Raised by Wolves may have the tagline “a memoir with bite” but at its conclusion there’s a softening. The devastating loss of Ho’s close friend and business partner sharpens their resolve to retire from the frontline and learn how to simply enjoy food – and life.
There’s a redemptive neatness to this that would be familiar to readers of addiction memoirs, but perhaps that’s not surprising. As Ho writes: “I felt like I was breaking up with someone I’d been in a relationship with far too long … In the end, I recognised how co-dependent and toxic it was.”
Raised by Wolves by Jess Ho is published by Affirm Press, $29.99. Jess Ho is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival.
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