Matthew Evans’ Friday Feasts: Freedom from choice
There is no menu for the languid lunches at Matthew Evans’s idyllic Tassie farm - just fresh food grown locally.
Seated at a long table of friendly strangers, in a warm, timber-clad room amid a bucolic Tasmanian setting, I feel strangely liberated.
It’s not just that I’ve escaped the city and office, and all their associated hassles, or that my mobile phone has largely ceased to function, thanks to Telstra’s regional indifference. It’s not even the simple, pagan atmosphere of souls gathered for the primal, timeless purpose of a feast.
Mainly, I feel liberated from choice: I have no idea what I’m about to eat and drink over the next three hours — and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve outsourced that function to my host, celebrity cook Matthew Evans. I’m at one of the TV star’s Friday Feasts; an all-inclusive multi-course meal served in a new, homely dining and kitchen complex on the Gourmet Farmer’s property, Fat Pig Farm, at Glaziers Bay in the lush Huon Valley.
While Evans, 50, will do his best to accommodate vegetarians or the gluten-intolerant, the menu is set, simple and largely determined by what’s growing or grazing within the fence line.
There’s little room for the kind of fads and fussiness currently plaguing the tables of Western civilisation. “We give you multiple things, so if you like one thing more than another, you have to interact with the people around when you’re sharing the platters,” Evans says. “There’s a negotiation that goes on.
“But also, there are so many decisions in life that I really like it when someone else has made them for you. You know before you come exactly how much it’s going to cost — and that you’re going to get a full meal and something to drink.
“There’ll be some things you might not have thought of ordering and things you might have wanted to order. You might be exposed to things that are new or different.”
While my intolerance of food intolerances stems from upbringing and cynicism, for Evans it is more a consequence of seeking to provide an authentic farm-based culinary experience.
“What if someone wants a skinny cappuccino? Well, what if! We milk full-cream cows. What am I supposed to do? We could go and buy a bunch of stuff and bring it in, but why would you come here if we’re just going to buy it in?” the food critic turned farmer says.
“We don’t grow chickpeas. We don’t grow lentils. We don’t grow soy beans. So it’s hard for us to offer a legitimate experience for people who have too many dietary issues or predilections. It’s freeing as a chef, because you’ve got the excuse, but it is for a reason.”
One thing you can be sure of is that everything will be quality, supremely fresh and, in most cases, sourced from the farm or the surrounding region.
“We bought this property five years ago with the intention of growing extra food to sell at markets, but then realised it could be a really good venue for taking the notion of paddock-to-plate to its logical conclusion: eating in the middle of the paddock,” Evans says.
Due to the wishes of neighbours and the local council, Evans and partner Sadie Chrestman limit the dining experience to the weekly Friday Feasts. However, the couple also offer a range of cookery classes at the farm, and they are seeking regulatory approvals for a micro-dairy to make their own cheese and ice cream.
Friday Feasts include a tour of the picturesque property. In a short stroll from the locally designed timber dining and kitchen building, you will meet the Wessex saddleback pigs that inspired the farm’s nomenclature, as well as several doe-eyed dairy cows, while chooks and a small beef herd are not far away.
At a well-tended market garden, Evans and staff horticulturalist Jonathon Cooper will boast of their vast range of vegetable varieties and generously share tips and secrets of the soil.
Back in the dining room, the atmosphere is casual as shared communal dishes help to break the ice between guests who might have been strangers moments earlier. Lunch, for up to 35, is suitably long, from about 12.30pm to 3.30pm or so, and unhurried.
We snack on leek and vegetable tart and sip blackcurrant spritzer (made with Tasman Peninsula McHenry’s Gin) before sitting down to charcuterie, pickles and salad with a 2013 Elsewhere riesling.
To follow, cider-braised pork stew (the crackling is perfect) with brick oven-roasted winter vegetables and Willie Smith Original Cider. And on it goes … pork and fennel sausages baked with stout, served with mash and braised leeks and a Home Hill Landslide pinot noir; and to finish, Eton mess with bay ice cream and walnut honey Anzacs.
The food is fresh, flavoursome and uncomplicated. No wonder Evans, for years a Sydney Morning Herald restaurant reviewer, is unconcerned about being on the receiving end of critique. “If you’re open to the public, you’re fair game,” he says.
Glaziers Bay is a 50-minute drive from Hobart and while the alcohol flows, like the rest of the feast, in staggered fashion, the sensible option would be to stay overnight locally. Some nearby accommodation providers will drop off and collect feasters.
Evans and Chrestman and their “free-range seven-year-old”, Hedley, moved to a new house on the farm a year ago, after growing weary of “commuting” from their previous home in nearby Cygnet.
It’s been an interesting journey for Evans since he traded the Sydney foodie scene for a life on the land in Tasmania almost nine years ago — and one far from the quiet tree-change experience of many mainland exiles.
His SBS show Gourmet Farmer, which tracked the transition, made him a household name. A new series yet to screen will chronicle his latest ventures. “I still have no clue compared to proper farmers who spend a lifetime steeped in this,” he says.
His separate, three-part SBS documentary series For the Love of Meat, was launched last week; a related book by the same name is due out on November 1.
“The documentary looks at how our meat comes into being — farming systems, what we do well and what we can do better,” Evans explains.
“The book is not about the show; it complements the show. It’s hardly me; it’s mostly other chefs and their ways of using meat in a more thoughtful way — using more of the animal, using less meat or sometimes no meat, to still make a delicious meal.”
Despite his fame, Evans appears to have remained, like his food, down-to-earth, honest and lacking pretension. For this, he thanks the tough love of rural Tasmanians: “We live in a great community of people who, like many Australians, are very keen to tell you what you’re doing wrong, publicly, and to bring your ego down to ground level.”