Fashion designer’s creativity in kitchen not quite a blaze of glory

When fashion designer Gregory Ladner volunteered to cook a meal for 30 dinner guests at his husband’s birthday party more than three decades ago, he couldn’t resist challenging the limits of his culinary skills.

Culinary challenge ... designer Gregory Ladner at his home at Darling Point, Sydney. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

When fashion designer Gregory Ladner volunteered to cook a meal for 30 dinner guests at his husband’s birthday party more than three decades ago, he couldn’t resist challenging the limits of his culinary skills.

“I still wonder how I did it. I’d never attempted cooking such a complex meal before, for so many people, but I was young and wanted to be ambitious,” he said.

“There were 30 stuffed quail on the menu, pastry fish with scales and God knows what else. And then I got the industrial blowtorch involved for the creme brulee and that’s when things started to get a little dicey!”

When The Weekend Australian asked some of our best-known novelists, playwrights, journalists and critics which recipes were most important to them and why, Ladner, 72, jumped at the opportunity to show off his cooking skills and recount the day he almost set fire to the kitchen below his Melbourne flat.

Summer Cookbook dinkus for digital 4:3

His creme brulee with candied rhubarb, which will appear in Monday’s edition of The Australian, is possibly the most ambitious recipe presented in the summer cookbook to date, but Ladner said he couldn’t imagine doing it any other way. “I’m a creative person and if it’s not fashion, it’s something else like drawing or cooking, and this recipe comes with the memories of being young, ambitious and having a fantastic time at a party that I’ll always remember.”

Ladner, who grew up in Melbourne’s western suburbs, was drawn to fashion and design from an early age, before establishing a career as a leading Australian couturier, an international designer working in Hong Kong and the co-founder of a successful fashion accessory business.

“I knew from an early age I wanted to be an artist, but my father wouldn’t have that; it was entirely out of the question. We had a cousin that was a successful fashion designer and he (father) later saw that there was a way you could make a living from it, so I went to Prahran Tech, which is now Swinburne University.”

“Now they might say it was childhood trauma or something … but he really wanted to make sure it was commercially viable and he was absolutely right. You do have to make a living, no matter what the art.”

In his recent memoir, A Boy and His Bear, Ladner credits the rise of his design career to husband Mark, an entrepreneur who “helped get my designs into department stores”.

“Without him I’d still be sewing away in the back of a shed somewhere … That’s why this recipe and memory is so special to me because it takes me back to those early days of our relationship.”

A Boy and his Bear, by Gregory Ladner