Chef Lennox Hastie and Elizabeth Hewson join The Weekend Australian Magazine
One is a chef famous for his expertise with fire; the other is a cook with impeccable credentials. Lennox Hastie and Elizabeth Hewson are culinary partners with a remarkable story to tell.
On a regular day, the kitchen in Elizabeth Hewson’s Erskineville home, in Sydney’s inner-west, is a bastion of domestic serenity. Pots and pans are neatly stowed away, bench space is occupied by a gleaming pasta machine and bunches of fresh-cut herbs compete for space with jars of semolina, bottles of olive oil, ripe tomatoes and knots of garlic bulbs. Things are calm and orderly, neatly stacked and tidy. The usual signs of family life are there too: keys, letters, pens and plastic spoons and cups for her son Louis, almost three, who loves to play with his toy wooden kitchenette.
But on this steamy Saturday in January the kitchen is a scene of almost total, if controlled, mayhem. Lennox Hastie, 44, the Firedoor chef and co-owner, an instantly recognisable face for anyone with a passing knowledge of Australian food, is standing amid a vast array of pots, pans, frypans, plates, bowls, glasses, cutlery and chef’s knives that claim every last piece of the kitchen. He’s calmly gutting a tiny red goatfish Hewson is about to cook in a dish of seafood pasta.
“Have you scaled this?” he asks Hewson. “You want me to?”
No she hasn’t, and yes she does. Seconds later, the goatfish is in the pot. All around them, boxes and baskets of glistening produce are ready to be prepped. A glossy stack of capsicum reclines against a bunch of kale and lean organic leeks; plump seasonal plums, peaches and apricots loll in an oversized bowl, lemons, limes, garlic and chilli perch near a paper-lined tray of cavatelli – cute curls of pasta Hewson hand rolled at daybreak.
In the background, Creedence Clearwater Revival is blasting out a tune and photographer Nikki To comes over from her makeshift studio, set up in the dining room next to the kitchen, to find out when the pasta will be ready to be photographed. She lends a hand popping vongole into a pot so that Hewson, 35, can continue chopping tomatoes. The aroma of garlic sizzling in olive oil is matched by the scent of wood smoke blowing into the kitchen from a miniature barbecue Hastie has set up in the backyard.
It could be a scene of three friends preparing the dinner party of a lifetime, the sort that involves the very best produce money can buy and people with the skills to pull off a banquet that would live in the imagination for decades. But this is work in progress. To – considered by many Australia’s preeminent food photographer – returns to the table where her camera is poised above an empty plate and does a final check of the linens and plates she has been arranging and rearranging.
“I’ll be 10 minutes,” says Hewson.
“OK, Lennox,” says To. “You’re up.”
“Here you go then,” says Hastie, handing her a plate of grilled leeks he seared moments earlier. “Three leeks or four?”
To and Hewson consider. Four it is. A few moments later, images of the plated food begin flashing up on a screen. The beautiful stalks, charred and smoky, snap into focus. They are ready for their closeup; ready to be captured for the pages of this magazine, in fact, for our new recipe pages commencing this weekend. It’s culinary poetry in motion.
Lennox Hastie is surprisingly shy for a man with an international profile, a global legion of fans, several restaurant-of-the-year and chef-of-the-year titles, a three-month waitlist for a table at his Sydney restaurant and even an episode of Chef’s Table dedicated to his “journey”, as they say in the food industry. On first encounter you might mistake him for being aloof, although to know him is to be disabused of that idea. Rather, with his warm eyes, subtle jokes and propensity to distribute bear hugs in spur-of-the-moment situations, he is one of the good guys of Australian food.
“When I first met Lennox I was so intimidated,” says Hewson. “The level of focus and intensity Lennox has is pretty extreme, especially back when he first came to Australia from Spain. The first time Nikki had to shoot Lennox, she cried. She was like, ‘He is just so intense’.”
Laughs To: “The night before I was supposed to do Lennox’s portrait, I was so scared. When Lennox gets stressed he gets quite internal. He would never hurt a fly but he has such a strong presence. If he’s feeling stressed, there’s just this compounded energy around him.”
It’s bizarre to learn that Hewson and To once quailed in the presence of Hastie’s gruff persona; but then, few chefs turn up in Australia with quite the reputation that Hastie did when he arrived in 2011, fresh from five years at Spain’s much-lauded Basque region restaurant Asador Etxebarri, where he worked with mercurial master chef Victor Arguinzoniz.
“I guess I had been in Spain working with a guy who barely spoke, not even in Spanish, let alone in English, which he didn’t speak at all, and then to come to Australia and be in the glare. It was painful,” Hastie says now, contemplatively. “It was a nightmare, actually.”
Hastie has one of the most unusual and intriguing CVs in Australian food. Brisbane-born but raised in the UK to a British mother and an Australian father, he trained in England’s finest diners, including Michel Roux Jr’s Le Gavroche and Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, before learning by chance about Asador Etxebarri while he was on a weekend off work in San Sebastián, Spain. Intrigued by the concept of Arguinzoniz’s tiny restaurant in the Basque mountains that had a kitchen entirely driven by fire, Hastie decided on the spot to drive to the venue. “The next day I started work there,” he says. “I was hooked on it. I stayed. What was meant to be one year turned into five.”
Although an obscure regional restaurant in those days, Asador Etxebarri came to the world’s attention when the influential Restaurant magazine began including it in its annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants list (in 2016 and again in 2021 it climbed as high as No. 3 on the list). For Hastie, years of dedication to the venue ensued, sometimes with days spent almost in complete solitude, as he learnt everything he could about the beauty of cooking with fire. But five years was enough, and in 2011 he departed – much to his mentor’s surprise and disappointment – to follow his partner, Diana, to Australia. The couple, now married with a son, Alex, eight, washed up at Marcus Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Diana, a surgeon, was working there at the time.
“I liked it there but if I was to do a restaurant in Australia it had to be Sydney or Melbourne,” he says. “They’re the only places I could do what I wanted to do.” They relocated to Sydney, where Hastie got to know restaurant figure John Fink.
Fink – a vivacious and ingenious force in Australian food and the owner, with his father Leon Fink, of a group of restaurants that includes Quay, Bennelong and Otto – had pinned Hastie as a major talent, and wanted him to join his stable of chefs. “For me it’s about talent, talent, talent, talent, talent. And the rest falls into place,” Fink argues. “And this guy was the real deal. You can’t buy that. You can’t teach that. You can’t train that. People have to learn that for themselves. Lennox is unique and he’s uncompromising. And I love that about him.”
“The level of focus and intensity Lennox has is pretty extreme.”
The pair decided to go into partnership on a Sydney restaurant based on cooking with fire. “The process wasn’t that easy, though,” Hastie says. “It was a nightmare in fact. Finding a site and getting the restaurant made, it was a ridiculous time.”
Firedoor took an excruciating four years to create, mostly because council regulations around running a restaurant with a fire as its central focus meant potential sites were, one by one, ruled out, leaving Hastie and Fink with a concept but no space. Eventually a compact brick-lined building in Surry Hills’ Mary Street became a contender, and in April 2015, Firedoor, a restaurant with a kitchen run entirely on fire with nothing cooked on electricity or gas, finally had its baptism of, well, fire.
When it came to opening Firedoor, Fink knew there was only one person he could trust to tell the story of a restaurant that was, in many ways, too hot to handle. After four years of anticipation, the Sydney food media was braying to appraise the restaurant and Hastie was becoming anxious to launch.
The only problem was, the person Fink wanted to steer the restaurant through its tough opening days was living in Italy, undertaking a masters degree in food culture and communication at the University of Gastronomic Science in Bra, in Italy’s northwestern Piedmont region. Elizabeth Hewson was unavailable. “When I grow up I want to be Lizzie Hewson,” says Fink with his trademark cheekiness. “When I was her age I could hardly even get out of bed.”
Fink had worked with Hewson at Sydney public relations firm Black before she departed for Italy (in fact, Fink wrote Hewson’s reference for the course in Italy). Black had handled the media account for Quay and Otto but by 2015 the business needed an in-house media director. Fink was not only about to launch Firedoor but also Bennelong, the Sydney Opera House fine diner, and he needed help.
“John called me a really long time before I’d even finished the degree in Italy and he said, ‘What are your thoughts on coming back and opening a small restaurant in the Sydney Opera House?’” Hewson recalls. “And he said, ‘Oh, and secondary to that we also have Firedoor opening’. But I said, ‘I’m not finished here, sorry’.”
Fink decided he would wait for Hewson to complete the year-long course in Italy rather than entrust his two biggest restaurant gambles to anyone else. “And after I got back from Italy, the next day I was at Firedoor,” Hewson laughs.
She says that while the launch was a success, the restaurant’s first two years were a challenge. “Restaurants take a while to find their feet and that was true of Firedoor,” she says. “There were nights when it was quiet. Many nights. I felt at the time that a lot of people didn’t understand Firedoor. Chefs and people in the industry got it. But not everyone. And I couldn’t understand that because when I ate Lennox’s food, it was unlike anything I had tried. And after a while I realised that people didn’t understand the story of the restaurant and the story of Lennox. I thought, ‘If we can get more people to the restaurant, have them sit at the counter to watch Lennox work and try his food, talk to him and learn the story, people would get it’. I hosted so many journalists, tastemakers and industry.”
Gradually, more people did start to understand Firedoor. Success began to roll, and diners started to comprehend that at its essence, Firedoor is a restaurant built on produce so extraordinary that Hastie “sometimes cries over it”, according to To.
“When I shot Lennox’s book Cooking with Fire, we did this prawn dish,” To recalls. “The prawns are a really important recipe to him because he had ties with his past working in Spain. Lennox was like, ‘Nikki, when I was working with this produce in Spain the prawns were so beautiful that I cried. We need to convey this in the photo. And I was like, ‘What? How do I do that? These prawns are in a basket.’ Lennox is like, if I cook something and it doesn’t work out, I have this guilt or this weight on me because I disrespected the produce.”
Although Firedoor has received dozens of awards – it is Good Food’s reigning restaurant of the year – and a cult following that includes TheNew York Times’ critic Pete Wells and esteemed Italian chef Massimo Bottura, its acute turning point came when it came to the attention of Brian McGinn, a producer on the blockbuster food series Chef’s Table, a show that highlights the world’s most interesting chefs. While in Italy, Hewson had emailed McGinn to congratulate him on the series, and to her surprise, McGinn replied. She sent him a copy of Hastie’s book and after a year of back and forth, the Chef’s Table team decided Hastie was the perfect fit for an episode.
In 2020, a team arrived to record Hastie’s journey from the Basque mountains to Sydney fine diner. The show was broadcast around the world in September 2020 in the darkest days of the pandemic, when people globally were locked down and hungry for food-based escapist programs. “We haven’t had a spare table since,” says Hewson. “On the first Wednesday of the month we release a month of reservations, three months in advance. That day is crazy. All the tables are filled in half an hour. People finally get it, and they finally get Lennox.”
Sydney born-and-bred Hewson, whose husband Tom Chapman works in digital merchandising, may be a lynchpin in the career of Lennox Hastie, and the head of creative at Fink, but she has not been idle on her own culinary career. Following the year in Italy, and even while helping launch both Bennelong and Firedoor, she began working on her second cookbook. Saturday Night Pasta, a tome about using cooking to help overcome the stresses of daily life, was published in 2020 to wide success. It followed her first cookbook, Moving Out, Eating In, written when she was 21, on how to cook for yourself after leaving home. Late last year, even as she assisted Hastie to launch his second venue, the Surry Hills tapas bar Gildas, she released a pasta and pasta sauce under the Saturday Night Pasta label. The range has gone into a bigger production run.
“Lizzie is incredible,” says Quay and Bennelong executive chef Peter Gilmore. “I have often told her that she will one day be the Nigella Lawson of Australia. She has a really good palate and really great understanding of food and flavour. I always value what she has to say. She has spent a lot of time in the restaurant and what she says is always worth hearing.” Fink agrees that Hewson is one of the best palates, and minds, in Australian food. “It’s such a privilege to work with her because she has a mainline to the purity and the balance of food,” he says. “Like, if she’s going to make spaghetti with chilli and garlic, she will make it exactly as it should be, she gets to the heart of it.”
“Lizzie will be the Nigella Lawson of Australian food.”
Hastie says Hewson has been a tempering friend over the past decade. “There are obviously people you work with and you get to know over the years but I found a very natural friendship with Lizzie. She’s very talented and cares so much about what she does. She’s always been so incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about everything she does and that hasn’t diminished over the years.”
The pair have become such loyal friends that they often chat on the phone after Hastie finishes service and have discussed writing a cookbook together on after-service dishes. Hastie admits he was pulled in to help Hewson make her first commercial batch of Saturday Night Pasta sauces. “She called me and said, ‘Do you have a five-litre pot I can make the sauce in? I need to scale up my recipe’,” he laughs. “I said, ‘That’s a lot of sauce. Come over to Firedoor, I’ll give you a hand’.” “And so the sample sauces were made at Firedoor,” says Hewson. “I think Lennox was surprised by how much he enjoyed the flavour.”
Nikki To has something she’d like to add about Hastie. “If you’re going to talk about Lennox being scary, you also have to talk about the hugs. He’s always giving hugs. I’m like, ‘Don’t you know how sweaty you are?’ And it’s not just women, he hugs men too.” Hewson laughs: “I often have to say to Lennox, ‘Let go of the journalist, Lennox. Step away from the hug.’”
Hastie is most definitely a hugger. A big, warm hugger. For all his intensity, his favoured form of expression is simple, direct and personal. “He really is like a teddybear,” says To. “I mean, he cries when he stuffs up a prawn. It’s so hard to be friends with both of them, they are both so intense.”
To has become not only a friend but a cherished colleague for both the cook and the chef, shooting both their cookbooks, as well as Hastie’s restaurants, profile images and now the pair’s recipes for The Weekend Australian Magazine.
“Lizzie and Lennox are best friends, they really are,” she says. “They want the best for each other. They want to lift each other higher, which is the nicest thing. And they want that for me too. It’s really a great thing to be a part of their friendship and work. I feel really lucky that I have them in both my life. They are both so incredibly inspiring.”
Find Lennox Hastie and Elizabeth Hewson’s recipes in The Weekend Australian Magazine. The duo will alternate each week, starting with Hewson on 18 February, 2023.
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