An art to charity feasts

IT’S the most exclusive invitation in town: dinner cooked by artist Tom Samek and judge Stephen Estcourt — won only with a hefty donation to a good cause.

Stephen Estcourt, left, and artist Tom Samek, who do a lot of cooking together. Picture: SAM ROSEWARNE

IT’S the most exclusive dining invitation in town: dinner cooked by artist Tom Samek and judge Stephen Estcourt. An invitation won only with a hefty donation to a good cause.

The two friends donated a dinner cooked by them to the auction to help resurrect Cygnet cafe Red Velvet Lounge, gutted by fire in 2014, and a dinner in the offing was bought at a Cancer Council auction.

Guests dine on oyster ice cream in seaweed cones, pheasant rillettes or mutton-bird sausages.

The charity dinners are not an enterprise the then barrister would have entertained when he first encountered the artist in the 1970s, when Tom was running a restaurant at
St Andrew’s Inn in Cleveland.

While he calls his blog Reminiscence of a Food Tragic, Stephen says his interest in food did not start until he and his wife, Mary, began stopping at St Andrew’s on the drive from Launceston to Hobart.

“Tom introduced us, and many of our friends, to the edgier side of food,” he says.

“We did not know about jugged hare, rillettes and moules mariniere until then.”

The Estcourts caught on fast.

“We travelled the world with food as our focus,” he says. “We would make bookings in advance and travel to eat.”

Tom’s only formal training in his native Czechoslovakia was as a motor mechanic — a trade that got him entry to Australia as a 20-year-old but one he has never used since.

“I always wanted to be a painter before everything,” he says. “Cooking was just a necessity, a way to survive.”

His grandmother ran a restaurant and Tom taught himself to cook from the memory of her food — he remembered how it tasted and worked back until what he made matched the taste memory. From St Andrew’s Tom moved to Richmond, where he cooked with Graeme Phillips at Prospect House — forcing the Estcourts to travel down and stay overnight for their culinary hit.

In the ’80s Tom lived at Hadleys Hotel in Hobart, where he had the attic for a studio and the run of the kitchens for occasional game dinners he would organise for diners.

His love of game also stems from his childhood. “We lived in the country and in winter you would be snowed up,” he says.

He remembers “half frozen” pheasants wandering into the garden. His father would pick them up and “next morning a nice smell would be wafting through the house”.

“We travelled the world with food as our focus,” he says. “We would make bookings in advance and travel to eat.”

Food and wine also feature strongly in Tom’s art, expressed in painting, wood carving, tapestries, theatre design, ceramics and murals.

“Food is a rich subject and it lends itself to lots of gags,” Tom says. “I like to put a bit of humour into the thing. It’s wall-to-wall frivolity, nothing serious.”

He also introduces art and theatre to his food.

Stephen wrote on his blog about a 1989 dinner where the food attacked the guests.

From five pastry domes placed along the table “there came a tap, tap, tapping from inside the pastry domes ... it was a human finger breaking through, followed by a human mouth eating the pastry from the inside.”

The five heads revealed began giving cheek to the guests, “some of whom foolishly fought back”.

At about the time “everyone started to know everything about cooking and become very fussy” in the late ’90s, Tom’s art was keeping him and he no longer depended on his rustic cooking for an income.

He says: “I just chuck things in and things happen. Stephen is not like that.

“He is an absolute perfectionist; he makes beautiful pastries, crisp batter.”

Stephen says: “I am a recipe man; any skill I’ve got is because I can read and follow a recipe.”

Tom: “He is a legal man, he follows the rules.”

Nowadays, apart from the high bidders, Tom says his
only dining customer is his partner, Tracy.

“I cooked once when I first met Tom and he said, ‘It’s
OK, I’ll cook from now on,’ ”
she says.

“I would never be as rude as that,” Tom says.

“ I said, ‘darling, just relax and let me look after you.’ ”

And he does, so much so that when Tom was incapacitated after surgery, friends delivered food parcels to their home.

Taste — in your Mercury every Tuesday