Tasmania’s most influential chefs: we name our top six culinary artists
THEY are Tasmania’s top culinary creatives making their mark across the state. Today we reveal our pick on the top six most influential chefs in Tassie.
Taste Tasmania
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A few short years ago it would have been a struggle to find, let alone name, 30 Top Tassie chefs, but now our small state is at the epicentre of an explosion of talent, led by chefs who are producing world-class fare that’s drawn the gaze of a growing foodie scene.
In compiling this list, one of our biggest challenges was the behemoth task of narrowing it down to just 30.
Tasmania is quickly becoming the country’s culinary capital. We have restaurants here now that are cultural reference points to those on the mainland. Increasingly, people in Sydney and Melbourne are reacting in awe when you mention you’ve managed to book a table at the coveted Agrarian Kitchen or Fat Pig Farm.
In our list of the top influencers in the state’s food scene, we’ve named those who live and breathe brand Tasmania — often without even realising it.
In this final day of our five-part count down, we reveal the top movers and shakers in the Tassie food industry, chosen for their influence in shaping the state’s dining scene.
6 JO COOK
Food curator and restaurant reviewer
While she may not have a big-name restaurant to lead, food curator Jo Cook wields plenty of influence within the Hobart foodie scene. She is the head of Slow Food Hobart, and the face behind Mona’s Winter Feast, which this year fed more than 87,000 hungry people over seven hectic nights.
And in amongst that she somehow finds the time to write the restaurant reviews for Qantas’ inflight magazine.
If you ate anything while out and about at Dark Mofo this year, Cook was responsible for putting it there. From the Winter Feast to the meals dished up at Dark + Dangerous Thoughts, she oversaw it all, sourcing the best people to deliver the service.
Formerly the owner and chef at Salamanca restaurant Syrup in the late 90s, Cook has been around long enough to know just about everyone in Tassie’s culinary clique.
5 MASSIMO MELE
Watch this space
If you’ve ever picked up a Delicious magazine, then you’d be across the work this celebrity chef and cookbook author does. His profile alone, subscribed to by a legion of fans, makes him an instant ambassador for all things gourmet in Tassie.
The Hobart-born and Naples-raised chef has just undertaken an epic journey around the state meeting and filming our island’s top producers, region by region. Once compiled (due later this year), his culinary circumnavigation of Tasmania will be a roadmap to the names and faces behind the labels.
The quest to capture the best of homegrown produce took Mele on an island-hopping cattle muster undertaken at low tide to Robbins Island, foraging for greens on the West Coast, and saw him catching seafood on Flinders Island.
He is currently the food director of Grain of the Silos Restaurant in Launceston’s iconic Peppers Silos Hotel and the force behind www.munchontasmania.com, an online portal to state’s best farmers.
This man about town has bagged a swag of awards in the past as the head of a number of high-kudos eateries in the Eastern Seaboard capitals, including the prestigious Donovan’s Restaurant in Melbourne, La Scala on Jersery in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs and the Hugo’s group of restaurants, including Hugos Manly and Hugo’s Bar Pizza.
Mele’s culinary pedigree and cultural sway keep many an eye firmly trained on him, which is why we’ve named him in our Top 5 of those wielding influence.
4 MATTHEW EVANS
Fat Pig Farm, Glaziers Bay
Through his national profile built off the back of his TV series Gourmet Farmer, restauranteur Matthew Evans has played a pivotal role in promoting the beauty of Tasmania. He took a personal quest to experience truly seasonal, truly local, truly slow-ripened, cool-climate-grown crops and broadcast it into the living rooms of millions of Australians.
The former restaurant reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald and one-time chef has spent most of his adult life – 25 years in fact – writing and talking about food.
For Evans, his first emphasis has always been about his family eating well, followed closely by the fact he wants everyone else to eat well, too.
Aside from living the good life himself, what Evans is accomplishing at his family’s Fat Pig Farm – along with wife Sadie and son Hedley, 8 – is making Tasmanian food accessible for everyone through their cooking school and restaurant as well as offering a glimpse of how many of us live, and his invite list is a long one.
“I still believe that the best food in Australia in not served by some fancy chef in a fancy restaurant. The best food in Australia is probably served on someone’s dining table, where they’ve just picked the potatoes 20 minutes before,” he says.
When he moved here from Sydney he couldn’t believe how many people had their own vegie gardens with their own chooks, and he thinks he’s nailed the reason why.
“Tasmanians never really lost that connection to their soil, their connection to the sea. Whereas on mainland Australia it skipped a generation. Now people there are like, ‘Oh, we want to get back in touch’. But here people didn’t lose touch and I think that’s the beautiful thing.
“Growing stuff, is total alchemy, but the priviledge of serving that up on a plate to someone you love, you can’t get better than that.”
3 CRAIG WILL
Stillwater and Black Cow Bistro, Launceston
This stalwart of the Launceston dining scene was one of the early movers and shakers of the state’s food movement.
As the head chef at Lonnie’s acclaimed Black Cow Bistro, Will helped drive the movement in Tassie to give locally sourced and grown produce an identity.
His restaurant was the first to champion Cape Grim and Robbins Island beef, building a brand around the produce so foodies could feel a connection with what they were eating.
The result has been a greater awareness of where food provenance.
Will’s ethos has always been about simplicity in cooking.
His passion for advocating for good produce and enhancing the dining experience with traceable raw ingredients has raised the profile of and put a value on our state’s offerings.
2 VINCE TRIM
Mona, Berriedale
He is the man behind Mona’s food offerings, from the fat searing Heavy Metal Kitchen to the mindblowing experience that is Faro and everything inbetween.
Mona’s executive chef Vince Trim is a goliath is the Tassie food scene, but you would be hard pressed to find anyone more humble.
He rarely talks about his own accolades, his access to chefs growing up across the ditch in New Zealand or his 25 years on the ground in Sydney, but what he does like to talk about is the Mona team and the exceptional work they do.
For Trim, it’s all about the people.
Last year, the world phenomenon that is the Museum of Old and New Art attracted upwards of 350,000 visitors, with many of them finding their way into one of his restaurants.
In his nine years there he’s seen a lot of change, from a time when Tassie was considered as a culinary backwater, to now where the food is toppling over itself in excitement.
There’s a growing confidence in the industry and Trim hopes his mark is providing a good training ground for chefs, among other things.
“I’d like to think that what we’re doing is contributing to the talent pool. It’s fantastic to see people who have been with us and see them succeeding and running their own ventures,” says Trim.
“[A few of us at the top] may take the accolades, but we’re at the end of a long line of people who have made something happen. There’s an enormous team behind us, working in all sorts of things to make it work for us.”
And it comes from the top down. Mona’s ability to morph and continually challenge itself ensures its place as a creative powerhouse.
“You’ve got someone like David Walsh and Kirsha who say, ‘Have a go. Be adventurous. Push boundaries. Test things out. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Challenge people and do things that aren’t necessarily the norm. So you have that on top of everything else and it just becomes an incredible place to be.”
But, while Trim makes teflon attempts to deflect praise, the Mercury is happy to call him out as a culinary genius.
1 RODNEY DUNN
Agrarian Kitchen, New Norfolk
On an average day Agrarian Kitchen co-owner Rodney Dunn spends his time milking goats for his housemade cheese, curing salamis and weeding. It’s these simple pleasures carried out in an idyllic location – along with a compulsion to share them – that inspired the former Sydneysider and magazine food editor to set up his farm-based cooking school and eatery in the Derwent Valley with wife, Severine.
Dunn says that in the early days there were many who laughed at his vision to open a cooking school and questioned the move to New Norfolk.
His response? ‘I think there’s potential here’. Later, he was hailed as a visionary.
While Tasmania already had a reputation for incredible produce and basked in a certain amount of awe, Dunn says visitors couldn’t really access the full locavore experience.
Enter Agrarian, a showcase of the incredible food that Tasmanians enjoy every day, food that’s been harvested close to where it’s been served and within a short time period.
“Tasmania has the potential to become a really special food destination,” he says.
“For such a small space we’ve got everything,” Dunn says. “It’s such an abundant place, from the diversity of what we grow to our rare breeds of pigs and cattle, and to our natives, our wallabies and pepperberry.”
And the secret ingredient? Dunn says: “The amazing thing about Tasmania is its climate. That cool climate allows long, slow ripening and the development of flavour. And to pick it and serve it as close to that point as possible when it’s ripe, there’s flavours there and it doesn’t matter how good you are as a chef, you can’t create that.”
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