When a food writer turns restaurateur
What happens when one of the Good Food Guide's regional editors leaves the table and heads into the kitchen?
Last Christmas, I found myself making Cypriot salad and festive nougat semifreddo for 100 animated partygoers. I'd agreed to a country tree-change that involved opening a cafe one day a week and catering for small events. The local hospital's staff Christmas party was my baptism by fire.
The move from my 32-square-metre inner-city flat to Borenore, near Orange, meant many things: the chance to try out country life, slow down, grow food, cook and write. But the thing I yearned for most of all and which made this opportunity irresistible was the chance to swap the reviewer's seat for a spot in the kitchen.
I'm not a professional cook. I put myself through uni waiting tables and had worked in cafes, but that was back in the Dark Ages. My enjoyment of food has come via a career, if you can call it that, of writing about food.
It wasn't a mid-life crisis, more a desire to see if I could create a menu, cook it, manage staff and the dining room, and make a profit.
The experiment was to last for six months. My friend Josie Chapman, the owner of The Old Convent, trusted me with her business - all I had to do was not stuff up.
The reality was harsh and swift. The lazy enjoyment of flicking through cookbooks and planning menus quickly gave way to the long-buried memory of how hard this business is. If you're not lifting heavy boxes it's heavy saucepans. Prep means hours on your feet. The toilets need to be meticulously cleaned - usually at midnight when you're tired and irritable and it's way past your bedtime.
There was also the matter of getting used to country life. The vast, open space and inky blackness of the night. Strange rustles in the garden and the early morning crow of a rooster.
On the first day I found a tiny dead bird at the front door. It had flown into the glass. I wondered if this was a harbinger of what was to come. A few days later I came across another dead bird, this time in the garden, and in the time it took for me to get the shovel, the dog had eaten it. I asked myself, as we looked mutely at each other, the dog and I, whether I had the stomach for country life?
On my first day at the stove, Sunday brunch, a corn cake exploded in the hot oil, as they are wont to do, and, I kid you not, the splatter landed in my right nostril. Oh, the pain. Most people were kind enough not to mention the ruby red drip I wore for a few weeks.
Inevitably, the pleasure lay in the cooking. Being surrounded by orchards meant that fresh fruit was in regular supply. Stone fruit baked with ricotta spiked with chocolate and glace fruit, raspberry and champagne ripple ice-cream (hallelujah for Sean Moran's book Let it Simmer, it provided both inspiration and many successes) and apple pie, made using recipes from Lindsey Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts, all appeared on the menu. As the weather cooled, lemon tarts and chocolate brownies became staples. (Someone has to write an ode to Belinda Jeffery's many brownie recipes, they guarantee smiling faces.)
A weekly highlight was the organic herb delivery from grower Anna de Baar. The sorrel season was thrilling: shredded finely it went into the black olive and sorrel omelet that I found in Gay Bilson's Plenty and torn leaves were added to salads.
I discovered that I'm no gardener, but to harvest anything that survived my intermittent care was a huge delight. I was as proud of my first batch of radishes as a new parent and never tired of the crunch of knife meeting just-plucked chilli. The delicate flavour of tiny silverbeet leaves and pungency of parsley that went straight from garden to salad bowl only served to demonstrate how alarming the gulf between home-grown and store-bought.
I was the lucky recipient of the redcurrant harvest. The birds got to the green almonds and walnuts before I did and too much rain too early meant a lot of split, fermenting figs on one tree while another, a tiny stick of a thing, yielded dozens of the most perfect purple orbs. Picked in passing, warm from the sun, they were a wonderment. Later there were olives, three types. In my eagerness to get at them I picked them standing on a kitchen chair. Of course I fell off it and hobbled around for weeks.
Buying food directly from the farmer and collecting from the garden, not to mention the many gifts of quinces, beans, pumpkins and peaches that came my way, was life-affirming and joyful. Not so the vapid aisle trawling required for all other supplies.
The week revolved around opening the door each Sunday. Josie's insurance came in the shape of a wonderful waitress, Maria, and an equally wonderful barista, Toby. As the three of us swung into action each week, I felt the love of this work, the way each individual role works in with the other and makes a seamless whole. We three were a good team and I could not have done it without them (or the two other cooks who helped me).
There is nothing more rewarding for a cook than a delighted customer and, thanks to a beautiful environment and existing goodwill, there were many of these. It was a thrill to hear both the hubbub of people enjoying themselves as well as the quiet that descends on a table when the meal is served.
Initially, when I visited Sydney, I was giddy with excitement at having so much choice and any foodstuff I wanted at my fingertips. But as the months passed and the simplicity of choice that comes with living in a smaller community and food I chose to buy only available in season, I came to view my city self as spoiled and indulged. The surfeit of food choices, the number of restaurants, cafes and bars seemed monstrous and I became sensitive to the waste and excess.
I'm not kidding myself that my ''experiment'' of cooking one day a week in a small country cafe is the same as running a regional restaurant. But the experience has grounded me more in the realities of the food business. It also renewed my admiration for those who do it well and reinvigorated my own enjoyment of food and preparing it.
It is in this state of appreciation that I salute the regional restaurateurs that appear in the Good Food Guide this year. There are many joys to living and working in the country, but many challenges too.
As always, it was a rewarding experience for everyone on the regional reviewing team (I did not review during my cooking stint) to travel the state over and discover simple, rural pleasures again.
The latest edition of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Good Food Guides are available from participating newsagents and 7-Elevens, selected bookshops and online at smhshop.com.au.