The mothers who made our great chefs

Is a chef born, or made? With Mother's Day upon us, Good Food is going back to where it all started for so many chefs in the family kitchen, alongside their mothers. From the baby steps of podding peas and picking herbs to being entrusted with treasured family recipes, the love of food passed from mother to child is an apprenticeship of a very special kind. We spoke with six leading Australian chefs and their mothers – some of whom work in their restaurants, some of whom provide recipes, and all of whom who provide inspiration and support – to talk food, family and kitchen lore.

Guy and Marisa Grossi

If food is central to the Italian family experience, it goes doubly so for Melbourne's Grossi clan. Guy Grossi followed in his father Pieto's footsteps by becoming a chef and restaurateur, but home was strictly the domain of mother Marisa. "Mum was always at the kitchen table, the stove was always on the go. As we got older and started going out there was always something under lids on pots when we got home late," says Guy, whose empire stretches from the rarified elegance of Grossi Florentino to the buzzing wine bar Ombra.

Marisa, now 85 but "still very tough and strong", says Guy, taught her four children to cook by osmosis. "You're sitting there one day picking beans, the next you're chopping an onion. You just soak it in and it becomes part of your identity."

Guy's career choice was guided as much by his mother as his father – as his 2012 book, Recipes From my Mother's Kitchen, attests. Her cooking is resourceful, opposed to waste – something Guy can't bear to this day – and above all, generous.

"It's one of the most fundamental things you can do for yourself and your children," says Marisa, "nourish yourself. It's a way of showing love and care."

The regular Grossi clan get-togethers always follow the Italian script of a multi-course extravaganza, and Marisa is a regular visitor to her son's restaurants, where she's treated like royalty by the staff, who call her Mamma ("I think she flirts," says Liz Grossi, Guy's sister).

"I'm very proud of him going into the family business more than anything else," says Marisa. "I love it when he uses my recipes or the skills he learned from me while he was growing up. He learned more technical skills from his dad later on, but he learned a lot of his cooking from me, in the family home."

Elvis and Hilda Abrahanowicz

Sydney hotspots Porteno and Bodega have a secret weapon, and her name is Hilda Abrahanowicz. Hilda, the mother of co-owner Elvis Abrahanowicz, is in the kitchen five days a week, starting around 6am to make all of the empanadas and chimichurri for the two Latin American restaurants. It's no small beer when you consider that means around 500, maybe more, empanadas a day, and chimichurri made the proper way, picking the parsley by hand "because so you need to choose the nicest leaves".

Bodega and its younger, larger sibling Porteno have always been a family affair. The first year of Bodega it was just Elvis, business partner Ben Milgate and Hilda along with her husband Adan in the kitchen. "Elvis said to us, mum and dad when I open the Bodega I want you to come and work with us … I said, I love it!" says Hilda, who also embraces cooking the staff meals, with the odd cake thrown in to sweeten the deal even further.

For Elvis, growing up with a food-obsessed mother made his career choice almost inevitable – or at the very least, a natural progression for a kid who would regularly wake up on the weekend to find the dining table covered in hand-rolled pasta.

"As far back as I remember I'd help out in the kitchen. When you're from Argentina it's all about the food. I love food; I'd help out so I could get to lick the whisk. When I was about 20 and deciding what to do with my life it just seemed like a natural fit."

A family dynamic might sound fraught in a hot-house restaurant situation, but for the Abrahanowiczes it's just the way they like it. "A kiss and a hug at the start of every day," says Hilda. "But I'm not a mother here, it's my job. Elvis is the chef, we have respect for each other."

As for Mothers' Day – Hilda is looking forward to yet more cooking. "For my daughter-in-law, for my son-in-law, for my whole family. I love it, I'm crazy for it."

Peter and Eleni Conistis

Opening a first restaurant can be a fraught business for anyone – particularly someone new to the cooking world. But when Peter Conistis opened his first restaurant, Cosmos, in Darlinghurst in 1993, his mother Eleni was right by his side. "My apprenticeship was my mum in the kitchen, showing me how it was done. She was right next to me the whole way. We really had some interesting times."

Conistis, who runs Sydney CBD's Alpha, was studying communications at university when a conversation with other students about the lack of really good Greek restaurants piqued his interest. It might seem a flight of fancy that he quickly envisaged himself as a chef and restaurateur, but food had always been a centrepiece of his traditional Greek parents' kitchen, where an average Sunday afternoon might see 20 people dropping by. And his mother was his biggest inspiration.

Eleni had learned to cook through necessity after immigrating to Australia at the age of 19. She'd write letters home asking for recipes, which she then transcribed into a little red book. "It's all 'a teacup of this' and 'a tall glass of that' and 'cook it until you can smell the cinnamon'," says Peter. "It was expressive, you had to see the food, smell the food, use all of your senses, and that's how I teach people to this day."

Eleni remains her son's No.1 fan (her personal highlight: Peter cooking at the Athens Olympics). "The first time I saw him in the kitchen, in his element, I thought, wow, this boy is unbelievable," she says. Eleni was the first to taste Peter's signature dish, his scallop moussaka, 25 years ago – a breakthrough moment that means she was finally able to see what he was trying to do with Greek food, modernising it for a broader audience.

"I could never represent Greek food in a way a Greek mother could," says Peter as to why he never went the easier option of a simple taverna. "My mum still cooks like crazy, you can't come over and not be fed. She shows the love she has for people through her food."

Dan and Angie Hong

Being Dan Hong's mother was no easy feat at times, but Angie Hong sensed his teenage slacker salvation would lie in the kitchen. "I sent him and his sister to a cookery course one summer holidays and it was clear he had something. But honestly, I was happy for him to do anything that occupied him."

Angie later went one step further and found Dan an apprenticeship – with no less than Martin Boetz at Longrain. "I consider Martin a mentor and my mum as well," says Dan.

The Hong family dynamic is open, gregarious, and food-focused – not only stemming from Dan's high-flying occupation as executive chef of the Merivale group's Mr Wong's, Ms.G's and El Loco – but stretching back to the legacy of the Thanh Binh Vietnamese restaurants run by Angie and her husband.

"My father bought a Vietnamese restaurant in 1991 without telling her," is Dan's version of Hong family history. "Mum was annoyed by the quality of the food so she decided to do it herself."

Angie is now retired from the restaurant business, but the family dinners she hosts every Monday night at her home have reached legendary status (this year's Melbourne Food and Wine Festival featured an event based on the weekly Hong get-togethers).

"It started on a Monday night when she had the restaurant in Newtown and it was the only night it was closed and we could get together," says Dan. "Monday nights are a highlight of my week. Mum does all the cooking. I help out with the prep every now and then."

Angie says Dan has taken some of her recipes at Mr Wong's "and made them better", but on Monday nights she's still the boss.

"I get Daniel to help a little bit when he comes, but in my kitchen I'm in charge. Sometimes we have an argument because I think my way is better and he thinks his way is better. He says 'Yes, Chef' to me."

Dai Duong and To Van Phuong

In all fairness to Dai Duong, his intention was not for his mother to make the rice paper rolls for Uncle in perpetuity. Her mighty contribution to his two Melbourne-based Vietnamese restaurants – more than 400 spring rolls made by hand each week – started strictly by default. "When I was testing the menu I asked mum for her advice because I wanted to get the recipe down pat. She tasted one and said, Dai, it's completely different – no, no, no! And I'd thought they were exactly the same."

It might sound like an imposition, but to Dai's mother To Van Phuong, coming from a big Vietnamese family of seven children means cooking in huge quantities is something of a given. "The Vietnamese food culture is based around eating together. We sometime didn't have enough room on the table so we just ate on the floor," says Van , who gets her husband to help prepare the ingredients at their Thomastown home and then spends 12 hours rolling. "I do enjoy making the spring rolls. I usually listen to classic Vietnamese music, it's my way to relax and it's soothing."

While Dai began studying graphic design at university before embarking on a career as a chef, his love of food stems from his food-focused childhood where he'd help gut fresh fish and do his own fair share of rice paper rolls. Disenchantment with university coincided with an increasing love of cooking, and while his mother urged him to seek a less labour-intensive occupation, she was more than happy to collaborate on her Vietnamese recipes.

Van's rolls are a headline act on the Uncle menu as "Mum's chay spring rolls" with iceberg lettuce and a fermented bean curd dipping sauce. "I've said to mum I don't want her rolling any more but she's like, it's my dish now. I'm not letting you touch them!"

Thi Le and Hieu Le

When it comes to cooking, Thi Le's mother Hieu was ahead of her time. She loves pickling, fermenting and preserving, and takes the notion of fresh poultry to a whole new level (yep, she buys live chickens and kills them herself). In that respect she outclasses her daughter, Thi Le of Anchovy in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, who in a moment of paddock-to-plate fervour bought two roosters and took them home to her mum's Sydney backyard to meet their maker. "I didn't realise how huge they were going to be … They were bigger than my dog. I was just chasing them around the backyard, but mum comes out and takes over, catches them and kills them. She told me I was pathetic."

Self-sufficiency is something of a creed for Hieu, who gave birth to Thi in a Malaysian refugee camp after leaving her native Vietnam. "We didn't have much … making do was a necessity," says Hieu, who has turned her barbecue into a preserving station so full of mysterious jars that an Australian neighbour once knocked on the door to ask what they were.

Thi says she went from a mac'n'cheese loving teenager to a fully fledged chef when she started to reassess her mother's "curious" culinary ways. The legacy of her preserves and pickles is manifest on the Anchovy menu – and the fresh herbs that play a big part in the contemporary Vietnamese approach. "A lot of the bases, dipping sauces and pickling liquors are inspired by my mum. Even the way we eat here, which is a bit of a mash-up, is kind of like my mum, who'll eat flatbread and paté and mixes everything up," says Thi.

"Mum just loves to feed everyone. If Jia-Yen (Lee, her partner) and I go to Sydney we like to go out and try new restaurants, but she tries to keep us hostage. We have to break out."