The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry

Reporting from murder scenes and interviewing Lorde live at the Grammys – that's what Joanna Hunkin did before she became editor at Gourmet Traveller. Enduring these high-pressure situations meant she wasn't too shaken by her first year at the magazine – which has been incredibly eventful and challenging, and involved her relocating from Auckland to take up the role.

On her very first day on the job, at the Restaurant Awards at Bennelong last year, she was handing out honours to chefs Ben Shewry and Kylie Kwong. Then, as the pandemic hit, she found herself having to produce a magazine under lockdown – a tricky feat, given that photo shoots, recipe testing and other group activities are key to Gourmet Traveller's coverage. Her team used some leftfield ideas to complete cover shoots and other editorial work while socially distancing!

We talk about some of the most memorable stories that have run in the magazine in the past year as well as relevant topics such as "authenticity" in food and how chefs feel about dealing with dietary requirements (from diners who claim they can't consume anything "shiny" or beginning with the letter 'A' to legit allergies to gluten and wheat – I wrote about this for the October issue of Gourmet Traveller).

We also cover her early days in Hong Kong (where her mother fed her microwave bacon!) as well as Joanna's return to the city later in life, where she dined at secret restaurants hidden inside Hong Kong's high-density apartments.

Joanna also chats about her top three Australian restaurant experiences of the past year, as well as her favourite dining spots in Auckland. If you'd like to support me on Patreon, head to patreon.com/leetranlam. From $1.50 a week, you'll get access to my weekly podcast and newsletter, where I cover all the good things I’m consuming: the best food stories I’ve read, food podcasts I’ve listened to, what I’ve been eating and I also dive into what I’ve been working on.

They're not obvious candidates for making beer: wattle, strawberry gum and leftover sourdough from Ester. Topher Boehm turns to flower cuttings and other NSW-only ingredients to create wild ales for Wildflower, the Sydney brewery he runs with brother-in-law Chris Allen. They've named beers after their children – including the wild-raspberry-flavoured St Phoebe, which was selected over 1500 drinks to be named Australia's best beverage. And his curiosity with fermenting has led to Topher brewing 200 litres of soy sauce in a barrel, just for fun. Maybe his revved-up creativity shouldn't be a surprise – Topher once had 70 home-brewing experiments on the go in his apartment (until his wife fairly decided that perhaps that was just a little too much to co-habitate with).

So how did Topher go from making frozen sandwiches for his family in Texas – and studying astrophysics and considering a career in shoemaking – to brewing beers that are found in 10 William Street and other top bars and restaurants around Australia? It's a pretty surprising path that also involves a really sweet love story (and a literally stinky town in New Zealand).

You don't have to be a deep beer nerd to enjoy this episode, as Topher is a great storyteller – just listen to the unbelievably "epic" tale behind the coolship vessel that's being made for his spontaneous beers. The vessel has survived bushfires and flood – intense conditions that literally swallowed a truck belonging to the Blue Mountains blacksmith who is making the coolship. And while Topher has learnt about beer from hanging out in Europe and the US, he is keen to create a beverage that gets its flavours from sources you can only find in his home state. “We were calling beer local, but it was made that way from where it was brewed, not the ingredients it was from,” he says. Which means Topher is especially interested in bush foods, like saltbush, and is experimenting with the idea of bringing back his sold-out St Phoebe run using native raspberries.

This episode actually features two parts: one recorded in January (before the pandemic) and a part two that sees us catching up remotely a few months after lockdown sets in.

We also cover historical aspects of beer: it's the reason for the world's oldest recipe and, despite its cliched blokey image today, it was actually women who traditionally were brewers. (Go back to Ancient Egypt and it was women who tended to beer.) PS The cherry beer you hear fermenting in the background is actually now available from Wildflower (it's delicious)!

Imagine being a 16-year-old working in a Western Australian gold mine. This was Mark Best's life, straight after high school. It was a tough way to earn money as an electrician, so he eventually left. “I arrived in Sydney and found myself unqualified for above-ground work.”

He ended up even deeper underground, claustrophobic and covered in fibreglass and varnish, trying to install battery packs on submarines at Cockatoo Island. “I literally will die if I don’t do something with my life,” he told himself.

So he decided to cook professionally.

Not long after this career path detour, he won the Josephine Pignolet Young Chef of the Year award. In 1999, he opened Marque, where he maintained three chef’s hats for 10 consecutive years and was honoured with a Breakthrough Award by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. By the time of Marque's final dinner in 2016, many impressive people had worked in Mark's kitchen: Isaac McHale (now running The Clove Club in London) and Mette Søberg (current research chef at Copenhagen's Noma) spent formative periods there. Of the talented locals (Victor Liong, Daniel Pepperell, Brent Savage, Adam Wolfers, Pasi Petanen, Hanz Gueco, to name a few), three would win the Young Chef of the Year award: Dan Hong, Daniel Puskas and Lauren Eldridge.

We talk about "The Pesto Years" of the 1990s, how travelling throughout France inspired Marque's beginning, the history of his calamari risotto dish, trying times in the kitchen ("I may have held a sausage to someone’s head"), the memorable last dinner at Marque and why he chose to close the restaurant.

We also cover: his current role as a World Restaurant Awards judge, what it's like developing menus for cruiseships (which he does for his Bistro by Mark Best business) and his appearance on The Final Table, Netflix's cooking contest. After getting hate mail from doctors while on Masterchef, he decided to take a different onscreen approach on The Final Table (SPOILER WARNING: we talk about that show's ending, from 53:15 to 58:12 on the podcast). It was also surreal to discover his fellow competitors owned his cookbooks. (Turns out he's quite qualified for above-ground work after all.)

Daniel Puskas started his career slicing tomatoes, but eventually ended up in the kitchen of Alinea, the acclaimed Chicago restaurant known for turning mozzarella curds into balloons filled with tomato foam. His experience there was part of his Josephine Pignolet Young Chef of the Year prize.

It's one of many honours he's earned throughout his career: he was also named the Citi Chef of the Year in 2018’s Good Food Guide, and Sixpenny is one of only three Sydney restaurants that's achieved three chef hats in the latest guide. You currently have to book two months ahead to get a table at Sixpenny. And it's worth the wait (Bar Ume's Kerby Craig cried when he last ate there).

Dan worked at some all-star kitchens early in his career (at Tetsuya's, alongside Shannon Debreceny, Darren Robertson and Phil Wood; at Marque with Mark Best, Pasi Petanen, Karl Firla and Daniel Pepperell), before becoming head chef of Oscillate Wildly at age 23: he'd arrive to work on his skateboard and play Mario Kart with chef Mike Eggert before service started.

At Oscillate Wildly, he met James Parry (another Young Chef of the Year winner), and they took Bob, their sourdough starter from the restaurant, and opened Sixpenny together in 2012. The menu is truly inspired, even down to its bread (including the ‘recycled’ loaf transformed with spent coffee grounds and golden syrup), and features fascinating ingredients (from emu eggs to anise hyssop). Sixpenny’s current sommelier Bridget Raffal is aiming for gender equality on her wine list. Dan is really open about the restaurant’s ups and downs (from the time he sat on a champagne glass, because he was shocked Sixpenny hadn’t scored two hats – to its recent ascension to three-hat status). He also shares some very funny stories from the many acclaimed restaurants he's worked in – he was truly great to talk to.

Kylie Javier Ashton has dealt with forged bookings and martini glass accidents; she's disguised Alex Atala with garbage bags, and endured countless people throwing up when she's been on the job (“you could see the frequency of the voms go up when the scampi dish was on” is one of the most memorable lines from this interview). Having survived all that, it's clear that she still loves her work and wants people to join the industry (as her involvement in Women In Hospitality, Appetite For Excellence and Grow shows).

Kylie Javier Ashton got her start at Tetsuya’s, when it was ranked in the Top 5 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. She's since become the award-winning restaurant manager at Momofuku Seiobo, which has been twice-named the best restaurant in Australia by Gourmet Traveller. Not a bad place for her to be, considering she didn't "even know how to carry plates" when she entered the industry.

Kylie has many amazing stories to tell, and covers it all, from what it's like to actually work with David Chang, the background to Paul Carmichael's food at Seiobo and why she asks her staff to give presentations on Caribbean culture, and the reality of your restaurant being in two pieces in The New York Times: one by Pete Wells, the other by Besha Rodell.

Plus: that memorable period running Duke Bistro with Mitch Orr, Thomas Lim and Mike Eggert (which followed her spell at Bentley Restaurant & Bar with Brent Savage and Nick Hildebrandt – the "hardest" place she worked). And let's not forget the time she also boxed in Cuba.

I LOVED talking to Kylie for this interview and she drops some of the best lines I've heard (it's worth listening to this episode so you can discover why “I’ve just been out on Oxford Street with an eyepatch” and “I didn’t realise I was Wolverine for so long" are two of the greatest things anyone has ever said on this podcast)!