Advanced Australian Fare: How Australian Cooking Became the World’s Best
Review by Michael Symons
Stephen Downes, Advanced Australian Fare: How Australian Cooking Became the World’s Best (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002), $29.55.
Stephen Downes has strung around two dozen interviews with important Australian chefs together with snippets mainly from his quarter-century of restaurant reviews. The result is highly amusing at least for those involved in or for some reason fascinated with the Australian restaurant boom of recent decades, even if it does not quite add up to the major historical study that events warrant.
Advanced Australian Fare’s story is that the 1956 Olympics organisers imported some European chefs to help with catering, notably Hermann Schneider. Later pioneers included Georges and Mirka Mora, Gloria and Blyth Staley, Mietta O’Donnell and Tony Knox, Stephanie Alexander, Iain Hewitson and Jacques Reymond in Melbourne, and Tony Bilson, Gay Bilson, Patric Juillet, Anders Ousback, Jenny Ferguson, Josephine Carroll and Damien Pignolet in Sydney.
Adelaide shone during the 1980s with, among others, Cheong Liew, Phillip Searle, Cath Kerry, Maggie Beer, Urs Inauen, Kate Sparrow and Le Truc Thai. Based on Don Dunstan’s prescient political preparations, "Intellectual Adelaide’s" glories included the first Symposium of Australian Gastronomy in 1984.
Downes’ main interest is the gradual breaking down of the once prevailing French dominance at fancy restaurants, with Adelaide people instrumental, and also Mogens Bay Esbensen, David Thompson, Janni Kyritsis and Tetsuya Wakuda back in Sydney. "To define today’s Australian cooking, you need look no further than Tetsuya’s efforts to satisfy the wine lovers", Downes discovers, because the chef would improvise dishes to match fancy BYO wines (p. 242).
An earlier step towards the world-beating Australian style had been taken in 1986 by Neil Perry at the Blue Water Grill overlooking Bondi Beach. This is the invention of quickly grilled fish with salsas – all those rare tuna steaks. Downes’ interview was drawing to a desultory close when Perry said "something astounding that gives me a new perspective on the origins of Australian cooking". Perry "cooked light and fast" because he and only three others served 350 meals a day. He worked alone on the grill and "you either got a really nice fresh-tasting piece of something or, you know, you were in the shit. You couldn’t get too complicated" (pp. 255-256).
Downes provides many such glimpses, after wisely opening by recognising that writing history is an art of exclusion, since he also excludes many. Virtually all his protagonists made their mark before the 1990s, when, as he says, "investment money – rather than emotional capital" entered the restaurant industry, leading to a "bland internationalism" (pp. 345-346). Highlighting heroes means several pointed omissions, also giving insufficient space to smaller players, and failing to unearth those forgotten perhaps because they were before their time. To offer one possible candidate (about whom I want to know more for my history of Australian dining out over the longer term), Madeleine Thurston opened the Hungry Horse in Paddington in the late 1950s.
Similarly, the Bluewater Grill helped create the bright and breezy style that many take to be "Australian", but a full analysis might have examined the slightly earlier effect of Bon Cafard. And, for overall impact, Downes should have given even more credit to Berowra Waters Inn. During Jennifer Hillier and my stay in Tuscany for the large part of 1977-1979, with several side trips through France, I pined after Berowra Waters as representing "home", so it must decisively have left behind French aesthetics. Furthering her impact, Gay Bilson was a full member of the legendary Adelaide set whom Downes features; at one point she seemed to fly over weekly.
But Downes’ version of events is broadly valid, even if numerous details were not checked. A greater drawback in this resolutely journalistic book is its avoidance of any whiff of "theory". This saves Downes from having to think through and resolve sub-themes, particularly the role of the word in shaping reality. As a minor instance, he acknowledges language’s power by trying to avoid the word "cuisine", and then routinely uses "chef". A greater inconsistency is the degree of influence he accords writers in encouraging good restaurants.
As a veteran critic, Downes has remained independent, if not positively erratic. Famously, around 1991 he became a belated, born-again fusionist and railed against his former love, French cuisine. He now valued how our cooks "opposed diametrically different flavours and textures, our plates looked brighter and more aesthetic and our value for money was peerless" (p. 289).
His outsider stance might have limited his influence, but he accords his old foes at the Age Good Food Guide almost dictatorial power in maintaining Melbourne’s Francophile conservatism. I have another suggestion: good cooks just kept respecting excellent cool-climate ingredients. After all, Melbourne sits amid the former "Garden State" (unlike Sydney that hardly has anything except fish).
While recognising Melbourne’s Good Food Guide (but not introducing Anne O’Donovan), he pays insufficient attention to Sydney’s extraordinarily influential, clever and tasteful Leo Schofield, who impressed the doctrine of "less is more" on a generation of cooks. Downes might have mentioned Vogue guru Joan Campbell, who rammed home the glossy "look" page after bright page, year after glowing year.
For Downes, the pen was mighty back in Adelaide. He sees One Continuous Picnic as seminal, coming from that "chief commentator on Australian food" (p. 111). He is right to go on about "Intellectual Adelaide", because our talking, thinking and writing contributed enormously to national culinary self-confidence, and vice versa. The mutual enthusiasm of "theorists" and "practitioners" was amazing at the first symposium.
As often noted, this climaxed in the "Clowns" banquet that for Downes "snipped the umbilical" to French tradition (p. 125). I will have to coordinate stories with Phillip Searle (or possibly Downes), because Searle apparently remembers "several weeks" of planning meetings with me urging him to get "more serious". As I recall, I pressed him more than once to take on the banquet (which would have been Graham Pont’s idea), but we had exactly one planning meeting over lunch at a Japanese restaurant, at which I simply offered to keep everyone else at bay, and did I come under pressure (Phillip wasn’t so clean living in those days), and promised exactly 48 diners, not one more nor fewer, which embarrassingly we stuck to, such was the intensity.
The first symposium might have given a handful of Australians fragile world leadership in what, in Brillat-Savarin’s footsteps, we called gastronomy. But could even we have talked "An Upstart Cuisine" (in Gay Bilson’s subtitle for the initial event) into the "world’s best" (in Downes’ subtitle, How Australian Cooking Became the World’s Best)?
Perhaps Australian cooks invented cosmopolitan experimentation, in which "new foods have been discovered, old ones bettered, and both new and old combined in a thousand ways. Foreign inventions have been imported; the world itself has been put to use, and contributes so much to our daily fare that in one meal we can trace a complete course of alimentary geography." No, because that’s not Downes but Brillat-Savarin, hailing Parisian restaurants in 1825 (Physiology of Taste, section 142).
Nonetheless, there were interesting parallels between Sydney-Melbourne-Adelaide and Paris nearly two centuries earlier [see Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-Century France", American Journal of Sociology, CIV (1988), pp. 597-].
And some cooking became so good as to win over the sternest critic, Stephen Downes. He locates some highlights (Esbensen’s introduction of Thai elements from 1976, Searle and Cheong’s banquet in 1984, Perry’s short order grilling in 1986, Tetsuya’s mixing-and-matching from late 1980s, and more), and he briefly suggests underlying factors: increasing affluence and "Australian adventurism" (p. 110). Tetsuya Wakuda told him: "We didn’t have maybe a so-called cuisine . . . . But we did have good food and interesting, free-spirited chefs. It has made Australia unique" (p. 245).
So, it comes down to sunlight and celebrities, and Downes calculates: "Of the 22 principals I have identified in the development of the Australian style, [only] twelve have been immigrants". Eighteen came from families of reasonable means and some even had quite well-off backgrounds. Eighteen enjoyed a degree of sophistication in their childhood eating, and the families of thirteen had commercial associations with food. Only nine had formal culinary training. Five were keen surfers (p. 347).
To relish "opinionated" writing is to enjoy the entertainment and the legend-making, while fearing for facts and ideas. The book is up-front, and a bit all over the place. His interviews are fun, occasionally sublime and overall strangely satisfying, all of which are appropriate to the topic.
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