When I went into Gatherings, Alex apologised for the mess, saying it had been a big night the night before. It wasn’t messy and I loved the way Alex’s eyes lit up as he described giving over his space to Mitchell Teirney and Josh Hunter for their dinner: Know the whakapapa (origin/story) of your kai (food); a celebration of traditional Maori food, storytelling and wisdom. Alex, himself, is all about provenance, basing his plant-based and seafood menu, as well as his wine list on produce and wines from the Canterbury region. I ate here the other night and it was an absolute delight. Dishes such as the yakitori potato and the braised cabbage, cured yolk, mustard, porcini echo the season and the region and were delicious. Lucky Christchurch.
Hi Alex. You were saying that you were originally from the UK?
I lived there until I was about 20.
Did you do your chef training there?
No I did it here as a way to make friends because I was 20 years old and my parents had moved to the other side of the world and I had followed them a couple of years after. I wanted to make friends, so I enrolled in a chef course so I could meet people.
Did that work?
Yes. I’ve got friends now.
Good. Was there anything else that drew you to it; it’s quite a hard industry.
I enjoyed cooking. As a kid I wanted to be a chef but my friend’s mum told me I shouldn’t do it so I forgot about that dream. It wasn’t until I started doing it again that I had that memory that it had been a thing I wanted to do.
You went through Polytech? I think it has recently changed that the whole course is at Polytech then you go out and get a job, as opposed to there being a component of the job as part of an apprenticeship.
We did a couple of weeks on the job. I was in a café called Under the Red Veranda; it was a lovely soulful café.
I remember that. It had a beautiful garden as well.
Yes, so it was nice they put me in a place like that. It was only a couple of weeks and the rest was all stuff on site in the kitchens at polytech.
It’s quite different when you work in actual kitchens, isn’t it?
Very different. After a year of the course, I decided not to carry on with my second year and just work fulltime. I got a good job and I found I was learning a lot more. It was a nice start and it got my foot in the door but then I just wanted to get on with it.
Where was that?
It was called the Twisted Hop. They were pioneers in the city of the craft beer culture. It was cool. I learned a lot about craft beer and food and beer pairings, which was really interesting because I had never really thought about that.
No. How do you pair beer and food? It must be similar to wine and food…flavour profiles and so on.
Totally. Craft beer can be so complex. You can get some really cool pairings. Occasionally we do it here, wine pairings and so on, and we’ll slip in a beer if we have something really interesting, because I think there are some beers that are just as interesting and just as complex as wine.
It’s amazing all the things people are doing. I notice in Melbourne too, so many breweries have popped up; urban breweries.
Christchurch has lots of them. It’s a surprise. it’s a good thing.
Then you were saying with the advent of the earthquake, you went back to the UK for a bit.
I wanted to go there as a proper adult because I had left when I was studying and had never worked there or even cooked there professionally. I went back to London after the earthquakes.
And you worked in kitchens?
Yes. I worked in a beautiful little deli in Primrose Hill where I cooked in front of everyone and presented food out across a big banquet. The executive chef I worked under had worked at St. John, so a lot of her philosophy and ideas came from that beautiful simplicity. She would come in every couple of weeks and run through with me what we were doing and what the thought was around it and tweak ideas. She was awesome.
Was that where you would say you drew your inspiration for the way you cook now or was that already latent in you and she ignited that?
It was cool working with someone who had been working in that restaurant and had that relationship with that restaurant, but a few years prior when I was a young chef and thinking fine dining and molecular gastronomy, which was the thing at the time, I thought that was what you had to aspire to be if you wanted to be a good chef and I went over to the Fat Duck and it was awesome and an incredible experience. But someone also suggested while I was there that I also go to St. John and I went in there and I had some of the best food I had ever eaten in my life and it was beautiful stripped back delicious food and that was a huge eye-opener for me that you can take as much pride in making the best bacon sandwich I have ever had in my life as you can doing a million things on a plate and making these beautiful little ornate dishes. They can be just as strong as one another and that was a good eye opener for me. To be working with someone who had been involved in that definitely helped strengthen that idea.
I guess it can be just as hard to keep it simple and allow the flavours to shine through. You really have to know what you are doing.
Definitely. It appears straightforward, but there is a skill to be able to do that and have restraint and control over what you want to present.
Did you approach them to work for them?
I sent out my CV to a whole bunch of places. I didn’t realise that she was the executive chef there; I literally just sent my CV out to a whole lot of places that looked nice. They got back to me and that was lots of fun.
How long were you there?
I was there for about a year. Then I felt the calling of Christchurch to come back.
That’s interesting. I really loved the way you spoke when I first came in about last night’s dinner with the Maori chefs and the waiata and the haka and obviously you do have a real connection to the land here and that side of things.
I think it’s important the culture that is such a strong part of this country and this landscape; that connection to the land. I worked under Jeremy Rameka at Pacifica Restaurant in Napier for a couple of years before I went away. He certainly taught me a lot about that side of the culture here and his food was fascinating. He was well ahead of his time, putting traditional Maori ingredients and techniques into fine dining and merging them with Japanese influences and classical French training. That was definitely an eye opener and I took a lot from that restaurant and that experience that has driven me here now. When these guys got in touch about a pop-up, it is awesome to collaborate and work with their culture and let people present that in my space.
Success for me is making other people happy. And giving them an experience and showing them something and connecting them with something that they may have never thought about or considered and it’s showing them a world that exists here that they might not have necessarily have any means of connecting to. Making people happy. That’s what I love to do. It’s a nice thing to do. It feels good.
In terms of your space, when you came back from London, was the idea that you wanted to have your own place?
I did. It was on the back of the earthquakes and Christchurch still being in an absolute state. I came back after a year and I was seeing a pop-up culture emerging in East London emerging. It was around the time of the Olympics, so there was lots of rejuvenation happening in East London which is the side of London I grew up around. There were all these interesting little projects going on in sites around the city that had been neglected and that I knew as a child as areas where nothing really happened, but they were being brought to life. So I felt I could bring some of that energy to here because I felt that Christchurch needed that. It was in a slump. Even a year on…you can still feel the repercussions even now. So I felt the pull to bring some of that energy I had seen back here to see how I could apply that to this city and hopefully give this city more energy.
Was it easy to do that? Were people receptive to that?
Yeah, they were because there was nothing here. The city was cordoned off.
Yes. I remember that.
There was an arts organisation called Gap Filler who were doing projects all throughout the city and they built a pizza oven out of clay that was a public oven for people to come into the central city and cook because there was nothing in there. I asked them if I could use it to cook for people and present people food and they said, yes, and that started really quickly. Effectively I owned a restaurant just through asking if I could use an oven; this clay oven in the middle of rubble and fences and army patrols. There I was cooking pizzas in the middle of central Christchurch when there was nothing else.
Amazing.
People were really receptive to that because it meant stuff was starting to come back even if it was that basic.
I loved all the stuff that happened around that time. I had a chat to one of the founders of Gapfiller and I really loved that idea…they really did make flowers grow from amongst the rubble. It gave people hope and a glimmer of something interesting happening in that time.
Definitely and what Christchurch could be. It was like, this has happened and it’s devastating but we can create opportunity through this. It was about making positive change from something really devastating.
It quite literally shook all of us up. You left, I left, and I’m still gone…I never wish that the earthquake had happened at all, but Christchurch had become stagnant and the creativity that has flourished in the face of adversity and the way people have come together and looked at things from a different angle. I think that’s an amazing outcome.
I think it definitely shook everyone and changed Christchurch. I don’t think Gatherings would exist if that hadn’t happened and I think that’s the case for a lot of the places that came after. The culture here has definitely been shaken up a little literally and I think it has definitely given people the opportunity to do things they hadn’t done before. People have opened up to those new ideas as well. It has definitely changed the face of this city, that’s for sure.
So the seed of Gatherings…which sounds like some kind of plant-based pun…you opened in 2017 and did that take some getting to, from the pizza oven to there?
In between the pizza oven thing, someone asked me if I wanted to cook in their restaurant and offered me a share in it. So I became a co-owner of a proper restaurant after doing the pizza oven project for about nine months. They asked if I was interested in taking over a kitchen and I found myself as a proper restaurant owner. That was on New Regent Street, again when there wasn’t much left. That was one of the first streets to re-open I ran a little kitchen in there and it was very basic because no one had any money. People started to enjoy what we were doing, so that happened and then after about a year and a half of that, I decided to take some time out and re-evaluate what I was doing. That’s when the ideas for Gatherings started to form. It was about a year-long build up to it.
I went and worked on an organic vegetable farm and that definitely sowed the seed for Gatherings and in the months that I started sharing those ideas I was picking up on through the farm, through a series of pop-ups…there was a space called the Space Academy, which is like a communal space that can be anything; a bar, a music venue, it’s awesome. They let me use their kitchen once a week and I did a series of Gatherings pop-ups to share what I was seeing and experiencing on the farm to see how people would respond. It was really good. After seeing the reaction I was getting from that and developing these ideas then this space became available so I just went for it and made it happen as quickly as I could.
And the philosophy behind Gatherings is that it is all from this region, wine and food? It’s hyper seasonal, without even leaning on that term, seasonal, you’re going with what is available. I had never used that phrase, hunger gap that you used the other night. I thought it was a really interesting concept and I guess if you are growing and getting things from the land, you have to be aware of those in-between seasons.
Yes and this is definitely the most challenging time for that. Because winter has finished and the root vegetables that have been in storage start to dwindle around this time and the other stuff hasn’t quite started coming on yet, so effectively it’s just a whole bunch of leaves at this time of year. it’s known as the hunger gap because the new season hasn’t quite started and we’ve used all the resources form the old season and we are here in this little spell trying to survive.
It was delicious and we certainly were not hungry afterwards. I loved that you came out and explained what you had prepared and then finished with, ‘but it’s essentially just a plate of leaves.’ It is plant-based with a seafood option, but it’s not vegan because you use butter and cheese and eggs.
That was important. I didn’t set out to open a vegetarian restaurant. It was more being inspired from the organic vegetable farm that I worked on and wanting to highlight what they are doing and connect people to that. That made more sense to me than saying, this is vegetarian and putting my flag in the ground because I don’t see it as that. I don’t think this is a vegetarian restaurant; it’s just a restaurant that works with stuff that is growing in and around the area. That’s what I’m setting out to achieve through what I do.
How do you work with your suppliers? Do they come to you and tell you what’s available? Are you going out yourself and getting things?
It’s constant communication. Originally when I first started out, I had met a lot of people through the other restaurant at markets and from talking to people. There are a lot of Farmers’ Markets here which is awesome. Then through establishing relationships with people and going to work out on the farm. I still try and get out there every few months and have a chat with Gianni and Lorraine and they give us a good indication of what is going on and what they anticipate is going to happen. We talk like that and that’s how I keep my ear to the ground.
I was so impressed and particularly with your dessert. I loved you’re really stripped back approach to presenting the dishes too in terms of how you introduced them when you came out, so you mentioned choosing to scatter cornflower petals over the frozen grapefruit and lemon curd tart because it was ‘a really joyous’ time of year, but it was such a serious delivery, it really made me stop and think about how joyous this time of year really is. Those flavours were so good and that pastry was perfect.
Thank you.
Where do you get your ideas? All good chefs are inspired by the produce which we have talked about but are you a cookbook person or Instagram? Especially for times like this, perhaps, when it’s a bit more challenging to come up with dishes.
I think it’s a bit of everything. I like cookbooks, I use Instagram. Going out and seeing what’s going on is good. Having little to work with forces you to think more so that definitely drives the thought of how am I going to create sustenance and give people a meal that they’re going to feel like they’ve eaten well when you only have a handful of things available to you. Travel is also a big influence; taking ideas from what I’ve seen around the world and the places I’ve worked. I constantly get ideas from all different sources. I’ll be at a friend’s house and they’ll cook a barbecue and make a sauce or something…I like being inquisitive and asking people why they’ve done things. It’s constantly learning and being open to learning from anything and anyone and not only focusing on one style or one thing. It’s a constant taking it from many sources.
Your sense of satisfaction from having your own place and being a hatted restaurant, is that what you were striving for as a chef or is it more about the people who are in here eating the food? What does success mean to you?
It’s making other people happy. And giving them an experience and showing them something and connecting them with something that they may have never thought about or considered and it’s showing them a world that exists here that they might not have necessarily have any means of connecting to. Making people happy. That’s what I love to do. It’s a nice thing to do. It feels good.
5/2 Papanui Road, Christchurch