Almay Jordaan

I have a question. Why do you do this?

That’s a great question. I have a friend in Christchurch, Nicky, who is a head chef, and every time she spoke about food and being a chef, I just thought it was so great and I wanted to share that with other people. I always had the title Conversation with a chef in my head and I thought, maybe I’ll do a book one day, or a series of magazine articles. Then I moved to Melbourne and started writing for The Northsider and once a month I had a column called Conversation with a chef. My editor, Marianne, told me it was a great concept and that I should make it out on my own, so I created the website and now I have about 170 chefs there. I really love getting the back story. But getting to you, I’m a French teacher and I was interested to see your background and your love of French and history. I have a PhD in Medieval French Literature. 

Can I ask you about that? Is that Victor Hugo?

No, it’s way back. My writers were writing at the end of the 12th century. 

Super. Wow, what a subject. I’m descended from French Huguenots. But that’s way after your guys.

Is that why you were interested in French?

No, I actually had no idea what I was going to do after school and my parents didn’t want me to do art. I was interested I artistic stuff, but they said that wasn’t a job. A friend of mine was going to go to a very good chef school in Stellenbosch, which is our huge wine region. I thought I would give it a go because it looked like the right amount of artsy, but my parents would still think it looked like tertiary education. They still weren’t very impressed that I wasn’t going to University. She didn’t do it in the end. They base themselves on the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America. You train completely in classical French cooking and I found it really hard to train in classical French cooking without actually really understanding French. 

I was really fascinated with French culture. Something that was really unusual at the time, but now it’s probably not, but the fact that every region is so particular and if you ask them about something that’s not from their region, and you just think it’s French, they’ll say, well I’m not from there so I don’t know. And they don’t care either, they’ll say, you go ask them. If you want to know about Caneles, go to Saint Emilion and ask them, we do something else. I was astounded how you could squish that amount of culture into one country. All of Europe is like that and it was so different form South Africa and my upbringing in South Africa and I was so fascinated.

So then I carried on cooking and when I qualified as a chef, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do it, so I went to university and carried on working part time as a chef. I did a course in Le français des affaires, it was like African business. You can do business everywhere in Africa. It’s a whole different story the way French is spoken there. It gets confused with all the local languages. The way business is conducted has a very serious African way to it. I was also really interested in the Classics, so Homer, Virgil, the whole lot, and mythology and writing, which I absolutely love. Eventually I decided that if I could, I would really like to become a food historian because that blends a lot of the things I like. However, being at a University in South Africa and even trying, it’s impossible to pursue a career like that. You have to have dome academia for years to really be able to do what I wanted to do. Now I would do Food Politics. That’s the new avenue.

That has become big, hasn’t it?

I finished the degree and then went full time into cheffing. I went to London, met my husband and then we decided we would give Australia a shot. He wasn’t keen to give South Australia a shot, so here I am. Then we were here for about five years before we found this site. Lots of things fell through, but we found this.

It’s such an institution already. I actually thought it had been around longer. I am so embarrassed that I have never been here. I do keep thinking, I have to go. Everyone keeps telling me how much I would love it here.

I think it’s one of those neighbourhood things. If you don’t hang out around here…I was just talking to Ted (front of house who I know from Thi Le’s Anchovy) and I have never been to Anchovy. I have spoken to Thi. I don’t know why. It’s just because I live up here.

That’s it.

I have no reason not to go there.

I know. I live in Abbotsford. It’s actually really close. But somehow the traffic…just getting here seems hard. It’s not really at all. 

In your mind, you just think, no. That is a nice thing to say, though, that I’m an institution.

I can see why people would say that I would love it. I do love it already. This décor is so great.

We work hard on the lived in look. We try for a balance between lived in and not too lived in.

One of my favourite places in Christchurch is the Wunderbar over in Lyttelton. It’s a quirky bar that looks out over the harbour so you have this amazing view across the bar through big windows into the volcanic crater which is now the harbour. The Wunderbar is a bit more kitsch than here.

We started off extremely kitsch and now we are moving into more obscure…Simon is big into astro art with really weird back stories. I guess the room kinda tells us what it needs. Often the people who work here, like Ted is really good at it, make suggestions about what to put where.

So although you might not have initially decided to be a chef, and fought against it for a while, obviously you have really embraced it now because you own this…

Yeah I’ve been cooking for nearly 20 years. I had my first cook book when I was five, so I was cooking at home a lot. My mum is a phenomenal cook and my grandmother as well. Big into preserving. We lived on a farm and pretty far away from having access to…in fact it is still hard to find lettuce unless you grow your own. Growing stuff is what we do. My folks are still back on the farm, and my brothers. 

I had a genuine interest in cooking which I now see a lot of my peers and my husband didn’t have that in their family. I feel privileged.

You are. I think that’s interesting. I had a chat to Annie Smithers, actually I’ve had a couple of chats to Annie Smithers, I love her. She was saying, because she gives a lot of cooking classes, that it’s incredible that the generations after her have a lack of confidence in cooking. On one hand you have MasterChef where anything is possible…

But it is so far removed from actual cooking.

It is so far removed. It seems as though people have a fear of what they might do with food, even the simplest things. Annie is great. I said to her, what you do is an art, and she said, no, no, it’s just a trade like any other.

It is absolutely a trade. I wish I was artistic. I love painting and I knit and I crochet and I do a lot of things with my hands. I’ve seen a lot of the people you interview and a lot of them are far more…like John Rivera at Lûmé…what they do is far more artistic than what I do. My cooking is from a different place. I think when you teach people, you realise that this is a trade I am teaching someone. There is a lot of it, when we write down a recipe…for example, we have a Mexican chef at the moment and unless I show her, she does not understand what I mean. I feel like if you had someone with an artistic bent, they could just read the brief and come up with it and it would fit what the recipe was asking for and it would taste good. So, in that respect, it is definitely a trade.

There is definitely a place for those doing fancy things with food, as there is a place and a craving for rustic or traditional food or food that is perhaps a bit closer to the ingredient it was made from. People want authenticity and connection as well as art sometimes.

I think it is becoming a bit of a trend. It is reflected in the way we cook in the kitchen and the way we plate. There’s a certain style here. I’m pretty old school. I’ve had people who quit because I don’t do things that they think they can learn from. I don’t sous vide at all. No immersions, circulators, no vac-packing. Everything is preserved in some way or we just don’t do it. I’ve only this year started using a dehydrator. It’s just the way we cook now. I used to do a lot of South African things like almost Italian, like boiled for 14 days in sugar and now look we have a mustard thing, but I am moving away from that very heavy sugar preserving thing. I’m trying to preserve things and keep it healthier, which is the way I eat. Also this area is super conscious about that sort of thing. I make no excuses to the chefs about the people I think are the best cooks out there, like Annie Smithers and Stephanie Alexander, Marcella Hazan and places like Zuni Café, River Café. It’s a very different style of cooking and coming from a different place. It is very dividing because some people tell me I need to update certain things and I’m not doing that on purpose.

So how often do you change your menu?

Almost daily. 

Is that from your own repertoire of recipes?

To be quite honest, I do have a repertoire in my head but I rely very heavily on a lot of collaborative cooking with the chefs. I really like it when there are chefs from different backgrounds to work with. I have two sous chefs and one cooks from a super Italian point of view and the other chef from a more Spanish point of view and then our Mexican chef. I could never know everything she knows about chillis, or Courtney’s knowledge of pasta. There is so much to know about cooking, I don’t think you could every tell someone, hey I pretty much know everything. You really don’t. There’s a really basic book that came out last year called Salt Fat Acid Heat. It’s supposed to be a basic book but when you page through it, there is so much knowledge there and it changes. I need other people to say, hey what do you think about this? I like your idea but how about we look at it like this? I’m not the kind of chef who goes, ok guys, these are my ideas, can you cook them now.

I guess then, this is a really holistic hospitality experience, the way you have set it up with the room feeling homely and your food is made the way it might have been made back in the day with the mothers and the daughters and the aunties coming together.

I’ll say, this is what I want the dish to look like and now that I have a baby, I leave at about 5 o’clock and they are the ones who have to do the dish during service so if something isn’t working, they have full authority to change it and they can tell me that they changed it the night before because…I can’t work those 80 hour weeks. You have to work those weeks if you have to check everything and make sure they do everything your way. I’m not interested in being like that, I’m interested in having people who enjoy their job and like working for me. Then you get so much more information from people and you can see they enjoy coming to work, and enjoy coming early.

That’s what I want as a diner as well. I read the book, Like Water for Chocolate…

Ah yes.

The woman who pours her emotions into the food she cooks.

The tears.

Yes! The tears into the wedding cake and then the people eating her food are affected by her emotion.

It’s great.

I do feel that whatever is happening in the kitchen must be passed through somehow. I spoke to Daniel at Citrico and he starts right at the sun, transforming seeds and helping the plant grow and he feels happy to be part of that cycle and responsible for cooking it properly.

If this is your job and you have all these people bringing all this beautiful stuff in…on a Friday they bring all the organics and all the cheeses. I think it’s great. I get to stand there and people are bringing me all this awesome stuff. You can get carried away and you can let yourself get carried away and people get addicted to that. This is awesome, this is what I get to do for my job. Today was one of those days. I had these incredible tomatoes coming in. I did think to myself, this is so cliché, Almay, you’re standing looking at these tomatoes and zucchini flowers, but it is phenomenal cooking in Melbourne and to be able to stand there and everyone brings it to you. I don’t want to do too much to it. Why would I? I guess that’s why I cook like that and why I am still cooking like that.

I spoke to Blayne Bertoncello at O.MY at Beaconsfield and he said the same thing. He is growing all his vegetables.

They’re pretty intense, aren’t they.

We did the conversation with a chef walking around the garden which is the most meticulously set up garden. He runs the garden like he does his kitchen, he has diagrams and knows where everything is and when it will be ready and what comes next. He said he knows what has gone into that vegetable and it is so perfect as it is that he doesn’t like to do too much to it either. It’s an interesting idea, that relationship with food. Annie is the same growing most of her produce. She talks about having more respect and appreciation and less wastage.

I only grow leaves for our kitchen here but if you’ve spent time watering them and watching them grow. I get annoyed if the chefs talk about something not being good enough, say guys, you have no idea how much time went into that. There’s some accountability for food waste. I don’t have the time to grow my own.

You have a baby now as well.

It makes things a little harder. She grows up here a lot and hopefully we can keep that going for a while.

What about the writing side of things? Do you get to do any writing?

I’ve done some writing for a journal called Bread, Wine and Thou and I’ve done a bit of writing for Yossi and I’ve done a bit of blogging, but I’m interested in so many different things. There are just too many things. And honestly, the kitchen exhausts me mentally, especially now I have a baby. I’m mentally exhausted. There is definitely a lot of pressure to come up with stuff that the people are not going to slam. Especially online. We feel a lot of heat. When people don’t like something, there’s a repercussion online immediately. All you are thinking of a lot of the time is how can I avoid that scenario. That’s mentally exhausting. So then to switch over into a writing mode feels academically hard. I still do all of the reading. I still read Gastronomica and all that type of stuff to keep up with things but actual writing, there’s no time. I’d rather go home and sit and knit or crochet or do some gardening or painting.

That’s already a lot. You have busy days and a family. 

I’d like to do more writing and I would like to go and study food policy, food politics and food security. I’m very interested in that subject. Especially coming from South Africa and still being in touch with how things work in South Africa, even a bit further to the north and for example, what this hurricane has just done to Zimbabwe and Malawi. I think that’s why I appreciate it here so much. You just don’t know how shit things can get. You have no idea what it’s like to live somewhere where you can buy frozen chicken with no provenance in a bag at the bottom of a freezer somewhere, you have no refrigeration, and some potatoes, and that’ sit. That’s what’s available. There’s no food because there is no transport, there’s no security. I’m very interested in what’s going to happen to those countries. Here, we are caught up in First World things, so the greenness of everything and the food miles. Of course that is super important and we have the privilege to be able to argue about that sort of stuff but there are places in the world where they are wondering where they are going to get fresh water and stuff. That’s another avenue of the whole food thing I’m interested in.

I guess going back there, South Africa has no electricity at the minute, I’m thinking about how my parents and my brothers cope with not being able to refrigerate or freeze anything. It is very frustrating. I think about the practicalities of life if it wasn’t like this.

It is so great here. It is a great city…well, it’s not a great city for many people. We are lucky to be able to enjoy the greatness. I do feel bad saying it’s such a great city because there are a lot of people suffering. It’s hard for us to understand what people in the same city as us might be going through, let alone other countries.

Everything is super good here, but then we had the egg recall yesterday because of salmonella. From a food security point of view, that’s shocking.

Well there was the strawberry thing over summer.

Yes. How do we think about these things in a city where we aren’t used to these kinds of things. I digress.

It’s interesting though. What’s on the menu tonight? Tomatoes?

They’re everywhere. I actually don’t mind a bit of cross over. I think since Dan Barber did it, we can now put the same ingredient on multiple dishes.

It’s seasonal to do that. Otherwise, are there rules that say you can’t have the same ingredient across dishes?

It’s going to be the greatest hits of summer. Our gnocchi, we always keep the pan fried gnocchi on but change the garnish, at the minute it’s with sweetcorn. Our Mirror Dory is more Spanish, it’s with ajo blanco and has eggplant with it. We only do four mains, one is vegetarian, a fish, our octopus is with fermented tomatoes and a really beautiful purple organic potato and squid ink. Then our steak we don’t ever take off the menu, bavette steak, which is a Neighbourhood staple. Then sides…all the peppers we are getting from everyone at the moment. I guess that’s where I’m using my chef’s knowledge of peppers because it’s ancho and piqueo, just lots of peppers either marinated or deep-fried. Heirloom zucchinis…literally there is not a summer vegetable we don’t have on the menu tonight. 

I am really welcoming pumpkins at this stage. We are moving onto pumpkins and thinking about chestnuts and mushrooms in a couple of weeks. I plan ahead according to the vegetables, but the actual dishes, we see what the vegetables are like and we work around that, instead of planning the dish and then not having the produce. We see what we have and work around the ingredient and sometimes I come in and they are over it or past it, or not as nice as we thought it was going to be and we just change the menu. That’s what’s nice about having a smaller place, you can just do that. In big places, it can be a disaster if you can’t keep things consistent. 

I’m already thinking about when I can come here. It sounds so good.

L?isten to the chat here

Neighbourhood Wine 

1 Reid Street, Fitzroy North