Flip Grater

Flip, let’s start with what you’ve got on your cheese board.

This is just a small selection of what we have. We have our Boursin, it’s a cashew boursin and we do three flavours and this one is the thyme and tarragon. We’ve got a vegan chèvre, a vegan blue and a vegan brie. This is our sopressa, that’s the spiciest of our sausages. This is our pastrami.

And everything is vegan, which is amazing because they look like cheese and sausage.

Well they are cheese and sausage and that’s why they look like it. We are trying to redefine what those words mean. I think we get attached to the idea that, for a long time, we’ve been making sausages and cheeses out of animal proteins, but that’s not what those things are necessarily. Now we are looking at different proteins to do those same treatments, to spice something up, to cure it, to smoke it, to culture it, but using plant proteins instead of animal proteins, that’s all it is.

Did it take a long time to work out? You’ve been cooking for a long time, and cooking amazing things and doing cookbooks and those things. Were you making cheeses and sausages prior to this?

Not really. I dabbled. I’ve been vegan for 23 years, but it wasn’t until four years ag when we moved back from Paris to Christchurch and had our daughter that I started looking into seitan and so on. I had made seitan before, but I had never really explored all the things you can do with seitan, but I finally had time and a real kitchen to experiment with. For the last…well, ever…I’ve been touring and always traveling and then living in Paris in a tiny kitchen and not having access to the things that I needed to really explore vegan meats and cheeses. I finally had all that and access to amazing Canterbury produce so I started exploring a lot more with a lot of different things and the seitan stuff I was making was a hit so I started selling it on Facebook and it grew from there. Then we thought maybe we should do a vegan butchery. I’m actually fifth generation butcher because my whole family line is butchers back from England and we thought that could be a nice subversion of that family history to do a vegan butchery. Now it has expanded into a deli because other things are yummy.

How long did it take to achieve the things on the cheese board? Are we talking months or a few batches to get it right?

Once I got the hang of seitan, once I do a new product it’s reasonably fast. Some products take longer than others to create. I usually have a pretty clear idea in my head of the flavour profile I want and honestly it has little to do with meat, because the last time I was eating meat I was a child, so I’ve never had pastrami or sopressa, but I have a memory of meatiness and what that means and I have an understanding of umami and I love smokiness, so I try and create those flavours. I’m putting it into a form or a shape or a colour, like the pastrami with beetroot, so that it does remind people of meat. And yes it freaks people out and plenty of people say why even mimic meat? But the idea is to try and get more people eating plants. People are attracted to meat and people are attracted to what is familiar to them. More and more people are turning to or exploring plant-based eating and it’s not because they don’t like the taste of meat. 

I guess there’s a sort of bridging thing between the two worlds. There’s a chef in Melbourne called Shannon Martinez who has Smith and Daughters, a vegan restaurant and deli. She makes a lot of vegan chorizo and so on because she has Spanish background. She loves meat herself and has a big tattoo of a ham leg on her arm, so she wants everyone to be able to enjoy what she really loves, so I guess that’s the crossover. We have a long way to go bringing everyone over to veganism or more of a plant-based approach.

At the same time, people don’t need to convert entirely. The idea is that people can dabble and taste things and at this moment in time, these products can live alongside the more traditional versions and then eventually they can replace them…ideally for the planet. It’s about slow progression and showing people what plants are capable of, what’s possible. A lot of people are doing that in the lab these days with futuristic technologies, whereas we are very old school in our approach. We are just making classic cheeses using cultures. We mostly make fresh cheeses and work with other cheesemakers who make cultures. We do old techniques but to plant protein, rather than animal protein.

Seitan is a really old technique from China. Effectively it’s like making a spiced bread, but a high protein bread.

That blue cheese id delicious and quite creamy.

It’s got cocoa butter in it, which makes it really creamy. The brie, I love. You bite into it and it’s almost chocolatey, almost sweet from the coconut and then it melts into a cheesy flavour in your mouth.

Can you make things like mac ‘n’ cheese with these cheeses? Or these are more cheese and cracker cheeses?

We don’t make any cheddar, but we use some vegan cheddars because we love making comfort food in the café, so we do make things like mac ‘n’ cheese. The only melty cheese we do is a buffalo style mozzarella, so a fresh mozzarella ball with cashew. It’s pretty awesome. It took a few goes to get the starches right and get it melting in the way we want it to. It melts really beautifully and it’s gooey and as some stretch to it. That was a fun process.

So does the stretch come from the starch?

Yes, various starches. It’s cool. It has been a fun little ride experimenting with all these things and we are still exploring. We’re really excited about the next stages. We’re getting a smoker and doing all sorts of processes. It’s a super fun area to be playing in.

Not to be fan-girling you, but a little bit, I have always been impressed with the way you have struck out on your own adventure as a singer-songwriter and then when you decided to move to Paris, not speaking any French, but wanting to go to Paris to record an album. I didn’t know you that well then but I met up with you in Paris and we had dinner in a vegetarian restaurant. That was before Paris really got into vegetarianism and I think it must have been quite hard for you from that perspective as well.

It’s so much easier now. I see online so many vegan places popping up now but god, there was hardly anything.

All of those things that you put into place are amazing. Putting out a cookbook is a big deal too, was that vegan?

It was probably vegetarian because it had a lot of collected recipes. Both of my cookbooks were my own recipes as well as collected restaurants from touring. It was a conversation starter when I was a New Zealander traveling the world to say on stage, I’m collecting recipes, please come and talk to me afterwards and people would come and write down from memory their recipes or they would read about it in the paper and bring along a family recipe. It was a really cool way to connect people, especially people who I didn’t share language with because everybody loves food. It took a lot of testing and a lot of work because some of them were just from peoples’ memories on the night after some wines, so there were a lot of adjustments. I don’t know if I would do it now though. In my twenties, I thought, yeah I’ll do that.

Maybe it’s more that in your twenties, you’re all, why can’t I do that?

Just the right amount of entitlement.

But then you probably couldn’t have imagined doing this kind of business. I think all roads lead…well, they have to because you can only ever end up where you are…but meeting your husband who is also into hospitality, everything has fallen into place.

He is massively into hospitality and I think I might have ended up in food in some manner, but certainly not doing all the things we’re doing here. Having a café and bar is definitely his side of things. It’s a great partnership because he’s awesome at that.

It feels as though Christchurch has really embraced what you’ve been doing. 

It feels as though Christchurch has really embraced what you’ve been doing. 

It’s really nice. 

I guess in the past, Christchurch has been a bit more conservative perhaps. Lots of things have opened up and there are some really great restaurants and cafes and as well, but it’s all about timing.

It is still a conservative place, ultimately, but I have felt super supported by Christchurch, by both the plant-eating community as well as the wider community who just like fine foods. We have always pitched ourselves as a fine food deli, as opposed to a vegan place. I think that makes it less scary for “normal people”, as opposed to activists and vegans and people that are already converted. We don’t need to turn vegans more vegan. That’s not the point. It’s about making this food seem approachable and familiar. Our idea is to make this space feel comfortable and you can feel at home here, whether you are a young person, a hippy, an older person having a wine tasting. All these different parts of our community come together here and its awesome to see. Every demographic comes here. And most of our clients are not plant-based.

I’ve had friends say it is really different now to what it was when you started, so I feel like you’ve been really clever and slowly built it up and expanded.

That was definitely planned and all purposeful. No. I wish I could say that it was. We didn’t know what we were doing at the start. I was selling chorizo through Facebook and then people wanted it so we rented this tiny kitchen here and it had a window, so I thought, I’ll just start making some meats while I’m here, and I’ll sell them on Facebook, then I thought I’d make a website, so I did that. And because of the window, people kept coming up and asking for food so I started making sandwiches. Then we put a table outside the window and people would sit down and eat. Then we thought we should do coffee, so we did plunger coffee for a long time. It has grown very organically. Pretty much since we started, people could pretty much come here week to week and see major changes. It has grown without any real intention or budget, so that’s why it has been a bit at a time…you know, this week we’ll buy a table and then next week maybe we’ll buy a chair.

Ultimately, it’s always going to look unfinished to me because I have ideas we haven’t realised yet, but it’s nice to step back and look at where we came from a year ago. It is almost a year since we opened that tiny kitchen. Wow, actually it has been fast growth.

It is fast growth. I say Pinot Cave with a French accent when I read your evening name for the place, but Cave is probably pronounced with more of a kiwi accent.

It’s funny because we tried to come up with a name that sounded ok in English but I don’t think that name sounds good in French. I wanted it to be called La Cave, but I didn’t want Cave to be said in English. It’s tricky because you have to know who is going to be saying those words. I thought Pinot was a French word all kiwis would be able to say right.

Well no. When I was waitressing in Merivale, granted that’s a while ago now, one of the other waitresses said to me, someone on table 7 have asked for “peanut noir” but if you’re allergic to peanuts, can you even have that? 

I have never heard that and I hope I never do.

I worked in the French Bakery at South City when I was at University and people were always asking for croy-ssants and milly fillies but a man came in once and said, Give us a quickie, love. I thought he might have been in the wrong place, but he wanted a quiche.

That’s great. I’m calling the quiche quickie from now on. We do a vegan quiche, so thank you for that.

What do you do about pastry?…actually I don’t know why I ask these stupid questions. Clearly you can do it.

It’s all do-able.

And you’re still singing. 

I try.

Do you sing in here?

I did an EP release in here. This is actually a great venue. I’m hoping to do more shows over summer.

Do you open the roller door in summer?

Any day that’s remotely warm enough, we open it up. It’s a completely different space with it open. This used to be a glass factory which explains a few things. It has a giant roller door so that when we open it up it has a very indoor outdoor feel, so that when we do events, people can spill out. In summer we’ll do more markets, we did a mushroom market here and in summer we’ll do more vegetable and wine festivals.

You’ve always been a really big advocate for mushrooms. I remember at one stage seeing a lot of photos of mushrooms on Instagram.

I’m a little bit obsessed.

What are the local mushrooms?

Canterbury has amazing mushrooms. That’s what we wanted to do with the mushroom market; show some of the incredible mushrooms you can get around here that people don’t know about. The foraging community is growing and the mushroom farmers are growing too. Canterbury is famous for porcini. 

There is definitely something about mushrooms. They are almost creepy in their structure. They are almost closer to humans evolutionarily speaking than they are to plants. As in, they require oxygen, as opposed to plants which emit oxygen.

I was reading that trees communicate to each other through funghi, almost like a conduit. 

Mushrooms are definitely going to take over the world. 

Thank you for preparing this delicious board to have with the rosé. I also really loved the Fricken Burger I had for lunch. You were saying that you based that on the simplicity of a KFC burger. I was a child the last time I had KFC, because it’s pretty disgusting now, but the Fricken was crispy plant based goodness with mayo and lettuce in a bun. It was perfect.

Thank you. I was definitely trying to recreate my memory of KFC. Obviously KFC is disgusting, but it’s disgusting for what it actually is as opposed to the pleasure centres it hits in you. If you can hit those centres without the exploitation and tumours that people find in KFC and it’s naturally made and a wholefood and locally made and handmade, then there’s no reason not to hit those pleasure centres.

Grater Goods 

105 Orbell Street, Sydenham

Christchurch, New Zealand