Grounded: Attica chef Ben Shewry remains dedicated to providing his best food every night.
JULES TAHAN
There are many aspects of Ben Shewry’s cooking that set him apart and have the world taking notice of his little restaurant, Attica, in Ripponlea. But one that his many fans might not know about is his willingness to poison himself in the name of fresh, exciting and different ingredients.
Every day Shewry forages for wild plants, in the morning around his home on the Bellarine Peninsula or just before dinner more conspicuously along the train line around Ripponlea.
“There are unkept areas along the train lines that nobody cares about,” Shewry says.
And he gets some funny looks from people wondering what he’s doing. “People are sometimes scared of what they don’t know or what they perceive to be unusual behaviour,” he says. “But if they took a moment to consider, there’s a whole abundance of wild edible plants out there and they’re just off to the supermarket to buy their absolutely bland and pathetic rocket leaves.”
Even though foraging is in his blood from his upbringing in rural New Zealand, he still sometimes has to consult a botanist to identify a plant. “It’s been part of my life; almost my whole life. My father taught us in the bush. I’ve poisoned myself quite a few times. I bounced back OK.
“One time I’d eaten something, quite a bit of it, and my throat started to close over a little bit. I was in the car and I rang my wife and said, ‘If you don’t hear from me in five or 10 minutes I’m going to pull over and take a moment to sit this out and you’ll need to ring the ambulance’.
“Any forager will tell you that he’s been poisoned numerous times. We’d never serve anything dangerous to our customers, but there are certain things I might not serve but I still want to know about.”
The stratospheric rise of Attica has not been accompanied by a surge in ego for the man who put it where it is. Last year Attica came in at 73 on the San Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants list. This year it jumped to 53.
John Lethlean, food critic for The Australian and one of the judges of the San Pellegrino awards, says: “Shewry’s a thinker, a real ideas guy. But he’s also restless for the next idea, the next spark of creativity. Ninety-nine out of 100 see something inspiring and mimic it. Ben takes it in a new direction, and he has incredible latitude at Attica to do it.
“There’s nobody there saying, ‘No, you can’t do that’. In most cases that would be enough rope to hang the chef, but not this fellow. It’s a sign of his remarkable maturity at such a tender age.”
Amid all the attention, all Shewry is concerned about is keeping up the high standard he has set. “I’m quietly determined,” he says. “I employ people very specifically. It’s hard to get a job here. It’s not so much to me where you’ve worked, it’s about what you want to give and to what lengths you are prepared to go for something. How much you believe in it.
“I’m very self-critical, so I’ll worry about the standard a lot. Is it high enough? How can we improve it? That’s the thing that drives me. I don’t know where that comes from but there is something inside of me that says, ‘You’ve got to keep pushing and pushing and pushing until you maybe have a mental breakdown’.” He laughs.
As for the celebrity chef thing, Shewry, 34, says it’s not for him. “The sincerity has to be there; the sincerity to want to do your own thing, to cook with passion and integrity. That’s the No.1 thing that drives us – integrity. As far as celebrity goes, it doesn’t interest me at all. I find it slightly abhorrent. I’m a cook. I still cook here very day. That’s my role – cooking.”
Still, it has been an amazing experience. “(Last year) we were inundated with literally thousands of phone calls and thousands of emails,” he says. “It was booked out the whole year. We didn’t have a night where we had an empty table. It was huge for the business.
“It doesn’t affect my sense of ego or my personality but it affects me because there’s a huge demand and interest in what I do. The amount of emails and phone calls is absolutely full on. I can’t keep up with it.”
It was an emotional time for him. “I cried because I had four guys in the kitchen who had absolutely worked their backsides off and my wife at home who sacrificed so much to get here, three children who have also sacrificed a lot. It’s hard for me to live with that. It’s a real burden on my soul and my heart.
“I wonder sometimes, ‘What’s the point of it?’ You make people happy. We make lots of people happy. And yes, we do make ourselves happy as well through that, but my family are the most important thing to me and am I making them happy? That is how I judge myself.”
Growing up with two younger sisters on a large farm in remote rural New Zealand – “an isolated rural area, back country, no shops, very small schools, closest neighbours 15 minutes’ drive away” – everything pointed to Shewry having a career as a chef.
His parents had more than 1000 hectares of farm, 600 of which was native bush. They ran beef cattle and lambs. Young Ben started cooking aged five.
“Mum said, ‘Ben played with pots and pans, like all kids do, but he never grew out of it’,” he says. “It was the main source of entertainment because we didn’t have television until I was 12.
“We had the animals on the farm and the bush and a motorbike – there were so many other things to do. It was a very creative upbringing. Food was our source of entertainment because we were so isolated.”
The farm provided almost all the food the family needed – meat from the farm, shellfish from the coast, vegetables from the garden. Every six weeks they’d do a huge supermarket shop. “We’d buy 30 or 40 litres of milk and freeze it. We had several chest freezers … if you kill a beast, that’s going to more than fill a freezer.”
His interest in a career in cooking was one out from the crowd. “There was no incentive to become a chef back then, there was no interest in it as a career choice,” he says. But it was a relief knowing what he wanted to do. “Absolutely. I’m always very clear on what I like and what I don’t like. Being clear in your own mind meant having no indecision.”
At 14, when the family bought a dairy farm and moved closer to the city – New Plymouth – Shewry found a part-time job at a café. “It was my first experience of seeing people happy eating the food you’d cooked them. It was intoxicating. That provided the motivation.”
At 21 Shewry found a job at a bistro in Wellington under Swiss-NZ chef Mark Limacher, who was a big influence on his cooking. “He was at the time one of the only people I felt understood cooking in a real, serious way,” Shewry says. “In restaurants at the time there was a lot of fluff in cooking, a lot of garnishes and additions to dishes which served no purpose. Like the sprig of rosemary. Or thyme. Rubbish, because you can’t eat those things.”
Limacher taught his young cooks well and was very supportive but very tough as well. “It wasn’t physical and it wasn’t personal, it was, ‘We have a job to do and we’re very much going to do it – either you’re with me or you’re not’. And that’s the same here. It’s only hard because it’s a high standard, and if you’re not used to that standard then you need to come up to that standard quickly. You either put your head down and you do it or you argue and then the faults arise. But I wasn’t that sort of person to argue.”
He did a five-week stage at David Thompson’s Thai restaurant Nahm in London (“He’s a genius, and I don’t say that lightly”) and worked with Andrew McConnell at Circa, The Prince.
“We are really good friends to this day, and I think that says something in this sometimes quite competitive world. I feel so proud of what he’s achieved.”
Shewry took over at Attica in 2006. Two years later Attica won two chef’s hats in The Age Good Food Guide and Shewry was named best new talent in Gourmet Traveller Australian Restaurant Guide. In 2009 it won The Age Restaurant of the Year award.
American Food and Wine magazine last year named Attica as one of the top 20 up-and-coming restaurants around the world.
As the awards piled up, Shewry had the “emotional” pleasure of cooking for his parents. He has said he “did all this for them”.
“They mean the world to me and they have always just totally supported what I’ve done,” he says. “Put no conditions of me as a child or as an adult. They really enjoy my success, sometimes even more than I do. I’m bemused by my success and I find it hard to deal with. I come from a very humble place and it’s not really that possible for me to accept it. It blows my mind to think about it, so I try not to think about it.”
He feels an emotional connection to many of his dishes, including the marron dish, a native Australian crayfish, because it evokes an incident in which his father saved the 10-year-old Ben from drowning while harvesting wild shellfish.
“We were at a beach where two sets of father/sons had drowned together over the past few years. Nobody goes to this beach; completely isolated. I was harvesting some mussels on an exposed reef, I had my back to the ocean, which is foolish. A wave comes in and knocks me off a rock and drags me across the reef on my back, shreds and tears it, and the next two waves did the same. I was sure that I was drowning. Dad’s a very strong man and he saved me, took me home and put me in a cold shower and washed the pieces of gravel and sand out of my back. I remember looking down, and the blood at the bottom of the white shower was completely red. It was a very important lesson. If you don’t respect it, it will really show you who’s boss.”
Surfing, mainly at Ocean Grove, is his big release. “If I wasn’t working I’d surf every day.”
True to the purist he is, Shewry surfs on a traditional 1960s-style nine-foot single-fin longboard.
“Very big heavy boards based on that period of surfing that finished in 1967 with the invention of the short board, which I would say is the most stylish and graceful way of surfing.”
Working such ridiculous hours, Shewry finds surfing sheds stress. “It’s been scientifically proven that it does. Negative/positive ions in the water. I don’t want to sound like a hippie but there are facts behind it. If I’m feeling grumpy about something I can go for a surf and it will put things in perspective pretty well. It’s a positive thing. You can go and surf and not hurt anything or wreck anything. I always try and give something back by picking up the litter on the beach. Take five minutes, just to pick up a few things that are washed in from the bay or people’s mess.”
He’s been approached to do TV, but with 55?seats full every night and a four-month waiting list, there’s no rest time for him. “It’s all-encompassing. It’s a 24-hour a day almost thing. I’m averaging four or five hours’ sleep a night. You kind of get in a tunnel and you don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, it’s OK. If you think about it too much it becomes difficult. It’s when you have a break from it – I have three weeks at the end of the year; it’s always a dangerous time for me. I spend a lot of time with the family. I reconnect with the children properly and then I don’t feel like doing this.”
Sunday, he says, is a sacred day to spend with Kobe,?6, Ella, 4 and Ruby, 15 months. “When I’m home I try and spend the time with the children. I don’t do other things. I cook with them. It’s not a very nice situation where your dad is working huge hours and cooking a lot of very nice food for a lot of very nice people, but when he comes home he doesn’t want to cook for the people he loves the most. It’s very important that we teach our children to cook; it’s probably one of the most important things that a parent will ever do for a child.”
He’s a purist and uncompromising, and reluctantly admits to being a perfectionist. “I am a perfectionist, but I realise not everything in life is perfect. Food is not perfect. Ingredients are not perfect. A pear on a tree is not perfect. I am focused, but I don’t think I’m focused to the detriment of others. I don’t like that single-minded determination where everyone is in a void and no one matters except for that quest. I am not that person. I don’t think that person treats their staff very well, and I like to treat my staff well.”
Meanwhile, the daily foraging must be done. True to his passion for an ecologically sensitive approach, Shewry is keen to affirm the care he takes.
“It’s something we manage. We don’t just go bashing through the bush picking whatever we see that’s edible. There’s a responsibility that comes with it, and that’s understanding the environment and understanding the small animals and creatures that live in the environment. If we were to remove too much of a certain plant it affects other species who can’t feed on that plant … If we pick too much certain kinds of seaweed, that’s going to affect abalone stocks, which are already at very low levels.”
All the awards and attention, he says, haven’t changed him. “I don’t believe my own hype. If you are going to think that you’re the 53rd-best restaurant in the world and the 53rd-best chef in the world then you have your head basically stuck up your behind. And if you are arrogant, that totally inhibits your ability to learn because you already believe that you know a lot or too much or enough. And I don’t think that. I think I’ve got a lot to learn.”
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