Sepia chef Martin Benn gives us food for thought
IT’S odd to discover how little you actually know about someone you’ve met many times.
Such is the often-superficial nature of relationships that, by dint of the arms-length critic/chef dynamic, rarely get past first base.
A pity, sometimes. A relief, other times.
Of course if they’re famous or talented enough to publish a book (okay, you can get away with a food book these days without being particularly strong in either department), you can find out about someone the easy way. And Martin Benn is definitely someone worth knowing about.
He may well be one of the finest chefs in the world, and if you have any doubt (which you may not after eating at Sepia, his Sydney restaurant) look at his book, Sepia: The Cuisine of Martin Benn. The ideas, the creativity, the craftsmanship, the techniques … Benn is on another planet, and eating at Sepia is about as exciting — to me anyway — as a restaurant meal can be. But let’s be honest; very, very few of us — except professional chefs with access to all sorts of gear and materials (a steam oven, perhaps, or liquid nitrogen and a water bath) — are going to make much from Sepia.
Doesn’t matter. The insight into how a particular dish — say yellowfin tuna with goat’s milk fromage blanc, miso mustard and ichiban dashi jelly — is achieved helps mere fools like me understand why his food is unique, so wonderful to eat, and why it costs a bit (although by world standards, Sepia is a bargain).
But then read his book, please. It’s a really nice story.
Like so many of Australia’s great chefs of the past 30 years, Benn is from somewhere else: Hastings, on the southeast coast of England. He drew the Ace card in life: growing up knowing exactly what he wanted to do.
While his dad and older brother tweaked cars and motorbikes, Benn would be in the kitchen with his mum helping with the Sunday roast. At 13, he went off to do work experience at a smart hotel, which did nothing but encourage ambition. At 16, he started at a culinary school and worked every other minute in the kitchen at a Hastings posh hotel, The Royal Victoria. He passed.
London called: Le Meridien, in Piccadilly Circus, put the 18-year-old in its Terrace Garden Brasserie — his first full-time restaurant job. It was the start of years of hard graft. Benn tells his story in an understated manner; the pressure, the character conflicts, the hours, the scars — literally — and the joy of it all … moving to the hotel’s prestigious Oak Room. Then moving to the new Marco Pierre White restaurant, The Criterion, also in Piccadilly Circus. “The Criterion was a machine,” he writes. “One week I worked 110 hours in a six-day stint.”
What I like about Benn’s narrative is its lack of hairy-chested boys’ club attitude.
Benn set off for Australia via Africa, landing in Sydney in November, 1996. Two things happened — professionally — over the next three years. He worked out what he didn’t want to do (cultural hotchpotch) and determined what it was he did.
“I still didn’t know enough about Australian cuisine but the influence from Asia intrigued me. I had been closely watching the young chef Tetsuya Wakuda. I was amazed at the totally different style of food he was creating compared to the rest of the country.”
Chef Martin Benn ( Photo : Sepia)
If fish and England were the trunk of Martin Benn’s food passion, Tetsuya Wakuda gave it Japanesque branches. A Brit and a Japanese were, at different stages, building blocks in the wall of Australian cuisine.
Benn met his partner Vicki Wild at Tetsuya’s and they opened Sepia in May, 2009. It is, without doubt, one of the great restaurants of Australia; the book is stunning. And the Martin Benn story? There are a few chapters yet to be written, trust me.
Source : The Austral;ian John Lethlean January 31st 2015
