Marque’s Mark Best finds the beauty in food
MARK Best’s love affair with food, in particular French food, was one that took a while to ignite. It did not begin until the acclaimed chef was in his mid-20s and on a very different career path. But when it did finally happen, it was a life-changing epiphany.
Best’s top French cookbooks. Source: Supplied
“It was like, holy f..k, this is it,” he says of his first day working at Macleay Street Bistro in Potts Point in inner Sydney. “It just hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was offered a job by the end of the day.”
Before that Best was an electrician working in the goldmines of Western Australia. Hailing from a tiny South Australian country town on the edge of the Nullarbor, he grew up with “limited options”, so he did a trade exam with the local mining company, with plans to become a carpenter. He was deemed too smart for that so was offered an electrician’s apprenticeship instead, but it wasn’t his passion.
“When I finished my apprenticeship, I got the hell out of there, took my bags, my guitar, jumped on the Indian Pacific and came to Sydney,” he says. “I was looking for a change but I promptly found myself refitting submarines for the Australian government on Cockatoo Island. Ironically I tried to escape the mines but found myself deeper [underground].”
Before he could fulfil his “pipe dream to open a little café that served coffee and a few muffins”, his flatmate suggested he work a day in a kitchen. Best still remembers the staff lunch that day. “[The owner] brought out probably the cheapest bottle of wine that could be imagined, but from where I had come from, it was amazing,” he recalls.
The next defining experience for Best was a six-week regional tour of France with his wife. They stayed in the homes and ate at the tables of farmers and producers. It was like “hearing a great song” for the first time. “The quality of the cooking just blew me away,” he says. “Eating a lunch with no expectation and having the most amazing experience with dishes that were as simple as whole roasted rabbit, with all the offal, with roasted carrots.”
He returned to Sydney to open the Peninsula Bistro in Balmain with his wife. “It was successful but I found it artistically frustrating because I didn’t have the depth of knowledge that a long apprenticeship would have given me,” Best says. “Being self-taught, I continually came up against roadblocks for my ideas so I decided I wanted to go back and work for the best restaurant I could find.”
So it was back to France, this time Paris, and to Alain Passard’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant L’Arpege, where he worked for free for five months, using the money he had made from his Sydney restaurant and living in a room “smaller than a studio”. “The hours were crazy but I didn’t mind because every day the possibilities of the cuisine I was being shown were just amazing. The ingredients that would come in, from ducks wrapped in pink tissue paper, and truffles, to everyday things like turnips, would come through the door. It was the attention to detail at every level, it was unrelenting pursuit of beauty from simple ingredients – that is something that continues to inform me to this day.”
He says the most significant lesson he learnt was that great meals did not require expensive or complicated produce. “Good food is not about luxurious ingredients; it’s about simple ingredients and unlocking their inner beauty,” Best says.
His ground-breaking restaurant Marque came next in 1999, on Crown Street in Surry Hills (“before it was cool and all hipsterville”), and was originally supposed to be another French bistro. But he and the architect got carried away and ended up with a “very flash-looking spot; so we had to suddenly decide we were going to be a fine dining restaurant to suit the design”.
Marque is still going strong, and Best has opened the successful Pei Modern restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney. He is an ambassador for AEG appliances, saying he wants to be “associated with something of integrity”. He has published the Marque cookbook and is writing a second. It seems his love of food never wanes. “Even after 15 years, Marque remains creatively intensive,” Best says. “It’s about the possibilities of ingredients ... I still get excited if I see something that I haven’t seen before or something that is particularly beautiful.”
Mark Best’s Top French Cookbooks
Pierre Gagnaire: Reflections on Culinary Artistry, Pierre Gagnaire (Stewart, Tabori, Chang)
Best’s list starts with this 2003 classic. “It was like a schoolgirl meeting One Direction. I could not speak,” Best says of finally meeting the legendary Gagnaire at his Paris restaurant.
Essential Cuisine, Michel Bras (Ici La Press)
Best credits the current movement of simple but beautiful food (styled and photographed like art) to the three-Michelin-starred chef Michel Bras. “It’s an amazing book,” he says. The cover photograph says it all – stunning.
Alexandre Gauthier: Chef, La Grenouillère (Stewart, Tabori, Chang)
Best describes Gauthier, chef of a restaurant set in a 16th century French farmhouse, as a “modern master”. Gauthier, considered a leading figure in new European cooking, is known for French cuisine but without its formality or “unnecessary intricacies”.
This story is from the luxury Wish magazine, free with metro editions of The Australian on Friday, March 6 2015.
Source : The Australian Milanda Rout March 4th 2015
