Culinary nomad: Christine Manfield leads the way – again
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“Adelaide was a bit of a culinary centre,” says Manfield, who likens it to Copenhagen, which would have its own food revolution 30 years later. “Small cities can sometimes be perfectly formed. They have that connectivity that allows things to happen more easily.”
From the start, food was visceral, political, a cause rather than a lifestyle choice. She cites Alice Waters, who founded her pioneering Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California in 1971. “Her involvement came very much through being an activist,” Manfield says. “She turned her activism to food. I was always interested in that.”
She was inspired, too, by a slightly older generation of Australian women cooks, such as Gay Bilson, Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer. She and Harris would drive interstate to eat at their restaurants, as they would later – having chucked in their Adelaide jobs and on a nine-month sabbatical in France in the early ’80s – drive their 2CV down to Lyon to eat at Paul Bocuse’s restaurant, and “because it was so f…ing fabulous, go back the next night”.
From the start, however, Manfield gravitated to Asian cuisine. “It was really fragrant and different and I understood it immediately and implicitly,” she says. “There must have been something subliminal there. For me it was searching for ‘other’.” She fronted Searle about a job at Oasis Seros. “And that’s when I studied the serious art of cooking,” she says. “I didn’t have a game plan and I didn’t see the light of day for two years, but Phillip was a true alchemist with spices, at a time when everyone else was cooking French. I learnt discipline and rigour from him. And minimalism: less is more; that it was about showing strength by removing anything extraneous; that your strength was your flavour.”
Cooking at the Falaknuma Palace, Hyderabad, India, in 2013.Credit:Graham Crouch
When she and Harris moved into pubs to see if they could run a restaurant – Manfield in the kitchen and Harris running the front-of-house for hotelier Peter Ryan – they began to generate serious attention. “Here were these two girls moving into beautiful old pubs and taking them to restaurant level with these spice-driven adventures,” recalls Dupleix. “And it was absolutely the two of them. Margie’s role was so beautiful, magically appearing at the tables like Tinkerbell, sprinkling fairy dust, then moving on.”
The pair started Paramount with a $200,000 loan from a visionary National Australia Bank manager at a time when banks often didn’t lend to women. Manfield remembers the early days of Paramount as “an age of innocence”, with David Thompson opening down the road at Sailor’s Thai a few weeks before her, and Perry already at Rockpool. “We were really fortunate that our businesses worked, because we were making it up as we went,” she says. “There were no rules. We were just firing off each other and I loved that camaraderie. I remember we had ordered Charles Eames chairs which didn’t make it in time for Paramount’s opening, so Neil just loaned us the furniture we needed.”
It points to another thing that has remained constant throughout Manfield’s career. Her relationships are enduring, tribal – from Adelaide’s women’s movement in the 1970s to the global tribe of chefs of which she is now an elder. This is someone who’s lived with the same woman for 41 years, who has visited the country she loves most, India – “I swear she was born with a bindi on her forehead,” says Harris – more than 40 times in 20 years. It’s there, too, in the food, which Nigella Lawson describes as “above all, generous and joyful, predicated on making and forging connections between people, both at the table and in the world”. Integral to that cuisine, Lawson adds, “is a particularly vibrant balance between passionate eclecticism and elegant rigour.” Which is what Julie Gibbs – who has published books by the likes of Stephanie Alexander, Maggie Beer, Peter Thompson and Kylie Kwong – sees as Manfield’s real strength. “She straddles both the realm of excellence and the realm of the home cook,” says Gibbs. “You can’t pigeonhole her and if anyone embodies Australian food, it’s Chris. She’s taken the best of European and Asian food and made it her own.”
Those enduring networks, built over three decades, are how Manfield is able to pop up across kitchens, cities and countries and “know everything will be in place for her”, says Martin Boetz. Her current incarnation is almost an exercise in harvesting karma in real time. For the Tasting India tour, for example, she has camped out in some of Australia’s hottest restaurants, often run by young female chefs she has employed, worked with or just inspired: from Jacqui Challinor at Nomad in Sydney to former Universal chef Thi Le at Melbourne’s Anchovy and Adelaide’s The Pot by Emma McCaskill, both of whom cracked their first hat in this year’s Good Food Guide.
Manfield with her partner, Margie Harris.Credit:Helen Coetzee
The 2018 Guide included more hatted female chefs than ever before. Alla Wolf-Tasker and Kylie Kwong were both honoured, alongside the younger generation. Typically, though, Manfield was already somewhere – everywhere – else. “She’s a very strong woman in a very strongly male-dominated field and she has shown that there are no boundaries or borders to what you can do as a woman in this industry,” says Dupleix. “By surviving that with her energy and humour intact, and then going on to forge another career in another way, she has set an incredible example for any young chef coming into an industry where you don’t necessarily expect to be a chef for the rest of your life.”
Not that Manfield has any truck with the notion of struggle. Those early years instilled “an incredible resilience”, she says. As for being female: “there were always models, from Alice Waters to Gay, Alla, Stephanie and Maggie. And I’ve been really lucky. There’s never been any bullying or sexism in the kitchens I’ve worked in, maybe because of the people I sought out. Then again, I never left any room for ambiguity,” she adds. “It was always ‘take me on my terms’, like my food. I was never one for being in a closet about anything.”
Muir, Manfield’s former head chef, saw a slightly different picture, however. “You couldn’t tell from the outside, but from the inside she had to work a lot harder than the boys,” she says. “And you can’t rely on backers. She’s very good at business and marketing because she had to be. You have to do 150 per cent of the normal 100.”
Nor was that particular to Australia. In London, Muir couldn’t get suppliers to return her calls, as one of only a handful of women running a kitchen. She had to ask her male sous chef to do it. “They were a big hard struggle, those years,” she says. “Chris fought hard, because she knows no other way. Watching that, being part of that, makes you feel invincible.”
Christine Manfield’s spiced lentils.Credit:Marina Oliphant
Manfield might be the poster girl for turning lemons into lemonade. Take the biggest reversal of her career, East @West. After three years, as the restaurant was garnering ever greater acclaim, the banker backers who had employed her as a salaried executive chef pulled the plug.
“It was tragic,” Peter Gordon remembers. “East @West was beginning to do some really groundbreaking stuff – a whole new level of elegance and sophistication. It was hugely important and all the foodies in London loved it. But the backers were obviously negotiating to sell the building, without saying anything, and it was cut short.”
Manfield didn’t break her stride. “I knew my job wasn’t finished when I got back to Sydney,” she says. “And I knew the whole philosophy of ‘Think global, eat local’ was right.” She told Harris she had one more restaurant in her. Harris, who had retired from front-of-house after Paramount, told her that she didn’t, but said if they were going again, they were going to back it themselves. The pair literally bet the house on Universal – their beach property at Wagstaffe on the NSW Central Coast – to not only complete Manfield’s restaurant odyssey, but also set themselves up for a truly itinerant post-restaurant life. “We are gypsy girls, always have been,” Manfield says. “It was the name of our super fund.”
Manfield guest-chefs at Martin Boetz’s Cooks Co-op farm, 2017.Credit:Courtesy of Christine Manfieldnbsp;
The plan has more than worked. If Manfield works hard today, it’s because she can’t resist the opportunity. “This is the best bit,” she says. “Because I’m still driven, but I can cherry-pick.” What she does now is the ultimate evolution of the concept that was Universal – think global, eat local – itself born of East @West and elBulli.
It’s the through line of her career. Take the signature dishes for which she is most famous, such as Paramount’s duck pie. A great plump, golden thing, it looked like a pie in a Beatrix Potter book, but one packed with five-spice duck and shiitake mushrooms.
“I’ve always loved that idea of taking comfort food, like a pie or an ice-cream on a stick that people can connect with, and taking them somewhere else,” Manfield says. It’s hard not to think of 1950s Brisbane, her baking grandmother. “Her name was Pearl and they adored each other,” Harris says. To this day, Manfield wears a black pearl in her honour.
That through line is there, too, in Gaytime Goes Nuts, the dish that featured in the 2012 MasterChef episode “that’s still playing in India”, Manfield says, where “MasterChef is on constant rotation across six channels.” The dessert was refined over 25 years, three restaurants and four incarnations, starting at Paramount in 1996 as “a Mardi Gras piss-take that just took off”, Manfield recalls. “Back then, it was simple, an ice-cream sandwich, three flavours between triangular florentines.” At East @West, it morphed into a pyramid. “But when it came to Universal, we decided that was too simple,” Manfield says. “We had evolved, there was a lot more technique and I was demanding a lot more in terms of people who worked for me. We wanted to layer the tastes and textures to create that party in your mouth.”
The Gaytime Goes Nuts, perhaps Australia’s most moreish dessert, had found its final form. Well, almost. That pillar of salted caramel, hazelnut chocolate and honeycomb ice-cream recently entered a fifth incarnation, as a digital line drawing that falls into place before your eyes as Manfield’s website downloads, vanishing as the brilliant colours of her latest horizon wash across the screen.
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Article source: http://smh.com.au/nsw/young-teen-received-more-than-600-emails-from-34yearold-posing-as-15yearold-20171013-gz0kx0.html
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