Award-winning chef Ben Shewry on criticising the critics and the 'human magic' of cooking

Although he runs the top-rated restaurant in Australia, Ben Shewry has no time for restaurant reviews.

Over 19 years helming the Melbourne restaurant Attica, he has seen the enormous strain that "oppressive" ranking and awards systems put on high-end restaurant workers, he says.

Although he is a big fan of [ https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201855776/jonathan-gold-discovering-hidden-food-gems] the late LA food critic Jonathan Gold, he says food critics are often uninformed and do not understand their power and privilege.

The world of restaurant reviews is rife with conflicts of interest, lacks a code of ethics and is "more make-believe than anything else", the Taranaki-raised chef tells Saturday Morning.

"This is a really serious issue, and we have never spoken out about it for fear of retribution. Critics hate to be criticised."

In his new memoir Uses For Obsession, Shewry writes about his lifelong obsession with cooking, the beauty of hospo 'families' and the perseverance he has needed to keep a restaurant open for 19 years.

Shewry says the concept of cooking seemed "super intoxicating" to him as far back as he can remember.

"This idea that you can take sometimes inedible raw materials, and through the human magic of fire and your hands and your mind transform them into delicious meals and those meals can create joy for other people."

As a tiny child growing up on a North Taranaki farm, Shewry would sit in his high chair watching mouthfuls of food enter his family's mouths.

At 10, after writing several letters to local businesses, he got his first kitchen job in a New Plymouth pub, alongside a crew of cooks dressed in bandanas and chilli-pepper aprons.

"It was a little bit like climbing aboard a pirate ship... They were the rulers of this tiny enterprise - the kitchen - within this bigger structure, the restaurant. Even though they had no ownership over the restaurant, they were very much in charge of that little world and they were having a really good time so that was a fascinating thing to me."

As chefs generally work very unusual hours they exist in a sort of parallel world, Shewry says.

"Our lives sort of revolve around others and we are a little bit isolated in society because of it. We don't get to celebrate birthdays with family, and often not Christmas Day so we become our own sort of family.

"There are incredible families in kitchens around the world. We bond over the intensity of the work and, traditionally, the long hours."

In response to a small section of "overly entitled" restaurant patrons who need a reminder, Shewry includes a chapter titled 'In Defence of Waiters' in Uses For Obsession.

Waitstaff provide a tremendous service to the community, he says.

"I think it's such a graceful and generous thing… This is an intellectual undertaking. It requires expending immense social energy.

"Waiters live in the service of others. Their whole source of being as a professional is to make people happy. And yet, in some small instances or maybe not so small they get treated as less than. People frequently ask them 'Is this your real job or are you just on the way to doing something else?"

Shewry says he was not really up to the task when as a 27-year-old new parent "really struggling in life," he took his first head chef job at Attica.

Back in 2005, the inner-city restaurant was newly opened but failing badly and had lots of debt.

Although it took him five or six years to find his feet as a head chef, the awards started coming in 2008, and since 2010 Attica been included in The World's 50 Best Restaurants.

Despite its lofty position, Shewry defines Attica as an "ambitious" rather than a fine dining restaurant adhering to "highly formal, quite stiff and very stuffy" principles.

Fine dining originated in France and is not suited to the "friendly, warm and relaxed culture" in both New Zealand and Australia, he says.

"For me, that sort of atmosphere says nothing about who we are as nations... I wanted my restaurant to reflect that."

The "usual range of luxuries" served in traditional fine dining restaurants, such as truffles and caviar, do not interest Shewry.

His passion is for cooking with the thousands of indigenous foods and ingredients used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders over 65,000 years.

The impeccable reputation that Shewry has built for Attica was no protection against Covid-19 lockdowns, which he describes as "a time of complete and utter chaos".

The restaurant - which had 40 full-time staff - was shut down for 262 days.

One week after Shewry's wife suggested the restaurant pivot to takeaways, he launched a brand-new food business, with a bake shop and an Attica At Home takeaway meal service.

The first meal on the Attica At Home menu had to be comfort food, he says, and his mum Kaye's lasagne perfectly fit the bill.

"We ended up selling and delivering about 17,500 portions of lasagne across two years and lasagne saved us."

Shewry remembers his mother bringing home a packet of lasagne sheets - "a very rare and exotic thing at the time" - for the first time back in the 1970s.

The dish she went on to make - pasta sheets layered with beef mince bolognese sauce - became "the great love of Shewry family life".

Beyond Aotearoa, the small rectangular pieces of pasta we use for lasagne are not widely known, Shewry says, and he sometimes takes them back to Australia for friends.

"They create this really uneven layer on top which gets really chewy and crispy. We all know that the greatest part of lasagne is the edge, the chewiest or crispiest part."