THE PLATING GAME

We asked two of our favourite Kiwi celebrities to share their food loves so we could create a dish especially for them

SAM NEILL Actor

National icon and global star Sam Neill is one of those actors who is like a litmus test for viewing quality. Enter Sam on-screen and you sink comfortably into your seat, thinking: ‘ah it’s him; must be a good movie’. Over a career spanning almost 50 years, he’s brought his trademark gruff charm to a raft of landmark film and TV productions – from Hollywood blockbusters to independent (many Kiwi) gems. The Piano, Jurassic Park, The Dish, Gallipoli, Peaky Blinders, Thor Ragnarok,

Rams, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Ride Like a Girl, Dead Calm… the list is endless. And yet he comes across as a regular Kiwi bloke, the sort you could easily imagine shooting the breeze with over a glass of red (perhaps a delicious pinot noir from his Two Paddocks vineyard in Central Otago). Here Sam reveals the restaurant he’d like dish to whisk him to, the ubiquitous American food he can’t stand, and the duck dinner he’ll remember forever with love.

With a successful acting career and a vineyard to run, you’re obviously super-busy – but do you like to/find time to cook?

Sam: I am so sorry, this is not at all what you want to hear. But the truth is, cooking is one of my least favourite things. I find it hard to understand how people find it enjoyable. I mean, I love eating, I love good food, I love the conviviality of sharing food and wine, but the preparation of food I find stressful and frankly tedious. It’s getting everything ready at the same time for instance. Look, it’s not as if life isn’t chock-full of deadlines as it is. And yet to put more deadlines on yourself within the cosy confines of your kitchen… why? I like friends who cook.

I encourage my family to cook. I encourage them to come over and cook for me. What are friends for? One of my sons is a very good cook, thank god, but no thanks to me.

What’s your style of cooking?

Sam: I’m grateful to the occasional smart business person who can provide really good ‘meals for one’. I am a microwave type of cook. However, most of these ‘meals for one’ are utterly dismal. They can be found regularly in any supermarket in what I call ‘The Sad Aisle’. Where you see single people, solitary souls with baskets for one. I am told in more racy climes these serve as dating sites, but the only ones I’ve ever been to are peopled by the saddest bunch, all of whom avoid catching another one's eye.

We’ve invited you for dinner and ask the usual question, ‘Is there anything you don’t eat?’ What would the answer be?

Sam: I am an absolute omnivore, but if you were to give me a choice I’d say my preferences lean towards game and seafood. As for things I don’t really care for – avocados are fairly slimy and unappealing. Cinnamon is simply disgusting – and one reason to avoid America, where they throw it on pretty much everything. I don’t particularly like South Asian food, but that is probably because I found it all so terrifying when I was in India. South East Asian food of any kind is fantastic. Sadly, I think the French have forgotten how to cook, but astonishingly London is the best place in the world for dinner these days (Covid aside). If you were offering pudding; a lovely crumble would be my request – either apricot or rhubarb.

Can you share a vivid food memory?

Sam: So many: but here is one. My last great dinner with my late father was in Paris. We had duck cooked with honey, to a 2000-year-old Roman recipe, and it was completely gorgeous. We all ate with great relish. That was my father’s last dinner he really enjoyed. The next time we had dinner was in Portugal; he had gone off his food, which was quite unlike him. It was the beginning of the cancer that ultimately killed him. RIP Dermot Neill, Food and Wine Enthusiast.

Your Two Paddocks vineyards produce both riesling and pinot noir, but pinot noir was your first love, so to speak. What’s a dish/ food that you personally love to eat with the Picnic Pinot Noir and the Proprietor’s Reserve?

Sam: With the Picnic Pinot Noir I would probably recommend a nice leg of roast lamb. With some pink inside. I rather deplore the slow cooking thing with lamb, which to my mind ruins it. My mother had many talents, but cooking was not one of them. Like most women of her time, it would take her a day to cook a roast, by which time it was reduced to the barely edible. People seem to be doing the same thing again; who knows why.

With one of the Proprietor’s Reserves

(The Last Chance, The First Paddocks, The Fusilier) something very smart. Wild venison maybe or, if I was in England, some grouse.

What’s your style of entertaining?

Sam: The most important thing is that we are all sitting round a table laughing, telling porkies and drinking good wine. I think a table is everything; not too big, not too small. One of the many sad things about 2020 is that there was so little sitting round a table with friends and family.

When you’re away working on a project, how do you tend to eat and what do you crave when you are away from home?

Sam: I’ve just finished more than four months locked away on Jurassic World

3 in England. Chef Jamie was engaged by the production to cook for us three times a day. Amazingly it was not only delicious; he never cooked the same thing twice. Furthermore it was strictly calorie counted and I lost about 7 or 8kg. Fantastic. However those kilos will be back before long and all that good work will be undone. It’s back to The Sad Aisle.

Your favourite places to eat out?

Sam: So many, but here are a few of my favourites:

Auckland: Kingi, Depot, Ortolana, Amano and Ebisu. Queenstown: Ra-ta-, Madam Woo and Wakatipu Grill. Arrowtown: La Rumbla and Aosta. Wanaka: Kika Wanaka and Urban Grind. Clyde: Olivers and Paulina’s. London: St John and Scott’s. Sydney: Sean’s Panaroma (Bondi) and Saint Peter (Paddington).

My thoughts go out to everybody in hospitality. What a tough year and I am hoping to see all of you up and about really soon.

What flavours do you tend to gravitate to?

Sam: Anything that is not hot. I don’t enjoy chillies and I don’t know why anyone does. And it seems to me they were only invented to disguise faults. All right,

I hear howls of outrage from hot food enthusiasts, but personally I love delicacy in food. Think New Zealand whitebait.

What’s your food weakness? Do you have a sweet tooth?

Sam: Yes, a terrible sweet tooth. I am old enough to remember sweet rationing, and I don’t think I have really ever gotten over that. I absolutely love sweet things. My idea of bliss is a golden syrup steamed pudding with way too much golden syrup.

If someone said ‘Sam, I’m taking you to dinner – my shout. You can eat anywhere in the world’ where would that be?

Sam: Thank you so much for the offer. I would like to take you up on that immediately. I would like to climb on first class (whoever is still flying) and let’s go to Copenhagen. I’d like to go to Noma once in my life. I expect tickets in the mail any day now. Can’t wait.

ANTONIA PREBBLE Actor

When you’re a Kiwi actor in hot demand, you’d be forgiven for delegating the cooking duties to the local takeaway (or the nearest available family member). Especially when you also have a toddler son in tow. But despite her full-on schedule, Antonia Prebble doesn’t just love cooking; she’s developed a new-found respect for the process, and a fascination for experimenting in the kitchen. The star – perhaps best known for portraying not one but two members of the infamous West clan in TV series Outrageous Fortune (Loretta West), then Westside (Rita) – talks us through her food favourites and foibles, the Paris meal she’ll never forget, and the a-ha moment when she fully understood the mean of ‘great cooking’.

What’s your go-to dish when you are busy with work or other commitments?

Antonia: When I am filming I do very little cooking. Mainly because we get fed so well on set. The buffet lunches for cast and crew are like dinners. I don’t usually get home till 7.30 or 8pm so I don’t need dinner or feel like cooking. I might have eggs on toast or a ready-made meal.

However, last year I really changed my relationship with cooking. In part it’s due to becoming a mum and domestic life being higher up the priority chain. I didn’t used to get much pleasure out of cooking but over the two lockdowns I had time and inclination to do a lot more and I loved it! That has endured. Before I’d do things in a way my partner [Dan Musgrove; Antonia’s co-star in Westside] would probably call slapdash. Now I get a lot more joy out of creating something.

When I was 25, my mum gave me a cookbook she had put together of ‘tried and true vegetarian recipes’ because I was a vegetarian for quite a few years. She gave me this notebook where she had cut out 25 or 30 recipes she had made over the years. And I had cooked hardly any of them since she gave them to me. So over lockdown I cooked all the recipes and absolutely loved it. Dan was like ‘Who are you, who is this person I am with?!’ Because I was cooking three meals a day for him. I suddenly became like this traditional housewife!

A few years ago I had low iron levels so I started eating meat again. But I mainly eat pescatarian; it really suits me. I have meat once a week, usually chicken.

Freddie is 18 months old. We really enjoy eating together, which we do quite a few evenings. Freddie goes to bed at 7 and we have dinner at 6. It’s a great way for Freddie to try a bigger variety of food; he will happily eat broccoli, zucchini, asparagus and so on if we are eating it.

What’s a tried and trusted dish you whip up when entertaining?

Antonia: I’m quite big on one-dish or one-pot meals. Even though I find a lot more joy in creating complex things I am probably still early on that journey! So if I am having friends over I like to make it relatively straightforward so it’s not too stressful. I have been making risotto for years; it’s something I can do with my eyes closed. And I really like making pies: chicken or mushroom, vegetable. One of the dishes in my mum’s book is a delicious spinach and ricotta pie. It looks impressive when you pull a pie out of the oven and I often decorate the top with ‘Hello’ then the name of the person who is coming. A lot can be forgiven, with how something looks, if you put ‘Hello so-and-so’ on the top! With a pie you can do most of the preparation before people arrive. I cook a lot of salmon as well.

What’s your style of cooking?

Antonia: Nothing too fiddly. I try to eat a range of food and eat relatively healthily. We make a lot of Thai curries. Tofu curries – as much plant-based as possible. I make a lot of lentil-based foods – tray bakes or lentil shepherd’s pie. Often we’ll just have a protein and vegetable, like tarakihi and salmon with vegetables or salad.

I really don’t like wasting food. If I can see there are vegetables going off I will use them.

You are a Francophile and speak good French, plus you spent time in Paris doing a theatre course – do you have any memorable food experiences from your time there? What foods did you particularly enjoy?

Antonia: I had one amazing culinary experience. I would have been 22/23 when I was over there; I’d rarely travelled on my own before and hadn’t had that many food experiences as an adult. One night we went out to dinner to my friend’s uncle’s restaurant. The meal was lovely but what I remember about it was the uncle kindly gave us a free dessert – an exquisite chocolate tart – with wine to match. I can’t recall what it was but it was a beautiful red, and it was the first time I’d ever had a food and wine pairing. I remember going ‘Oh my gosh, I get it now. I get why this is both an art and a science’ because to my naïve, immature palate, the taste of the tart and the wine just exploded. It has stuck with me all these years. I’d never quite appreciated what the pairing of wine can do to both the wine and the food! It was quite something.

I love wine. That’s my drink of choice. If we are having fish or a risotto I tend to get a white. I really like chardonnay. If we are eating something heavier or having a cheese platter I’d get a shiraz.

The one meal that defined my Paris experience, which is absolute anathema to what French cuisine is all about, was a sandwich Grècque. I’d go to this street vendor by the Pompidou Centre with my fellow students and get one. It was like a kebab with hot chips in it! It sounds so horrendous but it was absolutely amazing.

I had one other tricky experience. I ordered a steak tartare because it was the cheapest steak on the menu. This patty of raw meat turned up and I was like ‘oh gosh, what have I done!’ and couldn’t eat it. I tried a little bit though; I’ll generally always give something a go.

Apart from steak tartare, Is there anything you don’t eat?

Antonia: I tend to not really like sophisticated tastes! I’m not good on crayfish, or caviar or olives. They taste a bit too much like the ocean, very salty and full-on. I don’t really like champagne! I’ll drink it because I love the ritual around it but if I had a choice

I’d always go for wine over champagne.

I’m not good with most seafood. I’ll happily eat prawns but not mussels and oysters, for example.

What flavours do you gravitate to?

Antonia: Definitely milder flavours rather than strong, rich ones. I’m not good with spicy flavours, so I’d go for a mild curry. I love Vietnamese food, and I love Italian and French flavours too.

Do you have one food memory or experience you wish you could re-live?

Antonia: I went to Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant, The Fat Duck, in Melbourne. I was filming a TV show called Sisters there. I had heard about this incredible food scientist guy so I went for dinner and it was pretty amazing. There was one dish that looked exactly like a tomato but it wasn’t that at all. It was some kind of terrine. I also remember the first time I went to Logan Brown in Wellington and ate mashed potato

and thinking ‘this is the most incredible mashed potato I have ever tried in my life!’ It was one of those moments where I just understood what good cooking was. If you can create something delicious from the humble potato you are clearly doing something very different to what I am doing!

Your favourite places to eat out?

Antonia: I love going out for dinner. Obviously recently I haven’t been able to go out nearly as much as I would like. In Auckland I love Amano, Coco’s Cantina, Lilian, Orphans Kitchen, Odettes Eatery, The Engine Room – with their famous cheese soufflé… With all these places the food is delicious but the vibe and the atmosphere is also quite accessible. If you feel like dressing up you can, but if you don’t you don’t have to.

If you could have a cooking class with anyone, who would it be with?

Antonia: Heston – he is so extraordinary. I want to go to The Fat Duck and just lick the walls! I’d love to learn the magic of what he does, the science. It’s like a Willy Wonka thing. Then Sid at The French Café. I’d love someone to teach me how to create fine-dining dishes – how to chop an onion properly, how to sauté mushrooms, to make mashed potato. Sid could really show me how to create exquisite food. A couple of years ago, Dan bought me a voucher to learn about fine dining; he took me to a cooking class that purported to be fine dining but it was more like fine dining in the 80s! It was wonderful but not what I was wanting. I would love to have in my repertoire two or three options that are at that fine-dining level, that are really impressive, using those age-old techniques to create exquisite food.

I’m determined to learn these skills at some point.

Your food weakness?

Antonia: Cereal! I can’t have it in the house because it will go. I never have it for breakfast because it’s ridiculous to start the day with it. But I can have four or five bowls of rice bubbles or cornflakes a day! Apart from that, biscuits and chocolate. If you could eat anywhere in the world – we’re paying – where would that be? Antonia: The Fat Duck!