In the West Hobart kitchen of Jo Cook

It’s all about fun and good taste at Jo Cook’s West Hobart home – and that extends to the funky furniture as well as the great meals emerging from her kitchen

T here’s always something cooking in Jo Cook’s kitchen. Today, it’s chicken broth, and while it’s a few hours off, her West Hobart home is filled with its aroma.

We can smell it from the stacked timber steps at the front of the solid brick 1925 house. A white hallway draws us past bedrooms and a bathroom to the sunlit rear of open-plan kitchen, dining and living room.

Pots and pans hang from overhead shelving, a wall-mounted knife magnet keeps sharpies safely secured and a timber island bench softens the stainless-steel benches as well as functioning as a chopping block. It’s clear that cooking is a priority and labour of love in this house.

“I have three ovens,” says the chef, and food curator and consultant, who often works from home. “A gas and an electric, and a wood-fired oven outside.”

We take a seat on Jo’s iconic contoured Featherston Stem chairs – a set she bought out of the front window of Tommy Gun Records when it was in Liverpool St years ago. “I had been eyeing them off for ages but couldn’t afford them,” she says. “One day I told a friend about them. She laughed and said, ‘Get out of it – they’re mine’. She’d been trying to sell them for ages and asked me how much I would give her for them.”

These are no ordinary chairs. Designed in the late-1960s by Grant Featherston, the rotation-moulded polyethylene Stem chair was perhaps the most technologically sophisticated chair of its time.

Over strip oolong tea and samples of a new vegan cheese being made at Glenorchy, Jo talks about her journey through Tassie’s food scene.

Best known as the food curator of the annual Dark Mofo Winter Feast, Jo is also a stalwart of the local Slow Food movement.

Jo first came to Tasmania in 1994 for a two-week holiday. “I was living in Byron Bay at the time,” she says. “A friend was studying furniture design at the art school here. I kept hearing all these amazing things about Tasmania so I came to check it out.

“My friends took me out on a cray-fishing boat at Southport. Then we went up the East Coast and had abalone in front of the Hazards, and from there to Lake Pedder and honey straight off the hive. Of course it was amazing. That’s why I moved here.”

Jo set up the restaurant that became Syrup nightclub at Salamanca. “The nightclub started in the restaurant,” she says. “At the end of the night we would stack the chairs and tables in the kitchen. At the very beginning we were dancing on carpet. It was pretty wild.”

Family life followed the sale of Syrup in 2001 and the mother of two kept cooking. “We put in a commercial kitchen so I could do catering from here,” she says. “When the kids were little I was baking cakes and biscuits and supplying to cafes. It kept me engaged and in touch with the food scene.”

Jo’s business – she’s also the food and beverage consultant on Hobart’s Parliament Square development – operates out of an office cleverly disguised as a 1970s sitting room. A Chiswell sideboard is a family heirloom replete with its original receipt, there’s a re-covered click-clack lounge, covetable German ceramics and a shaggy highland cow hide rug. “When I was growing up, I always thought my aunty and uncle were super-stylish and I guess their aesthetic has rubbed off on me,” she says. “It gives me a memory of childhood, nostalgia.” Her desk is a wall-to-wall bench with shelves above and portable filing cabinets below. On the walls are a series of striking Phil Kitt images of the Hobart Zombie March; a large format black-and-white photograph of a woman in a PVC cat suit; and wielding a blowtorch with two young chefs is Jo herself in Syrup days.

Outside is a garden mostly of edibles, with beds built at waist height for easy access. The lemon and olive trees provide dappled shade in summer. “In Sicily,” she says, “they always use the cuttings from lemon and olive trees in wood-fired ovens because they’re full of oils and burn really hot.”