ANALIESE GREGORY
HUON VALLEY, TAS
The high-profile chef is enjoying some downtime in Tasmania, but she seems just as busy as ever.
Why? is a question Analiese Gregory has been asked regularly since leaving her high-profile job at Tasmania’s renowned restaurant, Franklin.
“It’s a decision not everyone would understand,” she says.
“I threw everything into it for two-and-a-half years and was proud of what we achieved.
“It was definitely a career highlight. But along the way, I came to love the lifestyle that I moved to Tassie for: the diving, the hiking, the foraging, the hunting, the cheesemaking on the weekends.
“I was commuting one-and-a-half hours each day and I realised I wanted to take the plunge to spend time in this world I was creating, and not wake up and leave only to arrive back after midnight each evening. So I threw caution to the wind and left.”
For Gregory, who grew up in New Zealand with a chef father, the odds of ending up cooking for a living were always high. “I love making things with my hands; I get a profound sense of satisfaction out of it and, I suppose, cooking was something that came naturally to me,” she says. “Plus, my teenage years were filled with an immense desire to escape small-town New Zealand, and the world of the kitchen offered that to me.”
Gregory’s culinary CV pre-Franklin includes stints at global luminaries such as The Ledbury in the UK, Michel Bras in France, Spain’s Mugaritz, as well as five years at Sydney’s Quay with Peter Gilmore, before heading up her own kitchen at Bar Brosé in Darlinghurst. These days, Gregory is staying put on her “run-down” 110-year-old farmhouse in the Huon Valley, accompanied by a menagerie of goats, geese and chickens. “It’s romantic, messy, cold and chaotic all at once,” she says.
“Right now, I’m renovating my house, making cheese, creating vegetable beds and developing a TV series.” She’s also just finished a book – “part story, recipes and photographs” – of her adopted home. “It sounds busy, but there’s a lot of contemplative time spent in front of the fire.”