NORNIE BERO
RESTAURATEUR & CATERER
MELBOURNE, VIC
With an eatery blending culture and everyday eating, an enterprising Torres Strait chef is blazing a trail for others.
Nornie Bero’s first catering job paid in marbles. As a child, growing up on Mer Island in the Torres Strait, she’d deliver her dad’s pumpkin buns and damper down the street in exchange for a fistful of glass marbles. “My dad ran a kind of tuckshop from our house, and I’d help him with the morning run before school,” she says. “Then, at the end of the day, all the kids would come over to play marbles because we had the big spotty [spotlight] as we could afford to buy the petrol to run the generator.”
Bero always had a love of food and cooking, inspired by her father and her culture but she pursued various careers (often at the same time) before embracing the inevitable.
“I worked with a woman who gave me my shot. One day, she said to me, ‘I think you got something here, kid. Do you want to do something with it?’ A switch came on. I knew that this opportunity, this job that can take me anywhere in the world wouldn’t usually come up for someone like me, who came from a tiny little island, so if I wanted to be the first in my family to go overseas and showcase our homegrown traditions – I had to grab it.”
Fast forward 30 years – with time spent working in Europe and years of cooking in her adopted home of Melbourne – and Bero took the leap into her own business, opening Mabu Mabu, an eatery and catering business in Yarraville’s Anderson Street (the name means ‘Help yourself’ in her mother tongue).
“It’s a mixture of culture and everyday eating, because I want to make sure that people know how to use native ingredients in everyday cooking,” Bero says. Traditional dishes such as sop sop (braised coconut yams) sit alongside modern interpretations, such as emu tacos or kangaroo tail burgers.
“I’ve been lucky, but I think sometimes women in my culture get left behind because they’re expected to look after the children or the old,” Bero says. “That’s why I hire a majority of women and especially women of colour, because that’s where my heart is. I found it difficult when I first started in the industry – I want other women who are like me to be able to have it easier.”