‘NO ONE KNOWS WHO I AM!’
Tom Parker Bowles loves going incognito during trips back to Australia to film ‘Family Food Fight’
T om Parker Bowles recently returned to Australia to film series two of Nine’s reality series Family Food
Fight. You probably didn’t even know he was here. A far cry from his life in the UK, where his recent separation from wife of 12 years, fashion editor Sara Buys, made national headlines. Here, the unassuming 43-year-old food critic, writer and Camilla Parker Bowles’ son – and now stepson to the future king of England – has a much quieter time of it.
“People don’t have a clue who I am [ here],” he tells WHO during a break in filming for Family Food
Fight. “It’s brilliant. [Everyone here] is just very direct – I like directness, and I just feel very comfortable. And you have the most amazing landscape, ingredients and food.”
Parker Bowles first visited Australia 25 years ago, to go backpacking. He instantly fell in love with the place – and the food – and has been back several times since, most recently to film for Australian TV. “I always loved [Melbourne’s] St Kilda, probably because it was the first place I came to in Australia, apart from Cairns,” he explains. “It had that lovely seediness. It reminded me of Brighton in the UK – it was a bit dodgy, it was fun. All those pubs. And Luna Park.”
Life’s a bit different these days – Family Food Fight, in which families compete in cook-offs each week, takes up almost all of his time. The second series is about to go to air, and a third has just been announced, meaning Parker Bowles
“Everyone is just very direct – I like it”
will most likely spend more time here next year. It’s a prospect he clearly relishes, though it means leaving behind his two children, Lola, 10 and Freddy, 8, for weeks at a time. “The last time they came out it was Sydney’s spring, four years ago, and I was doing [the nowdefunct cooking series] Hot Plate,” Parker Bowles says of travelling with his kids. “It was summer in the UK [at the time of filming] – Sydney in spring is a very different thing to [Melbourne in winter]. Melbourne is one of the great cities, but if I was filming all day long, it’s not fair to say, ‘Come away from Corfu or Ibiza’, or wherever they are.”
When he’s home with the kids, more exotic fare is on the menu. “It’s usually spicy food – Thai and Mexican,” he says. And his kids don’t mind the heat? “They’re good, actually. My daughter, she likes chilli. My son doesn’t but he loves oysters and mussels.”
It’s a far cry from Parker Bowles’ own childhood; things weren’t exactly experimental in 1970s Britain and he grew up eating “English food”. “I didn’t know about curry or Chinese or Indian – anything like that,” he admits. So did sampling chilli for the first time blow his mind? “It did!” he laughs. “When I was about 11, I just thought, ‘This is amazing! It’s so exciting!’ And that is probably where my love of chilli comes from, because we would have Tabasco if my parents were making a Bloody Mary, but then [I discovered] spice and Chinese.”
Parker Bowles says he loves the array of food in Australia and has already earmarked lots of new spots in Melbourne. “If I had to live anywhere else on earth, it would definitely be here,” he says. “Everyone assumes the Australians and the British speak the same language, but it’s different. That tradition of meat and three veg, and the cricket – those are the things we share.”
One thing Australia doesn’t have, he claims, is the strict adherence to social structure in the upper-crust aristocracy. “There is none of that sort of strange, labyrinthine social structure,” Parker Bowles says. “In Australia, everyone calls each other by their first names, [even if ] it’s the boss. It’s more democratic.”