ROAD TO RECOVERY:
after a ghastly year, life is rosier for chef Michael Van de Elzen
It’s fair to say 2019 was an awful year for chef Michael Van de Elzen and his wife Belinda – cancer treatment, a motorbike crash and a host of family health crises – but Emma Clifton finds things are looking rosier now as their cook school and its flourishing garden take off and they can finally enjoy their country idyll.
There’s an unexpected problem that arises when interviewing a chef, particularly when they’ve just cooked for you – the food provides quite a distraction. Michael Van de Elzen, the smiling, bespectacled chef behind The Food Truck TV show and the Good From Scratch brand, has just opened a cookery school with his wife and business partner, Belinda, who’s also a trained chef. We are all sitting at one of the long wooden tables in their new building, with huge open windows letting in the beach breeze from nearby Muriwai, one of the stunning beaches that line the west coast of Auckland. On the table is the product of our morning’s work: a caramelised beetroot tarte tartin, topped with a roasted hazelnut and rosemary balsamic glaze, shaved parmesan and fresh rocket. It is so good that I have to abandon all attempts at professional manners and ask if I can polish off the leftovers.
With almost 30 years’ experience each, Mike and Bee (as Belinda is known) are the kind of talented gourmets who can create extraordinary meals with what seems like no effort at all. In between being interviewed, Mike, 47, goes out to collect ingredients from the bountiful garden the pair have planted, which feeds the cooking school. He’s boiling fresh beetroot and caramelising sugar and doing that chef thing where it looks as if he’s making it up as he goes along, but with the kind of skill and experience that means it’s like watching a jazz artist at work. In the cookery school spirit, I’m also wearing an apron and crushing hazelnuts and rolling out pastry. The idea for the Good From Scratch Cookery School has been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for a long, long time for the pair, since they worked in their first farm-to-table establishment 20 years ago while on their OE in Europe. Five years ago, they bought the house in Muriwai and shifted there from central Auckland, with a plan to transform the lifestyle block. “In a way, we feel like the land chose us,” says Bee, 47.
The idyllic escape to the country started smoothly enough. But a couple of years ago, reality hit hard in the form of Mike’s cancer diagnosis. And then, one by one, a domino effect of bad news kept coming.
When the pair sit down for their Australian Women’s Weekly interview, they are warm, welcoming and enthusiastic about their new project, the friendliest hosts you can imagine. They are also battle-weary after a very long, very hard 18 months. In late 2018, Mike was about to hit the road for a couple of months to promote his new Good For Scratch Kids Cookbook. He kept getting struck down with a sore throat and losing his voice. He was diagnosed with polyps, so he had them removed, but that wasn’t the end of it. His voice got worse, so he sought a second opinion.
Eventually, it turned out to be cancer of the voice box. “I was 46… it’s not that old, you know?” Mike says of the diagnosis. “I was told there was a high chance they could cure it but there was also a small chance my voice would never recover.
“When you’re about to embark on all this” – he waves an arm around the spectacular cooking school – “you think, do we do this or not? If we don’t do it now, we’ll never do it. But if we do, and then I lose my voice forever… who’s going to run it?”
Disaster strikes
He was diagnosed just before Christmas 2018. Over the summer holidays, four days into 2019, Mike was riding a motorcross bike with a friend on Muriwai Beach when they both went over a sand dune that had a hidden 20m drop at the end of it. The bike landed on Mike and he was hospitalised with a broken ankle and a damaged back. Once he started walking again, it became obvious he had also torn all the ligaments in both knees.
When he got out of hospital after the accident, it was time for him to begin radiation therapy for his cancer. Five days a week for six weeks, Mike went to Auckland’s Mercy Hospital for his treatment, which involved having a mask fitted tightly to his face and then bolted in place while he went into the radiation machine, unable to move. A nightmare for anyone, but particularly if you’re claustrophobic, as Mike most certainly is. “This red haze came over me,” is how he describes it.
The treatment was exhausting, and he was often in bed by 6pm. Towards the end of the six weeks, he was also in tremendous pain. But he was still fairly positive, knowing things would eventually get better. Then, in May, Mike’s best friend, Steve Ward, was killed in a car accident. Shortly after, Bee’s stepfather had passed away. It didn’t end there; at the time of our interview, Bee’s father had just died from oesophageal cancer.
The road to recovery, for both Mike and Bee, is a long one. For Mike, a man who is famous for big glasses and an even bigger smile, finding his way back to his naturally cheerful self still requires conscious effort. “A year later, that’s still going on,” he says of his mental health work. “When you’re on TV, things change as well,” he says of his TV career, which started in 2012 with The Food Truck and saw him become extremely recognisable, almost overnight. “No longer can you just go out in public and willy-nilly do whatever you choose to, because people look up to you. And I’m fine with that; I’m grand with that.” But it was an adjustment, he says, to suddenly go straight from the kitchen into the spotlight, even if the response was nearly always positive.
Being a chef and being a TV personality require very different skill sets and becoming “public property” was something he admits, in hindsight, he wasn’t that prepared for. “It’s made me a lot… not an introvert, but certainly not as outgoing as I used to be. And that’s not because of the cancer, that’s through being a personality on TV that gets recognised.”
“On the cancer side, I still think about it every day and whether it will come back,” Mike adds. “And I think about my kids a lot. And what I do, to counteract that, is I eat as well as I can, I look after myself and I exercise. Exercise is a great way to put good hormones and good feelings back into your body. You finish a bike ride and you’re on top of the world. It’s been my biggest way to get positive again and get back on track.”
Rural happiness
Starting a family wasn’t easy for Mike and Bee – they went through many rounds of IVF in order to have their daughters, Hazel, nine, and Ivy, seven. They were keen to find a way to adapt their cooking careers so they would fit around having kids; restaurant hours of 7am till midnight, six days a week, are about as family un-friendly as you can get.
They wanted their girls to experience a taste of the rural upbringing they enjoyed in 1970s New Zealand. Mike and his siblings grew up on a poultry farm in West Auckland, which was both idyllic and a lot of hard work.
It meant they got to spend a lot of time outdoors, enjoying nature, but had very few holidays, as they could rarely leave the farm. It never fails to amuse Mike that people assume his mother was the inspiration for his cooking career. “Mum didn’t have all day to sit down and do beautiful pasta dishes. We were on a farm!” he says. The daily meal was roast chicken – freshly killed, plucked and cooked by his mother – with overcooked beans and boiled potatoes. “I grew up eating a lot of chicken,” he laughs. “Holy smokes. So much chicken.” His love of cooking traces back to his teenage years, when he got a job washing dishes at a local steakhouse every Friday night. “I loved it – I loved the energy of being in the kitchen, I loved being part of a team. I loved everything about it.”
Bee’s journey to becoming a chef
“I think about the cancer every day… I eat as well as I can, I look after myself and I exercise.”
FROM TOP: Mike and Bee when the girls were younger – they’re fans of garden to table eating; Mike and baby Ivy.
also started young. Her mum and step-dad ran a tearoom in Nga¯tea and before school she would fill doughnuts and make sandwiches.
There was very little sign of the foodie scene we now have in New Zealand. Mike can recall only two or three restaurants in Auckland for family dinners, and Bee struggles to think of any TV cooking shows they saw on television. “Hudson and Halls?” Mike jokes. “Billy T [James]?” As well as a staple diet of chicken, and curried egg sandwiches, one of Mike’s strongest childhood culinary memories was his mother’s odd but ingenious way of getting bread to rise. “She would make bread at night time, after we’d gone to bed. She’d wrap it in a towel, and then slide it into bed with me, my little single bed,” Mike laughs. “The body heat would ferment it and you’d wake up in the night with this big, squishy thing in the bed with
you.” He lets out a fake scream. “And then you’d realise it was the dough.”
The couple first met as young chefs when Bee applied for a job at an Auckland restaurant where Mike ran the kitchen. They worked together for a year before Mike headed to London. When he looks back now, he still can’t believe he was made head chef so young, because he had “no idea” about anything. “I just chased the money,” he admits. “When you’re young, my focus wasn’t on the job, I just wanted to get from where I was to getting paid better, as fast as I could, so I could go out and buy fast cars and waste all of my money on things that boys do.”
He does however acknowledge that he was a “bloody hard worker”, and part of the reason for his OE to the UK was because he wanted to get better and he knew that shifting overseas was the way to go. A year and a half after he had moved to London, Bee also headed over to gain more experience. They flatted together for a year before things became romantic.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Mike grins as he recalls their slowest of slow burns. “You can work with someone for a few years and live with them for year or so before it takes someone else to go, ‘Hey, you two – you need to open your eyes.’” They stayed in London for another four years, working their way through basement kitchens – “tough work, lots of pressure, lots of hours” – before shifting to Ireland, to a boutique hotel and restaurant called Dunbrody Country House. Overnight, they went from cooking for 1000 a night to a maximum of 44; but the workload was still intense because they were also foraging for all their ingredients.
In 2003, they were awarded the prestigious World Small Hotel of the Year by Condé Nast. Their Irish experience cemented their long-term idea for a rural cookery school and garden, but they knew it wouldn’t be straightforward. “We came back to
New Zealand and opened Molten [in 2003],” Mike says of their awardwinning restaurant in Auckland’s Mt Eden. “It’s a series of steps – you can’t just come back and do something like the cooking school, either financially or because you need to cut your cloth. You can’t just go out to the country and say, ‘Everybody come!’ You need a respected name. This place has been 20 years in the making, and now that it’s here, I still need to pinch myself sometimes.”
Cook school dream
The goal behind the move to a lifestyle block in Muriwai was to create a produce garden and cookery school set-up that would offset the costs of living on a farm. “It had to tick a lot of boxes,” Mike says of the school.
“It needed to be warm and welcoming, and it had to have a lot of natural light.” The positioning of the building, amongst the spectacular natural beauty of Muriwai, is a key selling point, agrees Bee. “People walk through that door and go, ‘Wow!’ and that’s exactly what we wanted to capture, that beautiful landscape.”
The school opened in early 2020 and Mike and Bee have big plans for how the school, and the space, could evolve for the future. Muriwai has a burgeoning food scene, with local wineries and breweries, and the aim is to open up the cooking classes and have guest cooking hosts come in.
Bookings are steady, and the pair are being patient, knowing that word of mouth will work for them – they have had glowing reviews from those who have done the half or full-day course so far. “We want it to be a little more consistent, and that will come in time,” Mike says. He estimates that it took five years of running Molten before they stopped panicking about whether they would be able to pay the bills at the end of every week. It’s not an industry for the faint-hearted, ever.
Their pace of life at Muriwai is quieter than it used to be, but it’s still a fair way from being a leisurely step back. The classes are led by Mike and Bee, who take the participants through the lush garden to pick the day’s ingredients, and then cook three or four different meals in the kitchen. The hours are long – the full day, for example, starts at 8.30am and runs till about 6pm.
The spectacular garden is growing well, and once they have an abundance of produce they’re looking at a local fruit and vege delivery system and opening a shop selling ready-to-eat meals made from the garden. The ethos of the Good From Scratch brand remains just as important as it was when Mike and Bee launched it in 2016 – people want to know what they’re feeding themselves and their families. Healthy eating is also the focus of the new show Mike will star in, Eat Well for Less, screening on TVNZ from late
April, which helps Kiwi families serve up good food on a budget.
Being able to have a busy life on a smaller scale is good for the kids as well. Life is easier – Mike and Bee’s hellish Auckland city commute was swapped for simply walking across the farm. It also allowed them to go to ground during the stresses of 2019; the natural world providing a port in the storm for the family.
“The challenges that we went through last year… it wasn’t just us,” Mike says, referring to their young daughters. It was a balancing act to keep them informed, but also protected, he and Bee agree. “They were quite aware of the motorbike accident, because they were there and they saw it first-hand.”
“We removed them a little bit from the radiation treatment [process],” Bee says. “But I think one of the hardest parts of last year was when Steve was killed. Because they knew that was ‘Uncle Stevie’, and one of Mike’s closest friends; we spent a lot of time together as two families. Not so long ago, Ivy burst into tears out of the blue… ‘I just miss Uncle Stevie.’ So they don’t forget, at all, and I don’t know if they really move on. I think they process things and store it away in different ways.”
They were all keen to put 2019 behind them, but they also knew much of it would be ongoing, particularly when it came to Bee’s father’s cancer diagnosis. “Last year, a friend of mine said, ‘In 2020, you’re going to turn a corner.’ And in my mind I knew I’d still got a major challenge to get through, and that’s my lovely Dad. He was progressively getting worse; it’s like he went from a 70-year-old to a 90-year-old overnight,” Bee says. “I have to say – and pardon my language – but I’m buggered. Emotionally, you don’t realise until you go through all that stuff and then look back.”
In that way, the cookery school became something to aim for in a different way; not just the culmination of decades’ worth of work, but also the light at the end of the tunnel. And now they’re here, and the sun is shining, the garden is flourishing, and life is on its way to getting very good again. “We’re a farm-based cookery school,” Bee says, looking around her, as the sea air whistles past. “We’ve dreamed of this for so long, nearly 20 years. To be finally sitting in this space, through all that fog last year…” she shakes her head with a smile. “We’ve done it.”
“This place has been 20 years in the making… I still need to pinch myself sometimes.”