Meet our local chef who served the stars
You are at work when your boss walks in. He has a mate with him sporting a pink t-shirt and no shoes. Turns out, the bare-foot friend is Mick Jagger. What do you do? If you work for former ACDC drummer Phil Rudd – and this sort of thing happens just about every other week – you say ‘‘Hi, Mick’’ and continue cooking lunch.
This is how Nelson chef William Gould – Willz, according to his name tag – has rolled, through most of his culinary career.
He can reel off the celebs for whom he has cooked, like a teacher taking the roll at a school for the famous: Slash, ACDC, Mariah Carey, Ben Harper, Carlos Santana, the Beastie Boys...
‘‘Ben was one of the boys. He’d come and hang out with me while I was cooking, come down to the kitchen have drinks afterwards. I’d get to watch his concerts from the side, not the front.’’
At one point he had Slash’s personal phone number. He used to call him up.
The Guns n’ Roses guitarist has led a rock n’ roll lifestyle, a point brought home to Gould when he pushed Slash in the chest while getting between him and some over-enthusiastic fans.
‘‘He’s got a pacemaker. I thought I’d killed him.’’
It all began in the late 1980s, when Gould was a 14-year-old living in Nelson, getting in trouble with the police.
Though not involved in the criminal ‘‘hard stuff’’, his mother thought it wise to ship him off to Tauranga to his father in the hope of straightening him out.
Dad – a no-nonsense Scot – took Gould straight down to polytech and introduced him to a chef named Henry.
Henry must have seen some promise and took the youngster under his wing, even buying him a set of knives.
But it was no gentle introduction to the world of the professional kitchen.
‘‘Henry was a Spanish man from Morrocco and he looked like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
‘‘But he was hard, he was old school – he threw pans and threw them well.’’
But Gould managed to dodge the flying cookware long enough to find work at a Tauranga restaurant. And that’s where the fun began. After a couple of years he eyed a move to England but got only as far as Australia.
‘‘I had a few beers, walked into a restaurant and said how much would you pay me. They said if you can start on Monday we’ll pay you $26 an hour.’’
The restaurant, Ravesi’s Hotel in Sydney’s Bondi, was the favoured haunt for passing celebrities.
Before long, Gould had risen to the point where he was approached to rustle up dinner for stars seeking a private chef.
His celebrity guests came to include Mariah Carey, ACDC and Red Hot Chilli Peppers bass player Flea.
One of his favourite stories was when he was cooking for Flea in his room with his wife and young children.
‘‘A young Italian waitress knocked on the door walked into the room and Flea says ‘This glass of champagne is on me’ and pours it over her chest.’’ Flea’s wife was not impressed. While based at Ravesi’s, Gould would go on tour with bands – often for months at a time.
But for every easy-going celebrity customer, there was a Mariah Carey.
‘‘Mariah would call me at two in the morning saying ‘I feel like a carbonara’. But everything had to be made from scratch.
‘‘I’d make it and send it up to her and she’d say ‘I don’t really feel like that now. I just feel like a milkshake’.’’
After about five years, Gould embarked on a world tour, intent on broadening his culinary horizons. That lasted seven years before he woke up in the Khyber Pass and decided it was time to go home.
Having met ACDC while working at Ravesi’s, Gould developed a friendship with Rudd, thanks to the pair’s Kiwi connection and a shared passion for pre1965 race cars.
Gould looked up Rudd when he returned to Tauranga and was promptly offered a job, as head chef at Rudd’s eatery Phil’s Place.
‘‘The story goes Phil walked into the place, they didn’t realise who he was, they treated him bad so he said, ‘That’s it I’m buying this place and you’re all fired’. And he did.’’ Clearly money wasn’t an object. ‘‘He couldn’t buy cigarettes, the one’s he wanted, so he bought the place next door and turned it into a cafe´ and sold the cigarettes he wanted.’’
For Rudd, home to work was just a few kilometres.
‘‘He couldn’t be bothered driving so he would fly his helicopter, call ahead to get the carpark cleared just to buy a pack of cigarettes.’’
Gould worked for Rudd for two years before returning to Nelson after his mother became sick.
He still feels a fondness for Rudd, particularly following the drummer’s high-profile legal troubles. Rudd was arrested and charged with attempting to procure a murder, threatening to kill, possession of methamphetamine and possession of cannabis, after a 2014 police raid.
The attempting to procure a murder charge was dropped and he was eventually sentenced to eight months home detention.
‘‘He’s still a nice gentleman. That’s all I can say. He’s not a close friend, I won’t say that, but I would stop in the street and talk to him and he knows who I am. He knows the family, he knows my dad.
‘‘Whenever he runs into dad at the raceway he still asks how I am. A lot of the media has portrayed him as a spoilt brat and things like this but he is a nice guy.’’
These days Gould is working as sous chef at Miyazu in Nelson, doing, among other things, teppanyaki.
It’s a role he says he felt honoured to be considered for ‘‘especially being a sixfoot Maori working in a Japanese restaurant’’. The change of pace suits him well. ‘‘I’m enjoying it, I don’t have to worry about the stress of rosters, I just get to throw food at my guests.
‘‘Japanese food looks simple but its not.’’
He is content living the quiet life on his lifestyle block with his partner Eleena, their horses and pet ram, Rammy.
He’s had a lot of fun but he’s happy to leave the celebrity lifestyle behind.
Ultimately he says he owes a great deal to his early mentor, Henry.
‘‘Fourteen was a tipping point. Most of the guys I hung out with then are dead or in jail now.
‘‘I was taught stick your head down and work hard and you’ll make it.
‘‘I’d like to think I’ve made it.’’