THE CUISINE QUEEN
Food critic Lauraine Jacobs dishes it up
Here are just a few of the quotes, gathered from Lauraine Jacobs during the interview for this article, in which the names of well-known or influential people appear:
“Ruth Reichl (former New York Times and Los Angeles Times restaurant critic and one of the most powerful food writers in America) — she knocked on the front door here. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘Am I pleased to get here.’” “I’ve had John Key at this table twice.” “I got Jay Rayner to come to the [Auckland] Writers Festival.”
“I know Tom Parker Bowles really well. I’ve been trying to get Tom Parker Bowles back for a while.”
“The other person we got was Anthony Bourdain.”
“What’s-his-name was up here — he’s on the board [of Air New Zealand] — Norm Thompson.”
“I wrote an email to Chris Quin when there was an article about him as the new chief executive of Foodstuffs and not once was the word food mentioned. And that incensed me because supermarkets are making money out of food and I would like to think the CEO of the largest and the only NZ-owned supermarket chain cared about food. So, of course, he phoned me up.”
“The next time I saw [National Party MP] Nathan Guy, he went, ‘Hello Lauraine,’ and walked on real fast. He did!”
Others, many, many others: Madhur Jaffrey, who Jacobs once took to a friend’s house for dinner; Michelin-starred, Kiwi-born, New York chef Matt Lambert, who commented on one of her Facebook posts recently; many friends in Hollywood; top Canadian food critic Lesley Chesterman and famed Canadian food personality Alan Fong.
Besides the names, there’s also the invitations, solicitations and appreciation that make up her life:
“I just got a call from [ Cuisine magazine editor] Kelli Brett and she’s got to do something, because Fairfax are running this influential women of the year thing and she’s got to write about a series of people that are in wine and food. And she said, ‘You’re the most influential person I’ve met,’ she said, ‘So can I write about you?’”
“I remember Angela Clifford from Canterbury, who runs the Food Farm and is part of [new food initiative] ConversatioNZ, and she said to me, ‘How come you know everyone?’”
“The woman who who organised Creative Matakana, Jo Connor, wanted to have a little bit of a food component and asked me to do cooking lessons. And I said, ‘Oh no, we can do much better than that.’ And the rest of that week was spectacular.”
“[Famed Lyttelton restaurateur Giulio Sturla] asked me to be the speaker [at ConversatioNZ]. I remember getting up and saying everything I thought was wrong about New Zealand and also everything that was right. And the next guy got up and spoke and said, ‘Well we can all go home now because Lauraine said it all.’”
The most prominent piece of writing on the home page of Jacobs’ website is a quote from Charlie Trotter, the decorated two-Michelin star chef from Chicago who died in 2013. It reads: “I would easily classify Lauraine Jacobs as the high priestess of the international food and wine scene.”
Food and wine marketing veteran Kathie Bartley, who recently invited Jacobs to be head judge for the inaugural New Zealand Food Producer Awards, says: “New Zealanders tend to be: you don’t share your success, you don’t gloat, you’re very humble. Lauraine is opposite to that, in that she will tell you that she’s important, that she was president of this, and she’s written how many books. She does tell you about herself.”
Simon Wilson, one of Auckland’s leading food writers and Jacobs’ former editor at Cuisine, says: “She just cannot stop herself from letting you know how important she is.”
THERE IS no easy way to categorise Jacobs, 68, who is more completely enmeshed in every part of the New Zealand food and culinary scene than any other person alive or, probably, dead.
For the bulk of her career, she was a key writer and editor for Cuisine, the magazine that both defined and helped lead the movement beyond our long-cherished roasts-and-tearooms food culture.
During her time at Cuisine, she wrote reviews, recipes, opinions, travel guides,
and generally established herself as one of the preeminent voices of the New Zealand food scene.
She also served as president of the prestigious US-based International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), as president of the New Zealand Guild of Food Writers, as part of a government food and beverage taskforce, and as New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s food and wine ambassador to North America. In 2009, she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the food industry.
Today she has a weekly column in the Listener and strong opinions, regularly-voiced, about nearly everything related to food.
“Food writer” is probably the most literally accurate phrase, but that descriptor fails to recognise the intricacy and depth with which she has connected herself into the food world both at home and abroad, so that she has assumed importance far beyond her abilities as either writer or cook.
As a young woman, after realising she didn’t want to spend her life as the schoolteacher she had trained to be, Jacobs went to London and attended the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
Returning to New Zealand, she went through a bunch of cooking-related roles: running cooking classes from her Remuera kitchen, operating a cooking school with high-profile Auckland chef Scott Ashton, then entering food writing as a contributor of mostly brunch-related articles to Fashion
Quarterly in the 1980s.
It’s not just about me — it’s what I can do for everybody else. Lauraine Jacobs
Her career really took off after she joined the writing staff of Cuisine within a few issues of its launch in 1986.
She spent 22 years there, through its glory years, before being pushed out in 2009 by theneditor Eric Matthews.
“Contributors can, and need to, change,” Matthews told the Herald at the time. “I think anything that remains for too long can get a little stale.”
It was an ending that left Jacobs “very, very sad”.
ASKED WHETHER she has a PR person, she laughs: “That’s not me. It’s just not about me — it’s what I can do for everyone else. It was like that when I took on that presidency [of the IACP] in America. I mean, I’ve been president of the Guild of Food Writers here, too. It really needed picking up.”
Jacobs spent eight years on the IACP’s board of directors. Part of her reach and network and influence comes from her time there, but it’s also what got her there in the first place.
She loves a cause and a fight and a fight for a cause. Right now, she’s fighting for the volcanic soil vegetable-growing grounds of Pukekohe, which are under threat, having been zoned for housing.
She was incensed by Nathan Guy’s lack of action on the issue, so she decided to take action herself.
“Why don’t we get a whole group of people from Pukekohe and horticulture,” she says, “and why don’t we apply for the traditional fertile vegetable growing area of Auckland to have world heritage status? That’s the only way I can see we can scotch it.
“This is my big, brilliant idea and a lot of people have said, ‘Yeah that’s great, and that was actually only about eight or 10 weeks ago, and I’ve actually had a meeting with somebody from ATEED [Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development], who lives out in the Franklin area and she says it’s brilliant and she’s given me some ideas too.”
The word most commonly ascribed to Jacobs, by both herself and others, is “champion”. She is constantly championing New Zealand food and food producers. Her grand fight is for people around the world to recognise how good New Zealand’s food is so that everyone in the food industry can get the recognition and money she believes they deserve.
“A lot of New Zealanders will hate me for this, but our very best food and our very best wine is
Lauraine will always call a spade a shovel. You can choose to accept that or you can choose not to. Allyson Gofton
the bargain of the planet,” she says.
She points out that people eating at world’s best restaurant Noma’s pop-up restaurant in Mexico pay US$650 per person and that people buy bottles of wine from Bordeaux for $3000, and she says that New Zealand could do with valuing its best stuff this way.
“I can go up to the supermarket and of course I can buy a bottle of wine for $9.50 or $11.50 but I can’t buy a bottle for $1100. We need to value that stuff and we need to find the people in the world that are prepared to pay it.”
She has played a role in the recent founding of ConversatioNZ, a group of leading New Zealand food people who have come together to champion our food, drink and culinary tourism, and she’s also recently added her voice to an anti-food waste campaign Love Food, Hate Waste.
Wilson says: “Her strong suit is entrepreneurial. She’s a champion for New Zealand food. And that’s what she’s really good at. So she has made it her business to know everybody.”
Allyson Gofton, whose role in our national consciousness as host of the 60-second Food in
a Minute television commercial coincided with Jacobs’ reign at Cuisine, says: “Lauraine was and is a good food writer, though for me her real talent lies in her endless passion and enthusiasm to support the New Zealand professional food industry. Behind the scenes Lauraine is dynamite — well-connected, fearless to speak her mind and always but always in support of chefs and the industry.”
She is not the only person in the New Zealand food world to have a lot of strong opinions but she is somebody whose strong opinions are regularly given more space and time and attention than most.
“Do you think it’s because I’m hanging in there?” she asks. “I think it is. I think it probably is because of the passion for it and I really do feel quite strongly about being supportive of everybody, of our farmers ... and putting my hand up to do things.”
IT’S A vaguely odd thing that she’s not better known. Annabel Langbein, Ray McVinnie, Allyson Gofton, Jo Seagar: these are just a few food-writing contem-poraries of Jacobs who have become much more famous, predominantly by virtue of being on television, something she has never done, at least not in any sustained or high-profile way.
“I bet it eats her up,” says Wilson. “She’d deny it. She’d go, ‘No, I’d be silly on TV,’ but she would have loved to have been a TV star. But could you imagine it? Because the only way to make Lauraine work on TV is for her to just fully embrace the Remuera matron thing and just go for it — there are some people who would laugh at that — and just embrace the imperiousness of it, and you become the queen.”
“Wouldn’t you love to see it? But sadly our television makers don’t take those kinds of risks. They might do it with a man but they won’t do it with a woman.”
ONE THING that nearly everybody says about Jacobs, in different and varyingly diplomatic ways, is that she’s divisive and — possibly related — that she’s quite outspoken.
Gofton says Jacobs was never hostile towards her, but that, “Lauraine will always call a spade a shovel. You can choose to accept that or you can choose not to.”
Says Wilson, “She rubs quite a lot of people up the wrong way. I don’t know that people are going to tell you that. There’s a bit of Remuera in Lauraine that gets in the way of her more natural enthusiasm, I think, sometimes.”
Bartley says, “She’s very outspoken. She says what she thinks. So she’s made a few enemies along the way because she does say what she thinks.”
Langbein: “She’s really tenacious and she’s not frightened of saying something which could be controversial if she believes it. If she believes in something she’ll say it ... She doesn’t really mind what people think.”
And Wilson again: “Lauraine likes to be number one. You can call that admirable ambition, but when anyone wants to be number one there’s always a less-than-admirable component to it.”
Gofton: “Yes Lauraine has a reputation for being quite a divisive personality. So what of it? It got Trump voted President. Get over it.”
During a conversation at her house recently, Jacobs said, “I love the new word “disruption”, don’t you? I think there needs to be some more