EATING AT 3AM

Sometimes you get your best ideas in the middle of the night.

We’ve been stalking an Instagram account for some time now with great interest. No personal name or background info, just stark, beautiful photos of food, with no distractions. It's obviously created by someone who understands flavour and technique, has a sense of great determination and focus, and is all alone into the wee hours of the morning. Who is ‘Eating at 3am’?

David Neville is a Wellington-based chef and consultant who likes to keep his knives close to his chest. It was a chance meeting with a client who described a memory of eating one of his dishes many years ago – and David having absolutely no recollection of that dish – that made this chef realise that he has cooked thousands of dishes, personally creating hundreds, and has reached the point where information is beginning to leak away with age. Eating at 3am was born from a desire to document and record his creations. “Those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

And so David devised an Instagram project which of course included photography (a subject he knew very little about) to enable him to document his work. As a chef, he knew that this project would have to be done outside of working hours and that would require starting at 5am some days, or working late into the morning on others.

“Eating at 1pm, or eating at 10:45am didn’t have a nice ring to it. Seriously, try saying eating at (insert whatever time you like), it won’t sound as good as eating at 3am.”

David also knew that without any names or associations it meant that the food could be viewed and judged on its own merits and qualities. For the same reason David has been tightlipped about his career that has spanned almost 25 years, working with, or for, some impressive culinary champions such as Peter Thornley, Rex Morgan, Tetsuya, Gordon Ramsay, Shannon Bennett, Charlie Trotter and Ben Shewry. “I never wanted to ride on their names and successes. The hard truth is that sometimes you just can’t mention some of these very accomplished chefs without it overshadowing your own work.”

David feels food has never been more exposed than it is now. The massive amount of available media means that a subculture of foodies will happily stay up until the early hours watching Netflix’s Chef’s Table, or scrolling through