GIVE A MAN A FISH...
Martin Bosley catches up with Teresa Pert, head chef at Wellington’s Ortega Fish Shack.
It’s 6.30am when I finally get a chance to speak with Teresa Pert. We have to be quick as she is on her way to work. She had finally got home at 2.30am that morning after finishing her night washing dishes with the new kitchen hand, “Otherwise,” she says, “we would never have got out.” Such is the glamorous life of this head chef, who today runs the kitchen of Wellington restaurant institution Ortega Fish Shack.
It’s a long way from her beginnings in Māhia and Wairoa. “My mum cooked a lot and I loitered in the kitchen when I was a kid,” Teresa says. “She was a really good cook and was a big influence. My nana was also in the kitchen and she was still baking at 90.” With days spent preserving, pickling and bottling seasonal produce, cooking was all Teresa ever wanted to do. Determined, she studied at CIT in Trentham and on graduating went to work in the kitchen of the Kaitoke Country Gardens restaurant before heading off to London where, she says, she had “no idea about ‘big’ food”. She had never heard of Michelin and its stars.
She found herself working for the exceptionally talented Kiwi chef Sean Marshall, learning much from him.
The training was tough in a hardcore kitchen but she held her own, gaining confidence and spending weeks thinking out a new dish and finding the time to play around. Returning to New Zealand, she took on a temporary job working for Mark Limacher at his Wellington restaurant, Roxburgh Bistro. She left there to go to Italy where she found herself “stuck in Florence living with relatives, living and eating like a local”. Eventually she got a job in a pizza joint owned by a Scotsman where one day the Moroccan chef, after stealing her sharpening steel, threatened to slit her throat. It coincided with her visa running out, so it was back to Wellington.
She joined chef Nick Huffman at Matterhorn just to help out, but stayed for six years. What followed was a variety of restaurants in Auckland, working alongside Sean Marshall again, helping open and rescue restaurants in trouble. It was, she says, “nightmare after nightmare”. Tired of being ‘the recipe lady’ she moved into her first head chef role at Pegasus Bay Winery Restaurant and to the strange environment of operating around a winery schedule. Here, surrounded by produce that she loved, she learnt how
food needs to suit its environment and, most importantly, not to worry about what anyone else is doing. As Teresa puts it, “Stick to your truth and cook from the heart.” Winning a few Cuisine awards along the way, she stayed for four years before Mark Limacher called her, looking for a head chef for his new restaurant, Frenchie. When Frenchie closed the following year, she moved next door to Ortega. She’s overseen the kitchen there since 2019 and feels like it's home: the family atmosphere, the energy and genuine passion for hospitality and the solid, consistent menu where respect and attention to detail is paramount. She regards Mark Limacher as her mentor, instilling in her a respect for ingredients and refinement.
She lives in Trentham and loves it, though a move to Ōtaki is on the horizon at some stage. She takes Cooper, her staffy-labrador-cross, to work with her every day, where he has a kennel on the roof of the kitchen.
In a throw-back to her childhood, the dish she is cooking for Cuisine features East Coast trevally. Fished off the local wharf, it was a bait fish when she was growing up and it wasn’t until she started cooking that she realised you could actually eat it. In some ways, it defines her cooking. “It’s a heartland dish, with a respectful nod to the Roxburgh,” she says. “Delicious, simple, with nothing fluffy. I am not about fluffy.”
TREVALLY WITH BUTTER-POACHED OYSTERS, BASIL BEURRE BLANC & RUSTIC SALAD
SERVES 4 / PREPARATION 15 MINUTES / COOKING 30 MINUTES
FOR THE FISH
4 x 250g trevally fillets, skin on 80ml canola oil
50g unsalted butter
BUTTER-POACHED OYSTERS
100g unsalted butter 100ml water
1 dozen oysters, either freshly shucked with juices reserved or from a pottle of shucked oysters, with the brine reserved
BASIL BEURRE BLANC
1 shallot, finely chopped 1cm piece ginger, finely sliced 1 sprig basil
1 sprig thyme
100ml medium white wine 250ml fish stock reserved oyster juices 250ml cream
30g unsalted butter, diced, chilled juice of ½ lemon
RUSTIC SALAD
1 cob sweetcorn
1 head gem or baby cos lettuce,
broken apart, washed
50g rocket or other peppery leaves 6 radishes, washed, trimmed,
quartered
1 small zucchini, thinly sliced
lengthwise
1 shallot, peeled, thinly sliced 1 handful picked dill, basil
& parsley leaves
SALAD DRESSING juice of 1 lemon 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard 50ml virgin olive oil
Season both sides of the trevally fillets with salt. Warm the oil in a non-stick frying pan and lay the fillets skin-side down in the oil. Keep the heat high and add the butter. Baste the fillets with the melted butter and let the skin colour. Do not turn the fillets over, but keep basting with the butter as the fillets cook. Keep the fish medium rare, so about 4 minutes should be long enough. Lift the fillets from the pan, place them onto a shallow dish and keep warm.
While the fish is cooking, prepare the oysters. Bring the butter and water to a gentle simmer in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and add the drained oysters. Gently stir the oysters a few times to distribute the heat and allow the oysters to tighten slightly – they should be warm yet still look glistening and fresh.
To make the basil beurre blanc, put the chopped shallot, ginger, basil, thyme and white wine into a small saucepan. Reduce the liquid over a low heat until only 2 tablespoons remain. Add the fish stock and half of the reserved oyster juices. Simmer for 3-4 minutes and reduce by a quarter. Add the remaining oyster juices and cream. Strain into a clean saucepan. Bring to a quiet simmer for a couple of minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the cold, diced butter. Season with salt and lemon juice. The sauce can be made in advance and kept warm but you will need to give it a whisk before serving.
For the salad, peel the husk off the corn cob. Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil and blanch the corn for 3 minutes. Drain and refresh the corn in a bowl of iced water. Strip the kernels from the corn cob by holding the drained cob upright on a board, one hand at the top, then slicing downwards with a large knife in the other. Tip the corn into a large mixing bowl. Add the remaining salad ingredients and toss together.
For the salad dressing, whisk together the lemon juice, Dijon mustard and olive oil in a small bowl. Season with salt.
Place a few spoonsful of beurre blanc onto a serving plate and top with the trevally, skin-side up. Arrange the oysters around the outside of the fish. Serve the salad on the side, dressing it at the last minute just before serving. ■
TREVALLY WAS A BAIT FISH WHEN SHE WAS GROWING UP AND IT WASN’T UNTIL SHE STARTED COOKING THAT SHE REALISED YOU COULD ACTUALLY EAT IT.