SUE’S SILVER LININGS Catering to life’s surprises
THE REALITY TV JUDGE TALKS CAKES, CANCER AND HER RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
If you had to pick just one word to describe The Great Kiwi Bake Off judge and catering queen Sue Fleischl, you’re best to go with bolshie.
She was bolshie when, at the age of 11, she took umbrage at her intermediate school cooking teacher for taking her Victoria sponge cake out of the oven instead of letting Sue do it – so she stayed behind at morning tea the next day and took everyone’s sponges out of the oven so she could see how they all cooked.
She was bolshie when, aged 17 and working at the famed Savoy Hotel in London, she went up to the “toughest, most horrible” chef in the kitchen and asked to work in the butchery department – becoming the first woman, and probably the first vegetarian, to do so.
Sue (55) later married him. “Well, not for long, we were only married for four and a half years,” she smiles. “We’re very good friends still and we have a beautiful daughter together. We just weren’t very good at being married!”
And she was most definitely bolshie when, confronted with a diagnosis of breast cancer, she demanded a double mastectomy with “none of this fluffing around – I want as much chemo as you can give me. Double it!” It turns out that bolshiness saved her life.
Chatting to the Weekly in her sumptuous kitchen on Auckland’s North Shore over tea and a slice of Jaffa cake, Sue’s outwardly calm, quiet and nurturing nature belies a steely strength that’s served her well during her 30-odd years in the hospitality industry. She has gone from being a onewoman catering company, operating off a stainless steel bench she installed in the lounge of her rental home, to commanding a staff of 23 full-time employees. Even she can’t quite believe it sometimes – though she did start as she meant to go on, somewhat optimistically calling her business The Great Catering Company from day dot.
“Ah, well you’ve always got to think big,” she laughs. “My friends would come over and see this little bench and say, ‘The Great Catering Company?’ And I’d just say, you watch. One day.”
Growing up in Hawke’s Bay, food was everything to the Fleischl family. Sue’s father was an Austrian Jew who fled to New Zealand during the war, so the menu at the dinner table was a bit different from her friends, Sue says.
“We grew our own olives and guavas and figs, and we’d have schnitzel and sauerkraut. The kids in the neighbourhood would go, ‘Ew, what’s that?’ But then it would be, ‘Let’s go to the Fleischls for dinner.’”
With a passion for food already brewing – and the Victoria sponge now mastered, thanks to her very patient cooking teacher – Sue knew that she wanted to be a chef, much to her dad’s horror.
“I come from a very brainy family, my father’s a physician, my brother’s medical too… but I think the brains ran out by the time they got to me,” she grins. “Though I’ve got the street smarts!
“My father said, ‘Why don’t you be a nurse or a teacher?’ And I thought, ‘I couldn’t think of anything worse for me’. So he said, ‘Okay, if you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it properly.’”
After writing dozens of letters to top hotels around the world, asking if they had a place for
Sue, only one came back – and it was from the Savoy.
“And then I was off!” Sue says.
“I stayed there for two years and
I loved it.”
Eventually the lure of home was too much and after stints working in some of Auckland’s top restaurants, Sue’s life took a detour.
Now a single mother, she had to figure out a way to provide for her daughter Dominique (30) and get back into the workforce with a baby. Someone suggested catering, and she was away.
“I love it so much,” she smiles. “I love making people’s days. I love the weddings, and even the funerals can be beautiful.”
Growing her business from just herself into what it is today took a lot of blood, sweat and tears, she nods – and she had to learn a whole heap about herself in a very short time.
“I realised eventually I was the problem in my own business.
I was a chef, not a businesswoman,” she says.
“I wanted to grow, so I had to kick myself, learn new things and how to manage
people. People say, ‘Treat people how you want to be treated.’ I think that is a load of rubbish. Treat people as they wish to be treated. You have to understand what their personality is like. Some people I can be direct with and with others I have to be fluffy.”
While learning how to direct a team was tough, it had nothing on what was coming in 2012, when Sue was diagnosed with cancer. It was a brutal blow – but not unexpected. “It was a case of when, not if,” she tells. “My grandmother had it, my sister had it. When it finally reared its head, it was like, ‘Thank God, we can finally deal with this and get on with life.’”
She continues with a wry grin, “I was, er, quite forceful with my surgeon. If you’re going to do something, do it right, and I wanted as much treatment as I could have. And it turned out that I had much more cancer than they’d thought; it was in my lymph nodes. I was right – the surgeon actually said to me, ‘You’ve saved your own life.’“
Sue was also determined to find any silver lining she could – even posing for a photo shoot to show off her newly bald head. “I loved being bald,” she sighs.
“It was liberating.”
Now totally clear of cancer and newly engaged to fiancé Michael, “the best person in the whole wide world”, Sue can’t help but squeal with delight as she talks about her upcoming wedding. “I wasn’t looking for love – I’d resigned myself that I’d be this little old lady with a cat,” she laughs.
“But, you know when you have your reflective days? I was driving to work the other day, and thought, ‘If I was to do my life over again, would I do it the same way?’ I think I would.
“It just comes down to believing in myself. Every now and then there are still times where I think, ‘I can’t do this.’ But it’s about saying, ‘Come on girl, you’ve done so much – yes you can!’”