Simon says
You get nowhere by shouting
I love restaurants. It’s my life, I’ve always done it. I want my little girl to grow up and walk into the kitchen and wash dishes and hopefully have a go cooking some time.’
THE BARIOLE olive is, even by deli standards, a very big olive. Simon Gault plops the matt-brown globe in his mouth. ‘‘Mmmm.’’ Meaty. Salty. Spicy. ‘‘It’s like a meal.’’ Mmmm. ‘‘I’m still going!’’
Twenty-nine seconds and counting. Gault knows how to sell food.
But, on Monday, an official announcement: The MasterChef judge who has been in the eating business since he left high school had resigned as the executive chef – and celebrity face – of Nourish Group.
Gault is leaving nine restaurants. Auckland’s Euro, Fish, and Jervois Steak House; Wellington’s Pravda and Shed 5, Crab Shacks in both cities, Bistro Lago in Taupo and another steakhouse in Queenstown.
By Friday morning, his successor had not been announced. The rumour mill was grinding names, including local My Kitchen Rules judge Gareth Stewart who left his job at Soul Bar earlier this week, but Nourish had nothing to say.
We phoned the group’s appointed public relations mouthpiece. Who was taking the top job? ‘‘I’m not sure about that, sorry.’’
Who would know? ‘‘It’s not something that we’re discussing at the moment and I’m not able to confirm anything or put a timeline on it.’’
Would Nourish director Richard Sigley front for an interview? ‘‘About this particular subject, no.’’
By the time you read this, Gault and his family (wife Katrina, daughter Hazel) will be in Sri Lanka, where he’s judging the Dilmah Real High Tea Global Challenge. But on Tuesday, he was in a warehouse in Takanini, 30 minutes south of downtown Auckland, contemplating his future.
The decision to leave, he says, has been coming for a while. He was not pushed. ‘‘I can categorically tell you that is absolutely not the case.’’
So why has he left? ‘‘I want to be a dad. And I want to have another restaurant. I love restaurants. It’s my life, I’ve always done it. I want my little girl to grow up and walk into the kitchen and wash dishes and hopefully have a go cooking sometime or working out the front and schmoozing people and hopefully putting a smile on their faces and having them walk out and go ‘that was incredible’.
‘‘That’s what I love to do. But I want to do it for me and my family and if I’m going to be living and breathing it, then it’s for my family to have.’’
That new restaurant, he says, will be his best yet.
‘‘They won’t be getting Euro’s rotisserie chicken. That’s in the past. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’ll have something new and better.’’
When? ‘‘It depends on some negotiating. Within six months? It could be . . .’’
You could fill a newspaper with Gault’s career achievements. A direct-from-King’s-College apprenticeship with Tony Astle at Antoine’s; the opening of Bell House, his first restaurant, at just 23; Gault’s on Quay, one of the first eateries on Auckland’s Viaduct; extended international cooking jobs for Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller and Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison; repeat seasons with
MasterChef New Zealand and 12 years with Nourish. He’s currently listed with the Companies Office as a shareholder in something called ChocolateLab Franchising (‘‘That’s a project that may appear. There’s nothing really to talk about . . I’ve got a bunch of ideas floating around and that is one of them’’). And, in the background for 16 years now, Sous Chef, the online, fine food and speciality equipment business he runs out of Takanini. Products include his own brand seasonings and stocks.
The latter was a three-year labour of love. Just days before the first batch was due to hit supermarkets, he says, there was a cap failure.
‘‘We had to throw the whole lot in the bin. A lot. Enough to supply every Countdown in New Zealand.’’
The guided tour of Sous Chef starts in the giant chillers. Italian cheeses, Australian wagyu beef and a box of yakon from Gault’s own garden in Drury.
It’s a clue, perhaps, to where he’s going next. According to one organic gardening blog, yakon, the so-called ‘‘apple of the earth’’ contains a sweetener that is not absorbed by the body. Gault, it must be noted, is considerably slimmer these days. Last year, at Euro, he began touting the virtues of buffalo milk butter and unrefined sugars.
‘‘I’m hugely passionate about it. I’ve lost a reasonable amount of weight,’’ he says. ‘‘I should show you a picture I put on Facebook last night . . .
‘‘I had two people who worked for me who were both overweight. I sat them down and said ‘the time has come that you have to address this’. I actually have a responsibility to help, having been through that journey.’’
Gault provided dietary advice, superfood smoothies and asked his staffers to text him daily evidence of what they’d eaten for dinner.
That Facebook entry is the before and after photographs of one woman’s transformation – a 21 kilogram weight loss in four months.
Coming soon to a small screen near you? No comment.
Gault is good on the telly. He says he loved his time on MasterChef, but after five years, it was time to leave. ‘‘What I love about it is how it’s affected the young people in New Zealand. Young people who have embraced food television, embraced cooking and will now try foods they wouldn’t normally try.’’
Three years ago, Gault was in Wellington doing a shopping mall demonstration. He pulled a young teenage boy from the audience and challenged him to an omelette cook-off. Blindfolded judges proclaimed the boy the winner, and Gault duly presented him with a food mixer.
Two years later, he was back at the same venue. He saw the boy and his mum in the audience. Afterwards, they showed him a handmade book featuring a photograph and a recipe for everything that mixer had made.
‘‘His mum said to me, ‘it’s a school day, but we’ve let him off to come and see you, because you’re his hero and his dad died this year’.’’
It’s a tearjerker, but Gault is not finished. Just last week, he hosted a modern Italian feast at Wellington’s Pravda restaurant. He recounted this story. And then he invited James – that one-time 13-year-old omelette maker – to come out of the kitchen. ‘‘He’s working there now. And that is probably the best story I have to tell about my career.’’
In 2010, after an extended period of wooing that included multiple free desserts (‘‘unbeknownst to me, she didn’t like dessert’’) Gault married hairdresser Katrina Van Dam. Their daughter Hazel is now 20 months old.
‘‘I want to be a dad and I want to be good at it . . I don’t want to wake up one day and go ‘I missed that’. You mould somebody’s life in the first three years and for good or bad, I want to be part of that process . .
‘‘Nipping around restaurants around New Zealand is actually not that daunting. It’s actually quite fun, going to Queenstown and all those places. But when you have nine restaurants, you have a lot of staff, and it becomes about them. Looking after them, and giving them the love. Which I absolutely love, but you live it and breathe it, every day, 24 hours a day.’’
He was preparing for a food show in Tauranga when, late last week, rumours of his departure first surfaced. Food writer Lauraine Jacobs noted: ‘‘I don’t think most who have gone to a Nourish restaurant have had a meal cooked by Simon in a long time.’’
Standing in that warehouse in Takanini in skinny jeans and a puffer jacket, Gault bursts out laughing.
‘‘I am not cooking everybody’s meal, and when you have nine restaurants, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work that out; that it’s just not that possible.
‘‘I would never dare to liken myself to somebody as talented as Armani, but I dare say he doesn’t sew every shirt. And I do cook in the restaurants. I do write all the menus, I do source all the ingredients and I do inspire my chefs to put on a plate my vision and my dream.’’
That Armani line is well practised – he’s used variations of it in at least two interviews in recent years – but it’s a reasonable comparison in an industry increasingly dominated by business groupings (conglomerates like Hip and Pack and Co, for example).
Last week, Gault was still listed as a director with Nourish Group. He was relishing not driving into the city, but was still receiving nightly restaurant reports.
‘‘I keep thinking, I don’t need these anymore. But I haven’t sold my shares, so maybe I do.’’
Will he sell? ‘‘Don’t know. Who cares?’’
Gault has, in the past, been painted as an old-school tyrant. A ‘‘screamer’’ said one magazine article. A man who once locked a staff member in a cupboard because she wouldn’t eat kidneys. ‘‘That’s completely wrong! I locked somebody in the office once, this is years ago, for a bit of fun, in the dark, so they could try the steak because they reckoned they couldn’t eat rare steak . .’’
You get more out of people, says Gault, by being nice. Everybody likes to be liked. ‘‘Yelling at people, you get nothing. They just retrench.’’
It is time, he declares, for a bacon break. Crisp rounds of pancetta, from the oven behind the shopfront counter at Sous Chef, are ready for tasting. He cuts them in half. The rind is pork-crackle good; the meat melts into salt and fat.
Gault hasn’t sat down once during this interview. He gives great soundbites to the stuff.co.nz video camera, but it’s only now, sharing food, that he looks truly relaxed.
‘‘I love it when somebody turns up and I can go ‘smell that’,’’ he says, twisting the top off his Flavours of Italy home cuisine.
‘‘Think of pizza! But that can also transform a bolognaise sauce. Put it in your mince and your patties and it’s going to be a completely different burger. In your chicken, under the skin, on top of the skin. Throw it in with your mushrooms or your roast potatoes. It’s whatever, and I love doing that because then I can get in people’s houses and they can create a little bit of magic.’’
Simon Gault: take one part chef, one part showman, stir vigorously – and watch this space.