By George!
A ‘horrible’ year for MasterChef’s George Calombaris is about lessons for the future, he tells Kim Knight on the eve of his Auckland tour
This story was four lemons and a freerange chicken in the making. Me: “What food says ‘family?’” George Calombaris: “It’s a comforting bowl of egg and lemon soup. You’ve got a spoon, and you’re holding the side of the bowl which is warm, and there’s crusty bread in the middle of the table, and your family . . . that, for me, evokes a real sense of presence. Time, place, nostalgia, warmth, security. All the things you look for at birth.”
Me: *drops phone, runs to egg and lemon store. Food as the beginning, the middle, the everything: “Food is the common language we speak across the world,” says Calombaris. “Black, white, French, Muslim, Catholic, Buddhist, Orthodox . . . ”
The 39-year-old chef and MasterChef Australia judge was born and bred in Melbourne. His father is Egyptian, his mother a Greek Cypriot who came to Australia, aged 12. “She arrived with her mother and sisters and little else, apart from a big case half-filled with cooking equipment,” Calombaris writes in his book Greek. “My grandmother told me the people at Customs didn’t know what on earth a mortar and pestle was — they thought it must have been some sort of weapon so they confiscated it. My mum had to work straight away — there was no choice as the family needed money, so she spent many years working as a seamstress.”
By the time Calombaris was 14, he knew he was going to be a chef or a soccer player. Today, his empire includes 11 restaurants, from finedining flagship The Press Club, to a string of souvlaki bars called Jimmy Grants (rhyming slang for “immigrants”). A further five eateries will open in the next three months, filming has just started on season 10 of MasterChef, and from November 16-19, he’ll be in New Zealand, headlining restaurant, food and drink festival, Taste of Auckland.
Calombaris is bringing fish and chips to the party — but the potato will be hangi-cooked and the fish will be whitebait because, he says, Kiwi whitebait is the best in the world.
“There’s no right or wrong with food,” he proclaims. “I say it all the time — don’t come to The Press Club and expect to like every course. You don’t walk into the National Gallery of Australia and love every painting. That’s the whole idea of creativity. It’s potentially sometimes putting question marks on what the so-called artist has done.”
Calombaris is speaking to Weekend at the better end of a very bad year. It’s just days since his conviction and $1000 fine for assaulting a 19-year-old man at an Australian A-League football grand final (in court, Calombaris said he thought the man had made comments about his mother. He pleaded guilty, but has appealed against the recording of a conviction). Back in April, his company announced it would be reimbursing A$2.6 million in underpaid wages, an error blamed on “historically poor processes”.
“A hell of a year,” says Calombaris. “Probably the toughest year of my life.”
But, on the staff payment issue: “I selfreported. I didn’t get caught out. We overpaid 50 per cent of our staff and underpaid 50 per cent. We didn’t go back and ask for money from the people we overpaid . . . I could have just shut up and said nothing and given all my staff a pay