Hot off the pass
Kiwi Analiese Gregory has found a home from home in Hobart, and is on a mission to run a sustainable restaurant that champions Tasmania’s weird and wonderful ingredients
Kiwi Analiese Gregory has found a home from home in Hobart, and is on a mission to run a sustainable restaurant that champions Tasmania’s wonderful ingredients
The next time Mattel do a Barbie chef doll – they’ve already done Hélène Darroze – they might want to make it an action figure in a wetsuit instead of chefs’ whites, after Analiese Gregory, the New Zealand-born chef of Franklin in Hobart whose underwater exploits are putting Tasmania on the culinary map. It was the “lure of free seafood” that persuaded Analiese, a sometime “holiday diver”, into full-on neoprene when she arrived in Hobart from Sydney in 2017. On her maiden dive she caught sea urchins and ate them on the beach “in the middle of nowhere”. “Even though it was really cold, it was winter, it was raining and I’ve never been so cold in my life – it was one of those super-amazing moments that drive you to do it again and again.”
Analiese first visited Hobart when some friends opened legendary local Garagistes and the Tasmanian capital became her go-to for a weekend’s R&R. “I guess I became really envious of their lifestyle,” she admits. When the opportunity came to move, she took it. For a chef, this “tiny island at the bottom of the world”
gives her unparalleled access to “killer produce” such as native angasi oysters, abalone and “weird and wonderful” deep-sea fish such as ray’s bream and striped trumpeter. “In Sydney, if I wanted to visit a supplier on the weekend, which I would do a lot, I’d have to drive two hours. Here, it’s 15 minutes. You can really feel the difference when people wake up, pick tomatoes and then bring them to you. They’ve never been in cool storage, never sat anywhere, they are just so fresh.
“I recognise that the food that I’m doing has changed a lot since I moved down here. In Sydney, you can pretty much order what you want from all over Australia and overseas, but here we only use produce from the island. It’s heavily limiting but that drives you to be more creative. Also, it’s the first time that I’ve worked extensively with a wood-fired oven. Cooking isn’t the same for me anymore without it. You have to let go of things being perfect all the time, being exactly the same, which is something that was very ingrained in me in Michelin-starred restaurants. Once you let go of that, it becomes liberating.”
Analiese’s family background would seem to have prepared her well for a culinary career. Her father, Mark Gregory, was executive chef at One Aldwych in London for nine years and was the first New Zealander to win the Meilleur Ouvrier de France. “He is all about the technique. He can make soufflés like nobody’s business,” she says. Analiese may have been the only 15-year-old at catering school to know what the mother sauces were – but she was influenced just as much by her half-Dutch, half-Chinese mother’s side of the family, who saw babysitting duties as an ideal opportunity to school the young Analiese in traditional Chinese cookery. She remembers making char siu bao, steamboat and bird’s nest soup. “For a long time I had professional cooking and cooking at home very separated in my mind. More recently, I’ve thought it would be better to merge them closer together. I wanted to do a cold Chinese quail at Franklin and was worried it was too Chinese but then I was like, you know what, we’ll just do it. People can just deal with it.”
Analiese’s career has taken her to some renowned restaurants – The Ledbury, Le Meurice and Quay among them – and even a pop-up in Fez (because “why not?”). A key figure is Michel Bras, her “holy grail chef” at whose Laguiole restaurant she spent a season. “Michel and I got on really well. I would go to the garden at his house every day to pick vegetables and herbs for the restaurant, and would go to the market with him at 3.30 in the morning.” She’s currently house hunting – or rather farm hunting – with a view to a garden, beehives and animals for the restaurant.
Analiese also worked in the famous research and development kitchen of Mugaritz in San Sebastián, where she experimented with growing blue cheese moulds, made meringue “maracas” and edible forks. “It felt like working in an experimental art project.”
On the agenda now for Franklin is sustainability, which she’s tackling in “baby steps”. “Everyone can make a difference,” she asserts. “I love cooking professionally and I love this industry but I don’t like the idea that we’re bad for the environment. Restaurants are massive consumers and we generate heaps of waste.” A programme of vinegar, kombucha, miso and shrub making is under way, and in her spare time she experiments with cheese-making and charcuterie. Her goal is to do a deep dive, metaphorically this time, into Tasmania’s produce. Already, she’s been won over by mekabu, the reproductive base of wakame seaweed (“like a big sea pineapple”) which she cooks down with soy, mirin and sake to produce “the most intense seaweed condiment you’ve ever had”.
She still describes herself as “a Kiwi with nomadic tendencies” or so her Instagram bio would have it, but she’s now “the most settled [she’s] ever been”. “I thrive on new experiences, new places, so I have to learn to create new challenges here for myself. It’s all part of growing up.” franklinhobart.com.au/restaurant