Culinary nomad: Christine Manfield leads the way – again

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This was published 5 years ago

Culinary nomad: Christine Manfield leads the way – again

This top Australian chef is still setting the pace, popping up across cities, continents, disciplines and genres.

By Brook Turner

“Chris has always had the most
fantastic radar for where things
are headed, for where the sun is setting; where it’s rising.”

“Chris has always had the most fantastic radar for where things are headed, for where the sun is setting; where it’s rising.” Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan

Christine Manfield blows through the door on the first hot day of spring like the breeze that's been missing. It's a sweltering 35°C Sydney day, but she looks fresh as a daisy in a baby-doll dress (black, Flintstones hem), dark blonde hair still wet from a quick shower, a smile as wide as a Tiki's beneath kohled eyes. You'd never know she got off the red-eye two hours earlier from Santiago; a 17-hour flight that marked the end of three weeks spent leading a group around the food haunts of her latest frontier, South America. You certainly wouldn't guess she'd stared down her 65th birthday six months earlier. The snake tattoo on her left arm may have faded slightly after two decades, but not the canvas.

For the next three hours, the woman who was Australia's spice queen, until she became Australia's dessert queen, sits at my dining-room table, unpacking the half-century since she left her strict Christian home in suburban Brisbane to start fending for herself, learning to cook in order to eat. She is focused and precise as she runs through the incarnations. Hairdresser. Primary school teacher. Acolyte chef as a new Australian cuisine took off in the 1980s. Gastro pub pioneer as the decade turned. Her first restaurant, Paramount, and a meteoric rise to become the only woman in a rat pack of young chefs (Neil Perry, David Thompson, Steve Manfredi) that ran Sydney fine dining in the 1990s. The fateful stage at the first truly global restaurant, Spain's elBulli, that followed Paramount's closure in 2000, and that inspired not only her first international foray, London's groundbreaking East @West, but her final and most acclaimed restaurant, Sydney's Universal.

We're talking because Manfield has a book to promote, Tasting India, her third on the country that's been the second greatest love affair of her life. But really, we're talking because it's time to pause for her close-up at a particularly interesting moment in her 35-year career; one that illuminates a particularly interesting moment in the culinary scene of which she is, as Sydney Morning Herald food critic Jill Dupleix puts it, "one of the mothers". Because, as her friend Nigella Lawson points out, "Christine Manfield's influence on the way we eat now cannot be overestimated. In Australia, she woke people up to flavours and influences from around the world, and her influence has fanned out by stealth, you could say, through the food editors, food writers, and enthusiastic eaters whose writing and cooking has carried her culinary voice out into the world."

And because what Manfield is doing now – popping up across cities, continents, disciplines, genres; wandering the world in her Prada boots, shiny black Rimowa suitcase (tagline: "No one builds a legacy by standing still") in tow – is navigating a whole new culinary horizon. As Dupleix, who first clocked Manfield at Sydney's Paragon and Phoenix pubs in the early 1990s, says: "Chris has always had the most fantastic radar for where things are headed, for where the sun is setting; where it's rising."

For Manfield, where it's rising is over the wide horizon of the global-nomad chef; a post-bricks-and-mortar incarnation that allows you – if you have the brand, network, stamina – to curate a career beyond the arse-busting heartache of restaurants. It's five years since she closed Universal – at its zenith, as she'd always intended, when you couldn't get a table for love nor money after her 2012 appearances on MasterChef.

"I thought everything would just peter out," she recalls. "Once you take your foot off the pedal in this business, you're forgotten pretty quickly." Instead, "the momentum just kept building. Everything started falling out of the sky. It was the post-Universal boom. I think it came down to the way it finished. It showed you could exit your business on top, without hating it, or any negativity. And because it ended on a high, and because I was suddenly a free agent, people just wanted more and more."

A woman whose incarnations have tended to encapsulate eras has found herself riding a new wave, working full-time but untethered from the kitchen that has traditionally anchored a reputation and kept it relevant.

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"She's a beacon because those of us who feel we have made some kind of change in the industry don't want to go quietly into that dark night," says another food-world pioneer, Alla Wolf-Tasker, who opened her two-hatted Lakehouse in regional Victoria's Daylesford in 1984.

"It's inspiring that she's doing such interesting things at such an interesting time."

Manfield at Paramount, which closed in 2000.

Manfield at Paramount, which closed in 2000.Credit: Steve Baccon

It is not a life for the faint-hearted, or the only mortally organised. Manfield often finds herself working the sort of 16- or 17-hour days she was doing at Universal, particularly for the pop-ups, where she basically enters someone else's kitchen as head chef. "The difference is, now it's only for a few days and then I can have a nana nap," she says with a laugh. She negotiates all her own deals and does her own admin, with military precision: the window for our chat is identified weeks ahead, from across the world, like a looming hole in space-time. After we finish, she heads home to her harbourside Sydney apartment to perch for a moment with her alter ego, partner in crime over 41 years – and the true love of her life – Margie Harris, a personal trainer who's already halfway through Manfield's laundry.

The next day, a Sunday, Manfield cooks and hosts a Tasting India tour lunch with her old friend Martin Boetz, founding chef of Sydney's Longrain, at his Cooks Co-op on the Hawkesbury River, north of the city. The morning after is the photo shoot for this article – "They've said, 'Bring an apron'. I've sent Margie out to find something in black leather" – after which she'll head to O Tama Carey's Lankan Filling Station in Surry Hills to take over the kitchen and work with the staff for a second, one-night Tasting India pop-up.

Over the following month, she'll do at least a dozen more pop-ups from an India book she's perfected over 10 trips, two editions and seven years, feeding several hundred punters at some of the country's coolest restaurants: Sydney's Nomad; Melbourne's Anchovy; Tasmania's Agrarian Kitchen; Brisbane's The Golden Pig; Adelaide's The Pot and Canberra's Eightysix.

Next March, she launches the book in Delhi and Kolkata, followed by London in April, where she's popping up at The Providores and Tapa Room, home to the "godfather of fusion" and another old mate, Peter Gordon. In June, she and friend and former publisher Julie Gibbs kick off the third and final series of their successful Cooking the Books pop-ups, which honour the great female food writers who "have informed how we cook today", Manfield says, from Elizabeth David, Marcella Hazan and Alice Waters to Jane Grigson and Nigella Lawson. Then there are the private group tours to India, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. In between she's mentoring young female trainee chefs, teaching classes at the Sydney Seafood School and Tasmania's Agrarian Kitchen's school, consulting to Pearl Catering as its food director, all the while working on another book, her 14th, due out in 2020.

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Of course there's nothing intrinsically new about these activities – or the "slash" careers of contemporary celebrities. It's the scale on which Manfield is working and her breadth of operation that's notable, and that all are "so Chris Manfield", as Dupleix puts it. "She was one of the first to really look at herself as a brand. I think she wanted a face to the world that was as strong as she was." In a sense, Manfield has been working towards this moment for years. She's always operated across not only countries but platforms: nicking off to India even as she helmed Universal ("It was built into the business plan from the get-go," she says); publishing not only books but on Instagram and Facebook.

Her latest incarnation has taken that to a whole new level. Her website is now the Manfield mothership – and about the closest she comes to a permanent home – hosting her posts, podcasts, tour and pop-up schedules, selling everything from her books to the range of products she started 20 years ago with old friend Simon Johnson. Digital hasn't just facilitated supply; it's also driven demand, specifically the appetite for the ephemeral events that are now Manfield's stock-in-trade, whether they're pop-ups or tours.

"Everyone wants the latest, the limited edition, a moment they can capture," she says. "I was in the right place at the right time. I wouldn't have had the experience or the clout behind my name 20 years ago. It couldn't have happened earlier." As her old friend (and Good Weekend contributor) Neil Perry observes: "Because the food world is getting so much bigger and more multifaceted, you can now be in it and make a good living without having a restaurant."

Perry has, of course, surfed the waves of that evolving food industry into much more corporate waters than Manfield, from his deals with Qantas and Lexus to his current role as chief brand and culinary officer of Rockpool Dining Group, bought by a private equity firm for a reported $65 million in 2016. Does he ever cast an envious glance in his mate's direction? "No, I'm pleased for Chris … but I'm the Rupert Murdoch of the restaurant industry," he quips. "I truly love what I do."

Meanwhile, the traditional restaurant game only seems to get more crowded and pressured: from food and labour costs to rent and low single-digit profit margins that have been a fraction of their northern-hemisphere equivalents for owner-operators, as Manfield was for most of her career. "A lot of chefs have pulled out of the kitchen full-time because it's just not sustainable," says Jessica Muir, Manfield's former head chef across Paramount, East @West and Universal. "You get to a certain age and you can't do the hours. When they get to 40 or 50, chefs are looking for a different way to do things."

Young guns in 1991 (clockwise from top) Tony Bilson, Steve Manfredi, Christine Manfield and Neil Perry.

Young guns in 1991 (clockwise from top) Tony Bilson, Steve Manfredi, Christine Manfield and Neil Perry.Credit: Elizabeth Dobbie

Muir points to the likes of Luke Burgess, co-founder of Hobart's acclaimed Garagistes and former Gourmet Traveller young talent of the year, last seen – online at least – teaching at Agrarian Kitchen and appearing – "One night only. Bookings essential" – at Hobart's Henry Jones Art Hotel. Or Mark Best, who closed his celebrated Sydney restaurant, Marque, two years ago. Or his former head chef, Pasi Petänen, whose recent career has been a series of star turns, including a Sydney Cafe Paci pop-up that endured for two years. Or Martin Boetz, who quit Longrain about the same time Manfield closed Universal. "I was monetarily very happy at Longrain," Boetz, says. "But wages and food costs were beginning to really affect things. I was lucky I'd bought this property [on the Hawkesbury River] with a view to building a holiday house and could turn it into a business."

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Dupleix has observed the changing scene. "The whole industry is disrupting itself and it's probably time for that to happen. You can't expect things to continue when people simply can't make any money, or work those hours. They need to find new ways of being cooks, which is part of Chris's story. She's always been one step ahead."

“Once you take your foot off the pedal in this business, you’re forgotten pretty quickly.” Instead, “the momentum just kept building. Everything started falling out of the sky."

“Once you take your foot off the pedal in this business, you’re forgotten pretty quickly.” Instead, “the momentum just kept building. Everything started falling out of the sky."Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan

Staying a step ahead has been the work of a lifetime for Manfield. The snake tattoo that slithers around her left arm is, like everything about her, anything but accidental. She was born in 1953, the year of the water snake in the Chinese horoscope. And over the years, she's shed more skins than a lake full of serpents.

Because she started out as a hairdresser, those incarnations have tended to be chronicled in haircuts. Margie Harris sneaks me an envelope of snaps and the variety is startling. There's the seven-year-old Chris in a tutu, with a cloud of white locks, in her Brisbane backyard. Next comes Chris the girl guide ("She got every badge," Harris says, "sewing, cooking, knots, the lot"), followed by Christine, the mohawk-wearing, motorbike-riding, primary-school teacher in the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth. A brief New Romantic period – think Aimee Mann circa 1985's Voices Carry – segues into the elegant white crop of the early Paramount years, before the signature modified mohawk of the early 2000s.

Manfield aged seven, in her Brisbane backyard.

Manfield aged seven, in her Brisbane backyard.Credit: Courtesy of Christine Manfield

The major incarnations have tended to follow a time cycle: hairdresser and schoolteacher for seven years each; Paramount from 1993 to 2000, and just under seven at Universal. "I wasn't even conscious of it, but I was 40 when we started Paramount," Manfield says.

"I'd just turned 50 when I went to London and when I started Universal, I thought, 'I'm not doing this when I turn 60.' That was the only really long-term, conscious decision I've made in my working life." As remarkable as her changes, however, is what remains the same: the intense blue gaze that only relaxes into the now-familiar smile with time, success.

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"The first time I met Chris I found her a bit scary," Peter Gordon admits down the line from London. "I'm a bit fluffy and hippie-trippy and she's so focused and direct. She knows exactly what she wants and what she's doing. But as I got to know her, I realised she has this beautiful temperament. What I'd found intimidating wasn't the personality – she's a total softie – it was the hair. And over time that's got softer, too."

As for what's driven Manfield's shape-shifting: "She was always fiercely ambitious, always questioning, always looking for more," says Harris, who first met Manfield in Adelaide in 1978, coming over for dinner and staying for four decades. ("I'm still her personal chef," Manfield says of Harris, who's known to sit up in bed first thing in the morning and ask: "What's on today's menu, chef?") "She was never going to get stuck," Harris continues. "Not in Brisbane or Adelaide or Sydney – the only thing she ever got stuck with was me!" Or as Manfield herself says: "I never went into this to be mediocre. I think it has to do with my background. You could just plod on and get by being mediocre, but what's the point of that? What I always fought against was that first reaction of 'No, no, you can't.' My reaction was always: 'Just watch me!'"

Her family life in suburban Brisbane in the 1950s and '60s was governed by "strict Christian values" and the cardinal rule, "Don't rock the boat". Until, that is, her father upended the whole vessel when Manfield was 14, leaving for another woman and, eventually, family. Her mother became a cook at Ansett Airlines to support her four children, of which Manfield was the eldest, and only girl. While they ate meat and three veg at home given the times and circumstances, there was a definite maternal-line cooking gene.

"My grandmother was a very good cook; classic, hearty Country Women's Association fare," Manfield says. "She would cook Sunday lunch for us and there was always a batch of scones on when we'd visit her in Brisbane." In the mid-'60s, Manfield, obsessed with rock 'n' roll, took a weekend job in a hair salon to buy records. School bored her. "I was a ratbag. There was too much going on to concentrate," she says. "It must've have been a nightmare for my mother. Her life had just fallen apart and she had this very rebellious daughter. She was trying to impose her values and she just didn't understand the monumental change that was taking place." At 16, she left home for good. "I remember feeling seriously disenfranchised," she says of 1960s Queensland. "It was dominated by Joh Bjelke-Petersen conservatives. The night Gough Whitlam was elected in 1972, we went around spray-painting buildings, 'Under new management'. It was Vietnam; a lot of friends had been conscripted and come back and we still couldn't vote. Queensland was the last state to lower the voting age to 18."

She married at 19 – "It was a way out" – and at 20 moved with her husband, an academic, to Adelaide, where he had a job at Flinders University. Don Dunstan-era South Australia was her coming of age, with its progressive politics, burgeoning women's movement and food scene. In quick succession, she left her husband of three years and hairdressing and went to university to study teaching.

Manfield, during her years as a primary school teacher in Adelaide.

Manfield, during her years as a primary school teacher in Adelaide. Credit: Courtesy of Christine Manfield

She became active in student politics and on the fringes of a bunch of self-taught cooks that included Cheong Liew, a Malaysian-born pioneer of fusion cooking in Australia; and Phillip Searle, then about to found the 1980s Sydney fusion restaurant Oasis Seros, where Manfield would serve her real apprenticeship; and Michael Symons, author of the classic One Continuous Picnic.

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"Adelaide was a bit of a culinary centre," says Manfield, who likens it to Copenhagen, which would have its own food revolution 30 years later. "Small cities can sometimes be perfectly formed. They have that connectivity that allows things to happen more easily."

From the start, food was visceral, political, a cause rather than a lifestyle choice. She cites Alice Waters, who founded her pioneering Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California in 1971. "Her involvement came very much through being an activist," Manfield says. "She turned her activism to food. I was always interested in that."

She was inspired, too, by a slightly older generation of Australian women cooks, such as Gay Bilson, Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer. She and Harris would drive interstate to eat at their restaurants, as they would later – having chucked in their Adelaide jobs and on a nine-month sabbatical in France in the early '80s – drive their 2CV down to Lyon to eat at Paul Bocuse's restaurant, and "because it was so f...ing fabulous, go back the next night".

From the start, however, Manfield gravitated to Asian cuisine. "It was really fragrant and different and I understood it immediately and implicitly," she says. "There must have been something subliminal there. For me it was searching for 'other'." She fronted Searle about a job at Oasis Seros. "And that's when I studied the serious art of cooking," she says. "I didn't have a game plan and I didn't see the light of day for two years, but Phillip was a true alchemist with spices, at a time when everyone else was cooking French. I learnt discipline and rigour from him. And minimalism: less is more; that it was about showing strength by removing anything extraneous; that your strength was your flavour."

Cooking at the Falaknuma Palace, Hyderabad, India, in 2013.

Cooking at the Falaknuma Palace, Hyderabad, India, in 2013.Credit: Graham Crouch

When she and Harris moved into pubs to see if they could run a restaurant – Manfield in the kitchen and Harris running the front-of-house for hotelier Peter Ryan – they began to generate serious attention. "Here were these two girls moving into beautiful old pubs and taking them to restaurant level with these spice-driven adventures," recalls Dupleix. "And it was absolutely the two of them. Margie's role was so beautiful, magically appearing at the tables like Tinkerbell, sprinkling fairy dust, then moving on."

The pair started Paramount with a $200,000 loan from a visionary National Australia Bank manager at a time when banks often didn't lend to women. Manfield remembers the early days of Paramount as "an age of innocence", with David Thompson opening down the road at Sailor's Thai a few weeks before her, and Perry already at Rockpool. "We were really fortunate that our businesses worked, because we were making it up as we went," she says. "There were no rules. We were just firing off each other and I loved that camaraderie. I remember we had ordered Charles Eames chairs which didn't make it in time for Paramount's opening, so Neil just loaned us the furniture we needed."

It points to another thing that has remained constant throughout Manfield's career. Her relationships are enduring, tribal – from Adelaide's women's movement in the 1970s to the global tribe of chefs of which she is now an elder. This is someone who's lived with the same woman for 41 years, who has visited the country she loves most, India – "I swear she was born with a bindi on her forehead," says Harris – more than 40 times in 20 years. It's there, too, in the food, which Nigella Lawson describes as "above all, generous and joyful, predicated on making and forging connections between people, both at the table and in the world". Integral to that cuisine, Lawson adds, "is a particularly vibrant balance between passionate eclecticism and elegant rigour." Which is what Julie Gibbs – who has published books by the likes of Stephanie Alexander, Maggie Beer, Peter Thompson and Kylie Kwong – sees as Manfield's real strength. "She straddles both the realm of excellence and the realm of the home cook," says Gibbs. "You can't pigeonhole her and if anyone embodies Australian food, it's Chris. She's taken the best of European and Asian food and made it her own."

Those enduring networks, built over three decades, are how Manfield is able to pop up across kitchens, cities and countries and "know everything will be in place for her", says Martin Boetz. Her current incarnation is almost an exercise in harvesting karma in real time. For the Tasting India tour, for example, she has camped out in some of Australia's hottest restaurants, often run by young female chefs she has employed, worked with or just inspired: from Jacqui Challinor at Nomad in Sydney to former Universal chef Thi Le at Melbourne's Anchovy and Adelaide's The Pot by Emma McCaskill, both of whom cracked their first hat in this year's Good Food Guide.

Manfield with her partner, Margie Harris.

Manfield with her partner, Margie Harris.Credit: Helen Coetzee

The 2018 Guide included more hatted female chefs than ever before. Alla Wolf-Tasker and Kylie Kwong were both honoured, alongside the younger generation. Typically, though, Manfield was already somewhere – everywhere – else. "She's a very strong woman in a very strongly male-dominated field and she has shown that there are no boundaries or borders to what you can do as a woman in this industry," says Dupleix. "By surviving that with her energy and humour intact, and then going on to forge another career in another way, she has set an incredible example for any young chef coming into an industry where you don't necessarily expect to be a chef for the rest of your life."

Not that Manfield has any truck with the notion of struggle. Those early years instilled "an incredible resilience", she says. As for being female: "there were always models, from Alice Waters to Gay, Alla, Stephanie and Maggie. And I've been really lucky. There's never been any bullying or sexism in the kitchens I've worked in, maybe because of the people I sought out. Then again, I never left any room for ambiguity," she adds. "It was always 'take me on my terms', like my food. I was never one for being in a closet about anything."

Muir, Manfield's former head chef, saw a slightly different picture, however. "You couldn't tell from the outside, but from the inside she had to work a lot harder than the boys," she says. "And you can't rely on backers. She's very good at business and marketing because she had to be. You have to do 150 per cent of the normal 100."

Nor was that particular to Australia. In London, Muir couldn't get suppliers to return her calls, as one of only a handful of women running a kitchen. She had to ask her male sous chef to do it. "They were a big hard struggle, those years," she says. "Chris fought hard, because she knows no other way. Watching that, being part of that, makes you feel invincible."

Christine Manfield's spiced lentils.

Christine Manfield's spiced lentils.Credit: Marina Oliphant

Manfield might be the poster girl for turning lemons into lemonade. Take the biggest reversal of her career, East @West. After three years, as the restaurant was garnering ever greater acclaim, the banker backers who had employed her as a salaried executive chef pulled the plug.

"It was tragic," Peter Gordon remembers. "East @West was beginning to do some really groundbreaking stuff – a whole new level of elegance and sophistication. It was hugely important and all the foodies in London loved it. But the backers were obviously negotiating to sell the building, without saying anything, and it was cut short."

Manfield didn't break her stride. "I knew my job wasn't finished when I got back to Sydney," she says. "And I knew the whole philosophy of 'Think global, eat local' was right." She told Harris she had one more restaurant in her. Harris, who had retired from front-of-house after Paramount, told her that she didn't, but said if they were going again, they were going to back it themselves. The pair literally bet the house on Universal – their beach property at Wagstaffe on the NSW Central Coast – to not only complete Manfield's restaurant odyssey, but also set themselves up for a truly itinerant post-restaurant life. "We are gypsy girls, always have been," Manfield says. "It was the name of our super fund."

Manfield guest-chefs at Martin Boetz’s Cooks Co-op farm, 2017.

Manfield guest-chefs at Martin Boetz’s Cooks Co-op farm, 2017.Credit: Courtesy of Christine Manfield 

The plan has more than worked. If Manfield works hard today, it's because she can't resist the opportunity. "This is the best bit," she says. "Because I'm still driven, but I can cherry-pick." What she does now is the ultimate evolution of the concept that was Universal – think global, eat local – itself born of East @West and elBulli.

It's the through line of her career. Take the signature dishes for which she is most famous, such as Paramount's duck pie. A great plump, golden thing, it looked like a pie in a Beatrix Potter book, but one packed with five-spice duck and shiitake mushrooms.

"I've always loved that idea of taking comfort food, like a pie or an ice-cream on a stick that people can connect with, and taking them somewhere else," Manfield says. It's hard not to think of 1950s Brisbane, her baking grandmother. "Her name was Pearl and they adored each other," Harris says. To this day, Manfield wears a black pearl in her honour.

That through line is there, too, in Gaytime Goes Nuts, the dish that featured in the 2012 MasterChef episode "that's still playing in India", Manfield says, where "MasterChef is on constant rotation across six channels." The dessert was refined over 25 years, three restaurants and four incarnations, starting at Paramount in 1996 as "a Mardi Gras piss-take that just took off", Manfield recalls. "Back then, it was simple, an ice-cream sandwich, three flavours between triangular florentines." At East @West, it morphed into a pyramid. "But when it came to Universal, we decided that was too simple," Manfield says. "We had evolved, there was a lot more technique and I was demanding a lot more in terms of people who worked for me. We wanted to layer the tastes and textures to create that party in your mouth."

The Gaytime Goes Nuts, perhaps Australia's most moreish dessert, had found its final form. Well, almost. That pillar of salted caramel, hazelnut chocolate and honeycomb ice-cream recently entered a fifth incarnation, as a digital line drawing that falls into place before your eyes as Manfield's website downloads, vanishing as the brilliant colours of her latest horizon wash across the screen.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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