My story about the egos and clashes behind the restaurant awards season appears in The Bulletin (that’s our local version of Newsweek) today.
More background to this story over at Tomato.
Flaming egos and acerbic critics. Why, it must be the annual restaurant awards. Ed Charles reports.
Melbourne chef Shannon Bennett won’t be banning the critics. But he might ban you. Especially if you don’t keep a reservation or are rude or shove his staff.
Bennett is the hottest chef in Australia. After five years in business, Bennett scored the trifecta in this year’s restaurant reviewing awards calendar. The 29-year-old’s Melbourne restaurant Vue de Monde this week scooped the industry’s top accolade, the Gourmet Traveller 2006 Australian Restaurant Guide Restaurant of the Year. Last week, he won the Restaurant and Catering Awards gong for Excellence. And in August, he was upgraded to a coveted three chef hats in The Age Good Food Guide.
Things can get hot in restaurant kitchens, where passion and big egos are a vital ingredient of even bigger credit-card receipts. Keeping tabs on the top chefs is the growth business of restaurant guides. The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide sells nearly 40,000 copies in a year, and this year climbed up alongside The Da Vinci Code on the best-sellers list.
Awards nights are also passionate. Bennett, the star of Monday’s Gourmet Traveller awards dinner, nearly missed out after his invitation was delivered to his old address. The SMH Good Food Guide awards fizzed after the winners and also-rans were leaked. Last year, Aria’s hard-boiled chef Matt Moran spat the dummy after he was downgraded.
In 2001, the Age guide was ceremonially burnt by a chef. Last year, it deemed only one restaurant worthy of three hats; this year there were four. Then the gossips were sharpening their knives after the guide’s editor Roslyn Grundy quit.
Gourmet Traveller editor Anthea Loucas says chefs take guides so seriously because their livelihoods are at risk. She was once threatened by a well-known chef who hammered his fists on her table, “crying” and “emotional”.
Neil Perry was crestfallen this year after Rockpool was demoted to the ranks of the two-hatters by the Herald guide. “I just don’t think they deliver the food service aspiration that we do,” Perry said of his new-found peers.
Simon Thomsen, joint editor of the SMH guide, said the restaurant was visited seven times before the axe dropped: “We felt the food wasn’t quite what it was.” Gourmet Traveller sent five reviewers to Vue de Monde on six occasions.
Bennett says multiple visits are vital: “If a restaurant has a bad day or a bad moment, a restaurant shouldn’t be judged on that … it should be judged on its consistency.”
Critics are fine, he says; he only boils over “when it becomes personal or if diners ever slag off or abuse my staff”.
“My ego’s in control.”