PHIL JARRATT concludes his profile of master chef Peter Kuruvita
After two years at a restaurant called Crab Apple in suburban Sydney, cutting his teeth alongside a chef named Scott, who smoked while he cooked, resting his ciggie next to the hot plate between drags, young Peter was ready for a change.
He answered a two-line classified ad for a chef and found himself searching for a doorway in a seedy lane off Riley Street in the city’s east. Instead he found two young chefs lounging on the bonnet of an Alfa Romeo Spider, surrounded by the empty bottles and debris from the night before, waiting for the boss (the owner of the Spider) to arrive. Peter joined them.
“Finally the boss arrives,” Peter recalls, “and he opens the door into this kind of wonderland.”
This was his introduction to the world of Greg Doyle, then the hottest chef in Sydney, and to Rogues, the pleasure palace that lay behind the door in the alley. Anyone who was a player in Sydney in the early 1980s knew Rogues, and everyone knew Doyle, who ran the excellent dining room within the club. I worked around the corner, and spent far too much of my salary behind those heavy doors, but for a handful of years it was the place to be.
Says Peter: “I was still an apprentice but this was when I really started to learn my craft. Greg was one of a handful of Sydney’s best chefs. Tony Bilson had Bon Gout going, Anders Ausback had The Yellow Book, Mark Armstrong had Pegrum’s, Peter Doyle had Reflections at Palm Beach. And I did ‘em all! I’d do Friday lunch with Mark, Sundays with Peter up at Palmie and a couple of nights a week at Rogues. It was an incredible couple of years. I moved into a flat in Bondi with a couple of other chefs and we had a constant party.”
But young Peter also took his trade seriously, which appealed to the luminaries he worked for. He says: “I think I began to do well because I had such a good work ethic, and for that I thank my parents. I was also talented as a chef and I progressed through the ranks quite quickly. Greg [Doyle] has the reputation as one of our best seafood chefs, but at Rogues he did it all. There were only three of us in the kitchen so we’d each do a bit of everything, and the food was just brilliant.”
But in a high-end kitchen, temperaments rule, as Peter found out. “We’d do 90 a night and Doyley would be screaming at us. He was a pot-throwing screamer. He’d burn you on purpose, or give you a full-blooded boot up the arse if he thought you weren’t working fast enough.”
In the days when celebrity chefs were just becoming a thing and egos were out of control, apprentice abuse was common and the wages were appalling, but somehow Peter had managed to put enough away to travel every year, usually exploring South East Asia or heading back to Sri Lanka.
He recalls: “The day I finished my apprenticeship I was off to London, but it took me a year to get there, backpacking through Asia for most of 1983. In China I learnt to eat everything that was offered, including snake and cat.”
In London Peter’s ambition was to learn from the best, so he started with the legendary Roux brothers, Michel and Albert, who’d had string of Michelin-starred restaurants since the 1960s, and he managed to find work at both le Gavroche and the Waterside Inn and develop a relationship with Michel Roux that lasted many years. Says Peter: “Michel married an Australian and whenever he came here he’d come to my restaurant to eat my mud crab. He just loved it. But Albert was a hard man, he’d work you 100 hours a week and not allow you to speak. Often at these top restaurants they wouldn’t pay you. You had to go and beg for your money. Eventually I decided to aim high and applied for the job of head chef at a little restaurant called Stanton’s in Clapham. We started to get into the guide books and people loved what I was doing, which was simply what Greg Doyle had taught me.”
When he finally made it back to Australia, Peter made a pact with himself never to work for the same boss twice, so when Greg Doyle phoned and offered him the job of head chef at his new restaurant, Pier, he had to politely decline. Doyle said he understood the logic and would recommend him to others.
Peter recalls: “Five minutes later Neil Perry rings and says he’s opening Bluewater Grill and wants me for head chef. I’d never met Neil but I said yes, and I was there for the building finish and I stayed for six months. Then Michael McMahon, who I’d met at Rogues when he was wine director for Len Evans, came into Bluewater Grill one day, invited me to lunch and offered me the job of head chef at Barrenjoey House in Palm Beach. That place was crazy and I loved it.
“Working for Neil, this pony-tailed Australian guy who’d never been to Europe or Asia and he’s cooking French food with an Asian accent, got me thinking about experimenting with Sri Lankan food. I started to add Sri Lankan flavours into what I was cooking at Barrenjoey House. That was the beginning of my own cuisine.”
Later, as chef at Bilson’s after Tony Bilson had left, Paul and Linda McCartney were among the many celebrities Peter cooked for. Linda was so pleased with her specially-cooked vegan dinner that she sent Peter a signed copy of her latest book. The inscription began, “Dear Tony…”
Says Peter: “That was when I realised no one knew me, so I hired a really good public relations consultant and soon everyone knew me.” Including big time TV producer Henry Crawford, who also happened to own a Fijian boutique island resort called Vatulele, which needed a new executive chef.
This turned out to be the first joint appointment for newly-married Mr and Mrs Peter Kuruvita, with Karen taking over as assistant manager of the eight-bure luxury hideaway for the rich and famous. Says Peter: “I created the menu every day based on what we’d caught. I’d literally be out on the boat hauling in the fish and Karen would be ringing me to ask what to put on the menu for dinner. All the guests would sit at the one table and I’d walk past them with a big fish over my shoulder to get it to the kitchen to cook it.”
After the island experience, Peter felt ready to open his own Sydney restaurant. With the help of an investment from dad Wickramapala (who sadly died shortly after its opening), the Kuruvitas created Avalon at Bondi, where he hired an apprentice chef from Noosa. (Today, Nathan Nicholl is, like Peter, a food industry entrepreneur as well as a chef, and the two will be working on projects together at Alba.)
Next came an offer from a business consortium to lend his name and talents to a restaurant called Flying Fish. Peter, who naturally asked for a piece of the action, recalls: “It was a handshake deal and of course it ended badly. But for the time it was Sydney’s most beautiful restaurant. I had complete control and I brought in the top chefs I’d worked with everywhere else. We opened with a bang and the Good Food Guide gave us two hats the first year. Hotel scouts came to look and see what the fuss was about. One of them represented Starwood Hotels who were then rebuilding the Sheraton Fiji. So we opened up Flying Fish Fiji.”
With three best-selling cook books and half a dozen TV food travelogues appearing simultaneously, the Kuruvita brand had well and truly arrived when Peter had an offer from
Blackstone, the new owners of the Sheraton Noosa Resort to do a Noosa restaurant. Says Peter: “I was trying to build a restaurant in Mexico at the same time, so it was a bit of a juggle, but we got Noosa Beach House finished in time to open on the first day of the Noosa Food and Wine Festival of 2014. We were still living in Sydney, close to the airport, and I suddenly thought, what am I doing? We could be living in Noosa. We packed up our two vans with the motorbikes on the back and drove up.
“We fell in love with Noosa. It’s a chef’s paradise. You’ve got all the produce of the hinterland and the sustainable fisheries of our ocean. There were hiccups along the way, but
Noosa Beach House was where my Sri Lankan influences reached their pinnacle. I’ve said all along in Noosa that my bread and butter is the locals. The tourists come and go, but if the locals like you, you’ll never be empty.”
This is the philosophy that Peter and Karen are taking into ALBA By Kuruvita, within the Parkridge complex on the shores of Lake Weyba at Noosa Heads, as Peter writes in his press release: “It is really exciting to be building a new venue again from the ground up. I wanted ALBA to have a diverse range of offerings – something for everyone!”
As we conclude our long conversation in the shell that will become Alba, Peter says: “The vision for Alba is a community hub, it belongs to the 700 houses in this precinct. Whether it’s coming to the providore to buy milk or having a big night out at the restaurant, I want it to be a place that locals will call their own. Snapper curry has been my bestselling dish for more than 20 years, so that will definitely be on the menu. And the black pepper prawns. Let’s says the accent will be modern Australian with a Sri Lankan twist.”
ALBA By Kuruvita is expected to open its doors in early December.
