Michael Meredith from Eat My Lunch joins Mike Hosking to talk about his pioneering social enterprise, and why he's leaving fine dining behind.
Mum and Dad set strict rules for the dinner table.
As the lowest links in the food chain, Stephen and I had to lay the table — the cutlery, the place mats, and fold the serviettes inside everyone's individual rings.
Food was on the table at 6 and all five children were expected to be there, hands washed, no excuses, before Dad said grace. And before anyone asked permission to leave the table, Dad insisted we say thank you to the cook.
And that's what I'm going to do today.
Stumbling into the gig when we created Viva and eating out meant entrees, mains and desserts, I wrote about restaurants in Auckland and elsewhere for more than 12 years.
When Michael Meredith opened his namesake establishment, I was the first to review it. As he closes it at Christmas, 10 years later, I may be among the last to eat there and write about it.
Then, it was a bold, even brash, adventure. Those were the heady days of the celebrity chef, and as far as Auckland went in fine dining, Meredith was one of the few.
The very few, and of them, only a couple had the audacity to name their restaurants after themselves.
In Parnell even the master chef, Tony Astle, called his place Antoine's; at SkyCity, it was dine by Peter Gordon. Downtown, however, it had been Gault on Quay and way out in Dominion Rd it would be Meredith's.
Auckland's Meredith's will close at Christmas after a decade serving some of the finest food in the city.
It wasn't the first time the quietly spoken Samoan-born chef had helped break the mould.
Michael Dearth had talent-spotted him to head the kitchen at his inner-city fine-diner, The Grove.
These days, that restaurant is part of the established order, with its platters of awards and string of double-barrelled chefs — Michael Meredith, Sid Sahrawat, Ben Bayley — but then it was an upstart, the irresistible force challenging the previously immovable objects of the O'Connell St Bistro, French Cafe, Gault's Euro, Kate Fay's Cibo.
At the first height of its fame — it has gone on to others — Meredith left for parts unknown to serious gourmandising. He took over three rundown suburban shops, knocked out the walls, painted them black and frosted the glass, and installed a state-of-the-art kitchen. Then, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
You went to Meredith's for his food and to experience a restaurant that was at once serious and sassy. It knew every one of the other boxes — service, wine, style, ambience — and ticked them all.
It didn't take long for the awards to crowd the mantelpiece and the invitations to drop into the letterbox: would Mr Meredith care to grace the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival alongside Heston Blumenthal and Thomas Keller?
Meredith's simply expressed philosophy was, "The thing I want [my staff] to understand more than anything, is food and how to respect it."
Others saw something deeper: Dearth called him "the zen chef" and one of his senior staff told me, "Without Michael's way, there's no way".
Meredith's way meant that everything took time. It was and is refined cooking. You need patience to strive for perfection. The chef tried and discarded, tweaked and refined. Searched for perfection. Relentlessly.
Announcing the decision to close the restaurant, Meredith spoke of the sacrifices in his personal life, the cost to his relationship, and his three daughters. He is in a new relationship and expecting a child in the New Year.
A break is needed: "When you own your own business you don't see your family. So this time around I want to enjoy that part."
There will be a new venture and it is no surprise that it will have a huge social dimension. For Meredith, with business partner Lisa King, founded Eat My Lunch, which provides free lunches to hundreds of school kids who would otherwise go without. Lately, free dinners too. The restaurant also ran a weekly "dine by donation" scheme where every cent spent on food went to charities.
Those contributions, as well as his expertise at his night job, have been recognised with the New Zealand Order of Merit.
There were, and there are, hundreds of other charitable events and activities that few will know about. People asked, he said yes.
I refuse to write, "For the last supper ..." but three of us went to Meredith's because two of us share a birthday and we'd all been here before, separately, and it seemed an appropriate way to mark the occasion.
I could deconstruct all the dishes in our degustation, from the canapes of chicken liver hidden in chocolate to the yoghurt sorbet, but somehow that's not the point.
After the meal, Meredith and I chatted and shook hands across the pass.
I remembered what I wrote in that first review: "I would eat anything that came out of this man's kitchen."
It didn't seem the right time to remind him. So I'll just do what Dad told me: Thank you, chef.
