Since the closure of her restaurant Alta, chef Georgia van Prehn has been busy with creative pursuits and a new puppy. That is until chef Michael Meredith got in touch about a new role at award-winning Mr Morris, writes Leisha Jones.
Over the past year, Georgia van Prehn has been
It was her creativity that was top of mind for executive chef Michael Meredith when he tracked her down for the head chef role at Mr Morris earlier this year. “I think she is one of the most creative chefs in Auckland at the moment and she’s brought a fresh look into what we are doing at Mr Morris, which is really nice,” he says. With chef Zane Neustroski’s departure earlier this year and with Michael splitting his time between Mr Morris and his Pacific-inspired restaurant Metita at Skycity, it was crucial to find a new talent to helm the kitchen in Britomart.
Michael first tried Georgia’s food at Alta, her since-shuttered restaurant on Karangahape Rd. Fans of her food there may recognise nods to some of her signature dishes now on the menu at Mr Morris: golden rectangles of potato hash topped with beef tartare and brined mussels; a carpaccio of beetroot brushed with smoked beef fat, served with pine nut cream; and a celery tartare with peanuts.
Three weeks after Alta opened in July 2021, it was forced to close for 107 days due to a Covid lockdown. “I didn’t know what to do with myself, everything had just collapsed and it was so stressful,” says Georgia. She went to the restaurant every day – to experiment with new dishes, deep clean, and work on the courtyard garden which would later burst with herbs and nasturtium when they opened again – doing whatever she could to keep busy and stay focused on the business.
The years that followed were a turbulent time for restaurants everywhere, and in June last year Georgia made the difficult decision to close, treating the final weeks as a celebration rather than commiseration, bringing back favourites like seafood platters and clam martinis for regular customers to enjoy one last time.
The day after Alta’s final service she fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting a puppy, something she hadn’t had the time for since becoming a chef – a fox terrier called Paris Hilton who kept her company while she took a couple of months off to recalibrate and “just breathe”.
During this time of rest and reflection, she did a pottery course, reignited a long-lost love of sewing, and got stuck into her garden, before slowly making her way back into kitchen work, dabbling in different environments to see where she might want to take her career next. She was trying her hand at cafe hours at Grey Lynn’s Ozone Coffee Roasters when Michael reached out about the role at Mr Morris.
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Advertise with NZME.Georgia liked the idea of working in a busy restaurant again, with the opportunity to put her own unique stamp on the menu. “I’ve never really wanted to accept a role where there wasn’t any creative control because coming up with flavours and executing a dish is my favourite part of the job. I was lucky Michael really understood that and allowed me to have it. It’s a bigger team than I’m used to from my previous jobs which has been a welcoming challenge and has opened up more possibilities in regard to what can be executed well on a menu.”
She says while she and Michael have slightly different styles, the way they conceive dishes is similar – they both like to experiment and try new things. “It’s nice to be working for someone who gives good feedback. I’m able to bounce ideas off him and he gets it because he’s a chef too. He hasn’t really shot down an idea, but instead suggests techniques I could change and ways I could make a dish more balanced. It’s really encouraging.”
As well as new dishes, Georgia has been working on restructuring the menu, adding more snacks and sharing dishes so diners can experience the menu in a more relaxed way, something Michael has always envisaged for the restaurant.
Georgia’s cooking is vibrant, fresh and refined, with a focus on vegetables treated in unexpected ways, which Michael cites as one of her greatest strengths. She hones in on only a few flavours, using different techniques to extract flavour and texture creating dishes such as tempura pumpkin slathered with rosemary mayo, topped with squares of pickled pumpkin offcuts and sprinkled with rosemary salt; or a seemingly simple dish of mushroom, hazelnut and celeriac, made using dehydrated celeriac noodles that are reconstituted in hazelnut milk, mixed with grilled enoki mushrooms and fresh hazelnuts, topped with mushroom oil.
“Working with vegetables is really important to me, I find it so much fun. I just love a basic vege, and trying to make something special out of it,” says Georgia, who also enjoys reinterpreting timeless flavour combinations. “I love a BLT or a Greek salad, all those naff classics that are just so good because they are perfect flavours.” One of her favourite dishes on the current menu is a Waldorf salad tart, a light pastry shell filled with radicchio, smoked chicken and walnuts, topped with an aerated celery mayonnaise. She is also utilising the asado grill that is central to the kitchen to add elements of smoke and fire to her dishes – there’s smoked banana caramel pooled on coconut icecream; and a smoky vinaigrette made with chargrilled cabbage offcuts.
As an innovative chef himself, Michael says he wants to give her the space to come up with dishes and solutions on her own. “We approach food differently but we have a good understanding of how each other works because we both like to create,” he says. “I’m always really open to her ideas and happy to give her that freedom. It’s hard to put boundaries around somebody like her who is very creative, it just doesn’t work. I understand that, because I wouldn’t want somebody to put boundaries around me.”
Having Georgia take the lead on the menu has allowed Michael to focus on running his two businesses, splitting his time equally between Mr Morris and Metita, and going wherever he is needed most week by week. And while Georgia still speaks of her own future plans, at the moment she is content putting all her energy into cooking and conceptualising at Mr Morris, a nice change of pace to running her own business.
“Outside of the restaurant, the most work I do is creatively thinking about dishes. On my weekend, I spend a lot of time reading through cookbooks and thinking of new ideas, sometimes they don’t stick, sometimes they do. And it’s really nice to just purely focus on that.”
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