Rundown tower blocks in an urban Melbourne wasteland, a young woman and her ravaged mother are drinking something sickly pink, thrusting the half-empty bottle at passing kids. Hip-hop thuds heavy on a basketball court. Ragged string hangs limply from hoops. It is raining. Leah is seven years old and she is crying. She tumbled on the slippery surface. She is shaken. “Stand up, Leah, you have to try again,” a voice calls kindly. Her team mates gather protectively around. The adult insists. Unsure, she slowly gets to her feet. Someone passes her the ball. Minutes later her fall is forgotten. She shoots, she scores, and soon after she scores again. Her smile lights up. Leah’s father was murdered recently. Being part of this game, this group, is one of the ways she copes.
At the other end of the court Ben Shewry is being effortlessly trounced by Akot, a talented tall young man with a South Sudanese background. Shewry, too, takes a fall. The head chef of revered Melbourne restaurant Attica is a key fundraiser and ambassador for the Helping Hoops basketball programme which offers mentoring to disadvantaged kids through sport. But the most important thing he gives is his time. “It was never going to be enough to raise money,” says Shewry, though he raised enough last year with his WAW Gathering weekend of some of the world’s top cooks to help keep the programme going through 2015. “I didn’t feel too good about the money, to be honest. It was too easy. It is harder and more rewarding to build relationships. These kids come from tough public housing estates, children surrounded by dealers, junkies, desperate people.
“Basketball teaches leadership and communication, learning to keep the faith. Leah scored two hoops. She learnt today was better for not lying on the ground.”
Shewry knows about picking yourself up. He is widely regarded as the best cook on his continent but half-hidden behind his success running one of the world’s top 50 restaurants, the New Zealand-born public face of modern Australian cooking, is another quieter, darker story of depression and despair. “I realised I hated my life,” he says. “It was 2009. We were getting the recognition I had been building toward since I was five making cakes for my family. I had worked as much as a human can work, 100 hours a week was routine at the beginning. My body failed, my fingers bled. I didn’t know if Attica would survive. I might not recover from a restaurant that failed but success had made me unhappy. I felt angry, caged, beaten down.” In a cooking world peopled by monomaniacs, Shewry is renowned for being one of the nice guys. He is socially committed, a loving father, a good family man and friend. A man not prone to rage. I ask if he knows now what triggered his depression. “I grew up in a culture which values humility above everything else,” he says. “I had lived 30 years without an unhappy day. I didn’t recognise it, though it had probably been building for a while.
“I was really close to not cooking any more,” he says. “I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t admit it. I hid it. I didn’t want to burden my wife.
“I was feeling sorry for myself, helpless. Then I met Lance Wiffin.”
Wiffin is an unlikely saviour. A quietly charismatic fisherman, he owns the Sea Bounty mussel farm close to the Shewry family home, an hour’s drive outside Melbourne. The next morning, we join him on board his boat at Port Arlington. The sky is early-summer clear, the waves mostly still. I strain not to slip or get in the way as the crew hook rope after rope of prime shellfish from the water in the bay. While the boat sways, Wiffin tells me how fishing here had almost failed when he was a young man. The wild mussels stopped spawning, the scallop market disappeared. He almost gave up but he had a family to feed. “I nearly walked away from the sea,” he says, “but I knew I belonged on a boat.” He blasts a bowl of blue mussels in the cabin microwave, simply cooks them in their briny juice. From sea to paper plate in seconds, the best you will ever eat – unless you have them Shewry-style, cooked at Attica. As we wash them down with Ovaltine, I soak in the easy friendship between an exceptional supplier and cook, both committed to quality produce and the sea, sustainability overriding profit. “I was in awe of his openness and honesty,” Shewry tells me later. “His industry was facing extinction. He worked all the time, he missed his kids. It struck a chord with me. I realised I had to make changes, to repair my relationships, to make time for my family.”
I ask how long his depression had lasted. “It was overwhelming for eight months,” he says. “A long time to pretend to have a happy face. When I came out of that funk it was the best ever feeling. I felt it lift. I felt the dark clouds part and the sun shine on us.”
The changes Shewry instituted at the restaurant were a revolution. Everything changed: the culture, the team, the food. “I have been more careful with the way I feel ever since,” he says. “We changed how it felt to be at Attica. For the staff, for me and the customers, too. I determined to employ people who are positive regardless of skills. I can train technique but you can’t teach kindness.”
I join the restaurant team for one of the “staff speeches”, a daily gathering where they all sit in a circle and listen to one of the crew giving a 15-minute talk, opening up about their work, their feelings, their lives. At first I was unsure, a little nervous. Was it a cult, was it an AA meeting: Attica Anonymous? Everyone’s here: chefs, pot washers, waiters, sommeliers, managers. As I see the smiles, the support, the camaraderie, I feel my reservations fade. “I wanted to break down divisions between ‘us versus them’,” Shewry tells me, “the two distinct restaurant roles: front-of-house and kitchen. It is the best thing I have ever come up with.”
I ask how the staff respond to being obliged to speak. “It is outside their comfort zone at first,” he says, “but they see people open themselves up. I have bawled like a baby. Everybody’s cried. It gets intense. When I was younger I wanted to win a lot of awards. As I grew older, I realised my friends don’t care if my restaurant is in the world’s top 50. They only care if I am a decent human being who treats my wife and family with respect.”
“One of the saddest things about chefs is that often they don’t want to cook at home. The most beautiful food you cook should be for your family”
Ben Shewry, Lucky Peach magazine
It was when Shewry rediscovered joy that he also rediscovered his family. “For the first four years at Attica, I wasn’t seeing my children,” he says. “When I was home I was a full-on zombie sitting with my kids. I was disconnected with my wife.”
To an extent, he has lived in the shadow of his own happy childhood in remote North Taranaki, New Zealand, where the nearest neighbour was a 15-minute drive away. His father was a sheep and cattle farmer cutting scrub, hunting wild pigs; his mother a teacher at a school of seven that included Shewry and his two sisters. “We had these amazing adventures,” he says. “When I was eight and my sister Tess was six, we tramped two hours into the bush. We camped in a hut for the night, we picked wild blackberries, we fished for eels. While we never felt rich in money, we were always rich in food.
There were risks: “One time, we had gone to the coast to harvest shellfish. I was offshore on a reef collecting mussels. I had my back to the sea. A big wave dragged me across the reef, another pushed me down. I was drowning. I remember the feeling of being lost and lonely. My father, always my great hero, swam in and saved me. He was always watching us.”
Shewry’s own relationship with his son would help pull him round.
“Four years ago, Kobe formed a basketball team with his friends from kindergarten,” he says. “The first season I didn’t see a game but they didn’t have a coach so it fell to me. It has become this huge thing in my life. To feel joy outside of cooking. I had lost that. I have been coaching them for three years now, on Wednesday nights. It is important to Kobe and the boys to give them skills and encouragement. Especially for a young boy to be mentored by his father.
“Success was not possible for me,” he says, “without the motivation to do right by my wife Natalia or my three kids. I always talked of how I put my family first and I don’t know I always did. I needed to prove myself to my son.”
The other fundamental change at Attica comes, of course, with the food. The reborn Shewry is a confident almost carefree cook. It wasn’t always so. “When we started, we served Thai, European, dishes from my mentors,” he says. “We had no idea what we are doing.” All around him, Australian cooking was in a similar identity crisis. “When I arrived here, all I could see were influences from other countries,” he says, “but risotto doesn’t invoke a sense of Australia for me.” Food for Shewry is an expression of his life and surroundings. “It is one of the reasons we work with native ingredients,” he says. “Australians should know what these things taste like. Connection to your roots is one of the most important things of all.”
“My earliest cooking was when I was five,” he says.“Everything makes up my memory palate, knowing what works and what doesn’t. But how can you create something significant unless you are happy when you do it?”
So Ben Shewry is saved, content again, creating uplifting dishes. I have eaten his slow-roasted pig cooked in a Maori fire pit and served to his peers, including René Redzepi, Albert Adria and Claude Bosi, at an event with some of the world’s best chefs in Poland. I have enjoyed his red kangaroo in a millionaire’s art museum in Hobart and now I have finally eaten the menu at Attica. Shewry is special. You will not find this food, these flavours, anywhere else than in his brilliant jewel box of a restaurant in the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea where Shewry, his happy staff and ingredients happen to be. The mussel dish is just that: Lance Wiffin’s delicious blue mussel, perfectly cooked, presented on a seaweed “net” – deceptively simple food with a personal story you feel only Shewry could have created. The meal like the man is welcoming. “Life is not about legacy,” he says. “It’s about being kind to other people.”
Our days together are over. We have toured his city and its suburbs. We have eaten crisp Cantonese pork and Aussie meat pies. I have stayed at his Ocean Grove home and read breakfast stories to his brilliant kids. It is almost time to leave, but first we need to drive along the coast: Kobe has a big basketball game tonight and he needs his dad’s support.
The names of some children have been changed.
Food photographs from Origin by Ben Shewry (Murdoch Books, £40). To buy a copy for £32 from Guardian Bookshop, click here.
Ben Shewry features in the current Netflix series Chef’s Table.
