Janet Jeffs was just 19 when she started her apprenticeship with Cheong Liew at Neddy’s restaurant in Adelaide.
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It was 1978, the heady days of the Don Dunstan era and Adelaide was a vibrant multicultural city ahead of its time.
Through Neddy’s, Liew began to introduce Chinese dishes, using ingredients no other chef dared to use: pigs feet, sea urchins and shark lips.
“What Cheong started to do was introduce some of his Chinese dishes and stay really true to his heritage,” says Jeffs, now the executive chef and director of Ginger Catering.
“He started to push that east/west idea but there was more of a Chineseness, an Asianness to the dishes, rather than a fusion.
“He really was a vanguard of that time. For me, Cheong is a culinary magician, a sorcerer of the kitchen.”
And now the sorcerer and the sorcerer’s apprentice are reuniting in Canberra for a one-off event dinner.
Jeffs and Liew will team up in the kitchen of the National Arboretum to present a four-course dinner and canapes that showcases Liew’s cuisine.
“We’re starting with his most famous dish, The Four Dances of the Sea, which celebrates the waters of South Australia,” Jeffs says.
“It’s a very complicated dish, precise and detailed.”
It features soused snook, calamari with black noodles, olive fried octopus, and a prawn sambal, all served with coconut glutinous rice.
To follow there’s salt water duck celery with tangerine chicken cloud ear fungus; red roasted wild barramundi with leek fondue, shaved calamari, spring onion and a coriander green jus; Mayura Station wagyu barvette with garlic soy rice wine and a cured egg yolk sauce; and to finish a black rice palm sugar pudding with roasted pineapple coconut mousse.
“Cheong was all about experimenting and being led by the ingredients,” Jeffs says.
“His complexity is discreet, his talent lies in combining flavours and textures into a single but multidimensional taste experience, which goes beyond the palate to the intellect.”
Jeffs says doing her apprenticeship with Liew was an amazing learning experience.
“I remember going to the Asian grocers with Cheong and going what's this, what’s that, how do you use this. To have that experience, being in that situation in the late '70s, early '80s was pretty eye-opening.”
She remembers being given plenty of space to develop her own style.
“A lot of his advice was about experimenting and not being afraid to pursue your own style,” she says.
“It was about thinking about what you were interested in and what you wanted to cook and eat.
“A lot of it is about the pursuit of flavour, a lot of chefs get lost in technique and style or the look on the plate, and don't consider how these ingredients are reacting together to make a complete dish.”
In tune with the sorcerer’s apprentice idea, Jeffs is including two of her young team in the dinner, Rory McLeod and Marie Koenig.
“We've heard so much about him from Janet,” Koenig says.
“It will be amazing working with him and learning from him and seeing how his flavour combinations will work, seeing how we may have already picked up some of his influences through Janet.”
The Master and Apprentices: One night only with Cheong Liew, Thursday, March 14, National Arboretum, Canberra, canapes and a four-course dinner with matched wines, $170pp. Book now at gingercatering.com.au
