Ben Shewry
Woolworths TASTE|July 2017

The head chef and owner of Melbourne’s Attica – recently ranked number 32 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list – on incorporating Australian Aboriginal ingredients on his menu, the importance of kindness and how he spends his Sundays (it involves kangaroos).

Isha Govender-YPMA
Ben Shewry

I decided to be a chef at age five. My mother, Kaye Shewry, agrees. I didn’t do cooking in high school until the last year because it wasn’t complicated enough. I was already well ahead of anything that they could teach me. I had worked in professional kitchens from around the age of 10 – and it was very intoxicating, exciting. Overall, I think it’s my mum’s influence. It was 1982 and it’s not like there were TV chefs around. We didn’t even have TV.

As young children, we had amazing freedom. My parents had a sheep farm in Taranaki, New Zealand. It was a hard land to farm and money was short. My mother had a huge vegetable garden; at the time I didn’t realise that was because of our financial situation.

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