The inspiration behind Peter Gilmore
The award-winning executive chef at Sydney Harbour's Quay restaurant on his love of produce, getting messy in the kitchen and being passionate about food.
Peter Gilmore is a chef who likes his ice cream. ‘If I had one last meal,’ he says, ‘it would involve some beautiful seafood and there would definitely be some ice cream in there. I must say I do love desserts.’
The executive chef at Sydney harbour’s Quay restaurant, voted Australia’s best restaurant and 26th in this year’s World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards, Gilmore and his sweet tooth first started cooking at the age of four, when his mother took him to one of her recipe classes.
‘My mum just loved trying different recipes,’ says Gilmore, ‘there was always something interesting at home. I guess that was what inspired me to cook.’ By the age of eleven, Gilmore knew he wanted to be a chef. ‘I was cooking at least once a week at home and I would definitely wrestle Dad for the barbecue tongs. I had developed a passion.’
Early career
As a 16 year-old, Gilmore started his apprenticeship in the kitchen and at 19 he left for the UK where he worked both in London and the West Country. Returning to Sydney three years later, he was based in the Blue Mountains where he worked at developing his own style of cooking, taking it on to Quay in 2001.
Gilmore doesn’t attribute his style to the influence of any specific chef. ‘I’ve worked with some good people in my early career,’ he says, ‘but I think that in a lot of ways I got to this stage of developing my own style through a lot of trial and error and cooking myself, not through working for any particular mentor.’
Quality ingredients
Rather than a great chef, it is quality ingredients that inspire Gilmore’s cooking. ‘I’m really inspired by the diversity of great produce we have in Australia,’ he says.
Alongside fantastic Australian seafood like oysters, marrin and barramundi, he says he uses native Australian ingredients like sea celery, warrigal greens (type of spinach) and lilly pillies (a type of fruit) in his restaurant. He’s also ‘really into’ heirloom varieties of vegetable, enthusing about Monks Beard (a type of land seaweed a bit like samphire, he says) and Good King Henry, another type of spinach.
Gilmore also has his own vegetable patch in his garden.
One chef he does rate is Michel Bras, because of his use of the garden and Gilmore says growing his own produce has changed the way he cooks.
‘I love going down to pick some fresh herbs or pick a few carrots and a nice bunch of tomatoes or something. It gives me a lot of pleasure actually, growing my own produce.’ His kids get involved too. ‘We’ve got some great purple and pink potatoes that they got excited about the other day,’ says Gilmore. ‘Anything unusual captures their imagination.’
Cooking at home
He also cooks with his sons, now in a new kitchen (he’s just moved house), making simple dishes and keeping things fun. ‘The kitchen I had before was pretty crammed up so it used to be a bit crazy, but it’s not too bad now. Like all chefs, though, I make a lot of mess when I cook in a domestic kitchen.’
He says he keeps a mix of staples in his cupboards, with sushi rice next to pasta and jars of chillis. His main gadget is a rice cooker, but food at home is mostly simple. ‘I won’t do something elaborate like I do at work. Most chefs are the same, we cook something easy – make a nice roast or have a really good barbecue or something like that.’
He doesn’t cook recipes from a book. ‘Like all chefs, I’ve got hundreds of recipe books, we all buy them and look through them and it’s just great for inspiration. But I very rarely cook a recipe out of a book. I just do my own thing.’
The future
Gilmore has his own book now called Quay: food inspired by nature, which contains the recipe for the guava and custard apple snow egg, one of his signature dishes which appeared on the Australian Master Chef. For now, working on his recipes at Quay is all he sees for the future.
‘I think I’m on a pretty good track where I am at the moment. I sort of want to continue along that track and keep refining what I do.’
There are reports of a more casual spin-off from Quay, but with both restaurants, the emphasis will remain on the produce, which is also his tip for budding cooks.
‘Being passionate is the most important thing when it comes to cooking. Even if you make a hundred mistakes, learn from them and really get in to it,’ he says. ‘But I also think shopping for produce and seeing great produce is very inspiring and maybe that’s where you need to start rather than a recipe book.’
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