A man in a baseball cap walks up to Peter Gilmore with a smile. “I had your snow egg five years ago,” he says. “And it was fantastic.” He shakes Gilmore’s hand, then wanders away along the boardwalk at Campbells Cove and disappears, along with other sightseers and joggers, along the path that snakes under the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
On this sunny Thursday, even if you didn’t know about the famous snow egg or recognise Peter Gilmore as its creator, it’s still easy to pick him as a Very Important Chef. Not just because he’s a stone’s throw from Quay, the fine-dining restaurant he has led for the past 25 years, nor that he’s accompanied by a photographer bearing a lighting rig. It’s because he’s dressed, outdoors, in pristine chef’s whites. He might as well be wearing a toque.
But even in his civilian garb on the weekends, Gilmore says he gets recognised on the streets: “It’s the MasterChef thing.” The snow egg – a soft meringue orb filled with custard apple ice-cream and draped in maltose tuile, resting on a bed of guava granita and cream, and served in a Riedel glass – had a starring role in the 2010 finale of the reality TV cooking show, which had a peak of 4.35 million viewers, making the episode the most watched non-sporting event since Australian TV ratings began, as reported at the time.
Some chefs might be bothered about having their careers so tied to a single creation. But for Gilmore, the snow egg is a snowballing accomplishment. “I see myself as quite a sort of humble person,” says Gilmore. “[But] there is a sense of pride in being acknowledged as doing something good.”
We’re only a five-minute stroll from Quay, but Gilmore is not a walker-and-talker. He pauses mid-stride, occasionally scrunching up his face in deep concentration, though this could be because of the intense Sydney sun beating down on him (his chef’s uniform does not include a sunhat). As he talks, he regally rests his hand on his chest, sliding his fingers between the button gaps in his jacket; other times, he flaps his sleeves like a restless schoolboy.
It is rare for restaurants and their chefs to stick around for so long, and in one place. But Gilmore has been executive chef at Quay since 2001; the restaurant was established in 1999 by the Fink Goup. But after 27 years, a $4m renovation in 2018 and a slew of national and international awards, Quay will close on 14 February. It’s the result of a “triple whammy” of factors, says Gilmore: a decline in international diners, rising wages and the cost-of-living crisis. The degustation at Quay costs $365 per person.
“We weren’t at the stage where we had to close. [But] we were breaking even rather than actually making a profit for the last three years. So, you know, you could say that after 24 years, all good things come to an end.”
Growing up in Ryde, in suburban north-west Sydney, Gilmore credits his mother, a keen home cook and dinner party host, for sparking his interest in food. A toddler-aged Gilmore would accompany her to cooking lessons run by Margaret Fulton. “By about 10, I was kicking Dad off the barbecue because he would always overcook the steak,” says Gilmore.
While Gilmore’s friends would sit down to meat and three veg at their homes, his mother would serve Italian, Thai and Chinese dishes at the Gilmore family table. “I sort of grew up with a multicultural palate … in the mid 1970s, it was probably more unusual than normal.”
At 16, he started his apprenticeship at Manor House in Balmain, a French-influenced fine-dining restaurant that was considered “one of the top five restaurants in Sydney” at the time, and counted the late broadcaster John Laws among its regular clientele. (Manor House is also where he met his wife, Kath. They’ve been married for 33 years.)
By 32, after a “formative time” in the UK, he was installed as the new head chef at Quay, with the brief to make the menu “more modern and more Australian”.
In real terms, this has translated into dishes like Gilmore’s “sea pearls”: an assortment of delicate spheres (he seems to have a thing for orbs) of paper-thin greenlip abalone suspended in dashi jelly, for example, or delicate slices of scallop huddled around creme fraiche spiked with Tahitian lime.
But if we’re talking legacy, it’s not plating but the people that Gilmore is most proud of. He estimates 600 chefs have piped, pureed and Pacojetted their way through Quay’s kitchen, and under his watch. “Being able to train, inspire and influence all those chefs and … where they go and how many people they influence, I’m really proud of that,” says Gilmore.
So too is being an Australian pioneer of the farmer-to-chef model, where Gilmore worked closely with small-scale producers to grow rare and heirloom vegetables and produce: white asparagus from Tasmania, striped peanuts from the northern rivers, pink radicchio from the New South Wales south coast. In Quay’s early years, Gilmore would peruse seed catalogues and grow test produce in his home garden, then set his sights on commissioning commercial growers. Although his first approach to a farmer about growing pea flowers did not go well. “[He said]: ‘Mate, I’ll plant a whole field of peas. When they’re ready, we go through and we pick all the peas and we send them to market. I’m not going out every morning looking for flowers for you.’”
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Remarkable and singular as Quay is, when researching this story, many people I asked spoke glowingly of their experience there – albeit from years ago. Before Covid, “maybe 40% of our diners were internationals”, says Gilmore, and these numbers haven’t bounced back. When the restaurant announced its closure in December last year, bookings filled out within 48 hours, and there are just under 1,000 names on the waitlist. For its final weeks, at least, Quay is the hottest ticket in town.
A few days after I walk with Gilmore, I sit in Quay among the privileged few. It’s a room with a view: bridge, harbour, Opera House. Little wonder Nicole Kidman once scouted the restaurant as a wedding venue. A man in his 30s sits behind me and happily enjoys the nine-course degustation solo. Another gentleman props up his phone on the table to watch an Australian Open tennis match – mercifully, he mutes the volume.
(He’s far from the most infamous guest at Quay. That dishonour goes to Vladimir Putin. “I remember he had his own taster come in, who had to eat from his meal before he did,” says Gilmore. “It says a lot about who you are in the world when you’ve got to have a personal taster to avoid being poisoned.”)
As the evening unfolds, waitstaff trot out a “crystal” tart filled with delicate dashi jelly cubes and katsuobushi pearls; udon-like noodles bound with rendered bone marrow; an almost-perfect rectangle of King George whiting with baby cucumbers. It is precision cooking, it is astoundingly beautiful, and after the last snow egg is served – for real this time – the dining room will probably be turned into a “normal restaurant or function room” by the new lease-holders, says Gilmore.
Could the Michelin Guide have saved Quay’s fortunes? The road-tripping, globe-trotting restaurant guide recently announced it was heading to New Zealand after a reported NZ$2.5m cash injection in its first year from the national tourism body, but Tourism Australia passed on an offer to bring it here. Gilmore concedes the Michelin Guide is no “magic bullet”, is “not perfect” and “has lots of detractors”, but Australia is now an “outlier” by not being included. “It just seems like the state governments and federal governments aren’t willing to back the sector.”
Australia’s relative remoteness and nascent restaurant industry means our food culture is unbridled by the culinary rules and traditions that govern others, such as Japan or France. And we have the “power of the whole continent” to access high-quality produce from the land and sea, says Gilmore. “You could be eating a Queensland reef fish or you could be having a cool climate abalone from Tasmania.”
Chefs here have the longest leash to play with their food. But in this precarious economic environment, restaurants in Australia are “playing it safe”.
“In these economic conditions, it doesn’t make sense to maybe take risks, but … I don’t want to see a very homogenised, beige dining landscape.”
It’s been about an hour, and Gilmore has ambled less than 300 metres. Across the water is the Opera House, and within its sails is Bennelong – another Fink fine-dining restaurant, led by Peter Gilmore, where he’ll finish up in June. And after that, the snow egg creator will be an empty nester. Gilmore and Kath plan to move to Tasmania permanently – he has a farm there – while their two adult sons may stay in Sydney.
A kid-free, Sydney-to-Tasmania migration sounds a lot like a retirement plan, but not for Gilmore. He’s mulling over some “interesting propositions”, but says if the conditions are right, “there is a small part of me that would like to open something down in Tasmania”. Not even Gilmore knows what the future holds, and there’s no crystal ball, or egg, that will tell him.
