‘I've been chasing that feeling ever since': Besha Rodell reflects on her most formative meal at a Melbourne icon

The Age

12 hours ago

Yes, there was a trip to France. A tower of profiteroles at Les Deux Magots. Breakfasts that included flaky, buttery croissants and fine porcelain cups of le chocolat chaud, so thick and creamy it has taken up residence in my sense memory as a paragon of deliciousness. But my journey into a life in food did not begin there. It began in Melbourne, Australia, at a restaurant called Stephanie's.
Stephanie's was Melbourne's grandest restaurant at the time, housed in a majestic old home in Hawthorn and run by Stephanie Alexander, a chef who is credited with changing the way Australians ate. She trained many of the cooks who went on to become the country's most prominent chefs. The name Stephanie's was synonymous with the finest dining.
In 1984, I was aware of none of this because I was eight and living with my American mother, my Australian father and my three-year-old brother, Fred, in a share house in Brunswick, an inner-north neighbourhood of Melbourne.
The hulking old terrace where we lived − white, with black wrought iron framing its verandahs − had previously housed an elderly order of nuns. When my parents rented it, with the idea of filling it full of other like-minded hippie/academic/journalist types, its sweeping staircase and stained-glass windows and high-ceilinged rooms were filthy. They scrubbed it, claimed its grandest bedroom upstairs, and advertised the downstairs rooms for rent.
Some of the first housemates they attracted were a single mother and her daughter, Sarah, who was about my age. Sarah was small, with dark hair and freckles and a gap-toothed grin, the opposite of my pudgy, blond, self-conscious self. She quickly became the leader of our gang of two, bossing me into compliance, though I did manage to inspire some awe with my firm belief that I was the queen of the fairies. (At night, while she slept, I flew away to fairyland, where I lived in a rosebush with my many fairy princess daughters. This is the subject for a different book entirely.)
The central mythology in Sarah's young life had to do with her father, who was mostly absent. He was, she told me, handsome and rich and lived in a fancy house with his beautiful new wife. (The narrative was quite different when Sarah's mother told the story.)
About once a month, Sarah would disappear for the weekend to her father's house and come back with 50-cent pieces that he had given her – more proof that he was 'rich', since our parents would never have bestowed such lavish wealth upon us. I distinctly remember after one such weekend, Sarah leading me dramatically to the milk bar near school and pointing to the wall of candies at the counter. I could pick whichever one I wanted, and she would buy it with her paternally acquired riches. (Did I mention my parents were hippies? Candy was not part of my usual diet.)
When Sarah turned nine, her father proved Sarah's mythology by taking both of us for a celebratory birthday meal at the fanciest restaurant in town: Stephanie's.
I have almost zero recollection of the food. There was a huge, beautiful chocolate souffle that haunts me to this day, but other than that, I cannot recall a thing I ate. I remember the brocade seating and deep red curtains, which gave everything a feeling of grandeur. I remember the lighting, the tinkle of glasses, the swoosh of the waiters, the mesmerising, intense luxury of it all. I remember feeling special, truly special, that I was allowed into this room where people were spending ungodly amounts of money on something as common as dinner.
Quite honestly, I can't remember much about that year or my life at that time, other than the fact that my mother started sleeping with men other than my father and he moved into a different bedroom and cried a lot and then eventually she moved out of the share house and into a tiny, crappy house somewhere else with the guy who would end up becoming my stepfather. But I remember Stephanie's.
My family did not frequent restaurants like Stephanie's, and in fact I do not remember any specific restaurant meal in my life before the one that occurred there, although I'm sure there were a few.
I didn't need an education in food. I grew up with fantastic food, some of it just as good – and in some ways better! – than what was served at Stephanie's. My father was an academic and an occasional farmer and a gardener and a devotee of Julia Child. I was reared on homegrown fruits and vegetables, rich cream sauces, chocolate mousse made with egg whites and heavy cream and not a lick of gelatin.
My mother had melded her American upbringing with her hippie sense of exploration. She spent her earliest years in Hollywood, where my grandfather was a screenwriter and many of his friends were Syrian. Rice and yoghurt became staples of her childhood meals, a tradition she never gave up. My father did most of the cooking while they were together, but when she cooked, lemon juice was added to everything: chicken livers, broccoli with butter, salads full of olives and feta bought from the Greek stalls at the Queen Victoria Market. No, I did not need an education in food. I needed – or more accurately, I desperately wanted – an education in luxury.
After my meal at Stephanie's, I began haranguing my parents on my own birthdays. No longer satisfied with the family tradition of picking a favourite home-cooked dish as a birthday meal, I told them I wanted to eat at restaurants instead. They tried. My mother and my new stepfather took us out – now with a baby sister, Grace, in tow – to a neighbourhood Lebanese restaurant for my 11th birthday, something I'm sure they could not afford. I was disappointed. The food was good, but the luxury was lacking.
This instinct, this need for extravagance where it is wholly unearned, runs in my family. Wealth has come and gone on both sides of my lineage, but it has never settled in and stayed. My paternal grandfather owned Malties, a cereal company that was one of Australia's most popular brands in the early 20th century. Then he had a heart attack and died, leaving my grandmother with five children and no idea how to run a business, and before long, the cereal company and the grand house in Eltham were lost.
My maternal grandfather grew up exceedingly wealthy in Philadelphia and spent his life squandering that wealth on fancy cars and trips to Europe and multiple divorces, including two from my grandmother, all the while fancying himself some sort of genius playwright.
Both of my parents grew up resenting the lack of luxury that should have been their birthright. I somehow absorbed that, but from a very early age, the thing I thought I ought to have, in a just world, was meals at fancy restaurants.
I did not need an education in food. I needed an education in luxury.
Money was a constant stress when I was growing up; I'd be lying if I said it hasn't remained a constant stress in my own adult life. And yet my mother has a thing for vintage cars, French soap, French underwear, Chanel perfume, tiny pieces of luxury that she should not be able to justify given that she is the type of woman who carries an extra canister of gas in her car because she runs out so frequently because she never has the money to fill her tank. (I know this makes no sense; you need not explain that to me.)
In fact, the trip to France was a case in point. When I was 13, my mother came into a small amount of money and decided to whisk me off for an around-the-world trip, even though she and my stepfather were struggling with a mortgage and my sister Grace was a toddler and leaving her alone with my stepfather for months to take me to France and America was a wholly ridiculous thing to do. But this is my mother we're talking about, who drove a vintage red MGB convertible rather than a normal car, who believed her teenage daughter must see Paris to understand the brand of sophistication she believed we deserved to inhabit.
I have endeavoured, in my life, to be more pragmatic. I have mostly failed. If I thirst for designer clothes, I know how to find them in thrift stores. I do not long for money, other than the kind that relieves you of the deep, existential dread that accompanies poverty.
What I long for – what I've longed for since I was eight years old, sitting wide-eyed in that grand restaurant – is the specific opulence of a very good restaurant. I never connected this longing to the goal of attaining wealth; in fact, it was the pantomiming of wealth that appealed. I did not belong in that grand room! And yet there I was! It was intoxicating.
I have been chasing that feeling ever since.
This is an edited extract from Hunger Like a Thirst by Besha Rodell, published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $35