Tales from MasterClass

MasterClass is the engine under the hood, the nuts and bolts. It’s been an integral part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival’s personality since it was first conceived, creating an up-close and personal arena in which the world’s Best get to strut their skills, reveal their secrets, their talents, their idiosyncrasies, their personalities and answer questions from a highly informed crowd. It started at the Grand Hyatt, then moved to the Sofitel before moving to the Langham Melbourne hotel, where it’s kept under close watch by executive chef Anthony Ross, who re-creates all the tastings at MasterClass. It’s live, mostly unscripted with the aromas of the food and the fragrance of the wine reaching the audience in real time. There’s certainly room for mistakes but that means there’s also plenty of room for magic.

Over the past 20 years, the MasterClass line-up has, to say the least, been starry, featuring more than 20 chefs who bristle with Michelin stars and have held a top place in the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. The line-up has included Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, René Redzepi, Thomas Keller, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Elena Arzak, Massimo Bottura, Inaki Aizpitarte, Alex Atala, Fergus Henderson, Neil Perry, Charlie Trotter, Rose Gray, Michel Roux, Phil Howard, Carlo Cracco, Dieter Mueller, Claude Bosi, David Kinch, David Chang and Peter Gilmore.

The ability of MasterClass to surprise as well as inform started from the beginning when, at the 1993 Festival, Italian-born, US-based chef Giuliano Bugialli was demonstrating how to make pasta when one of the audience members, horrified, shrieked, “But Mr Bugialli, you’re using your fingers!” The chef won both applause and approval and set something of an informal benchmark for Melbourne’s MasterClass when he good-naturedly but pointedly threw pasta at the woman.

Part of the energy of MasterClass has always come from the fact that chaos is never too far away. Sylvia Johnson remembers a thoroughly frightened Maggie Beer, “so scared she was almost wobbling” before her first class, who then won the crowd over with her (seemingly) effortless charm; US chef Mark Miller, much delayed due to flight cancellations, arriving in Melbourne only a few hours before he was to present and being confronted by a fully staffed Grand Hyatt kitchen that had completed most of his prep for him; and Trotter, gone AWOL to taste Grange Hermitage in South Australia, flying back just in time to pull an all-nighter and then completely silencing the room when he gave them a taste of his exquisite "tomato water" .

In more recent times there has been the sight of chef Ben Shewry, sitting in on Korean-American Roy Choi’s class, putting up his hand to ask for the secret to a successful tortilla (the juice of one lime apparently) and Hong Kong chef Margaret Xu teaching the team from Melbourne’s Ezard restaurant how to make tofu from scratch in exchange for them teaching her how to make chlorophyll. Nigella Lawson won the crowd over with her passion for home cooking while Michelin-starred Atul Kochhar did the same with his detailed descriptions and demonstrations of roasting spices.

Heston Blumenthal, writing in Australian Gourmet Traveller about his experience at the 2009 Festival said, “What I really liked about the MasterClasses was that they were kept small. Some of the big European festivals are more like trade conventions. There’s also a real mix of amateurs and professionals in the room. We had a book signing afterwards; signed a few body parts as well and there was one bloke who said he was too tight to buy a book so I signed his train ticket instead.”

Expert cooking, signed body parts, organised chaos — all in a day’s work at MasterClass.

What I liked about [Langham Melbourne MasterClass] … was that there was a real mix of amateurs and professionals in the room and gauging by the questions asked everyone seemed really interested. Heston Blumenthal, 2009

Zakary Pelaccio, Langham Melbourne MasterClass, 2011; Nigella Lawson, Theatre of Ideas 2011; George Calombaris, Langham MasterClass, 2011; Alla Wolf-Tasker, Langham Melbourne MasterClass, 2011; Rachel Allen, Langham Melbourne MasterClass, 2011 Michael Psilakis, Langham Melbourne MasterClass, 2010.