Watch This Face - Sara-jane Quadara

The Age

Friday March 28, 2008

Roslyn Grundy

She survived Gordon Ramsay in London. Now chef Sara-Jane Quadara hopes to wow the critics at Melbourne's most hyped new restaurant.

If it weren't for a series of sporting injuries, Sara-Jane Quadara might have spent her career in tracksuits rather than chefs' whites. "Cooking was never going to be my career," she says. "I always wanted to be a phys-ed teacher."

Then fate intervened. Quadara had deferred her studies and returned to her parents' Avenel home to recover from leg injuries sustained on netball and basketball courts. A friend, recalling Quadara's experience flipping burgers at a roadhouse during high school, mentioned that a nearby restaurant needed an apprentice chef. "I ummed and ah-ed and said, 'No, no, I'm just deferring for a year. I'm going back to uni,'' says Quadara. "More out of curiosity than anything else, I did a two-week trial and loved it.''

Now, having worked her way up through the ranks, including more than four years in European kitchens alongside the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Georges Blanc, Quadara, 33, has become joint head chef (with Matthew Gilroy) of Melbourne's most anticipated new restaurant, Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons, at Crown.

Starting out at 21, when many chefs have already completed their training, Quadara felt she had to grab opportunities while she could. Her first head chef, Gary Rule, a veteran of Anton Mosimann's London kitchen, remembers the young apprentice as "a bit dorky, but with a spark". Two years into her apprenticeship at Trawool Valley Resort, he took her aside and said, "You have such great potential; you need to go and see the real world."

She got a job at Marchetti's Latin, where she met Robert Marchetti, then the Latin's executive chef and now a co-owner, with Maurice Terzini, of Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons. Even in the early days, says Marchetti, Quadara's potential was clear. Stubborn, serious (he says it took a year to get a laugh out of her), hard-working and ambitious, "she'd be the first person to volunteer to work and the last one out every time".

By the end of her apprenticeship in 2000, Marchetti was urging her to join the kitchen brigade at the now defunct Sydney restaurant Banc. With its million-dollar fit?out, European-trained chefs and fine French cooking, it seemed a natural progression. Working in Banc's famously volatile environment gave Quadara an insight into how a hierarchical European kitchen might run. "The swearing, the screaming, the ranting and raving; you learn very quickly that they're trying to make you better.''

A year later, aged 26 and conscious that by 30 she would be too old for a work visa, Quadara flew to London. She arrived, jobless, and immediately bought a Michelin guide. "I read the guide, decided on four or five places where I thought I'd learn the most, and at nine o'clock on Monday morning, I started knocking on doors."

To her surprise, each offered her a job. She chose Gordon Ramsay's Michelin-starred Petrus. Working 16-hour days in the testosterone-fuelled kitchens toughened Quadara up. Colleagues made bets on how long it would take for her to quit. No one collected. But it was the only kitchen where she was not allowed to cook during service. Head chef Marcus Wareing told her, as she was leaving to help launch Ramsay's Connaught restaurant, that he had not wanted the brigade to see him screaming at a woman if she'd overcooked the guinea fowl. "I was disappointed ... I'm human - I'm going to make a mistake and I expect to be told so I don't make that mistake again."

Homesickness set in two years later, while she was working at three Michelin-starred Restaurant Georges Blanc, in the tiny French village of Vonnas. On a day off, she went to a bird sanctuary near where she was living. "I could hear a magpie warbling in the background. I realised I hadn't heard the sound for so long and if that's the kind of thing you miss about Australia, it's time to come home."

Since returning in 2005, Quadara confesses that she's been "loafing around", lending a hand at a friend's seaside restaurant, working at Avenel gastropub Harvest Home and waiting for the right opportunity. Still looking every bit the basketballer, the sports-mad chef is relishing being in charge of the vast Ferrari-red-and-steel kitchen at Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons. She still can't quite believe that a girl from Avenel could have ended up in some of Europe's great kitchens. "If someone had said to me when I started my apprenticeship that in eight years, I'd be working as a senior chef de partie at a three-star restaurant in the middle of France, I would have said, 'Oh, right. Whatever'."