Food
From the Loire to the Australian Limelight with Gabriel Gaté
Often regarded as Australia's first classically trained celebrity chef, Gabriel Gaté introduced a nation to the flavours of France.
Gabriel Gaté wears a much-loved Breton-striped polo shirt for our conversation. The horizontal navy and white stripes are evocative of the French Navy of 1858, cemented into fashion forever by Coco Chanel in her 1917 collection. His dark hair is flecked with a little distinguished silver, beach-rumpled, his face familiar as hell because he’s been on Australian screens since forever, his gentle, rugged handsomeness and twinkling eyes a synonym for Gallic good looks.
“You know I love cooking for others,” he says once pleasantries are out of the way. “People say, you know, ‘I don’t have time to cook – I’ve spent an hour, an hour a day and it is eaten, gone, in ten, fifteen minutes.’” A long-time advocate of fresh food and culinary literacy, he finds that somewhat shocking. “French people stay at the table longer because I think they do appreciate those things. Cooking is an act of love.”
The ingredients to Gabriel Gaté’s enduring professional success are, in equal parts, food and fame. And that he remains resolutely, lovingly, unapologetically French (he was awarded the La Croix de Chevalier dans L’Ordre du Merite Agricole in 2000 for his promotion of French cooking). “I realise my accent is still strong," he shares. “It is one of those things. But you know, you meet lots of migrants that still have a very strong accent after all these years.”
France is, in many ways, not just his birthplace, but his brand – and a point of difference in what was a less refined Australia at the time of his rise to national fame. With his Melbourne-born bride Angie – they met in Paris when she responded to a flatmate-wanted ad he’d placed – Gabriel Gaté touched down on our shores on AFL Grand Final Day 1977.
At the time, Australia was in the culinary grip of the newly-launched Kraft Singles, and the spectacular innovation of grilling them on toast. Gaté and Angie went straight to Angie’s sister's place for a barbeque where, Gaté remembers, “as you would say, there was a shitload of meat on my plate. A shitload of meat.”
How do you say that in French, I ask? He doesn’t skip a beat. “Une tonne de viande,” he replies, those eyes twinkling. “Salad?” I enquire, to understand if he got the complete authentic experience. “Bien sur,” he responds. “Coleslaw. I thought that was quite pleasant actually.”
A long-time advocate for fresh produce and culinary literacy, Gabriel Gaté's approach to home cooking has had a lasting influence on Australian home makers.
It’s summer as we speak. Gaté is holidaying, as nice, established, comfortable Victorians do, in a holiday house on the Bellarine Peninsula – a long way and time from Gaté’s childhood home in the Loire Valley, two hours southwest of Paris, a region known as the Garden of France.
Large and lush, the Loire overflows with châteaux built for royalty, vineyards and orchards abundant with cherries, asparagus and artichoke, its namesake river teeming with fish willing to jump onto one’s rod and be served, poached or steamed on a plate.
Escorted politely from school at 16 for a mischievous lack of attentiveness, a teacher enquired what else could he possibly be interested in? Food was the reply, the young Gaté having been reared in a multi-generational rural household absorbing the culinary skills of his Grand Mere from the kitchen table, who had raised and provided for her family working as a cook for one of France’s wealthier families.
The teacher organised a meeting between Gabriel and French master chef Albert Augereau in a village eighty kilometres away: the teenager rode his bike, as the family had no car. Fortuitously, Augereau needed someone to start straight away and Gaté’s life was changed forever. He worked long and hard, mastered boning meat and piping bags and absorbed the basic tenet of French cuisine, still taught around the world to chefs today.
“French cooking is like a system,” says Gaté. “You build on basic techniques, like with music, to create different outcomes. A mire poix or a white sauce is a basis for something else. Or, if you put a bit of f lour, a bit of an egg and a bit of milk, you have some pancakes. You put raising agent. You have got some, uh, you know, a little cake. It’s an art”.
These are the skills that took Gaté beyond the Loire, to England at the Savoy Group, and then back to high-end Parisian enterprises. Before he left France at 22, he’d accompany the master chefs with whom he worked when they performed on television, and do all the pre-broadcast preparation. “I had seen the chef’s good in communication. You have got to be good at talking about what you do.” Gaté added showbiz to his knife bag.
It would be in his new-found home of Australia, though, that the pieces would fall into place, after a brief time working in a restaurant here left him – quite simply – fried. “It was, uh, deep-fried fish, you know? Schnitzel. Overcooked meat. Just plain food with overcooked vegetables,” he recalls. “It was not what I wanted to do. It was just different to where I’d come from.”
Gaté at his dining table shells peas in preparation for our Selector shoot.
Hospitality is in Gaté's DNA, and his home kitchen is a true sanctum.
HOUSEHOLD NAME
Then, in 1979, opportunity knocked. A Touch of Elegance was a long-running morning show on Channel 10 in Adelaide, hosted by the iconic Jaye Walton. Walton knew what women wanted: they wanted to know how to cook. But first, an audition: Gaté was asked if he would cook a dinner party for Walton, as she had guests the next week on the same day she was f lying back from interstate.
“Bernard King was a guest. I did her a whole snapper that I had cooked in foil. I had gone to the beach to get some seaweed, put the snapper on the seaweed, closed the snapper, cooked it in the oven so it was steamed and made the sauce with that,” says Gaté. “And she loved it and said, ‘would you show that to my audience on television next week?’” The answer was yes, naturally, and Gaté became a weekly guest.
“Of course, not paid,” he laughs. “It takes a long time to be paid on television.” Angie and Gaté noted every time he appeared on television or radio or did a demonstration, Australians would clamour for the recipes, much more than Europeans ever did. So, they created a cookbook. Nobody wanted to publish it: they decided to publish it themselves, packed 300 or 400 books in the boot of the car, drove back to Melbourne, and schmoozed the tome into bookshops.
“The book was not a great success, but enough to for us to recover our money,” he recalls. Not only that, it made him a national figure, putting him on the same shelf as Margaret Fulton and Charmaine Solomon. This was followed by stints on Bernard King’s pioneering half-hour cooking show, King’s Kitchen. “I think he was a little bit in love with me.”
LOVE, LAUGH, COOK
In 1993, Gaté co-hosted a show of his own, What’s Cooking, on the Nine Network with showbiz dynamo Colette Mann, which ran for seven years. It was the first time he made real money. After that, it was close to 15 years on Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton. “Bert would say, Gabriel, you know, you’re a great chef, so it doesn’t matter if there’s a f lop, if the dish falls on the floor, if I put it in your face – it has got to be entertaining.”
Since then, Gaté has won numerous international awards, authored 24 cookbooks selling over a million copies, and has proved immeasurably influential on this country’s evolving attitude to food. Looking back, he recalls the initial rise of modern Australian cuisine.
“It didn’t mean too much, but at least it was a way to market Australian cuisine,” he says. “It’s still very different now here from France, because French cuisine is a cuisine of region. It’s a cuisine of family, a cuisine of, you know, bourgeois. It’s a cuisine of haute cuisine.”
By contrast, he observes, Australian cuisine is “now a cuisine of many different countries, much more than France. In France, we also have all the countries, but we have so many regions and so many variations that maybe we look less at other countries.”
Given his decades-spanning career, it’s clear that Gabriel Gaté, the master-trained chef, has shown a knack for renewal and reinvention, whilst holding true to his core being. His secret? “To be a happy cook, you need to increase your repertoire,” he says. “You need to build up. So, you learn a new dish, you practice it again, next week and the week after… I do it in a way that my family likes it, and it will be a dish for the rest of my life.”
That’s love for you. Merci beaucoup, monsieur Gaté.