I laughed when Jo Elwin asked me for what I would be having for Christmas dinner. My answer is leftovers, not your ordinary leftovers but upmarket ones. There are always things we have left when the restaurant shuts its doors for the Christmas break on the evening of December 23.
All the food is split between the staff but there are always things that I make sure I get or that I deliberately cook too much of so we have extra for later.
I always get the duck liver parfait, and the duck breasts – I can’t get enough of them. Then there are the frypan brownies and pavlovas … all those great Cibo classics.
Ham legs come in from Carve and glazes are made on the 23rd while we are still working. Glazing the ham on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning is a breeze after that. Plenty of time for sleeping on the couch on Christmas day as the prep is all done. It’s funny, one year (I think 2012), I got ham’d out because there was too much ham eating in the weeks leading up to Christmas Day.
We all get a little delirious doing a Cibo Christmas; crazy amounts of work on tiny amounts of sleep − kind of like a scene from Survivor v Lord of the Flies, three weeks in. Our chefs work up to 80 hours and we hire two fridges just to store all of the extra Christmas food. Weekly, we go through 250kg of beef bones to make our beef jus and 100kg of asparagus, which is sold as a side order. Daily we sell upwards of 80 whitebait omelettes, and 50 of our famous Cibo pavs.
Kate Fay, Chef, Cibo
Duck liver parfait with brined duck breasts and burnt apple puree
Pineapple and rum glazed Christmas ham with violet mustard
Cibo fry-pan brownie with cherries and berries