Michael Van de Elzen has been described as a celebrity chef but he prefers plain old chef. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Michael Van de Elzen has been described as a celebrity chef, a TV personality, a writer and a consultant but Michael prefers plain old chef and, while he's quite at home on screen or on a demo stage, he's even more at home in Muriwai where he and wife Belinda have opened Good from Scratch Cooking School.
Henderson Valley was a cool suburb to grow up in and because we lived on a chicken farm, I shovelled a lot of manure. It was hard work, but it was also rewarding because my sister and I sold it at the gate for $1 a bag. The deal was, we paid for the bags and steel ties, but the manure was free. We sold a lot, especially during rose season because roses love chicken manure and gardeners would flock to our gate. On a good day, we'd sell a hundred bags.
When I turned 15 I bought a brand spanking new motorbike, a Kawasaki KDX200. It cost $5200, which is a lot of chicken manure, but that bike taught me a valuable lesson about hard work — if you save your money, you can buy the things you want, and that bike gave me freedom and independence.
Both my sisters worked as waitresses at Tony's Vineyard in Henderson. When I turned 14, I felt obliged to work there too, but I didn't want to work up front, I wanted to be in the kitchen so I started on Friday nights as a dishwasher.
When you wash dishes at home you work at a reasonable pace but it's relaxed. In a professional kitchen that does 500 covers a night, you can't relax, but I loved it. The chefs communicating to ensure the tables were put up at the same time, how we all pulled together to get the job done. At the end of the night, there'd be banter, a beer, a delicious meal, I couldn't wait to go back each Friday. My pathway to being a chef wasn't about the food or my mother's amazing cooking, it was simply that first job as a dishwasher and falling in love with the energy and humour as we went into battle each night.
My first break was at Kermadec. There was one dish there that required a garnish of deep-fried, crumbed baby squid. One day I put chilli in it. Why not? I thought it'd be lovely, but we received complaints. Head chef Tekashi was very angry because each dish had to be followed to the letter, front of house staff were briefed, there were protocols.
That was a wake up call. I realised being a chef wasn't about mates gathering round a cooker, it was my profession and if I wanted to carry on I needed to buck up my ideas. I was demoted to the lower kitchen and put on crap shifts for two months but it was a valuable lesson. I've since done the same with chefs I've employed.
By 25, I knew the only way I could keep learning was to move to London. I started at Terrance Conran's Bluebird on Kings Rd in Chelsea. In London it doesn't matter where you're from, you have to constantly perform. The pressure never lets up and when the head chef starts yelling, you want to crawl into the nearest hole but the camaraderie got me through, and my sheer determination not to fail.
In London, anything below a sous chef wears a white jacket, while sous chefs and above wear black jackets. When our head chef John Torode — he was famous then and judges MasterChef now — gave me my black jacket, I was so proud. I had a rare night off so I went home and told my flatmates and we all went to the pub and drank too many beers. The next day I had a 7am start. My first day in a black jacket and I woke at 10:30. I'd never been so panicked. I called the restaurant and no one answered. I jumped in a taxi I couldn't afford and John Torode was in the kitchen and in his hand was a white jacket. He knew I'd been celebrating, and he knew how upset I was. I worked all that day in a white jacket, hungover, and the next day I got my black jacket back.
At the end of 2018 I started losing my voice. I thought it was a cold but my doctor suggested I see a throat specialist. A biopsy was done — I had the early stages of cancer. I couldn't believe it. For someone who speaks for a living, it was horrific to think I might lose my voice.
Before I started radiation, I went for a hoon with a mate in Muriwai and almost killed myself riding my motorbike off a cliff. I was airlifted to hospital with all sorts of injuries. I lost more jobs, and I couldn't commit to any future work because the surgeon didn't know when my voice would come back.
Life was really tough — then I started radiation. If you're even remotely claustrophobic, and I am, it is terrible. The first time I had the mask on, it was so tight, I panicked and saw this red haze. By the time they got to me I was in tears. The people in ARO [Auckland Radiation Oncology] were amazing and slowly we worked out a routine, but holy moly it was horrible. I had radiation for eight weeks, every day it ramped up, there was a lot of burning, my leg was still in a dirty big cast, my knees were bandaged. Recovering from a major motorcycle accident and having radiation at the same time, I hit rock bottom. And then Covid-19 came along and life was thrown into disarray again. It has certainly been a challenge but we've been grateful to spend time together as a family.
Opening the cooking school had been an ambition of ours since my wife Bee and I ran Dunbrody Country House in Ireland. That was the first time we'd ever served food we'd grown, from seed to table, and ever since we'd wanted our own farm and being on the farm has been a big part of my recovery. This has never been more true than during lockdown — being able to go out and harvest fresh vegetables for that day's meal has truly been a gift, and reinforced why we opened the school in the first place; to share with Kiwis the joy of preparing food from scratch. If it wasn't for Bee's amazing strength, I don't know how I'd have got through. Now I just take each day as it comes and I get up and say: 'Today's going to be another great day'. And I'm still a chef, I just
don't have a restaurant anymore. Now, if you want to eat my food, you come to the school and you cook your own meal.
Vouchers for the Good From Scratch Cookery School can be purchased at goodfromscratch.co.nz, and the site will be updated when classes can resume. Or catch Michael on TVNZ 1's Eat Well For Less, Tuesdays at 7:30pm.
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