By Kathy Ombler
What do you do when your restaurant’s at the top of its game and your television series a runaway success?
Yes, it’s a question not every chef will be in a position to pose. For Al Brown – who is – the answer is simple. Stick to the theme that works, evolve with it, surround yourself with likeminded folk and, most important, have some fun.
Which is why 24 paying guests with a hunger for the wild recently got “ready for the wild”, literally in the wild (albeit salubrious) environs of Poronui Station, at the bidding of Chef Brown and Greg Norris, from team building event specialist company CluedUp.
Some background first: Wellington’s longstanding, fine dining Logan Brown Restaurant is Cuisine Restaurant of the Year 2009. Partners Al Brown and Steve Logan have made a name for themselves with their Hunger for the Wild television series, sharing their easy going humour, love of fishing, hunting, the great outdoors and, of course, good cuisine.
As well, for the past six years Brown has been hosting wine and food degustation weekends at Poronui, a luxury wilderness lodge set in the prime fishing and hunting country of Poronui Station, near Taupo. He says he’s come to love the Poronui environment, the rivers, the wilderness and the lodge hospitality which he describes as “luxury without the pretension”.
Hence the development of the inaugural “Ready for the Wild” Challenge Weekend in June, the creation of Brown, Norris and Poronui Lodge manager, Eve Reilly.
Guests arrived Friday night and were straight into the challenge. Over cocktails by the fire they were sorted into teams and set a short quiz covering, of course, wild foods and scoring not points, but “bullets”.
Saturday got more serious, the challenges set in historic huts and stables all over Poronui Station. Following a demonstration by Brown the teams were faced with making a wild boar pie, which later became their own lunch. Fly casting and fly tying challenges were next, with Poronui fishing guides providing the ‘know how.’
Plucking and stuffing a duck (making the stuffing over an open fire before being test-tasted by Brown), and skinning and prepping the backstraps and back legs of a hare built up a healthy appetite for lunch, where competitions for the best deer roar and duck call provided entertainment.
The mood changed with the arrival of whole, skinned deer carcasses and after a demonstration by manager Reilly guests were asked to butcher the backstraps. (These became the farewell gifts, packed in chilli bins with venison recipes from Brown.)
Thus it was with a much heightened appreciation of ‘wild foods’ that the guests finally sat down to Brown’s degustation dinner. ‘Wild’ dishes included Poronui sika salad with shitake mushrooms, walnuts, blue cheese and pinot noir syrup and crispy duck and seared hare fillet with cauliflower horseradish and beetroot.
For Brown, the big satisfaction was seeing the guests’ reactions throughout the weekend.
“These were people with no experience of doing anything like that in their lives. Being confronted by a deer carcass, they were high as kites, doing all these things some of us have grown up taking for granted.”
Caption:
Chef Al Brown checks the standard of skinning and trimming a hare of its back legs and back straps; one of the challenges set guests attending the Poronui 'Ready for the Wild" Challenge Weekend.