Deep
water
PHOTOGRAPHY COLIN PAGE FROMORIGINBY BEN SHEWRY (MURDOCH BOOKS, HBK, $95).B
enShewrygrewupinan
incredibly remote part of New
Zealand: there were only seven
students in his school – and two
were his sisters. Nearby was the rugged
and dangerous Whareorino coastline.
“A lot of people have drowned there –
a lot, given that there’s nobody there,”
says Shewry, chef and owner of Attica
in Melbourne. Shewry nearly died there
himself, aged 10, and the memory is still
sharp more than 30 years later.
He was standing on a reef, gathering
seafood. His family was a few hundred
metres away.
“I had my back to the sea when I was
collecting mussels, which is foolish,” he
says. “A large set of waves came in. The
first one hit me without me realising
and it dragged me across the reef.”
His back was shredded as the wave
pulled him across the sea floor, and
those scars are still there, decades later.
“I came up in the whitewash, then thesecond wave hit me and held me down,
then the third wave held me down –
I was drowning. My lungs were filling
with water and I thought that was it.”
His father Rob realised what had
happened and swam out to save him.
Shewry remembers his family rushing
him into a nearby beach
shack. “They were trying
to clean the sand and
gravel out of my back
and it was so incredibly
painful that I nearly
passed out in the
shower,” he says. Under
his feet, he watched as
the white floor changed
colour. “It was red with
my blood.”
Some chefs use seafood dishes to
present a romantic spin on the ocean,
but when salt water slams into you and
holds you down, when you’ve nearly
drowned three times in your life, youplate a near-death experience instead.
That’s what Shewry did with Sea
Tastes, which was on Attica’s menu in
2007, early in the restaurant’s history.
“I didn’t feel a connection to the country
here yet,” he says. “Sea Tastes was one
of the first dishes I conceived using
personal experiences of a place.”
The dish wasn’t just about almost
drowning, but survival. For a family
without much money, the sea was a
lifeline. “One of the ways to feed yourself
was to go up the coast,” says Shewry.
He’d find sea urchins in rockpools,
carefully smash them without spiking
himself, then devour the lobes. He
found sustenance in seaweed and
mussels, too. “This was a story as old
as time itself on both sides of the coast,”
he says, given indigenous communities
in New Zealand and Australia harvested
shellfish to feed themselves.
This all shaped Sea Tastes. The dish
featured mussels and clams steamed in
seawater, their juices used to flavour
a clam custard that formed the base of
the dish. Shewry then added prawn jelly,
seaweed powder and “god forbid”, he
says, sea-urchin foam. (He cringes at
the dish now and refused to serve it
on hisChef’s Tableepisode in 2015.)
Native plants from Port Phillip Bay
were garnishes: pigface, grey saltbush,
sea lettuce. The dish connects to his
beachcombing past, and reflects his
efforts to use native ingredients.
“Wehavethe
world’s oldest continued
civilisation here, why
would we not be
interested in those
things?” Sea Tastes
marked a turning point
for Shewry, when the
chef’s singular vision for
Attica took form after
some false starts. It was a
strong statement: a mouthful that tasted
like a battle with the shore.
Today, when he heads out to surf,
Shewry remains in awe of the sea’s power.
“I’m just a tiny, tiny speck on the ocean,”
he says. “I’m just trying not to drown.”●A near-death experience inspired
one of Ben Shewry’s most important
dishes, writesLEE TRAN LAM.
“I came up in the
whitewash, then
the second wave
hit me and held
me down, then
the third wave.
I was drowning.”82 GOURMET TRAVELLER