The Weekend Australian 2024

Journalist: Christine McCabe

ALLA WOLF-TASKER – The renowned chef, restaurateur and hotelier recalls her food-focused adventures.

WHY I ROAM
Travel has always been an essential for broadening perceptions and for recharging. From the earliest days of our two-man hiking tent and battered Fiat traversing Europe from west to east, saving francs and liras for a seat at a well-known table, to more recent days of travelling in considerable comfort, it has always been a priority worth working for.

COOKING ON HOLIDAYS
If I stay in a hotel, the lure of markets can prove frustrating with nowhere to cook. Some years ago, 10 of us shared a villa in Puglia. We decided to eat out for lunch daily before a shared cook-up at around 9pm each evening of marvellous sea urchin, octopus and pilchards from the markets. The dinners that followed in the candlelit outdoor loggia remain a very special memory.

MY FAVOURITE PLACES TO EAT AND STAY
Travel is often driven by a destination restaurant. Recent favourites have included Florilege in Tokyo and Odette in Singapore. And then there are hotels. Le Sirenuse in Positano (pictured) was always going to resonate with me. Firmdale hotels are stamped with Kit Kemp’s unmistakably personal sense of style: The Haymarket in London and Cosby St in NYC are favourites. We also rushed to add Heckfield Place to our itinerary only weeks after it opened. It is a magnificent country property just out of London, with its own organic farm.

WHERE I GO FIRST
Markets are a good place to take a quick check of communities and their engagement with food. Some of my favourite ingredient discoveries have been at markets: purple artichokes of Venice’s San Erasmo island and razor clams at a market in Santiago de Compostela. There’s also chocolate produced by Claudio Corallo on the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, off the coast of central west Africa.

THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD
Cooking overseas in unfamiliar restaurant kitchens is scary. But in Hong Kong working with a non-English speaking brigade, I discovered that food has its own language of gesture and exclamation that will inevitably get you by. I also managed to take bullboar sausage, smoked eel and Holy Goat cheese to Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, which produced a couple of wonderful dishes for our table.

MOST MEMORABLE TRIP
Visiting Russia in the late 1990s, assassinations were frequent. As guests of the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg, we entered via a metal detector and were asked to please leave our guns at the door. Judging by the contents of the large safe, dozens had already complied.

Alla Wolf-Tasker is a passionate advocate for Australia’s restaurant scene, and her fondest childhood memories revolve around the food and generous hospitality of her “post-war migrant parents and their friends … at their tiny ‘dacha’ high up on the hill in Daylesford”. She recalls “crocks of dill cucumbers and sauerkraut on the porch, the flavour of freshly made cheese spread on warm home-baked bread, pans of just-foraged buttery wild mushrooms”. These memories and her experience in some of France’s great regional restaurants continue to inform the food at her legendary Lake House restaurant and hotel in Daylesford, Victoria.

Celebrating its 40th birthday this year, Lake House was originally built as a small 40-seater weekend restaurant by Alla’s late husband, artist Allan Wolf-Tasker, on a “blackberry-infested paddock at the swampy end of Lake
Daylesford”. It was inspired by French restaurants that Michelin declared to be worthy of a journey.

In Australia in the 1980s, this proved a challenge, with the notion of travelling into the country for a spot of fine dining non-existent. With Alla and Allan holding down jobs in Melbourne to make ends meet, they motored back and forth for several years, with young daughter Larissa in tow.

The pair quickly decided that if the restaurant were to work, they needed to jump “all in” and add guestrooms. Lake House hasn’t stood still since. Four decades and more than 100 awards later, it has become a regional restaurant that many travel not only hours but days to visit. And Larissa and her husband, Robin Wilson, now assist with the running of the property.

The restaurant is supported by 33 studios and suites nestled in lovely gardens planted by Alla and her mother Katherine, as well as waterfront terraces, an infinity pool, tennis court, library, notable cellar and a highly regarded day spa. The European farm-to-plate dream was fully realised in 2020 with the opening of the nearby Dairy Flat Lodge, a luxury retreat, complete with bakehouse and enormous vegetable garden, and sitting at the heart of a
productive farm. Wine, honey and olive oil are produced alongside a bakery supplying Lake House, the cafe at Wombat Hill and the local Daylesford community.