Julie Gibbs Tell me about your family heritage.
O Tama Carey My mum’s side is Sri Lankan Burgher. The whole family moved to Australia in the '70s because of the political climate. My favourite story is Nan brought crab curry wrapped in chatti pots on the plane and, of course, couldn’t bring it in. My dad’s side is kind of bitsy: white Australia, English, Scottish and, I think, Irish.
JG Were you interested in food as a child?
OTC Zero interest. I was surrounded by good cooks and people obsessed about food on both sides of the family. And I was completely uninterested in food for a very long time; didn’t really eat at all.
JG How intriguing. What changed that?
OTC Mum got sick of me and said, “What do you want to eat?” And I said, “Chicken breast, long green beans and potatoes.” So she cooked me that for a whole year. I think my tastebuds were so traumatised, just eating one thing, that it cured me a little bit. My first job was in the Central Market in Adelaide at the Providore, which sold fine foods. Mum used to work for the Adelaide Fringe festival and bribed the owner with theatre tickets because she decided I needed a job.
JG I find it very hard to imagine you not loving food. You’ve told me that you just fell into cooking?
OTC The Providore was the start of it, probably. And the people I was around and the influences I had were very food-leaning, both home cooks and also professional cooks. My best mate, Molly, was [restaurateur] Barry Ross’s daughter. We would come to Sydney and stay at Oasis Seros when Phillip Searle and Barry used to live above the restaurant. It was just wild. They would give us money and go, “Off you go.” And Sido Bilson was around at the time as well, so we just roamed the streets.
Christine Manfield was an apprentice there and I remember going into the coolroom and seeing all this food in containers and being able to have spoonfuls of caramel and going, “What is this amazing, magical world?”
Later, after I left high school, I did a bit of work with Phillip when he set up the bakery in Darlinghurst [Infinity]. I did a couple of stints where I baked cakes with him, which was very entertaining. There was one disaster when I nearly killed the 19-year-old sourdough starter by flooding it. I called him in a huge panic. He said, “Don’t worry, darling”, and hopped on the next train down from the Blue Mountains to rescue me and the starter.
JG What’s interesting is that you’ve cooked many different cuisines.
OTC I went to London and ended up in the kitchen with Allegra McEvedy, who was a 27-year-old up-and-coming British chef at the time. I helped as an assistant on a cookbook. She was cooking amazing food and that was when I first, I suppose, really loved food. A lot of it felt really natural, just because of the food knowledge that I’d grown up with.
JG What year are we talking?
OTC Would’ve been '99, 2000s. I remember having a laksa craving and her turning to me and going, “What’s laksa?” How can you not know what laksa is? And that was a moment where I kind of went, “Oh, I actually know stuff about food”.
