Analiese Gregory is known amongst her friends for doing daring and ridiculous things for food. She could be jumping off rocks in southernmost Tasmania to dive for abalone or scaling seaside cliffs for seaweed to make seaweed jam. She’s known for her ‘charcuterie closet’, her walk-in-wardrobe with the perfect dark, cold, and humid conditions for curing meats and doing crazy things with food – like making ice cream from Jerusalem artichokes.
But it’s this dedication to sustainable cooking and unmatchable curiosity about cooking from the wild that makes Analiese Gregory, who led the acclaimed restaurant Franklin, one of the most intriguing chefs of her generation and maybe even the world’s best chef.
The Analiese Gregory chef is also celebrated for her cooking classes at The Agrarian Kitchen and various media appearances, further solidifying her culinary status.
From haute cuisine to farmhouse living
Analiese hasn’t always been this passionate about cooking from the wild and innovating with unique ingredients. She started her food journey by moving to London at 16 to work for her father, an executive chef. Since then, she has travelled all over the planet with gigs in some of the world’s top kitchens and working with the world’s best chefs.
She’s worked in London’s iconic restaurant, The Ledbury, and under renowned Michelin-starred chef Michael Bras in his eponymous restaurant in south France. She also strolled at Sydney’s celebrated Quay restaurant and travelled to Morocco and Basque country to hone her skills and learn new and exciting cuisines.
The curiosity was there from a young age, but the edginess, daringness, and interest in sustainable cooking and foraging from the wild were yet to be developed. During her time with Michael Bras in the south of France, Analiese first got a taste for foraging. She would climb trees to gather fresh hazelnuts for the night’s specials, and this awoke something in her that lay dormant for years before unleashing into full-blown chef anarchy.
“I went from doing things with induction and steam and everything being super-precise to just like throwing stuff into a giant fire and seeing what happens”, she tells Associated Press.
After a nomadic life working in kitchens with the world’s best chefs, Analiese Gregory relocated to Tasmania, way down at the bottom of the world, to an old farmhouse on a 2-acre block in the Huon Valley. In this environment, surrounded by unbridled nature and all-consuming wilderness, she really let herself throw away the precision and throw herself into the world of sustainable cooking.
Gregory decided to open a new micro-restaurant on her farm property, reflecting her personal and professional transformation. She plans to create a bespoke intimate restaurant that emphasizes an individual and unique dining experience, deeply connected to nature and the local food community.
Fine Dining with A Private Chef
Diving, hunting, fishing, and cooking and outdoor adventures in Tasmania
In Tasmania, Analiese knows first-hand where almost all her ingredients come from. And that’s mostly because she’s grabbed them by her hand. Whether gathering saltbush, hunting wallaby and possum, fishing for flounder, or diving for abalone, Analiese has gone all-in with the world of sustainable cooking and feasting from the wild.
Her outdoor adventures include hunting, diving, and cooking on beaches, showcasing a lifestyle deeply connected with nature. “I moved to Tasmania and started cooking in an entirely different way”, she says. And what freedom that invites! If you thought a fully equipped kitchen was your gateway to culinary liberty, you haven’t seen the marvellous creations Annaliese whips out of nature
In her pursuit of sustainable cooking and living, Analiese Gregory hunts and fishes and is mindful of her impact on the environment. This approach mirrors the principles of sustainable diving, which emphasizes respect for marine life and conscious exploration of our oceans.
If she craves a particular food, she’ll find a way to get it from nature. It might be a little offbeat and unique, but that makes it magical. If Analiese hankers for flounder, she’ll head out in the middle of the night and stand waist-deep in cold water with a torch and a spear in her hand. She’ll get the flounder and cook it by the river over a fire: entirely fresh, handmade, and from the wild. That’s not to say she’s done away with all her training in top European restaurants: she might serve her hand-caught flounder with miso and dill pickles or a split beurre noisette sauce.
“All those recipes [I’ve picked up from abroad] are still part of the story”, she says. “There are things I make now with strange, maybe unique little twists”. This unique approach to cooking, foraging, and hunting makes Analiese a strong contender for one of the world’s best chefs. Her food cannot be replicated unless you are down in Tasmania hunting and foraging for natural ingredients and combining them with highly refined culinary knowledge from outstanding restaurants. Her deep connection to local food traditions and culinary practices makes her creations unique.
Sustainable cooking starts with conquering fears.
If you find Analiese’s story of cooking from the wild to be completely inspiring, it’s because it is. And I don’t think that it came easy, either. To get to the stage where she’s diving for luxury items like abalone, wakame, and sea urchins, she has to conquer a fear of the deep and a serious hatred for cold water. Before moving to Tasmania, Analiese had only gone diving to look at beautiful fish, never to hunt or catch her own. She hadn’t even gone swimming in Sydney’s warm waters, which she thought were ‘too cold’. Chef Gordon Ramsay collaborated with Analiese Gregory in his National Geographic series Uncharted, where she served as his culinary guide in Tasmania, highlighting the region’s unique ingredients and food traditions.
“In moving to Tasmania, I mastered some of the fears that had been holding me back in my life”, Analiese says in her recently published memoir and cookbook, How Wild Things Are. The reward is the chance to immerse herself in sustainable cooking and forage or hunt for most of the foods she uses in her cooking and a freezer packed with her wild catch, gathered from adventures all over the state. She also appeared in the National Geographic series ‘Uncharted,’ showcasing her role in connecting the audience to the local culinary landscape.
It started with an idea from the world’s best chef: How Wild Things Are by Analiese Gregory…
It wasn’t Analiese who initially had the idea to throw herself headfirst into the wild and start experimenting with sustainable cooking. The inspiration came from Ana Roš, head chef of Slovenian restaurant Hiša Franko, dubbed the world’s best female chef. At Gourmet Escape, the annual Western Australian food, wine, and music festival, world-famous chefs and gourmands gather for ten days to discuss everything culinary. Analiese and Ana Roš were having an onstage conversation, and Analiese mentioned her desire to return to France for its way of life and sense of cooking.
Ana thought otherwise, suggesting to Analiese that she could just as easily try to create what she was looking for in France here in Australia. She implored Analiese to go somewhere remote in this beautiful, wild land, pick plants, cook, and document the adventure. So, the seed was sown for Analiese Gregory to devote the next few years of her life to sustainable cooking, foraging, and all things wild and delicious. During this time, she also became Gordon’s culinary guide in the National Geographic series Uncharted, showcasing Tasmania’s unique ingredients and food traditions.
If you think Analiese’s journey in Tasmania results from going into early retirement, think again. She was having these wild adventures all while servicing the now permanently closed Franklin Bar & Restaurant in Hobart five nights a week. The rest of the week was open to diving, hunting, foraging, and whatever Analiese felt called to do. She could be camping in stunning world heritage areas with no electricity one weekend, cooking over campfires the next. Analiese also works on her TV series, ‘ A Girl’s Guide to Hunting, Fishing and Wild Cooking’, highlighting her culinary and outdoor experiences in Tasmania.
See the world’s best chefs hunt, forage, fish, and engage in wild cooking.
Are you curious to see just how Analiese Gregory spends her days? You can see it all in a new SBS documentary produced by Southern Pictures that follows her on her sustainable cooking and wild culinary adventures as she explores life at the bottom of the world in Tasmania. The series, A Girl’s Guide to Hunting, Fishing, and Wild Cooking, follows Analiese as she picks ingredients, forages, hunts, and shares her skills with her audience.
“To go into the ocean and get a sea urchin out and then just eat it… why would you even try to do anything else? It just makes sense,” Analiese tells the Associated Press. “Foraging, diving, hunting… it’s what gives my cooking and life here extra meaning. I want to cook everything over fire”.
The SBS show isn’t Analiese’s first time on screen. She also appeared on the National Geographic series Uncharted with chef Gordon Ramsay, serving as his Tasmanian guide. Together, the two went diving for sea urchins on Bruny Island… sensing a pattern.
Analiese feels called to diving because it provides the same stress reduction and returns to a state of calm that other chefs find from yoga or meditation. Her other sources of relaxation come from tending to her two-acre farm, feeding her goats and chickens, and nurturing her inner ‘mad scientist’ with much fermenting, pickling, and preserving.
What Analiese can’t hunt or forage herself; she tries to buy directly from farmers or friends and neighbours. She’s working on reducing her trips into town for groceries. While she’ll never be fully self-sufficient, she’s working on getting the freshest ingredients possible from as close as possible. Her favourite Tasmanian ingredients to cook with are abalone, wallaby, sea urchin, pepper berries, mekabu, saltbush, and leatherwood honey.
Corporate catering with a private chef.
A wild childhood that inspired Analiese
Analiese is no stranger to the open road of cooking. She was born in Auckland to a Welsh father and a Chinese-Dutch mother and grew up on a dairy farm in Matamata on New Zealand’s North Island. Surrounded by her farm friends, she embraced a rural lifestyle that connected her deeply to nature. She then moved to suburban Auckland, where she learned how to cook while surrounded by her Chinese matriarchs, her grandmother and great aunts, who instilled in her a valuable knowledge of cooking and Chinese cuisine.
“I thought I went [to their house] for cooking lessons”, Analiese says when remembering her mother dropping her off at her family members’ homes for babysitting. These matriarchs gave Analiese her fierce, independent spirit that fuels her abalone dives, wallaby hunts, and foraging for wild ingredients in the middle of nowhere.
Analiese was remotely home-schooled for several years as her family travelled around Australia in a caravan, giving her the first taste of discovering the wonders of her surrounding environment. From there, she served in the world’s finest restaurants, only to return to Australia ready to start creating food influenced by her Chinese heritage, European culinary education, and love of the outdoors.
Analiese’s heritage is important to her, helping her define her uniqueness as a chef in rural Tasmania who makes XO sauce and lives with a rice cooker perpetually on the bench. “[In Auckland] I learned how to cook char siu bao, bird’s nest soup, and steamboats”. Her mother, half Dutch, also instilled in Analiese the inspiration to merge different cuisines. While she regularly served undercooked stir fries at home, Analiese’s mother also frequently made Dutch stroopwafels, sweet breakfast sprinkles (hagelslag) on toast, and snacked on salted liquorice. As one of the most talked about and trailblazing young chefs in Australia, Analiese continues to make unique contributions to the food scene with her diverse culinary background and innovative projects in Tasmania.
Colourful cuisine that’s impressively different
Analiese’s colourful heritage, her experience in Michelin-starred restaurants and fine dining, and her deep immersion in cooking and outdoor adventures in the wilderness result in amazing cooking that you simply cannot find elsewhere. In her cookbook, you’ll find a string of recipes that seemingly blur cuisines and showcase sustainable cooking in a way that hasn’t been seen before.
You might find abalone and XO butter egg noodles inspired by her abalone dives in Tasmania and the fresh egg noodles her mother would buy from West Auckland’s Chinese market. There’s potato gnocchi and kombu butter, taken from her time working a gnocchi station at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, where she would make five types of gnocchi a day. The Basque cheesecake was inspired by her experience working near San Sebastian, and a potato galette taken from the Pommes Sarladaises served at The Ledbury in London.
One recipe will be for possum sausage, and the other for tomatoes & peaches with honey vinegar and burrata curds. There’s mulberry clafoutis, cashew miso cream with young vegetables, and crayfish and lovage omelettes… “I kind of finally came to a place where I can bring a lot of different influences together, which I’d never used to be able to do”, says Analiese. This signifies this period of her cheffing career as being of tremendous importance: when she finally carves out what makes her unique as a chef.
Learn to chill fine dining from the world’s best chef.
We’ve called her the world’s best chef, and say it again. Analiese Gregory is the world’s best chef because of her incredible display of uniqueness, innovation, courage, and creativity. And while she may be dubbed the world’s best chef, there’s no perfectionism left inside Analiese – she let go of all the stuffiness of fine dining when she landed on Australia’s southernmost island.
Chill fine dining, a term coined by Analiese is something she defines as valuing the food, wine, and experience of eating while eliminating other superfluous dining activities that take up excess time and energy. “It’s all about taking the experience back to its bare bones without expecting perfection, ” she says.
The term perfectly encapsulates Analiese Gregory’s method of cooking. She’s proficient with using liquid nitrogen and molecular gastronomy, but she can also kill and poach a rooster or pull a trout out of a river and smoke it on the riverbank. There aren’t many chefs who can claim to be able to do both, and that’s just one of the reasons why we call her the world’s best chef.
Analiese advises those who want to learn the art of sustainable cooking: “Take a nice thing that you like, and then stick it with things that you think will be complementary. Do… as little as you can to it”. The simple advice perfectly sums up her approach to cooking: no-nonsense but incredibly memorable cuisine that impresses with its creativity but is not pretentious or intimidating.
We’re looking forward to Analiese’s next culinary adventure. We hear that the world’s best chef is planning to open a bespoke intimate restaurant for lunch in an abandoned veterinary clinic in the heart of Tasmania, and oh boy, we cannot wait to see it.
By CHEFIN.com.au, a private chef platform with 250+ top chefs and 100% customised menus from popular world cuisines. Recommended by 35,000 sophisticated guests across Australia.