She’s a renowned chef, restaurateur, cookbook author and television presenter. But for Karen Martini, family conquers all.
FROM the outside it looks like any other nondescript office door in a grungy Prahran laneway. But behind the door, it’s organised chaos. A dozen people are rushing around the small photography studio, each with a different job to do. But all eyes are on Karen Martini.
The woman who’s rattled the pans at some of Melbourne’s best-loved restaurants has already spent more than three hours in front of the camera in a multitude of winter outfits, despite the glorious sunshine outside. But Martini, 41, is the consummate professional.
The occasion is a catalogue shoot with her mother Monica for the French-inspired Australian clothing brand Blue Illusion, of which Martini was recently named celebrity ambassador. It’s all to promote the chain’s Mother’s Day campaign, when 10 per cent of all sales on May 10 will be donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
Her photos done, Monica is now observing with pride as her daughter works the camera. Monica was a model in her early 20s, even being named Miss International Australia 1969, and is amazed her daughter is following in her high heels after all these years, even if it’s just for one day.
“You are given this gift of a child and you don’t know what their capabilities are going to be and what is hidden away in there, so it’s a real joy to see your children grow up and blossom and achieve and turn out to be this or that,” she says. “You have an enormous influence on your children without even realising it.”
Monica says her eldest daughter showed an interest in food from an early age.
“We had a little stool made so the kids could get on it and reach the bench and roll out the pastry while I was doing something else,” she says. “I had forgotten those things, but it’s coming back.”
Judging by her website (karenmartini.com), the busy chef is now passing on that legacy to her own children. Among the collection of lively how-to recipe videos is an absolute gem for spinach, feta and ricotta pie featuring Martini’s two daughters – Stella, 7, and Amber, 4. Amber is seen putting just as much ricotta mixture in her mouth as the bowl, but both are keen little foodies.
Two weeks after the photo shoot, the pace of Martini’s hectic life doesn’t seem to have eased. Today she is seated comfortably at a large wooden table at Market Lane Coffee, South Yarra: “Welcome to my office!” she beams.
She might have a hundred things on the go, but Martini gives me her full attention. Naturally chatty and friendly, her voice still gives a hint of the flu that left her bedridden for most of the Easter long weekend.
Martini’s work ethic was nurtured at an early age. A student at the now-defunct Vaucluse College girls’ school in Richmond (“I think they closed it when the last nun died”), Martini always enjoyed cooking but never considered it as a career. Decades before the celebrity chef phenomenon, the only onscreen cooking inspiration for the young Martini came from Peter Russell-Clarke and the Swedish chef from The Muppet Show.
It was a two-week stint of work experience with the then newly arrived French chef Jacques Reymond during year 10 that changed the course of Martini’s life. Much to the horror of her parents and the school nuns, Martini left school at 16 to do a chef’s apprenticeship.
“I didn’t know it, but my mother re-enrolled me in year 11,” Martini says, her striking hazel eyes sparkling. “She thought I would get sick of working and go back to school, but I haven’t looked back.”
After humble beginnings in the Austin Hospital kitchen, Martini quickly rose through the ranks of mostly male kitchens to become sous chef at Tansy’s restaurant in Carlton.
‘‘I was the younger one in an adult world and you grow up quite quickly among that. I suppose I was working a lot while my friends were partying.’’
After taking a break to travel through Italy and France, Martini returned to run the kitchen at Haskins Hotel (now the North Fitzroy Arms) and the Kent Hotel in Carlton, with co-chef Rita Macali. The pair became food media darlings.
Martini was lured to St Kilda’s white-hot Melbourne Wine Room in 1996, where she fell for the barman, Michael Sapountsis. The pair eventually bought the restaurant. In 2001, Martini became executive chef of Sydney’s glamorous Icebergs Dining Room, flying back every few weeks to spend time with Sapountsis. She returned to Melbourne in 2004 to open Mr Wolf pizza restaurant in St Kilda with Sapountsis, Emma King, Damien King and Marcus Ellis.
Martini and Sapountsis sold the Wine Room last year and are scouting potential sites for two new Melbourne ventures.
But Martini doesn’t just slave over a hot stove. Add demanding television commitments (Better Homes and Gardens and My Kitchen Rules), writing and recipe-testing for three cookbooks (Home is Where the Heart Is, Cooking at Home and Feasting) and raising two daughters and it’s been a fairly hectic career so far.
“I do juggle a lot, but I think it’s really important to still be a mother and to understand nothing can get in the way of that connection you have with your girls,” she says, proudly pulling up photos of her two junior cooks on her phone. “But they also have grown up with me juggling so much, so the expectation is maybe an unusual one.”
It’s quite different to her own 1970s childhood with a stay-at-home mother and a father who got home from work at 6.30pm for a meat and three veg dinner around the table.
From her little stool at the kitchen bench, Martini helped her English-Irish mum to crumb chicken, stuff peppers and make pizza dough. It was at her Tunisian paternal grandmother’s house that she explored broader culinary horizons.
“Visiting Meme was always an exotic, interesting thing to do because we were having chops and three veg at home, but you’d go and have cous cous, spices, fried fougasse (flatbread) and sweet sticky biscuits,” she remembers.
Some of those ideas have seeped into the recipes Martini develops for television and print – unfussy, achievable food with a modern Mediterranean slant. She strives for tasty dishes that can be made easily and quickly and says she is constantly thinking about food and what her next meal will be.
“I can stand at the kitchen bench with the pantry open and the fridge open and think, ‘What am I going to cook for dinner?’ I still do it,” she says.
But unlike many time-poor mothers, she is more likely to make a meal from scratch than resort to two-minute noodles or baked beans on toast.
‘‘I am always tasting new flavours and want something to excite the palate constantly,” she says. “So I am more than likely to cook something that might take a little longer just to get something different to eat.”
