Great Australian chefs

Great Australian Chefs provides us with a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the people who make restaurant culture what it is in Australia today. Famed Melbourne restaurateur Mietta O'Donnell introduces us to fifty chefs at the cutting edge of food and dining. Featuring a profile on each chef, evocative photographs of them in action in their kitchens, as well as a selection of their signature recipes - Chefs gives us the opportunity to recreate their unique flavours in our own kitchens. This exquisite hardback book is sure to delight, inspire and entertain.

Why these chefs?

It's always going to be controversial to suggest a list of the greatest of anything! However, the chefs chosen to be in this book reflect the revolution that has occurred over the last twenty years in Australian food and dining. While coming from a diversity of experiences they all have one thing in common - the ability to bring a number of complex ingredients together to make a harmonious whole. That can be as simple as a plate of food, or as multi-faceted as a restaurant. Carefully chosen by Mietta, they are great chefs because they develop concept, and then have the ability to translate that into something far greater than the mere sum of its individual parts. And then they are able to repeat that reality consistently for diners.

Great Australian Chefs comes as a beautiful, high quality hardback, lushly illustrated with unique balck-and-white- photographs that manage to capture movement, the controlled chaos and the attention to detail that goes on behind the scenes in a busy restaurant.

ISBN 1863951229 * HB $39.95 * 327 pgs * 235 x 175 mm

Mietta O'Donnell is well known as a restauranteur and author. Her grandparents, Mario and Teresa Vigano, arrived in Melbourne from Milan in 1928. They went on to establish the legendary 'Mario's' restaurant, which they ran for more than 30 years. Mietta was influenced by their entertainment flair from an early age and in 1974 she started 'Mietta's' in North Fitzroy in partnership with Tony Knox and Jules Lavarack. From 1985 until its closure in 1995 the restaurant was located in central Melbourne where it was celebrated as a culinary and cultural institution. Now Mietta is a prolific writer and commentator on the restaurant experience. Together, she and her partner, photographer Tony Knox, have published a number of books, including two editions of the annual Mietta's Eating & Drinking in Melbourne. The first edition of Mietta's Eating & Drinking in Australia is to be published in March 2000.