Craig Squire

After completing his apprenticeship at the Adelaide Festival centre in 1984, Craig Squire was able to start Gaby's, his own restaurant, on Kangaroo Island at the age of 21. It was so successful he was able to pay back the money he borrowed to get started within the first three weeks. He now admits, "we (he and Gaby, his girlfriend, who is still in partnership with him) were too young and gave up after six months".

Craig had a rigorous introduction to cooking, a trade which he entered by chance after applying for many positions. At the Festival Centre there were some pretty tough disciplinarians "the first chef I worked for was very strict, very traditional. I wasn't allowed to have an earring, and if I burnt something I had to stay back on my own time and make it again. He would stand behind me in the kitchen and bash me in the head if I wasn't chopping the parsley properly. It was terribly daunting for a 16-year-old, I was in tears." But the next chef nurtured the young apprentice and so Craig stayed in the trade. He now runs the very successful Red Ochre Grill in Cairns, which he opened in 1994 with James Fielke.

But there was a lot of cooking and travelling in between Kangaroo Island and Cairns. A season as head chef at Breathtaker ski lodge in the winter of 1986 followed, and several positions in restaurants in Port Douglas before heading overseas to jobs including head chef, Johnny's Wine Bar, and chef saucier of Kensington Place, both in London. "I worked really hard, 80 hours a week, catching night buses home, with hardly enough time to turn around and shoot back, for very little money. That was the thing in London, the better place that you wanted to work in the less money you would see."

Then he had a season as head chef in an Italian bistro in Austria where he made pizzas for visitors from Naples, the home of the pizza. Craig explained that the bistro used to buy the dough in buckets and he was the first chef there to make his own - "They thought I was crazy, but I lasted the whole season." He was experimenting all the time, "doing the early gourmet pizza thing...I made it up as I went along."

He then went back to London for a period, running one of the five restaurants owned by the wine merchants, Corney & Barrow. He found this very educational. "It was very formal, we would meet with the directors every Friday for a full brief. Change the menu every Wednesday, stocktake every Thursday, and there was competition between the restaurants to get the best costing. We were able to buy very good quality products and get whole sides of beef and hinds of venison so we could do things from different cuts, which is so hard to do these days, especially up here."

'Up here' of course is the Red Ochre at Cairns, which opened there two years after Andrew, James' brother, and Craig had started in Adelaide. The Red Ochre in Adelaide achieved fame almost overnight - "The second night we were open we had a full eight minutes in the 7.30 Report, there was just no turning back. In its peak, just before we left to come up here in December/January 1993, we were doing 1800 covers a week."

As well as the restaurant, Andrew Fielke also developed a range of 'bush foods' which he was marketing round the country, much to Craig's annoyance when he needed his help cooking. "Two weeks after the opening Andrew disappeared for a week, he went and sold bush tucker at some hick food country show on the peninsula, and handballed the job to me. I was second chef when it opened, but within the first month, effectively I was the head chef."

In the meantime, the Red Ochre brand expanded round the country and then within a year went into receivership. The Adelaide and Melbourne restaurants closed but the retail company continued to trade. In July 1999 the Red Ochre name came back to Adelaide with the re-opening of a well-known restaurant site (formerly Gekkos) on the river. It's a tricky situation for Craig and James who have no part of this enterprise, who built up the Cairns business on their own and who, in many ways, would prefer to be considered on their own terms. "If I were to open another restaurant, I wouldn't serve bush food. I love old food, like the recipe for watermelon rind the idea for which came from a 1901 New Orleans book. It was just a pickle that you would sit on your shelves as a preserve, so I converted it into this salsa, using cold-pressed peanut oil and wild thyme".

In fact the food which Craig is preparing now is much more balanced and better flavoured than the Red Ochre in its last years in Adelaide and Melbourne. It retains the interest of the 'bush' ingredients, though he is using these with a much lighter hand. People expect to find them on the menu in some form because they are such an important part of the Red Ochre image, and have made the name internationally known as a standard bearer for Australian food.

He is very conscious of the importance of tourism in Cairns, "you can't survive without it and you have to know how to play the game, to market properly and establish an image." Now Craig devotes a day a week to the marketing and administration of the restaurant. He has two senior chefs who assist him plus three others and a kitchen hand. It's a small team for the numbers which the restaurant serves. The pace in the kitchen is fast, but Craig is very precise in his cooking.

However, the stress takes its toll - "it's a young person's trade. If you have kids you can't be in a kitchen 14 hours a day. You can't be driving your staff so they walk out, particularly in a small town like Cairns, your staff are your friends. You are not going to enjoy life if everyone in the work place hates your guts, they already hate my guts enough." He was talking after a particularly busy night, so it's no wonder that he is looking forward to doing more catering work. Already the company has done some pretty amazing events outside the restaurant, from outback train stops to cruising yacht decks, rainforests, beach fronts, oil tanks, mountain bike tracks and even worked during a cyclone. He has moved fast and pretty furiously throughout his career, so this seems a natural progression. But it would be a pity not to be able to taste and see the continuation of the skilful combinations of Australian ingredients which Craig Squire has developed at Red Ochre in Cairns.

A review of Red Ochre Grill. See also this piece on dining in Cairns.

Craig Squire's Recipes

Salt and native pepperleaf prawns, crocodile and vietnamese pickles, sweet chilli lemon myrtle dipping Sauc
Steamed red emperor in banana leaf with papaya chilli and coconut salsa
Black sapote and macadamia nut pudding with native aniseed anglaise