A Place in the Sun - Moeraki |
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There may be more to life than food but best not suggest that to Fleur Sullivan. The hunting, gathering, growing and harvesting of food, the smoking, pickling, drying, bottling and jugging of food, the cooking, presenting and serving of food, the conversations that flow around a glorious meal, no matter how simple, the friendships made at the table - these are the things that give her the most pleasure.
The dynamic sixty-seven-year-old mother of three and grandmother of six has been the undisputed matriarch of South Island cuisine for nearly forty years, ever since she established Dunstan House and then Oliver’s, her Provencal-style Kiwi restaurant and lodge at Clyde in the hot heart of Central Otago.
But it’s Fleur’s Place, her seafood restaurant at Moeraki, that brings her the kudos these days. The artfully antiquated building with its collection of weather-beaten tables for outdoor dining looks as if it has been perched for a hundred years here on the landward edge of the old jetty. That jetty once served the fishing fleet in the tiny village thirty-three kilometres south of Oamaru.
The restaurant owns a fresh fish quota and local fishermen deliver the day’s catch to the slipway at the kitchen door. French chefs and an English charcuterie expert have been lured to work here and celebrity seafood chef Rick Stein talks about it longingly.
Recognised by Cuisine magazine as one of the 100 best things about New Zealand, Fleur’s Place eats up most of Fleur’s waking hours. But her life is not just about running a restaurant.
“I wouldn’t have the restaurant if I didn’t have the big picture. The food thing for me is not just deciding to make something but the history and regional origins of the foods”.
From her earliest days food and its preparation have been the very marrow of her life. “I grew up with people who grew vegies and chopped the heads off chickens, with a mother who set the table beautifully. It makes you want to make japonica and apple jelly and all the favourite traditional dishes. Well you can’t eat it all yourself so you invite people. It’s all part of having the big picture”.
Fleur had no intention of setting up another restaurant when she made the move to the coast from Central Otago six or seven years ago. She came to recuperate from a bout of colon cancer.
“I’m quite happy to talk about my cancer. I think it’s good for people to know you can come through it and go on with life. The cancer had got into the blood and I needed a year of chemotherapy. I sold Oliver’s and came to Moeraki to let the chemotherapy do its work. I also came here to be near my mother in Oamaru - I was with her when she died a year ago.
“So I went from Central Otago to the sea - from Central with its thyme and rabbits and rosehips and pickled walnuts and pies – and here a new world opened up. I’ve always loved Moeraki; always thought someday I’d live here – when I was about 108! The people are different here. They’re wind-blown salty people in gumboots”.
She bought a simple breeze-block house on the highest point of the headland with a view that takes your breath away and she did what she’s always done – explored the gustatory possibilities in the land around her, without any intention of going into business..
There were the Maori potatoes and the native spinach found on the beaches and in the hedges and at the penguin colony below the lighthouse on the far side of the promontory. It grows on the sea edge, out of the sand at the kaika (the little crib settlements on the easternmost face of the headland).
“I’ve been growing the spinach in my garden and we use it on the muttonbirds as a garnish. We’ve got lots of wild parsley and we make our own rewana bread with the potato starter”.
Have you ever tried chopped mussels with puha? Fleur hadn’t until she came to Moeraki. “You meet the best people when you’re out looking for puha. There’s nothing like chopped mussels straight off the rocks and puha. I learnt that from a Maori lady. It’s not for the restaurant – you have to use the commercial mussels there. Then I caught eels and went to see Fay Temaiharoa and she showed me how to smother them with pepper and hang them in the tree to let the air dry them. I took smoked cod heads to the marae and everyone was too kind to tell me I’d left the gills in!”
And the seafood! “I’d be at sea with the fishermen and I’d look longingly at the fish heads and frames and livers being thrown out to sea. Then there was seaweed - I could make a bit of soup with that!
She couldn’t bear to see all those fish bits go to waste so she set up a tiny caravan on the old jetty. Just a wee set-up, selling soup and home-made bread and a bit of smoked fish from the smoker she’s set up on a parcel of land she’d acquired. It wasn’t like going back into business.
But then she spotted this old farm shed at Maheno just a couple of valleys away and thought she could get an artisan builder to convert it into, well, a restaurant. But just a simple little one…
Perhaps it was inevitable that that simple idea grew into the thriving Fleur’s Place. And Fleur loves it. “I’m at the restaurant from when I open my eyes in the morning until it closes. I can’t wait to get started. There are never enough hours in the day.”
Story: Nathalie Brown
Photographs: David Wall, Paul McCredie, Charlotte Franklin, John Correa
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