Meet Georgia Van Prehn, the new head chef at Mr. Morris

GEORGIA VAN PREHN Michael contacted me. We had met previously, and he contacted me to see if I'd be interested in the job, and it was a pretty quick yes from me. I was very excited to be offered the job with Michael, who is a really respected chef in New Zealand and shares a lot of the same ethos as me. It felt like the right place to be.

GEORGIA I’d been overseas since I was around 18, so I hadn't been to Meredith's or tried Michael's food prior to coming into Mr. Morris when they first opened here. Michael is very well-known for having quite innovative food and being quite creative in his mind and showing his food on a plate. And I think that that's the way that I have always tried to think about food, creatively. I think Michael's very open-minded to new ideas and exploring new ways of doing things. I think we both have that style in the way that we like to cook

GEORGIA I always really liked cooking growing up. I started cooking dinner at home from 10 years old because that was my favourite hobby. I started making ice cream in an ice cream shop, and I really enjoyed coming up with all the flavours, and that was when I thought, "Maybe I should actually try to pursue cooking." I was planning on moving to Melbourne, so thought, "Cool, when I go there, I'll try to get a job in a kitchen.” And I loved it instantly and always have.

GEORGIA I worked at a lot of places because I was there for 10 years, probably most notably was a place called Host Dining, a place called Etta as well. I also went off to the UK for a small time. I wanted to stage at a place called Silo over there. So, I did that and travelled around Europe a bit and worked in some other places. And then, I went back to Melbourne and then I came back to New Zealand a year later.

GEORGIA At Host Dining I worked underneath a chef called Florian Ribul. He owns his own restaurant in Melbourne now. I learned a lot about practical ways of unlocking creativity from him. When you first start out as a chef, it’s easy to think you’re never going to be able to create your own food. Even young chefs I talk to now are just like, "I've got no idea how create a dish." I think Florian was the person that helped me realise that you could and gave me practical ways to do that.

GEORGIA No, I moved to Blenheim. I got a really good job there, a head chef opportunity at a respectable little wine bar called Scotch, and it worked out really well. We got a [Cuisine magazine] hat with me being there. 

GEORGIA I had always wanted to, and I got an opportunity in Auckland in a space on Karangahape Road that used to be Clay Wine Bar. I really wanted to present food in a different way, something outside of the box. Change people's perceptions of how a beetroot dish or a broccoli dish could be.

GEORGIA That was a beetroot dumpling. We roasted and dehydrated the beetroot so that they were really leathery and then sliced them really thin and folded them around labneh with sunflower seeds and then poured over like a beetroot sauce. I guess I wanted to think, in particular, of innovative ways to present vegetables. The name Alta was not so much stemmed from the actual meaning, but more meant ‘alternative’ or ‘alternate’ or ‘change’. I tried to do that across the board, even with the drink offering.

GEORGIA I did. We had some really great regular customers. They would come all the time and really got behind the concept and liked it.

GEORGIA We only opened for three weeks before it was the big lockdown in Auckland that got quite extended. It was real busy for those first three weeks and then by the time we reopened, it was dead. And to be honest, it was a struggle. I think most people got hit the worst after the event. There were no more discounts on anything, no government support. Covid completely changed the way we consume food.

GEORGIA The classics like Michael’s paua, chicken skin, potato bread, tuatuas and the chocolate dessert are all still there. Michael’s been very nice and given me a lot of creative direction and a lot of creative freedom. New on the menu, we've got a little broccoli cracker. It's a buckwheat cracker and on top is a puree made from the dark green florets on the broccoli, and then we've pickled the stems and put mustard seeds on it. It's a really tasty winter snack and it's vegan, all the dietaries. I quite like simple food. I don't want to confuse the palette with 10 different elements. I like simple, rustic techniques and presenting things in creative and unusual ways.

I’ve done a new crudo using feijoa leaf and a feijoa stock. That won’t be on much longer as it’s very seasonal and feijoas have just come to an end, but it's really delicious and super simple. I think it's the best crudo I've ever done. I made feijoa leaf oil with it, a flavoured oil. There’s also a smoked chicken Waldorf tart. I really like real classics, like a Greek salad or a Waldorf salad but doing twists on them. So, we've presented a classic Waldorf salad in a tart with smoked chicken, with a celery foam made with the celery leaf. We also have beetroot, which I did a different version here. We've still roasted and dehydrated the beetroot into a leather, then burnt and smoked it on the barbecue and brushed it in a smoked beef fat with a pine nut cream. So, it's sort of a play on your classic carpaccio but done with vegetables first and meat second.

GEORGIA What else? The chargrilled cabbage is quite cool. We've blitzed green bay leaves through butter, so you've got a really deep green colour on the plate. We've also made a charred cabbage vinegarette where we char the offcuts of the cabbage on the grill and then turn it into a smokey vinegarette that goes through it, and then there's a macadamia cream. I really like to try to utilize the whole vegetable; partly for reducing food wastage, but also I think it's fun to creatively push yourself to think about what are you going to do to use every part.

GEORGIA Yeah, I love making ice cream. This is more like a sorbet but I've just called it an ice cream because we've used coconut cream, so it's creamy, but dairy free. We smoke the bananas over the barbecue and make a banana stock and turn that stock into a caramel sauce. It's got lots of depth of flavour. The coconut ice cream has also been quite heavily salted, so it's on the savoury end, quite deep, but also quite refreshing at the same time and really light. You don't feel heavy. I think that's also another thing about my cooking that’s really similar to Michael’s cooking; it's quite acidic-driven so you’re feeling quite light afterwards, not so heavy you need to go to bed straight after dinner. I think if food is balanced, it never feels like too much.  

GEORGIA Definitely. Catering to all dietaries has been something that I've always tried to do. We do live in a world where lots of people have dietaries. You can get annoyed by it or you can get creative with it. Vegetables have so many different flavours. I actually think meat can be quite one-dimensional. I think people are so much more impressed by a really great vegetable dish than they are meat. If you can wow them with a vegetable dish, they're kind of sold. When I think back to some of the best food I've eaten, it's always the vegetable dish that gets stuck in my mind because I’m like, "Man, I never would've ordered that. I never would've thought of that. How did they make that taste so good?”

GEORGIA One thing that I did say to Michael, is the fire pit in the middle of Mr. Morris is quite unique. Not many other people in Auckland cook over fire. So, throughout my menu planning, I have tried to keep that in mind. Obviously, we cook all the proteins on the grill, but the chicken also gets smoked over the grill. The beetroots get smoked and cooked over the grill. The gnocchi is over the grill, the cabbage is over the grill, the octopus. There’s a persimmon salad that’s really autumnal and we've grilled the persimmon over the barbecue. Charred coriander, the banana that gets barbecued up and smoked. I've tried to connect the barbecue all throughout the menu, even during prep because I just think it's such a good feature.