Slow food, served fast

In 2009, I was travelling in Lebanon with my partner Caroline and four of my 10 siblings. Near our hotel in Beirut was a tiny farmers market with a sign that read ‘Slow Food’ in English. I was as attracted to those words as I was to the heaped up tomatoes and shiny aubergines and sheaves of flat-leaf parsley. I now think of it as a message from my future.

Three sisters eating up a storm in Lebanon

The Slow Food movement is about using fresh seasonal ingredients and local produce and taking time to turn them into thoughtful, delicious dishes. To me, it’s evocative of food slowly simmering on the stove, barely a bubble, while time transforms it into something that makes everyone smile and nod.

Ideas come from pressure

The idea for ‘slow food, served fast’ came, as many good ideas do, from a limitation. We took over a café on the lakefront in Wanaka with a tiny kitchen. Doing a restaurant or café service that needed multiple sections was out of the question. Yet making ‘fast food’ wasn’t going to make us happy (after all, my sister and I had left our old careers behind to do something better with our lives). On my daily walk over Wanaka’s Mount Iron an idea slowly bubbled to the surface and I grabbed it. We’d make ‘slow food’ – considered, yummy, quality dishes, true to our Middle-Eastern roots and, just like in any big family sharing meal, get everyone to come and choose what goes on their plate.

Our Big Fig motto, ‘slow food, served fast’ is not just a fun play on words – it defines us.  The time spent creating and cooking happened before you got there. The 12 hours the slow-cooked meat simmered overnight, the braises that bubbled on the stove, the vegetables that roasted in their spices in the oven, the grains that gently opened on the stove. When dinner was ready (at promptly 6.15 every night) our mother would go to the front step and yell ‘It’s on the table!!”. This is our equivalent.

Our food roots: Lebanon

Our grandparents had left Lebanon as children in the early 1900s and we were back looking for traces of family. It was an eye-opening mix of utter chaos and intense hospitality. When we visited home, our dad Sonny (NZ-born but Lebanese to his core) always threw up his hands and started shouting when you had to leave. Here were strangers we’d met an hour ago doing the same.

All the food, and some

The trip was planned by Karen, our most organised sister (she now runs our catering operation). It took in the birthplaces of our citti (grandmother) and shiddi (grandfather) – Machghara a mountain village in the fertile Beqaa Valley and Bcharre, an alpine town above the historic Qadisha Valley. Being our family, it was all about the eating. We faced down millions of mezze bowls (the tangy baby carrots, the smoothest hummus!), the unusual (whole deep-fried baby birds – crunchy!), the classic (falafel straight out of the boiling oil and into the mouth!), and learned to crave olives for breakfast (just like our dad).

Encountering strangers in odd places almost always led to adoption – they took us home and fed us and brought in relatives and neighbours to meet us and always went into mock-despair when we insisted on leaving. We once spent a whole day and night trying to leave the house of a magnanimous man who wouldn’t let us go till we’d eaten all his food, drunk all his whisky and shot off all his guns.

Onto Syria and Jordan

A smaller detachment of us went on to Syria and Jordan when the eating adventures continued. In Damascus we had incredible French pastries and our first gozleme; dough stretched and filled and cooked on metal over fire, which inspired the version we do at Big Fig today. In Amman we ate in a fancy seafood restaurant and in Aqaba avoided the jammed Lonely Planet-recommended restaurant. Street vendors taught us how to crack walnuts (two walnuts, one hand, squeeze). I had a vivid green wildly tangy iced mint and lemon drink that I’ve never been able to recreate or forget. We did a cooking class in Petra (cubes of fried potato with scrambled egg like our Dad made on a Sunday morning before golf, and delicious, comforting chicken rice). Was there ever a dull meal? Not that I remember.

Our kiwi food roots

We were also hard-out Taranaki kids. Our mother Dorothy’s family, had been in the small town of Inglewood since the 1860s; English Irish people out of Cornwall. That meant lots of milk (often drunk straight from the bottle), roasts, stews, pies, fish on Fridays – always snapper in batter – and homemade chips cooked in the dripping that lived in a metal bucket under the sink.

Our parents had the classic straight-row veggie garden, growing mainly salads and potatoes. Favourite easy meal was a slice of cold meat, boiled new spuds with mint and dripping butter, salads of just-picked iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions and cucumbers doused in tangy sweet highlander mayonnaise. And probably cheese.

In the early days, Dottie made everything from scratch, including flaky pastry without a food processor and baking without a mixer. That was a lot of arm-work because according to unwritten Taranaki code one always had the holy trinity ‘in the tins’: One cake, one slice and one set of biscuits. We kept our end up – morning and afternoon tea and supper were strictly adhered to at exactly 10am, 3pm and 9pm. 

Our Lebanese table

Legend has it that our citti got up at noon and cooked till three in the morning. Before our parents tied the knot, she taught Dottie the dishes we would eat for the rest of our lives - kibbi, meshi (stuffed vine leaves or cabbage rolls), mejaddarah and loubia, to name a few. Without the ‘international section’ of the supermarket (or a supermarket) they had to do some creative workarounds. When our Lebanese grandad came to stay, he and dad would haul home sacks of whole wheat sold as chook food, then boil and spread it on sheets in the front yard to sun dry before grinding it into burghul (or bulghur). To our horror, shiddi would sit out there all day waving away flies with a tea-towel. Neighbourhood kids would stop stone fighting for a minute and sit on their bikes staring at the sight of this old Lebanese peasant scene, their mouths drooping open, before hitting the pedals and racing off to tell their mums and dads.

The two together

You’ll see traces of everything we love at Big Fig. The flavours and textures and herby freshness of middle-eastern-inspired cooking and the sweet goodness and generosity of kiwi cooking. There’s always to-ing and fro-ing of hot dishes from the kitchen and most of the day you’ll see our pastry chef at work in the bakery, beating, icing and rolling hundreds of pitta balls. When you come from a big family, food never stops happening. It’s how we like it.