Before a tasty twenty years

If you’ve ever been to a local function and thought ‘this food is amazing’, there’s a good chance it was from Peter Ford, but the provenance of his success is built on decades of varied experience.

 

10AM on a Friday morning is a busy time for the team Peter Ford Catering.

From their kitchen, hidden away in a rejuvenated strip mall in old Wendouree, preparation for a job that evening is well underway.

Trays of thinly sliced prosciutto are laid out, dough is being kneaded and rested, a huge pot boils away on the commercial cooker.

Unlike the kitchens of commercial restaurants, it’s not chaotic, everything is structed, ready for execution in six hours.

Providing a top-quality dining experience in highly varied locations with set menus and a known number of covers is a long way from where the titular Peter Ford started in the food game.

It began as an apprentice in a seafood restaurant in Mornington before heading to Fanny’s on Lonsdale Street in Melbourne where he spent five years, “on and off”.

“It was a brilliant apprenticeship, great opportunities,” he said. “It was an insight. Some of the head chefs there weren’t brilliant, but it wasn’t a celebrity chef-based business.”

In 1988 Mr Ford moved from Melbourne to Barfold, just north of Kyneton to run a farm and café, a time he said he started to “live the dream.”

The driving factors were two-fold.

Mr Ford and his wife Louise were expecting their first child and an opportunity with long-time co-collaborator Dean Smith – now the head chef at Peter Ford catering – to work under renowned culinary expert Gary Jones at Melbourne eatery Lynch’s had gone to water.

“He was a gruff Yorkshire man who was in the kitchen before everyone else and left after everyone else,” Mr Ford said. “He was a prep machine.”

It lasted less than half a year.

“The owner had obviously bought the wrong chef. He didn’t agree with what he [Mr Jones] did and the chef didn’t agree with what the owner did.

“We all punched food out for about three or four months together, and then en masse about six chefs left the kitchen on Christmas Eve.

“I’d become the conduit between a pissed off head chef and a pissed off owner. I got jack of it all.”

When he got to Barfold Mr Ford ran a kitchen garden called Café Bundaleer, an experience he described as “the best year.”

“We were waiting for a baby to come, working on the farm, I could leave the kitchen sometimes and just harvest,” he said.

After that Mr Ford moved The Bentinck in Woodend, a larger restaurant and function centre with an a la carte offering.

With his second child on the way and back in the highly pressurised environment of an ala carte kitchen, something had to give. Turns out the breaking point was somewhat ironic.

“For the first time in my life I lost my job,” Mr Ford said. “They thought my attitude was too a la carte wanker and I didn’t give enough credence to their conference market.

“I said ‘I’m not doing 14 hours a day for something I don’t believe in’.”

He was out of work for about 48 hours, landing at the rival conference venue Campaspe House on a three-day agency fill job. The owner then offered a permanent position.

It’s there got his first real taste of the structured catering side of the industry.

“I spent three-and-a-half of the best years of my life working in a conference centre,” Mr Ford said.

“I was never away from the house for more then five hours, I worked a split, I was three minutes away from work and by this stage we had four kids under three-and-a-half. I could be part of the household.”

The experience went beyond work-life balance. Mr Ford learned to run a business and the structured nature of the conferences meant stability in the kitchen.

“We knew how many were coming, when they were coming, and with the conferences being in for three or four days I could write menus seasonally and think about the group,” he said.

“It was marvellous. I kept within budget for my boss, I had a great life, you could plan. And then a religious group took over and our values just didn’t align.”

Never one to wallow in self-pity, he was out to find another job, this time at the Convent Gallery in Daylesford. Edging him ever closer to Ballarat.

There Mr Ford took on new roles. He managed a large team, came out from the kitchen and stared to meet with clients and delved deeper into the business side of the industry.

Yet once again there were pressures. There was his young family and a commute back to Gisborne – on a motorbike that was not always free of collisions with kangaroos. He was also essentially running a business, and led him to seek other opportunities, this time in the city he now calls home.

Through a connection back to Campaspe House, Mr Ford ended up running the kitchen at the then recently refurbished Ansonia.

“The vision there was incredible,” he said. “So I came over in late 1995 and started getting things organised and we opened in ’96.

“It was a great five years and I think that really established my credentials here in Ballarat.”

In June 2001, at aged 37, and looking back at what he didn’t want to be, Mr Ford left the Ansonia.

So he stopped. His wife, Louise, returned to work nursing while he considered what to do next.

He bounced a few ideas around based on his experience with business, like running cooking focused corporate retreats and teambuilding events. None came to fruition.

“I spent a lot of time doing not much at all and felt guilty spending a lot of time training for triathlons,” he said.

Then came the progenitor of Peter Ford Catering.

Next week, we look at the establishment of Peter Ford’s company, his take on the food industry as a whole, what he loves about the business.