How we got here

The Sydney years

I spent eight years working in high-end Sydney restaurants. The kind where everything is precision-timed, plated with tweezers, and photographed before it reaches the table. Beautiful food, impressive technique, completely unsustainable lifestyle.

By year seven, I could break down a chicken in ninety seconds and make mother sauces in my sleep. I'd also developed chronic tendonitis, a caffeine dependency, and a growing suspicion that I'd forgotten why I started cooking in the first place.

That feeling—the gap between what you're doing and why you started—it grows slowly. Until one day you're standing in a walk-in cooler at 2am, and you can't remember the last time you cooked something that made you genuinely happy.

The turning point

The breakdown was quiet. No dramatic exit, no throwing my apron at the head chef. I just stopped being able to sleep properly. Then stopped tasting food correctly. Your body eventually forces the conversation your mind keeps avoiding.

My GP told me to take two weeks off. I took three months, most of it spent in a rental forty minutes north of Newcastle. No phone calls, no tasting menus, no Instagram stories.

What I did do: learned to fish poorly, bought vegetables at farmers markets because they were there, and cooked for myself without recipes or rules. Turned out I'd spent so long following other people's visions that I'd forgotten what my own taste preferences were.

Learning from people who never left

During those months, I met people who'd been cooking in coastal towns their whole lives. Third-generation oyster farmers. Home cooks who preserved lemons every summer and made their own bread because that's what their mothers did.

They taught me things no culinary school covers. How to tell if seafood is actually fresh just by touching it. Why some recipes work better at sea level versus inland. The importance of letting heat do the work instead of constantly intervening.

More importantly, they showed me that cooking doesn't have to be performative. It can be generous, patient, adaptive. Technique in service of flavor, not the other way around.

Starting without knowing we were starting

Living Shore began with a friend asking if I'd teach her teenage daughter basic knife skills. Then that daughter told her friends. Then someone's father wanted to learn to cook fish properly. Then a local restaurant owner asked if I'd consult on their spring menu.

Six months in, I realized I was running a business by accident. A year later, I made it official. Two years after that, we had a waiting list.

The name came from a conversation with a fisherman who described the tidal zone—that space between high and low tide—as "living shore." Always changing, constantly being reshaped by what moves through it, never quite stable but always fertile.

That felt right. We're not trying to pin down cooking into fixed rules. We're working in the space where technique meets intuition, where tradition meets adaptation.

What we believe

Good cooking starts with attention. Not perfection, not following rules precisely, but actually paying attention to what's in front of you. How the fish looks today versus yesterday. Whether your olive oil has gone bitter. If your kitchen is dry or humid, because that affects how flour behaves.

We believe most cooking problems come from people following instructions they don't understand. When you know why you're doing something, you can adapt when circumstances change. When you're just following steps, you're stuck the moment something doesn't go according to plan.

We also believe cooking is a conversation, not a performance. You're talking with your ingredients, your equipment, the people who grew your food, and eventually the people who'll eat it. The better you listen, the better the meal turns out.

Who actually does the work

Most sessions are run by me—former burnt-out Sydney chef, current obsessive learner. I'm backed by a rotating group of specialists: a pasta maker who spent two years in Bologna, a pastry chef who gave up wedding cakes to focus on bread, a preserving expert who supplies half the cafes on the coast.

We bring people in based on what each session needs. For oyster workshops, we work with someone who's been farming them for thirty years. For native ingredient sessions, we collaborate with a First Nations educator.

No one here is playing dress-up as a chef. Everyone teaching has spent years in professional kitchens, made every mistake at least twice, and figured out how to fix them.

What's different now

Fifteen years ago, I could tell you the Maillard reaction temperature by heart but couldn't cook a simple roast chicken that tasted good. Now I can do both, and I know which skill is actually more valuable.

We sleep normal hours. We cook with seasonal ingredients because they taste better, not because it's trendy. We turn down work that doesn't interest us. We close for two weeks every August because running yourself into the ground isn't sustainable, no matter what restaurant culture tells you.

This probably makes us terrible entrepreneurs. But it makes us better teachers, more reliable consultants, and significantly happier humans.