“This is my escape,” the chef and co-owner of award-winning restaurant Urban Bistro says of the private little oasis at the back of her Parkside home. “It’s nice to feel the sun on my back and be outside in the fresh air. And my two white shadows follow me wherever I go.”

Gardening and food have been two constants in Bethany’s life since she was a young girl, planting strawberries in the backyard or eating mangoes from the tree outside her home in Papua New Guinea, where her family lived for two years.

So, it is not surprising that when Bethany invites her sister Megan Power and her children Samantha and Charlie over for lunch, the meal has a floral theme – though it’s not too girly, the chef insists.

It is also appropriate because the two sisters are conspirators in pretty much everything. “We play hockey together,” says Bethany, who has a 10-yearold son, Harrison. “We had kids together, we love food, we love champagne. And we love gardening.”

The pair are also “liberators of plants”, Bethany says, growing most things from found cuttings, from natives to succulents, to geraniums and hollyhocks.

None of these make it on to the plate today. Instead, there is a zucchini flower, beautifully set into a fluffy potato blini, rosemary flowers with a stuffed leg of veal, borage in the heritage tomato salad and strawberry flowers as well as fruit with the semifreddo. While they are not the exact dishes you will find at Urban, they do reflect Bethany’s philosophy of taking the best ingredients and letting them speak for themselves. She says the menu at Urban is a catalogue of the food memories she shares with husband and co-owner Spencer Cole – from her mum’s lemon curd to the exotic flavours the couple discovered on their honeymoon in India.

After training at Regency College of Tafe, Bethany began her career as a chef at Spanish restaurant La Bodega, then moved to Windy Point (where she first met Spencer) and then travelled to London. She returned after being offered a position at the Hilton where she went on to become executive chef. It was at the Hilton that Bethany was able to work with celebrated chefs Cheong Liew and Simon Bryant.

Nine years ago, Bethany and Spencer opened Urban. “It’s a tag team. I do the mornings and my husband works the nights,” Bethany says. “There’s always someone looking after the business and someone looking after the family.”

recipes and photos courtesy of Appetite Magazine

“Joshy is so cruisy and you could mistake that as being too laid-back, but he’s not,” says Simon, who employed Josh at the Hilton Adelaide. “He’s incredibly curious to know the reasons behind why we do what we do, and I love that.”

Simon recalls when the Hilton’s Brasserie Restaurant once received a less than sparkling review. “Joshy carried that review around in his back pocket for months,” he says.

It was Simon who recommended Josh to the Adelaide* magazine as an up-and-coming talent, something the young chef describes as “flattering but a bit daunting”. The chef dropped in to see what Josh would create for a few close friends, including fellow chefs Daniel Wilhelm and Dylan Crismini, and girlfriend Sophie Brown, a nurse.

Josh explains that a passion for cooking is something that runs in the Gertig family. Dad Kym is a retired chef who used to own a cafe in the Adelaide Hills, while brother Nick, 20, is a baker.

At 15, Josh began part-time work at the cafe, igniting his ongoing love for all things culinary. Josh became so curious about food that he applied for work experience at the Hilton Adelaide during his final year at Cornerstone College in Mt Barker. The hotel soon invited him to be an apprentice.

“I was so excited because I knew Simon from when I did work experience and, of course, I knew about Cheong Liew,” he says of the former Hilton star chef.

But Josh describes his own cooking style as more in tune with Simon’s – rustic and not too finicky. “Simon’s knowledge of pretty much all food is amazing,” Josh says. “It’s not too fussy, but more focused on one good ingredient and trying to get the best out of good produce.”

Despite the long hours and cutthroat nature of the business, Josh has remained focused on success. “I really like the pressure,” he says. “I just want to learn, and get as many skills under my belt as I can.”

As for the future, Josh has no plans to open his own restaurant (“too much paperwork”), but says he’d love to work in a Michelin-starred restaurant anywhere in Europe. “I’d like to move up as far as I can,” he says. “I never want to settle for second best.”

recipes and photos courtesy of Appetite Magazine

For Luke, being mistaken for a street hawker is the ultimate compliment. The owner of Sydney’s award-winning Red Lantern restaurant, Luke is creating three bite-sized dishes, each inspired by the tour of Vietnam he undertook as research for for his latest cookbook The Songs of Sapa, where he tasted and rediscovered the flavours and street food of his ancestors.

These dishes reflect his travels: starting with rice paper rolls inspired by the Cha Ca charcoal grill flavours found around Hanoi, in the north of Vietnam. Luke then moves south to the hills in the centre of Vietnam to present grilled pork satay and homemade nuoc cham dipping sauce. The last dish, a banana cake made with condensed milk, is a favourite on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), where his family originated.

The fresh herbs and vegetables found in Vietnamese street food are what inspire this successful chef, who spent his childhood working in his parents’ Vietnamese noodle house in Sydney’s Cabramatta. Luke combines these fresh flavours with the top-quality meat available in Australia to make unique dishes.

“That’s the best thing about Australia. We have amazing produce,” says Luke, who is best known for his popular SBS television series Luke Nguyen’s Vietnam. “We also have many of the herbs used in Asian cooking.”

Luke was born in 1978 in a Thai refugee camp after his parents fled Vietnam. When he arrived in Australia in 1980, “you couldn’t even get lemongrass. Now people grow it in their back garden.” For the Asian herbs he can’t find, Luke compensates by choosing more common varieties with similar characteristics and flavours.

Cheong Liew wanders up after having grabbed lunch in a nearby food court. His part of the street banquet is inspired by the hawkers of Malaysia. “What I know about street food I learned from South-East Asian hawkers,” says Cheong. “You go to get some food and it takes 20 or more minutes to prepare, so you get to watch.”

For Cheong, it is the rhythm of the street food cooks in South-East Asia that most impresses him. “I sit and try to recall the sequence of the rhythm because that is what is important to the cooking,” he says.

Luke slices into the round, glutinous banana cake he has prepared earlier in the kitchen of the Food Business’ Bistro at the Adelaide Festival Centre and realises it is not the most photogenic piece of food.

“They’d serve this wrapped in newspaper on the street,” says Luke. He takes a quick look around and runs into the Kuo Chi Oriental Supermarket, emerging minutes later with a Vietnamese newspaper and a bunch of steamed rice dumplings woven in pandan leaves.

“I love this place!” he beams. “You can discover all kinds of different cultures and cuisines without needing a passport.”

recipes and photos courtesy of Appetite Magazine