Confessions of a tour cook

This week’s newsletter comes to you from beautiful Asturias, in northern Spain, where I’m currently leading a food tour for World Expeditions. Being in Europe in charge of a group of travellers has got me thinking back to my time as an onboard cook with Topdeck, and what it’s really like to make food for 40 boozy passengers in a dodgy campsite when you have limited skills and a large hangover. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks as ever for your support.

We always used to make Thai chicken curry in Prague, or somewhere within a day’s drive of Prague, whipped up in the luxury of a cook tent with four big gas burners.

That was not because Thai chicken curry is native to the Czech Republic, or because the European nation has any gastronomic or cultural ties to the Land of Smiles – it was because the huge Makro wholesale supermarket just outside Prague sold Thai green curry paste, and at that point in time basically no one else in Europe did.

So that became part of the small rota of “traditional” dishes that we cooks working for Topdeck would prepare in certain places. In Paris it was a giant picnic, served on trestle tables on the grass at the Champs de Mars, within view of the Eiffel Tower. In Rome it was lasagne, cooked – questionably – by wedging a large tray of pasta and sauce underneath the gas stove that had a metal hotel pan on it, in the hopes some of the heat would be reflected and the bechamel would brown.

And in Prague it was Thai chicken curry, which none of the passengers knew was a standard for that city, but all the tour cooks would churn out because sometimes you just want an easy meal that you can prepare by cracking open 10 jars of paste, and Australians all love Thai chicken curry anyway.

(Uncle Ben’s rice, by the way, is magical stuff, known among cooks as “apprentice-proof”. You can stick it on to boil and forget about it for an hour and somehow it will still be edible. I don’t know why and I don’t want to.)

I worked as a cook on board tour buses with Topdeck, around the mid-2000s. We lugged around groups of 30, 35, sometimes as many as 40 mostly Australian, mostly drunk passengers through Europe, showing them the sights and (more often) showing them a good time.

I had no idea I was going to end up doing this. Some people dream about working on tours and plan it for years, but I was just travelling in Africa on a quarter-life-crisis gap year when I met a guy called Kosta at a campsite in Botswana, and we got chatting. He was a driver for Topdeck, spending his off-season travelling.

“Can you cook?” he asked me. I nodded. I’d worked in a seafood restaurant for a few years during uni, and I had a three years of McDonald’s under my belt (in both senses).

So I applied, dropped Kosta’s name, and a few months later I was pushing literally three full shopping trolleys through the Calais Carrefour supermarket, trying to buy enough produce to feed 40 people for three days, trying to plan a menu that would be appealing to passengers but easy enough for me to produce in a single tent with four burners.

PHASED OUT

Tour cooks don’t really exist anymore. They were being phased out as I left Topdeck around 2006, when the company started setting up permanent bases in key campsites where cooks would stay for the whole season, and passengers would spend more time in local restaurants on the rest of their trips. Eventually the campsite bases were phased out too, and then the campsites were phased out, because the kids don’t like to spend their holidays in tents anymore.

So I was one of the last to do it, an occasionally conscientious preparer of giant meals, someone who was there as much to jolly along the passengers and join them out at pubs and bars than I was to make breakfast.

But I did have to make breakfast. That was the deal: drink with the passengers as long as you can, be one of the last to leave, make sure they have a good time. But then be up by 6am doing bacon and eggs (and preparing packed lunches if it was a drive day) for 40 people.

The campsite in Venice was an infamous party place, where the owners would put on these massive nights whenever a tour group was in. They’d have toga parties and tip spirits down people’s throats while they stood on the bar, skol beers and get everyone else to do it. A coach driver I worked with broke his foot in Venice, trying to grab something from the vehicle after a night at the campsite bar (hi, Coco).

I visited Venice 11, maybe 12 times. On every occasion I promised myself I would go into the city with the passengers the next day and have a touristy experience, instead of staying at the campsite again to sleep off a hangover. I made it in twice.

GETTING TROLLEYED

You haven’t shopped in a supermarket until you’ve attempted to shop for 40 people in a place you’ve never been before, where you can’t read any of the labels and Google hasn’t been invented yet. I’d walk into some place outside, say, Zadar, hoping for a massive, well-stocked supermarket, and find a few packets of off-brand pasta and some old tomatoes. You have to think on your feet then, rejig the menu, figure out if you can use the emergency meal ingredients that are always stashed under the bus.

On drive days we had to serve roadside lunches: usually three massive salads, plus bread and some treats, prepared in the morning before departure. First time I visited Paris I decided to make everyone sandwiches on baguettes, so I bought bread the day before and got up the next morning to make the sangas and found out that my baguettes were now essentially baseball bats. “Yeah, this is what baguettes are like in France,” I told the trusting passengers as they heroically attempted to chew the extremely stale bread.

If it was cold we would do a hot lunch, which meant making a huge batch of chile con carne, or something similar, in the morning, sealing the pot with gaffer tape and then storing it beside the bus engine to keep it warm on the drive.

Some tours were great: the passengers would join me in the cook tent, drink a few beers and chat, sometimes even help with the meal prep.

Some didn’t go so well: on my last-ever tour we were at our final stop in Amsterdam, having an evening in town, when someone came to grab me and tell me that one of the passengers was in the Bulldog (an infamous peddler of marijuana and magic mushrooms) and she wasn’t in a good way.

I found her slumped in a corner, so I put her arm over my shoulder and started helping her out of the venue to get some fresh air. She looked deep into my eyes, and vomited all over me.  

After two years, I had made my last authentic Czech Thai green curry. Time to go home.

WHAT WE’VE BEEN EATING THIS WEEK

As mentioned, this newsletter comes to you from northern Spain, where I’ve been enjoying some incredible food. The highlight so far has been Gueyu Mar, a seafood specialist on the Asturian coast. Set in a tiny beach town in an old farmhouse, the service here is laidback and friendly, but chef Abel Alvarez’s food is deceptively complex and absolutely beautiful. The star of the show is “El Rey”, a fish like imperador or alfonsino, which Abel grills simply over coals and serves unadorned by any sides. Incredible produce, treated with care and skill (and zero ego). The sea urchin cream with baby peas was also outstanding. I would highly recommend making the journey here.

WHAT I’M LOVING THIS WEEK

• Spaniards who know how to pour vermouth properly. I’ve ranted on my Instagram about the tiny, 60ml pours you get in Australia – in Spain, vermouth is poured more like wine, glugged in a glass of ice and garnished with green olives and a slice of orange. Perfection.
• Asturians! This region has to be one of the friendliest in Spain, a place of big smiles and warm welcomes. I love it.
• US authorities have hinted that they may scale back proposed social media checks for travellers hoping to enter the country – a welcome change, given these checks are likely to turn many potentional visitors away.

WHAT I’M NOT LOVING

• Qantas has announced further delays to its “Project Sunrise” flights, which will fly direct from Sydney to London and New York and were supposed to launch this year (after initial plans to launch in 2025). Supply chain issues mean the planes won’t be delivered by Airbus until next year. But does anyone even want these flights?
• My favourite airports always feature local restaurants (Singapore, Tokyo Haneda etc), so it was a bummer to visit the sparkling new Istanbul airport last week and find about a million American fast food chains, but barely any Turkish cuisine. I don’t want a burger, I want a kebab.
• Uber is making a play to become the only app you will ever need for travel, last week introducing everything from hotel bookings to ordering room service from local restaurants. Do we really need these multinational companies scooping every last cent out of travellers?