It’s been a big few months for Jacqui Challinor, head chef at Sydney’s much loved Mediterranean-influenced restaurant Nomad. In September last year, a kitchen fire caused the Surry Hills restaurant to close down and temporarily move up the road — without its signature fire grill. “When the fire happened, that threw everything into complete disarray,” she says. “It’s been an adjustment. Cooking with fire is the way I love to cook. Losing that has been a big disruption, but also a good challenge.”
While Challinor has experienced great success in the hospitality industry, her career might have been very different if she hadn’t listened to her friends. “It took me a little while to get the guts to apply for my first cheffing job,” she remembers. “I was worried it was a bit of a boys club and I wasn’t going to fit in, but it got to the point where my friends got sick of listening to me whinge about it and forced me to submit applications. So I got the first job I went for, as an apprentice chef at [cafe/health food store] About Life in Rozelle.” It was an inauspicious beginning for a top-tier chef whose peers often started their work lives at fine diners. But Challinor doesn’t feel disadvantaged.
“The head chef left after a few months and they never replaced her,” she says. “So I learnt a lot from a really early stage in my apprenticeship.” Eventually Challinor finished her apprenticeship at since-shuttered Merivale steakhouse Mad Cow. Her manager, Chris Whitehead, taught her how to manage a team — a useful skill for overseeing 55 staff at Nomad. “He’s the person I look to the most,” she says. “He’s got such an incredible demeanour; he would never raise his voice or degrade someone.”
After Mad Cow, Challinor stayed with the Merivale family, working at French eatery Felix, followed by her first official head chef role at now-closed Greek restaurant Xanthi. She followed that up with a stint in corporate catering. But despite a higher pay and better hours, she lasted just six months. “I absolutely hated it. For me, there just wasn’t the buzz and adrenaline rush you get from service. But it was nice to have a life for six months,” she laughs. After her short-lived catering career, Challinor returned to the restaurant game, with a job offer at Nomad, a new venue her former Mad Cow colleague Nathan Sasi was opening. Just one year later Sasi departed Nomad, opening up the head chef role for Challinor – a role she’s comfortably inhabited ever since, earning the restaurant a Good Food Guide hat for the past five consecutive years.
