‘I am genuinely on my own': The TV chef living the wild life in Tasmania

The Age

18-06-2025

Chef Analiese Gregory vowed to tone down the 'adventuring' for the second season of SBS Food's female-centric answer to the River Cottage franchise, A Girl's Guide to Hunting, Fishing and Cooking. But there she is in the first episode, preparing to scuba dive for crayfish off the south-eastern coast of Tasmania, where the Michelin-star trained chef lives since trading the London-Paris-Sydney high life for a simpler existence on the land.
'I'm always putting myself in moderately dangerous situations, maybe because it makes you feel alive,' says the Kiwi chef, who is on during a break in preparing the Winter Feast for MONA gallery's Dark Mofo festival.
The Huon Valley farmhouse we watched her restore in the first season is still a work in progress, as is the kitchen garden, from which she plucks lovage for the crayfish omelette she plans to cook on the beach. Sheep have joined the yard, as has a dog named Kana (a Maori word for 'sea urchin'). An Italian truffle-hunting breed called Lagotto Romagnolo, Kana has so far managed to forage a mushroom.
There is another addition to the farm that upsets the image of solo female independence – Gregory's partner, Hobart chef and restaurateur Kobi Ruzicka. 'He lives in Hobart, so it's a very modern relationship,' says Gregory. 'But I am genuinely on my own in the country with my dog most of the time, just trying to muddle through.'
Gregory was just 16 when she left the family dairy farm on New Zealand's North Island to train in London. 'I've always lived that way. I'm like, 'I'm going to move to France!', and I just do it.'
But after regular restorative escapes to Tasmania during her years with chef Peter Gilmore (who appears in season two) at Sydney's Quay Restaurant, the pull of the quieter island state and its abundance of produce became too strong. 'Being part of big-city life for many years, and having high-pressure jobs, I think I needed to do that to value [farm life], and to want to come full circle.'
A post-pandemic diagnosis helped Gregory make sense of her exceptional ability to focus under stress. In the series, she rarely appears ruffled, even when experiencing a panic attack during the crayfishing dive.
'From my 20 years in a commercial kitchen, you learn to internalise stress,' she says. 'And I've been diagnosed with autism, so maybe I do have a bit of that blank face. But it doesn't mean there aren't things going on below the surface … I went through a period of grieving for life being harder than maybe it needed to be, and then acceptance, and then learning to understand myself better … I think that in ways [autism] makes things harder for me, and in other ways it probably makes things easier. I do get hyper-focused and will stay up all night building bee frames to go in the beehive and things like that.'