From award-winning restaurants in Sydney to a homestead in Hawke's Bay
Britt Mann05:00, Jul 18 2020
Restaurateurs Jeanette Woerner, 54, and Chris Stockdale, 49, swapped award-winning restaurants in Sydney for a fresh start in Central Hawke’s Bay, where they run a historic homestead. Chris, who was born in Eketāhuna, helms the kitchen at Wallingford, while Jeanette, from NSW, hosts. The couple have two children.
CHRIS: I was in my dags lying on the sofa watching TV in the middle of the day, eating a packet of chips, beer in hand. I thought I had the flat to myself. Quick as a flash, flatmates are home and this girl's looking down at me asking about the name of my cat. I was taken by surprise – I couldn't talk. I mumbled something. When she turned her back, I took off, went to my room, and hid. I think she thought was I really odd.
About a month later, we met up again. She was opening a restaurant and asked me to come and work for her.
I was 21, 22, and Jeanette was 27. I was the waiter and she was the chef. I think it was only about six weeks later, we were dating. Six weeks after that, we got engaged. We didn't tell anyone until about nine months later.
She gave me a birthday card written in Chinese, because we worked with a Chinese guy. I really liked a ring from this particular jeweller, and she bought it for me. I'm looking at this card and I'm looking at the ring thinking, “S..., is she proposing to me?” (As it turned out, the card was just saying “Happy Birthday”.) And she goes, “Well, what would happen if I was?” And I said, “Well, I'd be saying yes.” She goes, “Well, then I'm proposing.”
Going into business together wasn't a conscious decision, it just happened that way. From an early age, I've always had a passion around food and cooking – my strength was always in the kitchen. I like to wear many hats – I will do bookwork, deal with the lawyers, deal with the accountants, and management roles and stuff like that. Jeanette was always really good with staff and people. She's really welcoming, very loving. And she's full of fun. She's easily excited, she's got this crazy laugh… She generally just really cares. So she was always very strong at front of house and a great communicator.
When we were in Sydney, we were faced with lots and lots of things. I was suffering from depression at that time, and had anxiety issues. We were under an incredible amount of pressure. It got to a point where we knew we had to make a change. We had to leave Sydney, it just wasn't healthy for us any more.
We saw an ad for a management couple for this place called Wallingford. We applied for it and they got back to us straight away. It all happened pretty quickly. Within three or four months, we'd sold the business, sold the house, took our daughter out of school… We cut our losses, lost heaps of money, and we made the move.
I was not too keen to move – I love Sydney, we had the businesses, and I didn't want to give that up. It was probably Jeanette that was the driving force about coming back to New Zealand.
I had to accept that, yeah, I was not well. I was not happy, and I just couldn't keep living the way I was living, basically. There’s that saying – “your money or your life”. And we chose life.
JEANETTE: He was a very alluring person. What he would show anyone is like the iceberg effect – you only get a little bit and all the rest is submerged.
You kind of have this rule in hospo, especially if you're an employer or the boss, that you never go out with any of your staff. He's quite a bit younger than me – there's a five-and-a-half-year difference. It's not so significant now, but certainly then it was significant.
He's really charismatic, and a very attractive person. I don't know, I was very, very doubtful about anything like that happening. We were at this staff Christmas party – we didn't really know each other – we'd seen Shakespeare in the Park. It started spitting and he took off his coat and put it over my shoulders…
He was so interested in everything. And when you employ a whole lot of people and you're running businesses, it's really nice to feel like you're not treading that path alone.
The really big thing came when we were opening up our cafe, Little Jean, and we had two kids who were kind of discovering who they were, and that business was massively busy. There were queues out the door, 50 staff, we started from scratch… I suppose we were alone in our togetherness in that.
We'd done everything together – worked together, lived together, opened businesses together. He hadn't been back to New Zealand for a while; my family had died… We only had each other then, and these massive commitments. I thought we were travelling that road together and I looked around and realised Chris had started to go into a really dark place. You're busy on all these levels – the business was turning over $120,000 a week. And Chris was battling, battling, battling. It was tough for both of us – he couldn't find the joy in life. And I had lost a person who was madly in love with me. I'd lost my go-to person. So we were both kind of very alone at that time.
Moving to New Zealand was a real leap. Chris really wanted to move to Tasmania and he kept holding on to Sydney – he would be offered jobs where he would get massive amounts of money to consult. But I was certain we needed to be surrounded by people who loved us. His mum and his sister are special kinds of people, they listen and don't judge…
When someone's [depressed] you get locked out of the relationship. You don't know what's going on or how to help. Even though you're married, it's super lonely. To have him come back – to laugh and to enjoy walking and respond to the dogs and have time for the kids – it's like you've got a second chance at life.
Chris is the most amazing chef in the world, but he's such a modest person. The first dinner service we had at Wallingford, we had a whole crowd of foodies in from Wellington for a nine-course degustation. He got a standing ovation. He makes everything – he makes the pasta, he made truffle icecream. He uses all the stuff on the property – feijoas, and mandarins and plums – that all goes into icecreams or pastries or jams.
He's a creative person – he always asks that question, “What if?”
“What if I built my own stone table?” So he did, he made a stone concrete thing for his kitchen bench.
We've always been in these massive places. Now we only book for 16. During that really bad time, he didn't want to cook, he didn't like cooking. To see someone you love, not enjoy what they love… Now all that creativity's coming back– he's smoking things and making butters and new breads – to see all that firing up again, and watching people's faces when they receive mad food… It’s a good feeling. It's like I'm home.