Wanaka’s newest celebrity chef Angelo Georgalli or The Game Chef, as he is known, is living the dream. The inner-city London-raised, self-taught chef, did not read a book until he was 17, but in a few months Georgalli will again be beaming from TV screens in New Zealand and around the world. Kerrie Waterworth met him hunting in the Hunter Valley.
It was a stunning autumnal clear-blue-sky day and we were tramping along a four-wheel-drive track in Dingle Burn Station in the Hunter Valley when we saw two men coming down a goat track on the side of mountain.
One man had something large and dark around his neck and the other had a rifle in his hand.
Our paths crossed at a parked vehicle, where chef Angelo Georgalli watched his client unhook the legs of a fallow buck and drop it on the back of the truck.
We had stumbled upon "The Game Chef" doing what he loves most — hunting and shooting and showing an overseas tourist how to source food from nature.
We found out later the deer would be cut up by Georgalli and his client, who did not wish to be named, would take 15 bags of vacuum-packed deer steaks with him on the plane back to Hong Kong.
The television show The Game Chef has screened in 90 countries, making it one of the biggest TV shows to be released from New Zealand, "and for some reason I’m really, really popular in Thailand," Georgalli (46) said.
He moved with his wife Stephanie and their three children to Wanaka three years ago and in that time the peripatetic Georgalli has carved a niche in the frenetic TV cooking show market, written a cookbook (with the help of Wanaka writer Carla Munro) and redecorated, renovated and landscaped a five-bedroom hunting and fishing lodge in the Cardrona Valley.
Not bad when you consider he has never done a cooking course in his life, is dyslexic and grew up in a council house in London.
"I suppose you could say cooking was in my blood. My dad was a chef and my mum was a really good cook."
Georgalli was born in Glasgow. His father was 56 and his mother 38.
Soon after his birth, his Greek-Cypriot father decided to move the family to Cyprus and live a southern Mediterranean lifestyle on his coastal farm, but it ended suddenly when Turkey invaded Cyprus.
"We lost our farm, our house; all we had left was one suitcase full of clothes and a few photos."
The family were taken to a British army camp in Limassol, where they lived for six months until they realised they were never going to be able to reclaim their farm. They moved to Italy to live with relatives of Georgalli’s Italian mother.
"My first memories were of Italy. It was very tough for Dad because, by then, he was 60 years and he couldn’t find work, so we ended up moving to London."
The family had almost no money and had to live in a three-bedroom council house in Tottenham, but Georgalli’s father knew how to live off the land, even if it was in one of the world’s biggest cities.
"We had a big garden and my dad divided it into two sections, one to raise chickens and rabbits and the other to grow produce. I remember as a young boy helping my dad in the vegetable garden and slaughtering the rabbits and chickens. He wanted to ingrain in me at a very young age that you can grow your own food and harvest your own meat. He did that until the day he died."
Being the youngest of four boys he spent a lot of time in the kitchen with his mother.
"One of my favourite dishes that Mum used to make was eggplant parmigiana, and we also cooked a lot of rabbit and lamb dishes, pasta, pasta sauces, puddings, deserts and cakes. We never ever went to restaurants or bought takeaways. We couldn’t afford it."
At school Georgalli discovered he was dyslexic, so he left at 14 and went to work for a cousin who ran a Greek delicatessen. At 16, he started working in restaurants.
At 25 he met his future New Zealand-born wife and they moved to Auckland where he opened his first cafe.
After running seven successful cafes, delicatessens and restaurants in Auckland they moved to Italy, where the family spent a year living in a rambling 16th-century house on 20ha in Tuscany.
"It was absolute family time. We spent every minute of every day together as a unit. We home-schooled our eldest boy, we foraged and picked fruit from the orchard, we raised our own chickens and rabbits, we cooked every day and we all took up archery."
They returned to Auckland, where they found city life was no longer for them, and bought a house and a farm in Matakana, near Warkworth.
Georgalli converted an old barn into a bed and breakfast, landscaped the entire farm, raised seven pigs, 50 sheep, six cows, and 400 chickens, planted 80 fruit trees and grew 100m of organic produce.
On New Year’s Day three years later, and with everything finished and running smoothly, Georgalli sat with his wife on their deck surveying their work and suggested maybe it was time to try the South Island.
By the end of the month they were living in Wanaka.
"I had four job offers to work as a chef, so I stayed six months at one restaurant, trained two chefs and then left to open an archery school, which I had always wanted to do. I had 47 students until the day the ski season started and then I only had three."
In the meantime, a TV producer with whom he had worked on one episode of a cooking show four years earlier had rung to ask if he was interested in fronting a cooking series of his own.
Georgalli pitched the concept of a show that involved foraging, hunting, fishing and cooking foods found in the wild.
The producer took the bait, a pilot was made and the series The Game Chef was born.
Series two, called Angelo’s Wild Kitchen, and a book, are set for release later this year and with the Georgallis’ latest project, a renovated and redecorated Cardrona Valley Lodge now taking guests, he has focused his energies on expanding his catering and hunting business.
And if his second series is as successful as the first, he could rekindle a demand for wild rabbit and deer meat and that pesky rabbit in the garden might start to look appetising.
