We’re excited to get her out here with us, but this isn’t a door-to-door service kind of thing. We presumed she’d be into an adventure, and luckily she is because the instructions for getting to the hut read like a cross-country scavenger hunt:
First, fly into Queenstown, then find the car we’ve left for her (search the wheel wells for the key…), then drive an hour to the heli pad while getting reacquainted with an automatic car (she drives stick). Load up her bags and fly over the Alps and into Fiordland to be dropped at the edge of the jungle to meet us.
We’re there to greet her when she lands, and she unloads with a single backpack. “Well I’ve got two kinds of torches, some wire, knives, thermals, bug spray, and some overnight essentials,” Monique explains of her light luggage.
We gather around the fire watching the chef adjust coals, re-position carrots and kumara, and sear the venison. What’s science for most people is an art here. She’s testing done-ness by touch, managing heat not by knobs but with an iron.
Monique is wearing a hoodie and jeans, but her perfect chef’s form is on display as she chops and dresses the meal and tidies her station – which is the entirety of Warrick’s roughly 60 sq. foot kitchen. Her world-class training is there in her focus and precision, and of course, the meal itself. But what stands out even more is how comfortable she is with the whole thing.
“It’s nice to make food and just put it on platters and eat it together. No tweezers involved” Monique says, smiling as she joins everyone at the table to eat. Of this whole adventure, it’s perhaps this moment – sitting to eat with everyone during dinner – that’s most out of the ordinary for her.
