Writer – Page 10 – Dani Valent
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I’m a journalist, restaurant critic, cookbook author, travel writer and screenwriter. I love telling stories!

My professional writing career started with travel publisher Lonely Planet. I was what they called a ‘parachutist’, which meant I’d go anywhere. That’s how I ended up writing about Bulgaria, Bonaire, Corsica, New York and Hong Kong.

One day my Lonely Planet boss said, “We need someone to go to Turkey to eat.” “That sounds like me,” I said. World Food Turkey was the result, a social, cultural and culinary investigation of Turkey which really turned me on to the rich possibilities of telling stories through food. Food is culture, history, family, life!

I’ve continued to thread food and travel through a writing career that’s included interviews with actors, politicians and even an astronaut. These days, I’m focusing on chefs, restaurants and cooking. My passion is connecting home cooks and eaters with great dishes and cuisines: if it’s tasty, I want to know about it, and I want you to know too.

Here

Dani Valent is the co-writer (with director Braden King) of HERE, filmed in Armenia. HERE premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2011 where it was one of 16 films chosen for official dramatic competition.

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Make a meal of it

No matter how committed you are to eating and drinking, you’d have to attend 14 events every day for 17 days to cover the whole Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. To save you from this arduous, artery-hardening and altogether impossible undertaking, I’ve trawled through the program to come up with flavourful picks from this massively tasty festival, which runs from next Friday, March 1, to March 17.

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The Graham Hotel. I cook

The Graham Hotel owners Tony and Peter Giannakis and chef Perry Schagen work together to create a festive feast. Ruler of the rotisserie Peter Giannakis beckons his chef. “Come on, Perry, your knife skills are better than mine,” he says. Perry Schagen steps up to the lamb with an impressive blade, pierces the crisp, citrus-scented skin, and eases the meat from the bone onto a platter. He swoons.

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Heston Blumenthal

All you really need to know about Heston Blumenthal is made abundantly clear in his toasted cheese sandwich. It’s not the edible ingredients – bread, cheese, ham – that perplex; it’s the presence of “new washing-up sponge (without scourer)” on the list of necessities. The questing Blumenthal mind decided the humble, well-loved toastie would be improved if the bread was cooked longer than the filling to create a crisp, golden shell and perfectly melted – not over-melted – insides.

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Marco Pierre White

There really is something about Marco Pierre White. I’m in the plush lobby of Melbourne’s Park Hyatt, I’ve spent nearly three hours talking to the famous British chef and I’m simply not myself any more. I’ve entered a vortex, encircled by the 51-year-old’s charisma, trapped by his stories, his slow, quiet sentences, pregnant ellipses and rhetorical questions, which he goes on to answer in a weighty, meaningful way that reels me in tighter. “Honesty is paramount,” he says. “I bare myself.” I somehow doubt it, but I can feel myself nonetheless being charmed by the restaurateur and television star, who is spending three months in Melbourne to film MasterChef: The Professionals.

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© Dani Valent 2024