Bondi to Newtown: Our Big Kitchen shares the power of team building through food

By EVA BAXTER

Yesterday, Our Big Kitchen in Bondi celebrated International Chef’s Day by teaming up with French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu to cook 1,000 healthy, gourmet three-course meals for Australians in need.

The Greek Welfare Centre in Newtown, located on King Street, is among the five charities which received the meals.

Our Big Kitchen regularly sends meals to the Greek Welfare Centre to support its work in enabling and empowering individuals from the Greek community and the community at large.

The Greek Welfare Centre was established in 1975 in one of the first attempts by Greek immigrants in Australia to establish a specific service to meet the immense welfare needs of the community.

Our Big Kitchen is a community run, non-denominational industry kitchen located in Bondi which prepares meals to be distributed across Sydney.

Last year the team at Our Big Kitchen distributed over 200,000 meals to disadvantaged Australians.

Our Big Kitchen founder and director Rabbi Dr Dovid Slavin told the Independent, “what we are essentially is a factory that produces all these meals, but we do it the community-oriented way, lots and lots of volunteers that come to spend time here with us in a positive way by cooking those meals.”

Serving stories

“While we make food, what we really make here are stories,” said Rabbi Dr Slavin.

“The way the kitchen was born is the story of a husband who wanted to keep his wife happy.”

He said his wife started her career in hairdressing, predominately helping women who were going through cancer treatments to give them the strength to fight on.

“Inevitably she started realizing that many of these women, young mums and older mums, are simply not managing in being able to feed their families.

“What started in our home kitchen as a small enterprise of sharing some food to make it easier for them, grew into what became our kitchen today, after we experienced the power and the joy of team building around food,” he said.

“So, with Le Cordon Bleu we were able to, in honour of International Chef’s Day, offer something very, very special to our recipients.”

Le Cordon Bleu Australia teaches internationally recognised culinary arts and hospitality management programs to domestic and international students, and its Australian campuses offer an environment to learn the art of French culinary techniques in cuisine and patisserie, and undergraduate and postgraduate business degrees.