It isn’t easy being Poh. Sure, her existence looks downright peachy from the outside – she’s attained that one-name-only status of the true celebrity, she rates off the scale when it comes to the likeability factor, and let’s face it, she can cook.
But when you’re juggling a new season of your TV series, a suburban vegie patch the size of the MCG, a weekly stall at the Adelaide Farmers’ Market, a café, a book deal, an imminent art show, a husband and two Scottish terriers, the question must inevitably be asked: does Poh Ling Yeow ever completely lose it?
“At the moment I feel like I’ve just popped out quadruplets… I don’t think I even remember what it’s like not to be tired,” she says, still disturbingly cheerful, down the line from her Adelaide hometown. “I’m pulling 100 hours (a week), it truly is insane.”
If insanity is the ruling motif of her life, it was certainly ratcheted up by her new café, Jamface, opened four months ago with husband Jono Bennett, ex-husband and current manager Matt Phipps and best friend Sarah, who also happens to be married to Phipps (as their collective Facebook status might say, it’s complicated – yet clearly very amicable).
“All of my restaurateur friends said, ‘Don’t do it!’,” says Yeow of the eclectic, handmade café (she and her partners were instrumental in its fit-out) at Adelaide’s Central Market. “But it was a dream I had pre-MasterChef so I had to do it. I really believe that anything rewarding in life will bring you equal amounts of grief and pleasure – it will balance into half and half – so while I do stop and wonder what I got myself into, then I think, wow, I’ve really done it.”
Yeow has reached an interesting place. She has attained a level of celebrity that means people are surprised to see her in the flesh, cooking in Jamface’s tiny open kitchen. “It’s like they think there are these cooking fairies that come out of the woodwork and prepare everything.” Simultaneously, she’s attained a level of celebrity that the public can be equally dismayed when she’s not there. It’s that notoriously double-edged sword of being a public person that Yeow refers to several times over the course of conversation. Since rising to fame on the first season of MasterChef in 2009 (perhaps fortuitously she lost the final to Julie Goodwin after going typically off-piste on the final chocolate challenge) things have certainly changed for the Chinese-Malay lapsed Mormon who used to be known by the Anglicised name of Sharon.
“I get recognised all the time. I completely take it for granted now. My knee-jerk reaction is to be friendly to everyone.”
Indeed, if Yeow was to ever lose it – a highly speculative proposition in itself – she creates the impression it simply would involve her megawatt smile being only slightly dimmed. “People confuse TV Poh with café Poh and they don’t realise I can’t run out in the middle of service if they want a photo. It can make things very difficult. If I step away for two minutes it means paying customers don’t get their food. I find that 99.9 per cent of people are lovely and respectful and polite.” And the other 0.1 per cent? “They can be demanding. In a less than ideal situation they can force a photo and it’s so not like me to be saying no to that.”
Perhaps the key to her rare equanimity is midnight baking. As revealed in the inaugural Poh & Co. and continued in the soon-to-be-launched second season on SBS, the night owl loves few things more than to measure, sift and fold between the hours of midnight and 4am.
So how does she cope? Perhaps the key to her rare equanimity is midnight baking. As revealed in the inaugural Poh & Co and continued in the soon-to-be-launched second season on SBS, the night owl loves few things more than to measure, sift and fold between the hours of midnight and 4am. She fires up her mint-green KitchenAid around four nights a week, a practice that contrary to expectations is not the mark of an insomniac. “I actually sleep really well, but I really enjoy the solitude and quiet at night. I love it, my brain is so active and nothing is accosting me in terms of emails and work.”
The methodical, wholesome nature of baking has been identified as a good tactic to combat depression, a theory Yeow enthusiastically endorses. “I totally subscribe to that. One of the reasons I love doing it at night is that I can still have thoughts bubbling but focus on measuring things and the simple satisfaction of following a recipe. I love the chemistry of baking. I’m well known for parking myself in front of a cake baking and watching it rise. I need to know it’s heading in the right direction. Plus, you can share afterwards, which is really lovely.”
Like the best TV chefs, Yeow is a natural-born nurturer. It’s a quality that seeps through the screen and into the living rooms of viewers who may or may not be making notes about her cauliflower and anchovy orecchiette but will be infused with a general sense of contentment about the world being not such a bad place after all. Her appeal can really be boiled down to Maya Angelou’s quote, adopted by marketers worldwide: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Call it the likeability factor. Her very Aussie husband Jono, who she met on the set of MasterChef (he was a runner; they were forbidden by the terms of their contracts to fraternise but “we kind of figured out we liked each other and after filming finished we started dating”) is likeable. Even their dogs, two square-chopped terriers named Rhino and Tim, are likeable.
I don’t glamorise my life at all,” she says of the series. “I look quite appalling. I don’t change my look so I just wear what I’d wear around the house. My brand is very much about people being able to relate to being in the ’burbs.
"I don’t glamorise my life at all,” she says of the series. “I look quite appalling. I don’t change my look so I just wear what I’d wear around the house. My brand is very much about people being able to relate to being in the ’burbs."
The ’burbs, as she calls them, are a tangible part of Poh & Co. The much-derided home of middle Australia is an uncredited star of the series. Yeow admits she was very much a city girl who had lived in the cosmopolitan Adelaide area of Norwood for much of her life (“I had always assumed I’d live in my flat until I died.”) The entrance of Jono, who needed his own studio space as well, prompted the move to an unspecified outer suburb where the blocks are large, the trees are tall and the idyll of quarter-acre living is writ large.
“I was really anxious at first,” she admits, “but I got immersed into the neighbourhood and I found this amazing diversity. It’s amazing how beautiful it can be if you give it a chance. I realised this year (filming the second season of Poh & Co.) that you can’t really run away from yourself, no matter where you are. The place I feel best is home, doing everything at a snail’s pace, and I hope that comes across in the series.”
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