While she’s a foodie – the Monday Morning Cooking Club cookbooks are a testament to that – Lisa Goldberg explained that her love of exploring is not always about the food itself, it’s also about what’s around the restaurants.
“I love the whole package,” she told The AJN, while discussing her YouTube show Walking Up an Appetite (WUAA), which has just recently dropped its final episode. “It gives me the greatest joy to share where I’ve eaten and what I’ve done.”
It’s partly what inspired WUAA.
What else inspired the show? Goldberg loves doing cooking classes and demonstrations. So, during lockdown she decided to jump onto Instagram Live for a cook-along. The goal was to connect with others also stuck at home. She ended up doing 75 Instagram Live sessions, creating an incredible community of cooks and people who love to talk about food.
“It got me through lockdown,” she recalled. “Not only did I get to know the people, but they got to know each other. It helped a lot of people to have something to focus on.”
Also during lockdown, Goldberg was forced to find creative ways to catch up with her daughter Jessie, who was living in Bondi, and technically outside her five-kilometre rule imposed by NSW government. The pair decided to do a pastry walk, wandering through Sydney’s eastern suburbs, snacking on pastries, and exploring the area along the way. They very quickly realised that snacking and walking was a fun thing to do. And very quickly, an idea formed.
“I wanted to walk, I wanted to eat. I wanted to show interesting things along the way and share the joys of the suburbs I was in,” she said.
In each episode of WUAA, which Goldberg said was deliberately put on YouTube rather than pitched to a network to enable the team control over what the show looked like, she walks 10km each episode and visits three establishments that specialise in the same kind of food.
For the pilot, Goldberg focused on a hot brisket sandwich in Sydney’s east. But, she said, it was important that she highlighted other cultures, other foods, and other areas of Sydney. She went to Cabramatta for pho, walked from World Square to Chatswood for dumplings and from Punchbowl to Newtown for the perfect falafel.
Filming, she said, was nerve-wracking.
“It was very exciting though, to have this idea and then filming the pilot,” Goldberg said. “It was quite surreal to be on the streets of Bondi, talking to a camera and eating, and doing all these things that we’d spent so many hours discussing. It was remarkable.”
Goldberg takes some special guests along the walk with her, whether it’s her daughter Jessie, her husband Danny, who was very proud of his part in the “martinis and snacks” episode, or food and travel enthusiast Janice Fung.
So, how did she come up with the food she focused on? It started with a list of foods and Google Maps, and a lot of it had to do with the route and area she was exploring. The area itself was very important to Goldberg who said it would have been very easy to stay in the eastern suburbs of Sydney because everything is here.
But, she wanted to take herself out of the “bubble”.
“That was one of the greatest joys of filming – who I’ve met and what I discovered along the way,” she said. “I want to inspire people to also leave wherever they are in the world and see what’s out there through food, whether that’s in cafes, restaurants, stalls or food trucks on the side of the road. Just enjoy other cultures through food.”
What was important to Goldberg as well is that the food was more than one-dimensional.
“I wanted to pick things with heritage, foods that celebrated a cultural group,” she said.
And she always tries to bring something of her Judaism into the mix, especially with the part of each episode when she demonstrates a dish in her kitchen at home. For example, after the pho episode, Goldberg made a chicken soup pho, and rather than making fish and chips, she made fish cakes with sweet potato crisps.
But there were some foods she couldn’t do simply because geographically it didn’t work. Scones, for example, are one of Goldberg’s favourites. But she couldn’t find three places within 10 kilometres of each other. Perhaps, she said, it’s because the best scones are made in people’s homes. The other one that was struck off the list was bagels. Again, the two main places that Goldberg wanted to showcase were too far apart. Just as an FYI, Goldberg shared that the best scones in Sydney are at the Tea Cosy in The Rocks, and for bagels, head to Lox in a Box and Brooklyn Boys Bagels.
Another challenge Goldberg came up against was establishments that didn’t want to take part. “They’re too busy, or it doesn’t work, or they’re just not interested,” she recalled. “They’re part of the ‘three’ already so it means going back to the drawing board.”
The feedback for WUAA has been very encouraging, Goldberg said. And the show is something she’d love to see continue.
“I’ve put some wishes out there, and I’ve put some positive thoughts that we can take this solid core audience that we’ve built and give them more,” she said.
Just a warning though, watching WUAA will induce some crazy cravings so be prepared to listen to Lisa’s recommendations and find yourself immediately racing out the door to try them all.
Walking Up an Appetite, along with plenty of BTS and extra shorts, is on YouTube.
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