Kenyak’s Chris Greentree on Chocolate, Memory and the Uncertain Business of Being Australian.
Memory is a poor archivist. It loses dates, misplaces details and has an unfortunate tendency to improve the evidence. Yet it can remember a taste with extraordinary precision: The particular sweetness of something eaten as a child, the smell of a room, the strange pleasure of finding the thing you thought had disappeared.
Chocolate is rather good at exploiting this weakness.
For Chris Greentree, the founder of Kenyak, nostalgia is not about faithfully reproducing the past. That would be both impossible and, probably, a little dull. It is about creating something recognisable enough to open a door, then leaving it ajar. What lies on the other side belongs partly to the maker and partly to whoever takes the first bite.
That idea becomes more complicated when the subject is Australia. What makes something Australian? A native ingredient, certainly, but also a technique borrowed from somewhere else, a migrant influence, a particular landscape, a family habit, a meal remembered decades later. Australian food has spent a long time trying to answer the question, occasionally with the solemnity of a constitutional convention and occasionally with a jar of lemon myrtle.
Kenyak takes a less anxious view of the matter. Its ingredients carry their own histories, from Tasmanian honey to produce and spirits sourced through relationships with the people who make them. The provenance matters, but not simply because provenance is fashionable. There is a more human proposition at work: that ingredients can accumulate character through landscape, labour, care and time.
There is an appealing contradiction here.
Chocolate is an unforgiving medium. Temperature matters. Technique matters. Half a degree can apparently turn an otherwise promising day into an argument with yourself. Yet within that precision Greentree leaves room for the irregular, the hand-made and the slightly accidental. The finished chocolates are not trying to impersonate machines, and perhaps that is part of their appeal.
His route into chocolate was hardly inevitable, either.
Before fine dining, pastry and the kitchens that would eventually shape Kenyak, there was classical percussion. That detail seems less incidental than it first appears. Both food and music depend upon rhythm, repetition, timing and an understanding that technical control is only useful if it eventually allows something more expressive to happen.
Kenyak began, in part, from a living room during lockdown and developed through the less glamorous but considerably more useful education of going elsewhere to learn how to make a business work. Greentree's experience at Restaurant Orana, Lune Croissanterie and Pigeon Whole Bakers has left him with a particular interest in the things that make an experience stay with us: Not spectacle for its own sake, but craft, repetition, generosity and the relationships that accumulate around them.
Kenyak describes itself as making nostalgic Australian chocolates, but that description only really gets us to the front door.
The more interesting question is what happens once we step inside.
Because perhaps the best kind of nostalgia does not tell us what to remember. It gives us just enough to remember something ourselves.
You describe Kenyak as making chocolates that take people back to their best memories. Memory is notoriously unreliable, editing, embellishing and occasionally inventing. How do you turn something as intangible as a childhood recollection into flavour without making it feel nostalgic for nostalgia's sake?
Chris Greentree: The fact that memory is so unreliable is perhaps what interested me most about using it as a foundation that we build products from. It’s a vehicle, toll free - that effortlessly grabs anyone coming into contact with our products by the hand and takes them to a place that they understand the feeling of.
From there we really lean into our own embellishments to encourage people to join their own dots. That’s nostalgia to me. Proper nostalgia - not somebody saying, “Oh, you remember this moment when you were six and you did xyz…” but this context that we shape in order to give people their own space to remember something and feel very personally connected to what we’ve made as a result.
You’ve chosen to tell Australian stories through ingredients such as Tarkine honey, Balmoral honey, native produce and other things encountered on your travels. What makes an ingredient feel sufficiently Australian to belong in the Kenyak universe - and is there a danger of trying too hard to make something Australian?
Chris Greentree: Australianism is an impossibly undefinable term, isn’t it? I’ve written and daydreamed so much about it in an attempt to understand what it means in Kenyak’s world.
When I was nineteen, I had the privilege of working for Jock Zonfrillo at Restaurant Orana. The premise of the restaurant was to explore Australian ingredients, something that has moved in and out of focus in Australian dining over the last thirty years as waves of interest and conversation have come and gone.
While I won’t speak for JZ, what mattered to me at the time was very simple. We had access to these truly epic ingredients because Jock had gone out, met people on Country and built the relationships to source them. Gubinge from the Kimberleys, unfiltered native honey, fresh green ants, not to mention incredible things foraged from the city around us, like paperbark and boobialla berries.
We cooked with them and it was great. But we also cooked with Asian ingredients, heaps of rice wine vinegar, and Italian and French technique. That’s where my head started to explode a little bit.
Australian isn’t just native ingredients, or cooking on a fire, or this or that. It’s you and me and every person who lives in this country and their story.
So, is there a danger of trying too hard to make something Australian? Yes. But I guess the bigger danger is trying too hard to question whether something is Australian. If it feels right, it probably is.
We’re making a genmaicha chocolate later this year. I spent months wondering if it was right and arguing against myself. But it feels right, so we’re doing it.
The Tarkine honey is particularly fascinating because the flavour carries something of the landscape in which the bees forage. How important is provenance to you beyond the rather fashionable idea of knowing where something comes from? Can a sense of place genuinely be tasted?
Chris Greentree: There’s two paths here, right? On one side we have the commercial chocolate path, where we all seem to really stick to the branding that “this chocolate was grown here and it’s super important to say that” - and on the other side a bit of a disinterest or perhaps disenfranchisement to it all.
Neither of those paths really serve me, because the idea that a chocolate tastes good simply because it comes from a particular region is lazy; and the notion that honey is honey, well - bonkers.
Provenance to me is Australianism. The intersection of people, ingredients and story - that’s what you can taste. That’s why we choose to work with honey from the Charles Family in northwest Tasmania and from Jack at Bee One Third in Northern NSW.
I think you can genuinely taste place in something, regardless of if you know the origin story or not. That patina signals to us that it’s something special, that it’s got soul. And that we want to use it at Kenyak.
We work with some simply amazing ingredients as a result, not just the honeys - but whisky from Belgrove Distillery, gin from Taylor and Smith, cookies from Pigeon Whole Bakers, vanilla from a family farm in Queensland.
While I don’t love taglines, when you eat one of our products I think you really can taste the difference.
Your chocolates often begin with something wonderfully familiar - honeycomb, strawberry, hazelnut, coconut, a chocolate box - and then take an unexpected turn. What makes you decide how far to push a familiar memory before it stops being comforting and becomes something altogether new?
Chris Greentree: That is always the challenge.
When you see yourself, or someone you love(ed), in a photo - you feel this real pull to how you felt when it was taken. It’s that snapshot that comforts you, not how you feel about them now. But you change and morph and, as you put it to me earlier, embellish the idea.
I’m realising just now that’s probably why all of our products have this two-step idea to them. I guess I’m a big thinker, and I want to make products that people can connect with straight up, no questions asked. Then leave a little thread there for them to pull at if they are curious enough to follow it.
Our honeycomb certainly does that. On face value we just do a milk and a dark choc version. But if you deep dive, you’ll see it’s two entirely different honeys - and chocolate profiles - that tell a story about the importance not just of place, but people that care for bees.
There’s a striking contrast between the precision of pastry and the emotional looseness of memory in what you make. How much of Kenyak is about control - and how much is about leaving room for something slightly imperfect, personal or unexpected to survive the process?
Chris Greentree: Chocolate is science. All of our recipes, and work really, is very specific. I take it for granted now that I’ve got more experience but it is really very demanding. Half a degree in room temperature is enough to really ruin your day as a chocolatier.
So that’s the trade-off. If I’m working with something that requires that much attention and formula and adherence and respect, then the rest is a float out on a daydream to have some fun.
The finishes on the products we put inside our chocolate boxes is a real highlight of this, and it wasn’t even a choice. When I started chocolate work, I didn’t have an extractor. So any design that went onto those chocolates had to be achieved by dropping naturally coloured cocoa butter into a mould and moving it around - either with my finger, a paintbrush (let’s never do that again) or the air from a small airbrush.
Kenyak still doesn’t own an extractor, so this technique has stuck; I’m really in love with it. It’s natural, similar but not perfectly the same across every chocolate, and it has a little soul to it. In fact, our signature design has become a thin line of white chocolate blown across a milk or dark chocolate shell.
You came to chocolate through fine dining, pastry and hospitality, then built Kenyak from a living room during lockdown before taking the long way around through places such as Lune and Pigeon Whole. What did those kitchens teach you about making something that people remember, rather than merely something that tastes good?
Chris Greentree: I really just fell into it all. I was going to be a classical percussionist when I finished high school. Music and food aren’t too far apart. I think what sits in the middle is the story and the person and how we feel about it.
You’re pulled to something because you connect to it and place a value in that feeling. Whether that’s conscious decision making or not isn’t relevant, the repetition is.
I want longevity in Kenyak. My parents own and operate a second-generation family business, it’s almost 70 years old. They didn’t get that from just selling a product, they did it from offering service and a relationship that people are repeatedly pulled to; and valuing that as business owners above anything else.
So, my career has just built on that. Orana showed a business’ ability to craft exquisitely humble and repeatable experiences, Lune in their cadence of product ingenuity, and Pigeon Whole Bakers in the honour that comes from being a part of someone’s life on the regular across a range of interactions.
And perhaps the most difficult question: if Kenyak were itself a childhood memory, what would we see, smell, hear and taste when we closed our eyes?
Chris Greentree: If I close my eyes right now, it’s sneaking inside Grandma and Pop’s house on their farm with my brother after we’ve just had a very warm and very expired can of lemonade from the fridge in Pop’s shed.
It’s like two pm, hot out; yet so cool and dark inside the house. Nap time for Grandma and Pop. We’re coming in through the laundry so all you can smell is this very particular fabric softener and leather polish.
But that doesn’t really matter.
There’s a freezer in here and I’m going for the frozen slices of Woolies mud cake Grandma keeps for us to have after we’ve walked from the bus stop. Freezer burn falling off the Glad Wrap - life is good.
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Words and questions by AW.
Answers courtesy of Chris Greentree.
Photo courtesy of Kenyak.
