Karen Martini

Melbourne chef, restaurateur and food writer Karen Martini has been cooking professionally for more than 20 years. She trained at top restaurant Tansy’s in the early 1990s and has headed restaurant kitchens including the iconic Melbourne Wine Room, white-hot Icebergs Dining Room in Sydney and her current artisan pizza restaurant Mr Wolf, winning countless chefs hats and other plaudits along the way.

Karen’s kitchen career has been balanced by media commitments, cookbooks and much-loved recipe columns, including a role as food editor of Sunday Life magazine, with the Sunday Age and Sun-Herald newspapers.

Since Karen became a mother in 2006 her love of relaxed cooking with fresh, healthy, seasonal produce has intensified. ‘I’m always thinking about what I am going to eat next, how I might cook it, how I could do it differently,’ she says. ‘When I’m helping people to cook and eat and get the same pleasure from it that I do, then I’m happy. My recipes are an extension of me.’