The XX factor

Do women do restaurants differently? DANI VALENT sits down with some of Australia's most renowned and long-standing female restaurateurs to talk nature, nurture and imposter syndrome.

- DANI VALENT

Alla Wolf-Tasker is sitting in the dining room at Lake House, the Daylesford destination she founded with her late husband Allan, 40 years ago. That she’s occupying a table is unusual. She can’t remember the last time she ate in her own restaurant. But our topic is legacy, and the way women build it, and Wolf-Tasker decides the best way to chew it over is literally, during a lunch with daughter Larissa, just three years old when her parents founded the business and now Lake House’s brand manager.

Our table of three discusses all kinds of things: unseasonal pine mushrooms springing up after summer rains, the peacock that visited Wolf-Tasker after her beloved Allan passed away in 2022, the beauty of broccolini shoots and – as so often happens when speaking with successful women – imposter syndrome. “Early on, I went through a terrible period where if the mise en place [kitchen preparation] wasn’t right, I didn’t know how to tell the chefs,” she says. “So I would get up at three o’clock in the morning and replace it all.”