Sunday breakfast with Merrick Watts
Jane de Graaff 30 March 2009
Merrick Watts reckons he's found the best hangover cure of all time.
"For breakfast you have a bowl of ‘bun bo hue', it's a pho, like the international dish of Vietnam. It's just a beef broth noodle soup." Hmmm, not your average steak and eggs then?
"You have to go to certain places to find it." He explains "And it might have different names, but its got pork leg in it and what I like to call mystery meats... It's quite spicy, it's quite oily, but it's very filling, that's the best thing. I always swear by that. Whenever I'm feeling a bit seedy, I have the soup for breakfast. It is awesome."
We're at Cumulus Inc. in Melbourne's CBD, and we've caught Merrick between filming upcoming episodes of Thank God You're Here, press conferences for The Merrick & Rosso show on the Comedy Channel and his daily breakfast radio gig with Tim Ross and Kate Ritchie on Sydney's Nova 969.
"I'm a huge foodie and a massive food snob." He confesses, settling into a breakfast of Turkish baked eggs. "It doesn't necessarily have to be expensive stuff, but I do like quality foods. I love fresh produce." We pause as the coffee arrives. "For me, breakfast is all about eggs. I prefer poached as a whole, but I quite like baked. I think fried eggs are really good too. People underestimate them. Eggs to me just say breakfast. Look at that (scraping at the gelatinous yellow glory of the eggs in front of him), I reckon that's great. Look at that yolk."
As a consummate performer with larrikin comic timing on his side, Merrick is full of breakfast memories and stories and it's easy to follow him on the rollercoaster adventure. "When I was a kid, we went to America when I was about 8, Disneyland... I just remember the buffet breakfast, my brother and I could not have been anymore excited. I remember having waffles and pancakes.... it was really one of the best days of my life!" And that was just the start. "When we were kids my dad used to pull my brother and I out of school every year and take us overseas to educate us on the world... So we'd go to Europe, we'd go to America, we spent time in Asia, Africa, everywhere. And we'd eat the different foods in different countries. So like in Egypt, we'd eat foul for breakfast, and it's delicious."
But it wasn't always smooth sailing. "We went to Greece when I was about 9, we went out to eat an omelette and it was covered in this green oil, and I thought there had been an accident! I'd never seen green oil on something like that. Olive oil? That was just something that you cooked with, I'd never seen it used as a condiment. But we ate it, and it was great."
Working in breakfast radio with a start time well before the sun comes up, Merrick learned the hard way that he needs to get breakfast right if it's going to keep him going. "Beans and toast are quite good, beans give you energy. It's all about making sure the energy and sugar levels are right. It's very important. I won't start without breakfast. I think it makes a personality difference. Eating a good breakfast at the right time, it sets your day up."
But even the best breakfast can go wrong. "There's nothing worse than having a good breakfast and a bad cup of coffee that goes with it. That's really disappointing. If the coffee is bad and the breakfast is good, then that makes a good thing ordinary."
These days Merrick is creating food memories closer to home, if he's not spending weekends in his veggie patch he's making pasta sauces and minestrone from scratch. He grins. "The first time we ever went overseas as a family, dad said to me maybe 8 or 10 years later ... ‘you can't remember half the things we did in America, but you can remember all the meals'." He smiles knowingly, pausing for effect.
"But if it's good food, it's always a good memory."