COOKING IS IN Clarissa Pabst’s blood. Both her parents were chefs, as were her grandparents on her mother’s side, but it wasn’t until she was in her early 20s that she tapped into her inherited passion for food. That’s when she went to William Angliss Institute in Melbourne to study commercial cookery – and now she’s the owner of Essen restaurant in Stanthorpe, Queensland, the town where she grew up. “We opened Essen in September 2019,” Clarissa says. “It was a ‘right place, right time’ scenario: I hadn’t considered opening a restaurant as it always seemed out of reach, but on moving back to Stanthorpe, the opportunity presented itself and was too good to pass up.”
Serving modern Australian food that subtly acknowledges the Pabst family’s Austrian heritage, Essen has a ‘grow local, eat local’ ethos that requires Clarissa and her family to source ingredients from local producers, in addition to their own homegrown herbs, vegetables and fruit. “When you grow up in a town where the focal point is farming, agriculture, tourism and wine, it’s difficult to see it any other way. We’ve got so much›of the good stuff on our doorstep, why wouldn’t we use it?” Clarissa explains. “The fruit and vegies are often picked the day we use them, and the freshness is the difference. It’s the reason why people ask us, ‘Why does this taste so good? What have you done to it?’. Often the answer is that fresh food speaks for itself, and we didn’t have to do much to it! That’s the beauty of it.”
While Essen is now known for its exceptional cuisine, success hasn’t come without challenge. “A few months after opening, the pandemic hit,
