Everybody loves Julia
Julia Busuttil Nishimura went from a beach-going girl from Seaford to one of the country’s most-loved food writers and cookbook authors – and her star is only just rising.
It was a Sunday morning in late autumn 2015 when Italian teacher Julia Busuttil Nishimura was strolling through the Carlton Farmers Market, as she so often did on weekends.
The South Australian-born food-lover had been writing her recipe blog, Ostro, for a couple of years and, to her surprise, a woman at the market recognised her and began to heap praise.
It was a sliding doors moment.
“My now-publisher was right there nearby, and she came up to me and said, ‘I love your recipes, too’,” says Julia.
“She gave me her card to have a meeting. That’s how it started, which is just wild. I still pinch myself.”
Fast forward nearly 10 years and Julia, 36, is a bestselling cookbook author (Julia’s fourth book, Good Cooking Every Day, has just hit shelves); magazine columnist and Substack writer.
She inspires her 134,000 Instagram followers daily with photos of her beautiful, yet approachable food, plus a chic home and fashion aesthetic to boot.
She also is a mother to two boys, Haruki, nine, and Yukito, four, and together with her husband Nori, the family cook, eat, play tennis and explore their Melbourne playground.
In August, Julia was named the 2024 Trailblazer in the food communication category at the Melbourne Food and Wine Legends and Trailblazers Awards, and she has also been selected as a judge in UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s new Food Hero Australia Awards, which recognises people doing good things in food education for children. It’s a dream coming true – one Julia didn’t know existed back when she was a young girl living in Seaford.
The daughter of Maltese parents and the youngest of three children, Julia Busuttil’s childhood was punctuated by trips to the beach and weekends at the Maltese club in Beverley.
“Summers are the strongest memories of my childhood because we would spend all day at the beach and get fish and chips on the way home,” Julia says.
“It was a very chill time in the early ’90s. I grew up there, then moved closer to Glenelg when I started high school.
“We didn’t have a lot of family in the area, so we would spend every weekend at the Maltese club, eating Maltese food and playing bingo and going to all the festas. That was a really big part of my childhood.”
Food and cooking also formed an integral part of Julia’s family life in SA.
“We would go down to the beach and collect sea water to make ricotta; we had a big lemon tree and had broad beans growing; everything revolved around food,” she says.
“I was just fully obsessed from a young age. We would go to our local Foodland and I would beg my mum to let me do the grocery shopping and pick dishes to cook.”
Julia would pore over her mum’s cookbooks and by age 10, she was cooking meals for her mum’s friends, just for fun.
“I started experimenting a little bit, just trying to figure out what was in the fridge and come up with dishes.
“They weren’t always good, but I was just really intrigued about the process of having these ingredients and turning them into something that people loved.”
Little did 10-year-old Julia know just how many people would one day love her food. After completing high school in country Victoria – she had moved to Hamilton with her mum at age 16 – she figured she would become a chef.
“Back then it was like, if you really love food, what else do you do?” But, knowing deep down a commercial kitchen wasn’t her calling, she instead studied languages and politics and, ultimately, a masters of teaching at Melbourne University, working as a primary school Italian teacher for five years before ditching the blackboard for the kitchen.
A five-month sojourn to Italy was the catalyst for Julia’s food writing. She was working as an au pair on a sprawling property in southern Tuscany when she experienced a “full circle moment” with food.
“We would stop our day and cook pasta every day for lunch and all sit at the table, no matter how busy everyone was,” Julia says. “It was not just about the dishes but about the feeling. The feeling of being fed and feeding and the conviviality of being around a table and sharing a meal and not rushing things.”
She put pen to paper. “I began writing everything down. That was where I was like, ‘I have stories’.”
Upon returning to Melbourne, Julia started her blog, Ostro – the name of the southerly wind in the Mediterranean – to share her own creations.
It was 2013 and Italian food and culture now ran through Julia’s veins. Together with her Maltese heritage and her husband’s Japanese influence, her recipes offered something special; exciting yet familiar; exquisite yet comforting.
Julia and Nori married in 2014 and Julia was pregnant with their first son, Haruki, when she met her publisher at the market in 2015.
She signed a book deal the following year and by 2017 her debut cookbook Ostro was in the wild.
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“I never really had that in my pipeline but once I had the idea that it could happen, it was like: I really want to do this,” Julia says. “I was still teaching at the time, so I was juggling a lot of balls, but it was so fulfilling. I had no expectations, I just really wanted to make something that I was proud of and I loved, but also of course you hope that it does well.”
It wasn’t long until Julia signed on for her next book, A Year of Simple Family Food (2020), followed by Around the Table (2022) and, now, Good Cooking Every Day.
Her latest creation is lighter and brighter than its predecessors, with achievable dishes ranging from her version of tomatoes on toast to kusksu (Maltese spring soup) and her kids’ favourite, pasta alla norcina. She also suggests how to pull recipes together – menus, if you like – to entertain or simply feed the family.
The book’s release closely follows Julia’s crowning as a “Trailblazer” at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, where creative director Pat Nourse described her as “one of the most exciting newer voices in food and recipes in Australia, if not the world, and a style icon to boot”.
“It’s a nice compliment,” Julia says as laughs about the style icon moniker. “I love fashion and I love beauty and interiors – for me that ties into my food.
“I’m a very visual person and styling and aesthetics really do play into how I think about food and art. Nori does too, he loves design and fashion and interiors – it’s part of us.”
To her followers, Julia’s writing and photos go beyond things to cook. Images of children huddled around the table helping roll fresh pasta; trips to local markets and convivial meals together are aspirational. However, she assures mealtimes aren’t always picture perfect.
“They aren’t always beautiful and calm and slow – there’s a lot of chaos and a lot of mess!
“If Yuki could have his way, he’d have pasta every night; if Huro could have his way, he’d have rice and gyoza every night – so we can’t please everyone.”
Her tips? “There’s no rule book, we just find our own way but I think eating together is really important.
“And getting them involved as much as possible is the key. Getting them to pick the pasta shape hooks them in, and for them it’s like: ‘Okay, I have some ownership in this meal’, and that makes them want to eat it.
“For me, the biggest thing is for them to grow up with a feeling that food and eating and cooking is a pleasurable thing. If that’s all they walk away with as adults, I feel like job done.”
While they live in Melbourne, the family returns to SA every summer, splitting their time between the city and the beach.
“The kids love going back,” Julia says. “Our dream is to have a beach house there.”
Julia also returned to Adelaide earlier this year as part of Tasting Australia’s line-up, teaching people how to make pastry in the festival’s first-ever Make series. For her, it was about showing how delicious food needn’t be tricky, and that’s something Tasting Australia director, Karena Armstrong, describes as a “marvellous, marvellous skill”.
As Julia explains: “I’m a proud home cook. I never want anything to be too complicated. Some dishes might take a bit more time or some might be more challenging, but even home cooks might want to give themselves a challenge.”
This article first appeared in the November 2024 issue of SALIFE magazine.