Big serves: Pat Rafter loved bananas. Hingis: sushi. Kournikova: turkey sandwiches

In the late 1990s, I was contracted with my friend and fellow cook Peter Littlejohn as a chef for the restaurant serving the tennis players at the Australian Open. A new catering company had been appointed and they were keen to shake things up. Peter and I had carte blanche with the menu and we were keen to prove ourselves. We wrote up menus and ordered specialist ingredients for elaborate, made-from-scratch food that was going to power the players to glory.

A team of support staff – kitchen manager, cooks, runners and prep hands – was provided in a large production unit downstairs. We didn’t need them! The manager looked at our menu with a barely perceptible frown. Obviously he was just a jaded functionary, envious of us in our upstairs kitchen with our superior skills, big budget and even bigger ambition.

We ordered in sacks of potatoes for hand-rolled gnocchi, dozens of eggs to boil and peel for caesar salad, fresh lemongrass and lime leaves for curry pastes, whole chickens to break down for schnitzels and curries. The funny looks downstairs turned into barely disguised sniggers. If we hadn’t been so sure we knew it all, we might have paid attention.

On day one, we were in the kitchen at 5am, hand-grating Granny Smiths for bircher muesli, baking blueberry muffins by the dozen and churning out smoked salmon frittatas. At 7am, the restaurant opened. Twenty minutes later, the front-of-house staff were poking their heads into the kitchen. More food, please! We were elated. The players loved our food. But the servers weren’t joking. MORE FOOD! With three hours of breakfast to go, there was no time for self-congratulation. We would need to make plenty more of everything. And quickly!

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I’m still not sure how we got through that first service. Pounding our way to potent curry pastes, ricing trays of combi-steamed potatoes and peeling dozens of fudgy four-minute eggs, we managed to put up gnocchi in a truffled cheese sauce, vegetable curry and a “bottomless” caesar salad. Alas, they ran out an hour into the lunch service. When the day finally ended, at 11pm, we sat, heads in hands, not even able to contemplate the fact that it was all going to happen again in seven short hours.

We knew that more people use the players’ lounge than the big names: the juniors, the up-and-comers and the qualifiers all have access. What no one had told us was that we’d also be catering for the entourages that travelled with every player – the coaches, physiotherapists, parents and partners. Eight hundred covers a day. They were the eaters. The players themselves were barely seen!

And what of the players? When they did come in, Martina Hingis, I seem to remember, ate sushi and mangoes, Anna Kournikova turkey sandwiches. Pat Rafter liked bananas.

We struggled through 18-hour days, our hubris quickly evaporating in the kitchen heat. We sought help from the brigade downstairs, who grinned as if they’d been placing bets on how long it would take us. Catering at this level, for this number of people, isn’t “cooking”. Soon we were ordering boiled eggs, tubs of curry pastes and mashed potatoes from that production team. By the second week even that was beyond us, and they were sending up industrial packs of pre-made gnocchi, ready for us to drop into vats of ready-made tomato sugo.