Pictures: Amber-Jayne Bain.
It happened in the chocolate room. Not the place you’d expect to hit rock bottom, but for Wellington pastry chef Maxine Scheckter, then just 22 and already working at a world-famous restaurant, it was where she finally fell apart.
The past few years had been madness – training at the Ferrandi culinary school in Paris, and jobs at world-class restaurants in France and England. She was a superstar in the making, but inside she was suffering.
Since her early teens, Maxine had experienced chronic migraines and “a constant feeling of dread, a knot in my stomach”. She would pick at her skin, bite her nails and pull them off. At the time, neither she nor her parents recognised it was anxiety.
“I spent so long trying to deny it,” says Maxine, 29. “Now I know that doesn’t work.”
Things got dramatically worse when she got a job at a top London restaurant, which she chooses not to name. It was a “toxic workplace”, where Maxine and her colleagues endured abuse and sexual harassment by a “horrendous” head chef.
“I was definitely depressed before then, but it exacerbated my mental health struggles.”
She left the job, realising it wasn’t worth the misery. Then came an unbelievable offer – a position at celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal’s three-Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant.
The atmosphere in this kitchen was completely different. “It was my dream job and everything I’d ever wanted, but I was still depressed,” she tells. “One day, I had a breakdown, where I started crying at work.”
She confided in fellow chef Philipp Collisi, who worked in the restaurant’s chocolate room, a temperature-controlled area barely bigger than a closet. There, surrounded by exquisite desserts, Maxine sat in the corner and cried.Eventually, she got up to return to work.
“We can just pretend this isn’t happening,” she told Philipp. His response changed her life. “He said, ‘No. You have to deal with this.’ He insisted on telling the pastry chef and making me do something about it. If he hadn’t, I don’t think I would be alive. I think the depression would have won.”
Maxine’s employers at the Fat Duck were “amazing”, she says. “They found a counsellor for me. My boss let me work part-time, which is unheard of in a restaurant like that. They checked in on me all the time.”
She also started on anti-depressants, which she still takes. She was finally getting help, but it wasn’t enough to lift her depression. So she made the decision to return to New Zealand.
“As lovely as they were at work, it still wasn’t sustainable for me,” she recalls. “I was so unsure of myself and how I was going to continue day to day. I ended up back here, equally as lost.”
Amazingly, out of that darkness came Sugar Flour. Maxine opened the business originally as a pâtisserie in the Wellington suburb of Kilbirnie. The early days were tough. Her biggest regret is that she wasn’t able to mentor her workers the way others had done for her.
“I could have done a lot more to lift them up, but I was so stuck with my own mental health issues,” she admits.
Meanwhile, Maxine started offering one-off pastry classes and realised this was a way she could stay in the industry she loved without the non-stop stress of a professional kitchen. She closed the café and now runs Sugar Flour as a full-time pastry school, based in Newlands, with regular sold-out classes. Finally, she gets to encourage others who love baking.
“I have a lot of repeat customers and I love seeing them from where they start to where they are now,” she enthuses. “I see people build their confidence and try things again at home.”
Last month, she celebrated a career milestone with her first book, Pâtisserie Made Simple, where she breaks down daunting professional pastry techniques and makes them achievable for anyone, just like in her classes.
Anxiety and depression are still part of Maxine’s life, but now she notices the warning signs.
“I’ve learnt to embrace it,” she says. “Not in terms of, ‘I’m just going to let myself fall into this black hole.’ More like, ‘I’m starting to feel depressed and I don’t know why, but I won’t try to fight it or ignore it.’ I give myself a few treats, relax more, don’t take things so harshly and wait for it to blow over.”
Maxine’s husband of three years, Ben McFetridge, is her biggest support. She smiles, “We’ll have a movie night, and he’ll make me a Coke float and get my favourite lollies.”
If you’re struggling with your mental health, text or call 1737 at any time to speak to a trained counsellor for free. For the Suicide Crisis Helpline, visit 0508 TAUTOKO. In an emergency, dial 111.
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