Outback caterer to the stars
Life as an outback caterer, cooking for film crews on location in the far reaches of South Australia, means Rachel Marcus is always jumping in her big blue bus with its commercial kitchen and taking sustenance to the stars.
When Rachel Marcus took over the outback catering business started by her father in the 1980s, she had more to master than just the cooking. The business, Steve Marcus Film Catering, mainly cooks for film crews shooting in regional South Australia and it is run out of an enormous blue bus, where the seats have been ripped out to make way for a commercial kitchen.
The blue beast on wheels is 13.5 metres long, weighs 16 tonnes and can carry 1500 litres of water. It also has huge amounts of storage for dry food, along with three commercial ovens, a commercial dishwasher and room for six people to cook and prepare food.
Rachel standing in its impressive commercial kitchen.
“When Dad and I talked about me taking over the business I said to him, ‘I can’t drive that bus’,” Rachel says. “He said, ‘the hardest thing is just putting the clutch down, so have a go’. I did it okay, so he signed me up for truck driving school to get my licence. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I still hate hill starts.
“Every morning when I go to work in this industry, just parking that bus wherever they’ve told me to go is such an achievement. You can really kind of relax once you’ve killed the engine – that’s one really big part of my job done.”
Rachel took over the restaurant on wheels in 2019, renaming it Marcus Film Catering and updating the bus to make it more manageable, including having the engine rebuilt and installing automatic transmission.
Five years down the track, the business is doing well and Rachel is loving the lifestyle of mobile catering, although she admits the challenges are unique and frequent.
“I remember one time, it was about four o’clock in the morning, and I was up at Balhannah, and I had the bus parked on a friend’s property overnight before I started a shoot in Hahndorf,” she says. “As the bus was warming up the park break let go, and the bus rolled down a gully and landed in a gum tree.
“I called my dad in a panic and he said, ‘you’re going to think I’m crazy, but can you get to the gas taps, can you cook breakfast?’ And I said, ‘yes I can’.
“He said, ‘well you actually have to do that, and I will sort out a tractor and a local farmer to pull you out, but you still have to do your job. You still have to cook and serve’. And so I did. I fed 40 people while the bus was leaning towards the driver’s side so the ovens would stay shut, if it was leaning the other way, I would have had to tie the oven doors shut so I could cook.
“The issue was that I couldn’t move the bus without making the damage a lot worse and didn’t have enough power and traction to get out of the tree branch that had become embedded in the body of the bus. The tree missed my newly rebuilt engine by about 30 centimetres.”
The catering business has fed thousands of casts and crews over the past four decades since Steve launched it from the family’s home base in Broken Hill, serving movie stars such as Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce. In his early days, Steve famously went on a morning stroll with The Rolling Stones’ lead singer Mick Jagger, who was on location filming a music video outside of Broken Hill.
These kinds of brushes with fame are all part of life as an outback film caterer, something Rachel and her brother Alex experienced as kids, playing on film sets while their parents, Steve and Margot, were working.
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The bus on a country road somewhere, as Rachel takes the driver’s seat.
At age three, Rachel was already showing a talent for hospitality, wandering around her parents’ Broken Hill restaurant, Steve and Margot’s, and straightening the table settings. This was back in the days when the only other food offerings in the mining town were Chinese takeaway or a counter meal at the pub.
“Dad would go out and cater for a commercial or a film and come back, take his film catering, grubby clothes off, and Mum would hand him his chef whites, and he’d do service in the restaurant that night. He’d then go to bed for a few hours and then go back out and do the film work again the next day,” Rachel says.
Rachel and Alex would often lend a hand during the school holidays, getting up in the dark to join their dad on the bus and drive out to some remote location to deliver breakfast and lunch. It was on-the-job training and Rachel loved being by her dad’s side on the big blue bus – for the record there have been four previous buses along the way – Rachel’s is bus number five.
“We’d be making 80 egg and bacon rolls and feeding a Japanese film crew in 47-degree heat and they’d all be perishing,” she says. “I also remember spending a lot of time at the mechanics and metal fabricators when Dad would get the bus fixed. I still really like the smell of those places.”
But life changed dramatically when Rachel was six years old. Her parents split and her mother Margot married a director, Rod Hardy, who worked on shows such as Neighbours, Prisoner and The Flying Doctors, and the family moved to the United States.
“We ended up moving to the States because Rod was chasing his big break over there,” Rachel says. “He worked on shows such as Jag, Battlestar Galactica and The X Files.
“I pretty much did all my primary school in LA. We moved around a lot while we were there and travelled with my step-dad’s work. So, I was at school in Beverly Hills and at one point we were living in a house on Rodeo Drive.
“A lot of the school families are in the film and television business as well, so it all feels normal over there. But it felt a long way from Broken Hill.”
Rachel and her brother returned to Broken Hill when she was 13 years old, and by then her father and his wife Robbie had bought the local Imperial Hotel, which they transformed into high-end accommodation.
Guests often included visiting film crews and Rachel would run into famous faces around the corridors.
“It’s one of those funny things that even though I had lived in the States with a director step-dad, it was actually through Dad and living in Broken Hill that I was exposed to more world fame and sort of bigger opportunities,” she says.
Some of those famous faces included Strictly Ballroom director Baz Luhrmann and his costume designer wife Catherine Martin, who were in Broken Hill to scout filming locations.
“They had dinner with us and they were genuinely interested in our lives and what it was like in Broken Hill,” Rachel says. “I was about 17 and I was talking to them about projects that I was doing in drama at the time, because I thought maybe I’ll do something artistic, like become a production designer or do costumes.
“I showed Catherine my sketches and they were telling me they had some pull at NIDA, and if I ever wanted to go down that path to let them know. I was just like, ‘what!’.”
Rachel, who usually works with one to four assistants, and is now based in Clare, ended up working as an assistant in the art department of the television series McLeod’s Daughters, shot near Gawler, before moving into a variety of hospitality roles including at The Lion Hotel, and as a senior member of Adelaide Festival Centre’s food and beverage department.
She had no plans to take over her father’s catering business until the idea was raised in 2019 while she was on set helping him on the mammoth movie Mortal Kombat, filmed in Adelaide and Coober Pedy.
“We fed 860 people in the first two days,” Rachel says. “Dad was saying it was probably the hardest job he’d ever done, certainly the biggest, and it’s hard on you physically, on your feet for up to 16 hours a day.
“So, he sat me down and said, ‘I want to retire, and have wanted to for some time’, but he felt this incredible loyalty to the South Australian film industry for how much it had provided for him. It meant he didn’t want to retire and because there wasn’t another local caterer to take over, or wasn’t anyone coming up through the ranks, it left a gap open for an interstate contractor to come in.
“That’s how he put it to me and he said, ‘I wouldn’t talk to you like this if I didn’t think you could do it. You’re basically already doing it’.”
Rachel says the skills needed to be a successful outback caterer include being organised, planning ahead, having great relationships with your suppliers and being able to pivot at short notice.
The bus can store enough food for a week for a crew of 70 to 100 and Rachel’s meat orders will vary from 30 kilograms per week to more than a tonne, depending on the job.
“I work on about 250 grams of protein per person for the main meal,” she says. “I did figure out that on a shoot we did for a Netflix series called Territory, we used about 15,000 eggs.
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“As much as I love being away on location, sometimes I am placing orders for produce before the current order has even arrived. It can be a huge juggling act along with the constant fear of running out of food.
“But basically, my job is to keep people fed and fuelled, so I like to provide a creative, exciting, gourmet experience, but it’s actually more important just to get someone fed, which I always do. If you are hungry and you turn up to my bus, I’ll give you something to eat. That’s what Dad taught me.”
Rachel’s father Steve, who started the catering business, is a favourite with casts and crews including the legendary Jackie Chan.
One person who did exactly that was actor Cate Blanchett, stepping onto Rachel’s bus when she was in South Australia filming The New Boy.
“She said she was starving but, of course, she only eats what she referred to as ‘actress food’, something like tuna or smoked salmon and salad,” Rachel says. “She was sort of standing there, chatting to me, and she said, ‘You know what my first job was when I was in acting school? I worked on a catering truck’.
“I said, ‘well, you have full access’. So, I’d get to work and she’d be in my cool room trying to find a piece of fruit or something, in full costume, and she was playing a nun, so that was pretty funny, but she was gorgeous as well.
“They were living in Burra while we were filming and her daughter was at school there and they had their son’s 21st in Clare. It’s when it’s not Hollywood, glitzy, glammy, and you are just kind of in a country pub with someone famous that you think, ‘God, this is alright’.”
Some of the other major films and shows Rachel has worked on include The Stranger with Joel Edgerton, The Tourist with Jamie Dornan and Jimpa with Olivia Coleman.
While Rachel was working as her father’s assistant she also catered for other large events, including the Great Australian Outback Cattle Drive, and music festivals featuring big names such as Lionel Richie, Rob Thomas, Ronan Keating, Bryan Adams and many more.
One of her career highlights was when actor Simon Baker came onto her bus after lunch one day to say that she’d cooked the best schnitzel he’d ever had.
“In fact, he had said the same thing to somebody the previous year, and the person who made that schnitzel was Stanley Tucci,” she says.
Some of the famous faces Rachel has met through the years including Baz Luhrmann and David Hasselhoff
For most jobs, Rachel provides breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea and the 39-year-old will decide on a menu according to how many people she is feeding, the weather and the filming schedule.
“An average film crew is between 40 and 70 people any day, and we do breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea every day,” she says. “So, I look at those numbers, I look at what time crew call is, we could be serving breakfast anywhere from 5am or, if we’re doing a night shoot, the first meal isn’t until 5pm.
“Then I think about what the crew would like in those conditions. You know, my menus when we’re out bush are quite different to the menus I provide when we’re in the city. When we’re out in the bush, after the first few days, I tend to go back to more of a homestyle cooking, a bit more comfort food. I’ll happily just do a pasta day, which will be a couple of pasta sauces, a few different shapes of pasta, heaps of salads and tiramisu. Or I can get away with doing a tuna mornay as a dish, or a shepherd’s pie when we’re in the bush, because people are just kind of aching for heart-warming comfort food.
“Then, when it’s a stinking hot day, if it’s 42 degrees in the Flinders Ranges, you do cold meat and salad, and afternoon teas are things such as sushi, cold rolls and sandwiches. You also have to make sure there are plenty of veggie and gluten-free options.”
One of Rachel’s tricks of the trade for feeding hundreds of people in a hurry is to plan and prep ahead as much as possible.
“Using a film reference, we say the ‘job’s in the can’,” she says. “We can do things such as seal off steaks or cook off chicken or get a curry going while the crew is eating breakfast, and then you learn how to treat those items so that they don’t get destroyed throughout the day.
“So, you can cook things and chill them and give them a reheat, or you can put them in a 100-degree oven all day, and they’ll actually just get better as time goes on.
“And that’s the art of how we can do these numbers with the gear that we’ve got on location.
“It’s getting ahead, thinking about jobs that you can prep as early as possible and then freeing yourself up to be able to throw greens over a grill so that they’re absolutely perfect when the crew do break for lunch. I quite like that the cast and crew can smell sesame oil and things still cooking when they turn up to unit base. You don’t want it all just coming out in big trays and sitting there and going khaki. Things that should be served hot are served hot, things that should be cold are served cold.”
Some of the remote locations Rachel has driven to in her big blue bus include Coober Pedy, William Creek, Parachilna, the Flinders Ranges, Quorn and Hawker. She says she loves the reds and oranges of the desert and the hospitality of country people.
“I think it was my time in Broken Hill that really made me love the outback in particular, and the people in those communities,” she says. “I really get a kick out of helping and being involved in film, and another great thing about this job is being able to reconnect with all these people who Dad had formed relationships with.
“So, no matter where I break down or if I need a new jockey wheel for the cool room, I can ring Dad and say, ‘I’m in this weird town in the middle of nowhere. Who do you know?’ I had someone out fixing my air conditioner on Good Friday in Hawker, and I’m thinking, thank God it happened here because I’d never get anyone out on Good Friday in Adelaide.”
So, when she has just finished feeding 200-plus people on a film crew, does she have an overwhelming sense of satisfaction?
“I do stand back and think I love what I do, but I also think, thank God that’s over.”
This article first appeared in the April 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.