How Jock Zonfrillo overcame drug addiction to heroin and turned his life around

There was a moment when MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo wanted to stop using heroin and turn his life around. But it wasn’t easy. This is how he did it.

Jock Zonfrillo’s life was characterised by extreme highs and lows.

From stealing cars at 11, to drugs and perpetually self-destructive behaviours, people marvelled he survived his early years.

But to the celebrity chef, TV judge, husband and father-of-four, it was just his life.

“I didn’t know any different, that for me was a normal upbringing,” he said ahead of his memoir launch in 2021.

“But then you speak to people like my wife after they’ve read it and they go ‘that’s not a normal upbringing for a kid’. The really confronting part came after I finished it and a couple of people read it and it dawned on me that my past was not normal at all.”

Zonfrillo grew up in a loving home with his Scottish hairdresser mum, Italian barber dad and older sister Carla. Barry – as he was known then, his nickname Jock coming from his largely European colleagues in the Turnberry Hotel kitchen where he started his apprenticeship at 15 in the ’90s – wanted to be just like his Nonno Zonfrillo, surrounded by children and grandchildren.

“It wasn’t as if I grew up and didn’t have any shoes or something,” Zonfrillo said, trying to explain how he got into drugs.

“(My parents) came from a generation of parents who had no f**king idea of what their kids were up to, or the effects of drugs or what those effects looked like or what they did to people.

Jock Zonfrillo before he was a MasterChef Australia judge.

“Me leaving home so young to go to work obviously had an impact as well. All of a sudden you are a not a child at home. You are a child in an adults’ world and – forget all about the harshness of that work environment, which was f**ked – but you are among fully fledged adults who are completely unhinged for the best part. You are looking up to them as your mentors and teachers, so inevitably you end up mimicking their behaviour. And trying to become them, in a way”.

It was hard to reconcile that version of Zonfrillo with the exuberant judge on MasterChef who helped breathe new life into the much-loved franchise in 2020 with colleagues – and now firm friends – Melissa Leong and Andy Allen.

Worry beads in hand, he inspired conversations about mental health and was frank about his own struggles with anxiety and addiction.

In his memoir – Zonfrillo wrote how he did his last shot of heroin on New Year’s Eve 1999, in the toilets at Heathrow Airport. He was 23 and he’d been hiding his crippling addiction from his loved ones for years.

Adelaide Chef Jock Zonfrillo at his Rundle Street restaurant 'Blackwood'. Picture: AAP

Zonfrillo could not keep living the way he was, shooting up in toilets, feeling physically ill and constantly guilty.

“I remember thinking: ‘This is the last-ever time. This is the last shot.’ I would never take drugs again. When the plane landed in Sydney I’d be free of all of that,” Zonfrillo wrote.

And he was free – with a fresh start in a new millennium in Australia as head chef of Restaurant Forty One – leaving that sordid past behind and relieved at never having to face his guilty secret again. Or so he thought.

Fast forward to 2014, when an article broke the story Zonfrillo was once a heroin addict. Reliving that day was the most harrowing part of writing his memoirs.

“I think it was one of the most horrible days of my life, without question, Lisa,” Zonfrillo told me as we chatted ahead of his book’s launch.

“I had to sit the kids down and tell them. And tell my mum and dad. And my ex-wife. Just the feeling of that was absolutely horrid. There’s no getting around that – it was what it was.

“But once I got over how vulnerable I was, all of a sudden there was a sense of relief that that secret that was mine for so long was now revealed.”

Former apprentice chef Martin Krammer. Picture: Supplied

In the 370-page memoir, Zonfrillo also shared his regrets, including about the prank on Forty One apprentice Martin Krammer in 2002 that went horribly wrong. The kitchen was full of running jokes, including on head chef Zonfrillo himself.

The Advertiser reported Krammer took legal action against Zonfrillo for setting his pants on fire, resulting in $70,000 damages being awarded by a judge. Zonfrillo failed to pay the damages, prompting Krammer to obtain a bankruptcy order against him in the Federal Magistrates Court.

The incident resurfaced just as he was filming Junior MasterChef. The story gathered momentum on social media and trolls called for him to be sacked.

“The idea that a person might grow into a different disposition and world view 20 years after they’ve achieved renown as a reckless, f**king idiot seemed to be beyond the scope of these people’s understanding,” Zonfrillo said. “As I wrote in the book, I own every single bad decision I’ve made. And I’ve made a lot of them.”

There was initial controversy over the book with a feature in Good Weekend magazine suggesting there were contradictions between Zonfrillo’s recollections of his time spent with celebrated British chef Marco Pierre White in London in the 1990s and those of White.

Marco Pierre White also spent time with Jock Zonfrillo. Picture: Supplied

Zonfrillo also had extraordinary successes, including winning Young Scottish Chef of the Year at 16. But it was establishing Orana – his Adelaide restaurant, which showcased and put Indigenous ingredients on the map – and the subsequent establishment of the Orana Foundation were at the pinnacle of his career achievements.

It was heartbreaking for him to close Orana in 2020. And it took a huge toll on him mentally.

The Advertiser reported that creditors, owed more than $1m, accepted a $101,000 cash settlement offer in the wake of the closure of Orana and Zonfrillo’s other Adelaide restaurant, Bistro Blackwood.

Restaurant Orana at 285 Rundle Street in Adelaide. Picture: Dean Martin

The Orana closure was just part of what Zonfrillo calls his “timeline of shit” in 2020, with allegations also in the media about Orana Foundation. His wife Loz was pregnant with Isla, which was already stressful after the difficult time she had carrying Alfie, who was born several weeks premature in February 2018. They’d just moved their whole life to Melbourne, a new city where neither of them had any roots, in a pandemic.

He said he wouldn’t have survived without his strong partnership with third wife Lauren – who he married in 2017 in a beach ceremony on Mnemba Island in Tanzania, and his children including his two daughters from two previous marriages – Ava and Sophia.

But Zonfrillo always said his highs more than outweighed the lows.

“It’s fair to say I’ve had a lot of joy in my life and I’m thankful to have had the life I’ve had,” he shares. “I think of all the travel I’ve done over the years, the places I’ve been – I’ve been very, very lucky.”

If you are experiencing mental health issues contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or BeyondBlue 1300 224 636. If it is an emergency please call 000.