The Gospel, according to Jock Zonfrillo

HE’S egotistical, charismatic and filled with preacher-like zeal. Meet the Scottish chef redefining Australian cuisine.

PERHAPS the tattoo on Jock Zonfrillo’s heavily inked arm should serve as a warning.

Its Latin script declares: “Nemo me impune lacessit.’’ It’s the motto on Scotland’s coat of arms and translates into Scots as ‘‘Wha daur meddle with me?”, or into more prosaic English as “No one crosses me unharmed’’. You get the idea.

It adds to the sense there is something slightly intimidating about Zonfrillo. He is a mixture of ego and charisma, salesman and preacher. He swears like he has cornered the market on profanity. Then again, there is always something unsettling about those with a cause to sell. They take risks most of the rest of us wouldn’t contemplate.

For Zonfrillo, this meant knocking back a $300,000 a year job with Penfolds’ Magill Estate Restaurant last year in favour of walking the tightrope – financially, emotionally and reputationally – by starting his own high-end restaurant in the city.

Zonfrillo is by nature a risk-taker. He is not constrained by any boundaries in pursuing his obsession with food. He admits it’s a quest that has cost him two marriages, led him to a now-beaten heroin addiction and left him with few close friends.

In opening his new double-barrelled restaurant in Rundle St – downstairs is Street, edgy and lively, upstairs is Orana, refined and high-end – Zonfrillo is turning a long-nurtured dream into a present-day reality. But he is also taking his biggest gamble yet by trying to create something he says has never existed: an identifiably Australian style of cuisine.

That is, Australian food made with native Australian ingredients.

“It’s myself and the ANZ,’’ he says when asked how he is funding the venture.

“I have poured every single penny I have ever had in my life into this and it’s a huge risk and it’s very hard day-to-day.

“It’s difficult to make the payments and make ends meet.”

Zonfrillo is writing his own definition of Australian food. He has spent months with Aboriginal communities, researching the food and aiming to understand the culture of what he calls the “most misunderstood race of people I have ever come across’’.

He made seven trips to one community in the Kimberley region alone before they would even speak to him.

As a result, his menu includes ingredients such as saltbush, dorrigo pepper, chocolate lily, sow thistle, cinnamon myrtle, strawberry gum and even green ants.

Not that Orana is some sort of bush tucker throwback. He says his idea of Australian food does not stop with the arrival of captain Arthur Phillip in 1788. As he says “settlement happened’’.

“If we are going to represent something about Australia and Australian food today, then it has to include that. It happened. There is no changing that.’’

Zonfrillo, it seems, is also searching for the next new taste. There is a restlessness about him. The second time I meet him he has lost about 8kg after becoming ill in Ethiopia filming his Nomad Chef documentary for the Discovery Channel.

He says a combination of too much work and unusual food had knocked him about. You would have to think eating raw cow in Ethiopia carries with it a high degree of risk. Although, perhaps not more than eating flying fox intestines in Vanuatu.

If this is the future of Australian food, it’s in unusual hands.

For a start, Zonfrillo, as the tatts attest, is Scottish. The now 37-year-old chef first arrived in Australia at the tail end of the 1990s as a backpacker, before moving here full-time in 2000 with his first wife.

The notion of how Australian culture and identity should be reflected in its cook-ing has been something that’s gnawed at Zonfrillo since that first trip to Australia. On his first trip he was mystified by the lack of identity in the cooking.

“The point is not that Australians don’t make great food, or have great restaurants,” he says. “You can go and eat amazing Thai food, Vietnamese food, Italian, Spanish, Korean. You can go and eat all these cuisines and they are very good. But where is the Australian food? Where can I go and eat something Australian that tells me something about Australian culture?’’

Zonfrillo had learned his trade in a tough apprenticeship at Scotland’s Turnberry golf

course, and worked in Michelin star restaurants with the likes of Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay in London before heading to Australia.

He thought he was going to get the opportunity to answer the questions this year at Penfolds Wines flagship Magill restaurant. The winemaker had granted him two years, and untold dollars, to bring his mad pursuit of an Australian cuisine to life until a still mysterious last-minute change of heart from the wine executives brought it to a crashing halt.

Clearly, though, Penfolds decided it didn’t really want to buy into the grand Zonfrillo scheme. At the time it said: “For Jock to bring his dream to life, it would be a better fit elsewhere.’’

The two years on the Magill payroll didn’t go to waste. He has taken all he learned and poured it into Street and Orana. Still, he is not keen to talk about the split.

What he will say is that he learned of Magill’s change of heart “at the 11th hour’’.

He says they asked him to stay. They even offered him a lot of money to put on his chef whites and run their kitchen.

“I could have easily done that. I could have taken that $300,000 a year and walked in there and cooked really nice food in a winery, but I would not have had a morsel of integrity left in my body if I had done that,’’ he says. “I knew that whoring myself out to do that, to take the money, was not the answer, so I walked away.’’

It is a sign of the loyalty he inspires that five of his Magill Estate staff also left to follow Zonfrillo into his new world.

But the question still lingers. What is Australian food? Zonfrillo knows people will try and pigeonhole his food as either native or modern Australian. What he is adamant about is that it’s not “bush tucker’’. “I am not suggesting we all sit around this table and eat witchetty grubs and have a loin cloth on,’’ he says. “I am saying, maybe we should look a little bit more at some of these amazing flavours that are in this country and create a cuisine that identifies Australia from it.’’

He talks a lot about the “astringency’’ of native ingredients. Astringency suggests, a sharp, sometimes bitter taste, and the skill in presenting the food lies in creating a balance in the flavours.

Zonfrillo also knows any identification with bush tucker is likely to be commercial suicide. He knows, even if he doesn’t like it, that Australians react with something close to horror when the topic is raised. He even has a name for the reaction: Facial neuralgia.

That curling of the lip, the scrunching of the face we all do when confronted with an idea we don’t like. Zonfrillo says this kneejerk reaction has been the biggest hurdle in pursuing his vision.

Even after the sales pitch, I have to admit a level of scepticism.

Zonfrillo is a charismatic, passionate advocate of his food. He is like an old-style preacher man, although one with a far more commanding vocabulary of words starting with F and C, trying to convince you of the error of your ways and that the door to salvation is at hand. But it’s only when you sit down and eat at Orana that some of the fog starts to lift, you understand what the hell he is talking about and you hear yourself saying to him things such as “those green ants were fantastic’’.

Street is different again. You can get pork crackling, hamburgers, wings and ribs down there. There is not even any reference on the menu on the wall to native ingredients. But they are there all the same.

It’s hard, no matter what happens from here, not to think that Zonfrillo has created something remarkable in Adelaide. In a recent review of Orana, The Advertiser’s food editor Simon Wilkinson says: “I can’t remember a meal where there is so much to take in: new ingredients, unfamiliar flavours – and an inkling that this could be an opening that is talked about for a long time.’’

Born in Glasgow into a half-Scottish, half-Italian family, Zonfrillo’s early food experiences ranged from your basic Scottish (mince and potatoes) to more worldly pasta dishes inspired by the other side of the family. His dad, Ivan, was a barber and met his mum, Sarah, a hairdresser across a lane which separated their two workplaces.

He says he was always interested in food even as a kid. But it was a desire to buy an expensive bike when he was 11 or 12 that drove him to apply for a part-time job at a local hotel called North Park. By this time the family had moved from Glasgow to the small seaside community of Ayr, about 50 minutes south of Scotland’s largest city.

The job was for a dishwasher. The chefs would stand at the entrance to his little station and lob red-hot pans into his sink. The young Zonfrillo wasn’t impressed.

“I just remember thinking ‘I want to be the guy throwing the pan; this is f--king bullshit’,’’ he says.

After a few weeks dodging pans, one of the restaurants’ chefs didn’t turn up for work and Zonfrillo was asked to look after the vegetables for the evening. And that was the end of his dishwashing career.

It must have been a strange life for a 12-year-old. Zonfrillo would go to the restaurant after school, work until late in the night, then go home.

“I came to school and slept and I really didn’t give a f--k about school,’’ he says. “I didn’t care about any of it because I had decided I was going to be a chef and so I had made up my mind that anything that I was doing at school was irrelevant.’’

His parents tolerated the lifestyle, in part Zonfrillo thinks because the alternative was even less attractive: That he would gravitate to the streets of Glasgow looking for his old friends and getting up to no good.

He left school at 15 and became an apprentice chef at Turnberry Resort, the famous golf course that regularly hosts the British Open. It was a brutal introduction to the realities of kitchen life. It was army-like in its discipline: Polished black shoes, the correct socks, constant abuse.

“You have someone standing behind you, f--king screaming at you because you have put your knife down with the blade facing out not in,’’ he says.

Turnberry took on about 30 apprentices the year Zonfrillo started, and only two completed the training. It also meant, as a 15-year-old, it exposed him to an adult world with its various temptations and traps. Drugs and alcohol became a staple.

Turnberry ran a misdemeanour book and if your name was taken down four times you were booted out. By the end of his time at Turnberry, Zonfrillo was in there 54 times and wasn’t sacked. There was the time he came to work 2½ days late and the kitchen gave him a round of applause. It was a tribute to his skill as a chef that he completed his apprenticeship.

Drugs were common in the world Zonfrillo moved in. Twice he battled heroin addiction, finally kicking the habit when he moved to Australia in 2000, vowing to himself a new country meant a new life. It worked. He has been clean for 14 years.

“From the outside, it looks like an attractive lifestyle,’’ he says. “The reality is, of course, that it wasn’t. A lot of friends of mine didn’t make it.”

What Zonfrillo found was that his passion for food outweighed his desire for heroin. And he knew he could not do both.

The rise of the food culture in the past 10 years has given the industry a veneer of glamour that it has never had before. Zonfrillo’s passion for creating new food and tastes is undoubted and genuine, but he is also aware of what it has cost him in other areas of his life.

“Two divorces, a handful of friends because you don’t have the time to spend with them, so therefore you can count your close friends on one hand, and a deep mistrust of most people,” he says.

“That’s what you’re left with at the end of the day. Is it really that glamorous after all? I don’t think so.’’

On the other hand, he has a daughter from each of his marriages. Ava is 13 and lives in Sydney, while eight-year-old Sofia is in Adelaide.

But all those hard lessons were still to come. After Turnberry he moved south searching for new experiences. He wanted to work in restaurants with Michelin stars, the mark of excellence within the industry.

He pitched up at The Arkle in Chester, but was fired after a mad night where he lost his cool after the head chef and sous chef were too drunk to work and he was left in charge. He thought his career could be over that night. But that Zonfrillo bravado meant he was not giving in just yet. This was England in the 1990s and the biggest name in the London culinary scene was Marco Pierre White. His Hyde Park restaurant had three Michelin stars and he was a man with a fearsome reputation – a relentless perfectionist who was creating some of the most innovative food in England.

Zonfrillo arrived in London as a 17-year-old with a shopping bag holding his chef whites and £15 in his pocket. After a day’s trial, he was hired.

“There was amazing food, there was amazing talent, there were amazing chefs working in that restaurant,’’ he says.

Zonfrillo was living on the edge of opulence, but was penniless himself. For three months he would leave work with everyone else before sneaking back in and sleeping in the restaurant’s change room. He was only discovered when a waiter tripped over him one night. White was told but instead of sacking him, arranged accommodation for him.

“Right from that first day I met him he was very caring,’’ Zonfrillo says. “There was a side to Marco that people don’t ever see. And it runs very deep with him.’’

Still, 12 months after he started Zonfrillo got itchy feet and headed to Australia.

He tried and failed to get a job at Sydney’s top notch restaurants and was just about to head home when a call to Level Forty One brought success. Perched at the top of Sydney’s Chifley Tower, Forty One has views over the harbour and has long been one of the city’s finest restaurants.

At the time it was owned by Swiss chef Dietmar Sawyere, who would also employ Zonfrillo when he returned to Australia to live in 2000. “Jock was typical of the young passionate chefs that came out of the Marco Pierre White stable at that time,’’ Sawyere says. “Passionate about food and cooking but feeling they had to rebel.’’

After 12 months of working 18-hour days and seeing nothing of Sydney except the view through the windows of Forty One, Zonfrillo’s visa expired and he went back to London.

And into the arms of Gordon Ramsay, another Pierre White protégé, who by that stage had become the next big thing in London’s culinary scene. It was perhaps not surprising the two abrasive Scotsmen did not get along.

“I lasted there three months. I did not like the way he ran his kitchen, I did not like him as a person, I did not like a lot of things he did,” Zonfrillo says now.

He went back to work for Pierre White and was involved in well-known London restaurants such as the Oak Room, Les Saveurs and the Pharmacy.

By now London life was getting on top of him and he headed to Cornwall to open the restaurant at Hotel Tresanton, owned by the interior designer Olga Polizzi. He became head chef at the age of 22.

It was at Cornwall that he reconnected with the idea of foraging and collecting local ingredients. It was something that had been drummed into him at Turnberry, where his lessons included how to shoot deer. He’s a good shot, apparently.

But after a couple of years in Cornwall Sawyere re-entered his life and asked him to come back to Sydney. By then he was engaged to an Australian and decided the time was right to start anew. It was when Zonfrillo returned to Australia he started to get serious about investigating Australian food. He tried to slipping some ingredients on to the menu, but the reaction was always the same: “What is this shit?’’.

In the end he was so disillusioned he walked away from the business. He moved into importing and selling kitchen equipment and doing the odd consultancy before moving to Adelaide with his second wife in a bid to save the marriage. After a stint working at the Austral in Rundle St, Zonfrillo was offered the job at Magill Estate.

“Against my better judgment I accepted that job,’’ he says.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to step back into the high-pressure world of top-line cooking. On the other hand, he also sensed things were changing in a culinary sense which could make it possible for him to cook the kind of food he really wanted to. “I thought this is it, the time is
f--king now,’’ he says.

There were other examples, globally, of chefs pushing the boundaries. There was Alex Atala in Brazil and Rene Redzepi in Copenhagen had created Noma, a restaurant that would be declared the world’s best on the back of locally sourced ingredients and with a view of saying something about Danish culture.

Zonfrillo travelled to Denmark to understand what Redzepi was doing.

“I do think that coming here fuelled him even more in his search for real Australian flavour,’’ Redzepi says.

“I think that’s one of the most important things he took from here: a reassurance that what he was doing back home could be something special.’’

Zonfrillo has also spent time with Atala and is friendly with Heston Blumenthal, with whom he shares a PR agent.

Zonfrillo has grand plans for native food. He is setting up the Orana Foundation to help support the indigenous communities that supply his ingredients, and to create a database that chefs can use to create their own versions of Australian food.

“We are not claiming to be the be-all and end-all of Australian cuisine, but we are starting it from somewhere, and my hope is that other people look at some of those ingredients and go ‘they are really good’, and they go off and do it,’’ he says.

It’s a long way from Glasgow to Adelaide but Zonfrillo is convinced his new home is the perfect place to pursue his vision.

“They can see through the pretentious shit and make an assessment based on what it is rather than the hype that is surrounding it. I like that about Adelaide.’’