Matt Preston reveals big family ‘scandal’

In a frank and honest interview with Stellar, MasterChef judge Matt Preston unpacks the explosive family secret he is revealing for the first time and explains why now is the right time to release his memoir.

Matt Preston’s memoir Big Mouth will be released next week. Picture: Cameron Grayson

Julia Child said that “people who love to eat are always the best people”. If so, it stands to reason that Matt Preston may be considered the crème de la crème. Not only has the longtime food writer and critic served as a judge on TV series such as MasterChef Australia and My Kitchen Rules, he has also penned eight cookbooks. But as much as Preston has gabbed about gastronomy, he has yet to dish about his rich personal life. Until now. In an interview with Stellar, he explains why it’s the right time to release his memoir, and unpacks the explosive family secret he is revealing for the first time

Renowned for his discerning and keen judgement, and his love for a sense of occasion, Matt Preston nonetheless chose to share a long-held family secret amid the swirling activity of a Jetstar departure gate. Squeezed alongside crying toddlers and angry passengers being stung for excess hand luggage, the former MasterChef Australia judge, when asked

by his curious then-17-year-old daughter why he had two birth certificates, casually dropped the bombshell that the paternal granddad she and her two brothers knew wasn’t actually his dad.

Matt Preston on the cover of this weekend’s edition of Stellar.

In that “perfectly inappropriate” setting, Preston tells Stellar, he explained how one certificate bore the name of his biological father and the other the name of his adoptive father. “You’re always looking for the right moment [to reveal the truth] and there was something so perfectly wrong about that moment,” he adds, recalling the airport conversation he found himself having with his children Jonathan, 23, William, 20, and Sadie, 18, last year. “What’s fascinating is we always make a big thing of it – oh, that’s a surprise, or that’s a big family shock or a scandal – but is it really? So many families have stories like this.”

Yet not all families have a famous food personality on a branch of their tree. His intriguing, two-certificate revelation anecdote kicks off Big Mouth, Preston’s rollicking new memoir full of unseemly events, indiscretions, wild moments, tragedy and insights from the Stellar food columnist and senior editor of delicious. magazine. Preston also pairs those tales (including

why he was adopted in the first place) with delectable side dishes of food memories and nostalgia. But as his daughter Sadie so wryly remarked in the airport that day, “Oh, Father, don’t we have a lot to talk about?”

Apparently so. At 62 years old, Preston has been a longtime journalist, practised storyteller and oft-interviewed on-air personality – especially during his 11 seasons as a judge on MasterChef Australia – yet he has never truly divulged his family history. So what did prompt him to finally talk about Michael, the biological father he has met only once, and his younger brother William, whose life ended at the age of 22 when he suffered sudden unexplained death in epilepsy (SUDEP)?

“Writing about it gave me clarity about my feelings,” Preston explains to Stellar. “Illegitimacy was such a massive thing back in the day, but now it’s just an irrelevance. It solidified my attitude that the only person you should judge is yourself. Anything that happens to you is not relevant – but how you behave is relevant.”

“Writing about it gave me clarity about my feelings,” Preston explains to Stellar. Picture: Cameron Grayson

With his signature cravats, luxe velvet jackets and foppish fringe – now turning a George Clooney-esque salt-and-pepper – Preston became the bon vivant of Australian television during his decade on MasterChef Australia from 2009 to 2019. Whether dropping plates, amusing adjectives or zingers with his fellow judges Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris, he developed the patter that would make him a recognised and beloved global identity.

By his own admission, the British-born Preston isn’t of the therapy generation. He doesn’t regard his past as traumatic, although he recalls being the only child during his early school days without a father to run in the parents’ race on sports day. The legacy of these years, it seems, is pragmatism.

As for his brother’s death, he’s found himself thinking about it more since their mother, Jennifer, died late last year at the age of 89. Going through her belongings with his two sisters, Katie and Eleanor, he felt there was a side of the square not there. “It re-accentuated how wrong it is that a child dies before his parent,” he says. “That was 40 years ago; it’s a long time for someone not to be on this earth and there’s a tangible sense of long-term loss.”

These reflections could have been published during the height of his time on MasterChef Australia. But to borrow from Preston’s parlance, Big Mouth benefitted from lengthy marinating, a slow braise and a good rest before serving. It’s not a flash in the pan but an intimate, considered and at times funny tale of a boy who loved food growing into a man who made it his livelihood.

Chronicling his early years, before his mother’s new husband, Antony Preston, adopted him when he was five, has given Preston time to reflect on his own parenting. “The attitude of my generation to fatherhood is largely different to their fathers’ approach in terms of involvement,” he says, pointing out that when his oldest child was born, he was a freelance writer who would tap out his articles while his son slept in the bassinet beside him. Now he cherishes the fact that his grown-up children enjoy hanging out with him and relishes time on the golf course with his sons. “When boys decide to talk, it’s then [that you talk]. It’s not tomorrow, it’s not by appointment. You’ve just got to be there.”

“Emma has low expectations and I’ve just managed to exceed them,” he jokes of his marriage. Picture: Cameron Grayson

Despite his elaborate TV wardrobe – somewhat undermined by his admission that he once had pants made in striped curtain fabric from IKEA – Preston says his day-to-day life is decidedly less grand. He doesn’t wax lyrical about white truffles or harp on about tomatoes sun-blushed on a Tuscan hillside. Rather, his love for ice cream, processed puddings, freshly baked bread and fish-finger sandwiches are as charmingly recalled as his stories about

his mother and grandmothers Joan and Vivienne (the mother of his absent biological father).

Their impact likely explains, he says, why he has so many female friends and adores and respects women (although he amusingly professes to still finding Stellar editor-in-chief Sarrah Le Marquand intimidating despite working with her for more than seven years).

Most revered is his almost-30-year relationship with his wife Emma, which has largely existed out of the public spotlight. So rare are their red-carpet moments that, as Preston says with a laugh, there was a time when an internet search for “Matt Preston’s wife” would yield a picture of him with radio and television personality Kate Langbroek.

“Emma has low expectations and I’ve just managed to exceed them,” he jokes, going on to explain that while he’s publicly the show pony in the marriage, he adores it when she takes centre stage.

“I love those nights when we go out and I’m quiet and Emma holds court and is incredibly funny and has everyone in fits of laughter. I love those moments when you can sit back and see the person you love absolutely shining. There’s something beautiful and exciting about seeing that.”

Preston met Emma not long after moving to Australia and having now lived more of his life here than in the UK, he’s given some thought to how one can enjoy a flourishing marriage.

“What tends to happen is that as men and women get older, the men don’t change,” he explains. “The kids leave home and the women are suddenly going, ‘What am I going to do with this time?’ They want to do this and that and as a bloke in a relationship, you have to be prepared to go on that journey, to find those areas they’re going even though you’re quite happy mowing the lawn and pottering around the house.” To that end, the couple play golf together. Emma always beats him.

While Big Mouth charts his personal milestones and reveals how Preston’s career went from TV soap reporter to restaurant reviewer to media star – throwing in plenty of behind-the-scenes details on the making of reality television – he doesn’t sugar-coat his moments of foolishness. Following his first appearance on a reality show – Seven Network’s My Restaurant Rules in 2004 – he became “a bit of a dickhead”, he recalls, reiterating what he told Stellar’s podcast Something To Talk About in July.

He’s grateful for the advice given to him by reality TV veteran Ian “Dicko” Dickson before starting his role on MasterChef Australia: never stay in a pub or club beyond 10.30pm because nothing good will happen after that time.

“Going through that experience was very chastening,” Preston says of his early days on television. “It’s important to me that when I see my friends, they recognise me as the same person they’ve always known.”

As for the huge cultural impact brought about by MasterChef Australia and shows like it, Preston says his singular ambition when he started out was to get Australian households to stop using pre-grated parmesan in their cooking because, he insists, it smells like vomit.

But even though the show in its heyday attracted more than four million viewers and caused a jump in supermarket produce sales, the former judge is blunt: “We wanted people to not see cooking as a chore, even though it is. I understand why my mother liked a bit of cheese, an apple and a Magnum.”

But anyone looking for beef between Mehigan, Calombaris and Preston won’t find it in Big Mouth. A triangle, Preston observes, is the strongest shape and if one was being an idiot, the other two would tend to pull him into line. (Indeed, as he chats to Stellar via Zoom, he reveals that he, Mehigan and Calombaris are off to India to shoot a series of cooking masterclasses.) Likewise, there’s no great revelation about the trio’s exit from the show in 2019.

Since then, Preston has hosted the Victorian Saturday Mornings show on ABC Melbourne radio, sung on Network 10’s The Masked Singer Australia, judged on Seven Network’s My Kitchen Rules and, more recently, foxtrotted on Seven’s Dancing With The Stars Australia. Although he had to withdraw from DWTS after sustaining an ankle injury, he says the show helped him to process his grief over the loss of his mother.

His other key takeaway is that you don’t have to be good at something to love doing it, which is why Preston is still training with his dance partner, Jessica Raffa, three times a week. It’s keeping him so fit that he adjusts his laptop to show Stellar that he’s wearing the same white jeans he wore on season two of MasterChef Australia back in 2010. “They still fit,” he declares triumphantly.

Following his comparison of MasterChef Australia to “catching lightning in a bottle”, Stellar asks Preston if he seeks to do so again. “God, I absolutely don’t need to do that,” he exclaims. “I’m loving spending more time reading, seeing my friends, going to cafes, playing golf, walking the dog and getting under my wife’s feet. You have to continue to do your thing to make your little corner of the world a little bit better than it was yesterday.”

Big Mouth: A Memoir by Matt Preston (Viking, $34.99) is out Tuesday.