Australia’s best restaurant started from a conversation with a busker
AUSTRALIA’S Best Restaurant has just been crowned, and it went to an underdog. The chef says it’s all thanks to a busker in Sydney’s Circular Quay.
IT WAS the conversation that changed chef Jock Zonfrillo’s life. Desperate to learn about Australian ingredients and our indigenous food cultures, and unable to find the answers in books, he took a trip to Circular Quay.
“It struck me that the best way to find the answers was to talk to an Aboriginal person,” Zonfrillo says. “I knew there were always guys busking at Circular Quay, so that’s where I went. I approached a guy — Jimmy- and asked him if I could talk to him about food. We talked for four hours. It changed my life.”
In a room full of Australia’s best chefs, at the Gourmet Traveller Best Restaurant Awards on Wednesday night, Zonfrillo’s Adelaide restaurant Orana was named ‘Australia’s Best Restaurant’. The announcement was met with cheers from the room and overwhelmed tears from the chef and owner.
“To say we were the underdogs is an understatement. I was floored. Speechless. I didn’t build the restaurant to become ‘Australia’s Best Restaurant’, I did it to showcase the work of The Orana Foundation. But this still means so much for what we’re trying to do.”
With the restaurant, and the foundation of the same name, Zonfrillo aims to improve the culinary world’s understanding of ‘Australian ingredients’. By building a comprehensive database of our native ingredients, including their culinary uses, their cultural significance and their nutritional information, he hopes to inspire a broader understanding of these largely ignored ingredients.
Many, he says, have been right under our noses. “We all recognise Geraldton Wax as something that grows in gran’s garden. You can buy it at Bunnings. There are over 430 varieties, all used for landscaping or cut flowers, and not once did someone think ‘I wonder what it tastes like?’”
“It has this amazing Kaffir lime flavour … We’re trying to create the most edible variety, and then we want to see it at the supermarket next to the rosemary and thyme.”
“But,” he adds, “we’ll probably call it something else. Something without ‘wax’ in the name.”
Orana (‘welcome’ in a number of Aboriginal languages) represents more than just a collection of under-utilised ingredients, but an overarching philosophy.
“The more Jimmy talked, the more I realised this was a culture very connected to the land. He told me they have six seasons, not four, and that the seasons changed based on what nature told them, not pages on a calendar.”
“When the white lily flowered on the beach, he told me, the stingrays would be fat and right for hunting. As soon as the flowers went away, hunting was forbidden.”
Zonfrillo took Jimmy’s lessons and embarked on a journey of discovery, visiting numerous Aboriginal communities across the country, watching food being prepared and cooking his own food in return. “At the moment we have a crocodile soup on the menu, and I call it ‘soup soup’ because that’s what they called it when I took it to a community in Arnhem Land.”
Jock says the final words of his four hour chat with Jimmy had the most impact.
“His parting words to me were ‘whatever you do, give back more than you take’. That still governs so much of what I do.”
Tristan Lutze is a food writer and photographer. You can see more of his work on Instagram, Facebook or at TristanLutze.com
