Bill Granger was a radical who ingrained scrambled eggs and avo on toast in Australia’s soul

Bill Granger at his Granger & Co restaurant in Chelsea, London. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

It seems so obvious now: the flat whites, the communal tables, the big bunches of flowers used as decorations, the scrambled eggs, the smashed avo on toast.

Australian cafe culture is so ingrained in the souls of most Australians of 2023 that it’s easy to forget that back when Bill Granger introduced us to bills in 1993, a lot of what he was doing was radical.

That first bills cafe filled a small terrace on a backstreet in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, a spot so compact that Granger couldn’t fit in a cool room beside the kitchen. The result was a menu reliant on produce that would come into the kitchen fresh and go out to diners almost immediately.

Granger developed a menu that reflected the sunny, boomtime Sydney of the 1990s in those heady years leading to the Olympics. Big plates of cream-splashed scrambled eggs were the favourite, but ricotta hot cakes with banana and maple syrup were also good, as were the sweet corn fritters.

Plates were heaped high, the coffee was excellent and if you had to share a seat at the long communal table with total strangers, that was part of the charm. Visiting bills simply made you feel good.

It was a winning formula aided and abetted by cookbooks and television programs that sold a version of sunny, happy, beach-y Sydney not only to Sydneysiders, but to the world.

Bill Granger and wife Natalie with their children (L-R) Bunny, Ines and Edie at Oxford Street, Paddington in Sydney for opening of their kidswear store.

“A lot of what he did probably doesn’t seem that revolutionary in 2023 and that’s because it has been so widely adopted and become a thorough part of the cafe vocabulary,” says food writer Pat Nourse. “It’s all now relatively familiar, and that’s because what Bill created is now a big part of our Australian breakfast culture. He was an original, and a game changer.”

Indeed, it is a kind of genius to take something as simple as scrambled eggs and create an empire around it that transcends three decades and three continents. But that was the lifework of Bill Granger. He packaged and sold a version of Sydney brunch culture that the world liked, wanted, and even needed. And one that is as strong today across Sydney, Tokyo and London as it was when Granger was a toothy cook fresh out of art school.

Australian food has lost a giant.