Unpublished Interviews: Jock Zonfrillo
My dictaphone is a treasure cabinet of unpublished interviews. When I heard the sad news of Masterchef judge Jock Zonfrillo's death -I remembered an interview I did with him in 2017
At the end of April 2023, the culinary community received some very sad news – Masterchef Judge Jock Zonfrillo had died at the age of 46. His death was sudden and unexpected – he was in Australia to promote the current series of Masterchef that was about to air.
In November 2017, I joined a press trip with a group of wine journalists from East Asian publications. We spent a week touring Australia, visiting vineyards and tasting rooms, dining like kings and learning about the wonderful regions and wines Australia has to offer. Our final treat was to visit Rootstock Sydney - a natural wine fair. In between tasting hundreds of wines, we enjoyed lectures about indigenous plants, winemaking techniques and food pairings. Chef Jock Zonfrillo hosted a lunch, where he showcased some traditional Australian ingredients in his dishes and talked us through their uses.
Although this was a wine trip and I had a commission for a fairly long piece – I was desperate to interview Zonfrillo. Here was a Glaswegian-Italian, with a training in classical French cuisine, driving around Australia keen to learn from First Nations people about the plants that grow in the country and how to cook with them. I wasn’t sure what to expect – I had heard mixed reports, that he had this tough-guy, ex-junkie story, that some felt he was appropriating another culture and also that he was a genius, a sweetheart and a culinary anthropologist.
I hear a lot of rumours in this job. I listen to every one of them and take them all with bacalao levels of salt. At least, I thought to myself, he won’t be boring.
A group of us ambushed him during lunch, dragged him off to be photographed and then sat at his feet on a staircase while we fired questions at him. He was a funny mixture of grumpy: “That’s awful” he said, when I suggested that we sat at his feet like disciples and he could feel like Jesus, and very serious – bemoaning the fact that his huge appetite for knowledge about indigenous culture was not sated by the pathetic amount of literature he found on the subject.
He didn’t talk about drugs, or being edgy or wild. He didn’t have a PR breathing down his neck, but to be honest he didn’t need one – he seemed media savvy and good at getting his message across. His language was excellently colourful - so close your eyes if you don’t like the f-word. (Also, I had better apologise to all the Scottish people for assuming people in Glasgow like deep frying things - very ignorant, sorry. But it did perk him up a bit).
I pitched the story to the magazine I was writing for, but there wasn’t room for it in the Australia issue – fair enough. I forgot all about it and this interview stayed tucked in one of the many folders on my Dictaphone, untranscribed, thirty minutes of chat on a staircase in a warehouse in a Sydney suburb. Chef Zonfrillo was eloquent and generous with his time. Here’s what he had to say.
(I’ve edited it a bit for clarity, cut some rambling bits out, but I left in the sweary rant about crunchy things on plates - because it was brilliant.)
How did you first become interested in indigenous Australian cuisine?
I wanted to have some kind of an understanding of those people who had been doing what they were doing for sixty thousand years. I came to Sydney in the early 90s on a twelve month working visa and I was searching for the answers. I naively assumed it would be part of the fabric of Australian food. I figured there would be some remnants of that in Australian food culture. But there wasn’t. All there was, was salt and pepper calamari and fucking hot chips. It was disturbing in a way and when I went back to the UK afterwards, it just played really heavily on my mind. There was a missing chunk of Australian food culture that should have happened and didn’t. I went back to the UK in 95/96 and stayed until 2000. It really bothered me for four or five years
Did you try to remedy this?
I went to the libraries, found some books with details around indigenous life and culture, but they didn’t answer my questions. And it didn’t fulfil my appetite for knowledge around why this wasn’t part of Australian everyday life.
When did you go back to Australia?
I came over again in 2000 and I was asking the chefs around town about food and culture. Because I had worked in three-Michelin-starred restaurants and was French trained, they were like “why don’t you do that?”. But that’s not what I wanted to do.
I was trained in the first job I had to “cook from where you are”. Our chef used to stalk deer and pick mushrooms and mosses and serve dishes that made perfect sense for the area where they were served. When I did my apprenticeship, I was taught how to stalk deer, how to find edible mushrooms, I was taught how to fish - I could do fly fishing. That formed my understanding of food and how to put it on the menu.
So I had this training to cook where you are, cook the things around you that are in season. Yes, there’s all this stupid stuff they say now “locavore, provenance” - all these words are trending, they come and they go, but in the UK you were taught it was really fucking important and you didn’t fuck with it. It wasn’t “a thing” to be cooking seasonally, it was just what you fucking did. You couldn’t get strawberries from California or or stuff from other countries. It wasn’t a thing. So coming to Australia I was confused by it all. Everything was deep fried.
But you’re from Glasgow?
We don’t put everything in a deep fryer
Mars Bars?
It was an English person who did it first
No, you are joking!
Look it up! If you look at Glasgow, it’s full of Italians. You have a better chance of getting a bowl of pasta.
So what happened when you were talking to chefs in Australia about indigenous cuisine?
For me it was real. A sort of a disturbing thing. I’m never taking no for an answer and I was getting a lot of nos. It can’t be that in the oldest surviving culture in the world there is nothing engaging left
There are no cookery books? Nothing written down?
A couple of them but not much. There is some information around what aborignal people ate and a couple of books around songlines but it’s super vague. It was very tough.
I was in Sydney then. I lived there for ten years and now I am in Adelaide which is geographically more in the centre of the country. It’s easier to get to places and quicker to get products. I can get things at least twelve hours quicker that I could in Sydney
At your restaurant, are you recreating traditional recipes, or interpreting indigenous ingredients and using them in your own way?
Some things don’t work – like cooking vegetables in ash – they become gritty and I can’t charge fifty bucks for a gritty vegetable, so there has to be an interpretation of a technique sometimes. But the way I create a dish - the origins, the thought and the process of the dish will come from the indigenous ingredients and my sixteen years of learning.
First of all I cook what’s in season – seasons are very short so we have to act fast. The most important thing is to understand the ingredients. If I have a kangaroo tail, I understand the anatomy and the gelatinous nature and the fibres it has, because I have cooked with ox tail and they are similar enough, But I also need to have a cultural understanding of it how people traditionally cook it. So they would kill a kangaroo, bury the tail in the ashes of the fire and eat it the next morning, so it cooks for a long time and is gelatinous and unctuous
How often does your menu change?
There is so much here to discover and you don’t want to get stuck. We do have this strawberry dish which has been on since the beginning. There is salt, fermented powder, strawberry juice and eucalptus oil - nothing crispy or crunchy. You don’t need something crunchy on the plate just for the fucking sake of it. Don’t get me fucking started. I don’t give a shit, not interested. Why can’t you enjoy something smooth and silky? Why does it have to have something fucking crunchy on it? Who fucking said that? Sometimes yes, if there is a reason for it, but if its just for the sake of it? Not interested
How did you build up trust? To get people to share their recipes with you?
Just going out into the community. It took time. I drove out there seven times before I got anywhere. The first time I went out into the community – I just kept going it’s a long drive – a day and a half’s drive
You were showing commitment!
It was weird for them to have some random Scottish guy on their doorstep asking all about their cooking. That was the first time. I then drove back home but I didn’t give up. And I asked myself – shit, do I give up? Did I do something wrong? is it super complex? Was I rude? You have a day and a half’s drive to ask yourself a lot of questions. But ultimately, when I got home I realised I knew nothing about Australia, nothing about the people and their lives and that was wrong and I really wanted to understand, I wanted to learn
Tell us about the breakthrough day, when they let you in?
The breakthrough was actually in Sydney and that was meeting a guy called Jimmy. I wanted to understand more and couldn’t from books or libraries and the internet wasn’t much use then so I thought the best way was to speak to someone.
In Sydney it wasn’t easy, but I rememberd on Circular Quay there are guys busking. So, there was Jimmy, he was busking and I asked him if it was OK to ask him some questions about when he was growing up, about food, about what he ate.
He said “sure” and started telling me about how they have six seasons instead of four. As a chef, that really interested me and he’s talking about these lilies that blossom on a beach and that when they blossom it is a sign that the stingray livers [the tape was unclear here - I think this is what he said] are fat?
So I wanted him to talk to me as a person, not just as a chef and that’s the missing information, that’s the Australia I’ve been looking for. It [indigenous food culture] should be a fabric through Australian life. It changed my life. It just changed the way I thought about Australia and the people and the land. I had an idea in my head, I fantastised it was this amazing food I had never seen before and I realised there was something worth chasing.
Are you still discovering?
Every day! I try to get out of here as often as I can, it’s very difficult, I have restaurants, so it is increasingly demanding and difficult for me to leave for longer periods so for the last couple of years I have been doing four to five day trips as opposed to the longer trips I was doing. It’s not possible to go for longer now. I needed to open my restaurant Orana, to open somewhere that was gastronomically delicious, somewhere that would bring attention and help people to understand and taste and realise why it [indigenous food] is worth talking about.
I was very sad to hear about Chef Zonfrillo’s death. My condolences to his family and friends, he was a real character – Requiescat in Pace.