Bill Granger
London-based Australian chef who served smashed avocado on toast to the Instagram crowd
BILL GRANGER, who has died of cancer aged 54, was a self-taught Australian chef credited with changing the world’s breakfasting habits. He made his name in the 1990s as the proprietor of a café called bills (sic) in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, and went on to build an empire of restaurants around the world. From 2009 he lived in London, and established branches of Granger & Co in Notting Hill, Chelsea, King’s Cross, Clerkenwell and Marylebone.
It was his breakfasts that made Granger’s reputation initially, although there was nothing calculated about his focus on the neglected art of the morning meal. He simply happened to be a morning person – “By the afternoon I’m ready to crash.” This was because he tackled everything he attempted with enormous gusto: “I’ve basically got two speeds – 78rpm or 16. I don’t really do 33 and a third.”
His innovation was to replace the stodgy fry-up with food that was light and nutritious, but full of flavour. His creamy scrambled eggs made restaurant critics fall at his feet – The New York Times christened him the “egg master of Sydney” – while his coconut bread, ricotta pancakes and sweetcorn fritters also became an indispensable start to the day for his patrons.
Granger was best-known for popularising smashed avocado on toast, which became something of a shibboleth in Britain, designated by some older commentators as the favoured foodstuff of faddy millennials whose difficulties in getting on to the housing ladder could be attributed to their addiction to such expensive fripperies. It was certainly true that Granger’s influence helped to make brunch the favourite meal of the Instagram generation and kept innumerable artisan cafés in business.
He became a dominant figure in cuisine with a series of cookery books that sold in their millions; as early as 2002 he was able to tell a Telegraph interviewer with baffled pride that he was outselling Tom Clancy.
Part of Granger’s appeal was that his food was unfussy: “Like me, [my] recipes are not at all cheffy. Let’s face it, nobody’s going to enjoy a dish more, or have a better time, if you’ve spent three hours shaving a carrot.”
He attributed his success to offering his patrons a warm welcome (“my pet hate is those signs saying ‘please wait to be seated’”) and a homely atmosphere. “I do home cooking. We [Australians] don’t do formality well. When we try to do formal fashion, it’s a dog. When we do beachwear, surfwear, jeans, it’s fantastic.”
There was nothing casual in his approach to creating a relaxed ambience: “We were one of the first cafés to employ restaurant standards in produce, look and attitude, and people responded immediately.”
To some extent Granger’s success was due to his media-friendly presence. His boyish enthusiasm and lack of pretension came over well on television, and when the Telegraph’s Casilda Grigg reviewed his book Simply Bill in 2005, she noted that “fans of Australia’s best-looking chef… are rewarded with plenty of eye candy: Bill looking like a Ralph Lauren ad as he shops for groceries with his kids and rustles up chocolate-chip cookies in his sparkling white kitchen.”
Granger inevitably earned the sobriquet “the Australian Jamie Oliver”, which he took in good humour: “I think we’re both into the idea of good, uncomplicated food.”
This was the simple secret to his success, he insisted: “I don’t want to put 25 complex things on a plate just because I can… People say to me, ‘Oh, how clever, you’ve really picked up on the trend back to simple food.’ But I’ve always done it and I’ve never seen it as a fad; most people like straightforward food, done well, in a clean restaurant.”
William Granger was born in Melbourne on August 29 1969. His father was one of a long line of butchers. His mother, he recalled, “came of age in the 1970s, when the domestic arts were being rejected by liberated women. So, from the age of eight or nine, I ended up doing most of the cooking.”
His mother was also an alcoholic, and, to the surprise of many who only knew him in his sunny later years, Bill suffered from depression as a teenager and missed several years of schooling. After his parents separated he decided to reinvent himself and moved to Sydney to study fine art.
He supported himself by working as a waiter in a French-mediterranean café, and eventually persuaded the owner to rent it to him for a couple of evenings every week.
Influenced by Elizabeth David and Nigel
Slater – “he was the first to really bring home the idea of a personal love of food, and passion in its preparation and serving” – Granger spent an exhausting six months cooking food at home and bringing it to the café, as it had no stove. “I didn’t make enough money to pay myself, but it did teach me to keep things simple.”
In 1993, aged 22, he launched his own café, bills (at the time he favoured the lower-case “b” and lack of apostrophe “because I was young and it was trendy… It drives people bananas”). He rented the building in Darlinghurst from a man who had failed to make a success of a brothel-cum-diner, and the café’s early years coincided with the gentrification of the suburb.
It drew a diverse crowd, attracted not just by the food but by the light, airy aesthetic of the space: Granger always brought his trained artist’s eye to the look of his restaurants. His success prompted Granger to open bills 2, a fully licensed restaurant, in nearby Surry Hills in 1996; a third bills followed, in Woollahra. He began to appear regularly on Australian television, and celebrities such as Cate Blanchett and Leonardo Dicaprio graced his eateries.
After spending some months travelling in Asia, he opened restaurants in Japan and South Korea. In 2009 he decided to move to London with his wife and children, “with no contacts, no job to come to and just five suitcases. It was a bit of a midlife crisis.”
Although he found the British lacking some of the spontaneity and easy-going nature of his fellow Australians, he observed that “living in Australia, it’s like there’s a party in the northern hemisphere that you’re not invited to. Once you live in London you get real Fomo [Fear of Missing out] living anywhere else.”
In 2011 he established his first British restaurant, Granger & Co, in Notting Hill: “It’s casual, you can stay all day. It’s not a dining experience, it’s a place to eat.” He also had his own BBC television series, Bill’s Kitchen: Notting Hill, and became a food columnist for The Independent on Sunday.
Bill Granger is survived by his wife Natalie Elliott, and their three daughters.