From drugs to kangaroo pie

When, at 17, Jock Zonfrillo fare-dodged his way from Ayrshire to London to ask Marco Pierre White for a job, nobody could have predicted that he’d end up as one of Australia’s top chefs, says Joanna Moorhead in the Financial Times. A heroin addict since the age of 14, he confessed to White that he’d just been fired from his last job for swearing so loudly in the kitchen the diners could hear – and when White rang his ex-boss to ask for a reference, it could hardly have been more damning. “The conversation was on loudspeaker and I was in tears. I knew I wouldn’t be getting a job. All I could think was, how the f*** am I going to get back to Scotland? I had no money at all. And then Marco thanked the chef, hung up the phone and said, ‘I think you should come and work with me, don’t you?’” Zonfrillo thrived under White’s tutelage, and seven years later, in 2000, he moved to Sydney, where he finally kicked his drug habit and immersed himself in Australia’s indigenous food culture. It wasn’t all plain sailing: one terrible review left him so wounded, he almost gave up cooking altogether. But in 2013, he opened a restaurant in Adelaide serving kangaroo tail pie and cockles with green ants – and in October the Australian Good Food Guide

named it restaurant of the year. Now 42, he believes food has been his salvation: “The thing about being a junkie is that the only way you can get out is if there’s something in your life more compelling than drugs. And for me, I had another addiction: to food and to cooking. That’s what moved me on. That’s how I survived.”