Jock Zonfrillo
Glasgow-born chef and former drug addict who became an award-winning culinary star in Australia
JOCK ZONFRILLO, who has died of undisclosed causes aged 46, was a Glasgow-born chef who became a culinary star in Australia after a long struggle with addiction; when he became a judge on the country’s version of Masterchef, his lean good looks and tattooed, bad-boy image won him a legion of female fans.
He was born Barry Zonfrillo in Glasgow on August 4 1976. His mother was a hairdresser from Ayrshire, where he spent his early years, his father a barber of Italian extraction.
At the age of 12 he got his first job washing dishes part-time in a restaurant. After leaving Belmont Academy, South Ayrshire, aged 15, he began an apprenticeship in the kitchens of the Turnberry Hotel.
In his 2021 autobiography, The Last Shot, however, Zonfrillo described how, from the age of 14, he developed a drug habit, starting with cocaine and going on to heroin. “Drugs were everywhere – we were surrounded,” he recalled. “A lot of kids got into trouble and I was one of them.”
Sacked from his kitchen job aged 17, he dodged the fare on a train to London and in 1994 pitched up at Marco Pierre White’s restaurant at the Hyde Park Hotel, where he was surprised to be greeted by White – “this f---ing massive guy” – himself.
In his office, White proceeded to phone the chef who had sacked Zonfrillo. “At first, he hung up, because he didn’t believe it was really Marco,” Zonfrillo told the Financial Times in 2019. “But Marco called back and said, ‘I’m after a reference for Jock.’ Well, the chef went to town: he said, ‘Jock’s a drug addict, he’s a total waste of space.’ The conversation was on loudspeaker and I was in tears. I knew I wouldn’t be getting a job… And then Marco thanked the chef, hung up the phone and said, ‘I think you should come and work with me, don’t you?’”
In his memoir, Zonfrillo wrote of being homeless for the first three months of working for White and that when his boss realised, he found him accommodation and lent him money. White, he wrote, was “a father figure” who “saved my life”.
Doubts were subsequently raised about some of Zonfrillo’s claims in an article in an Australian magazine which quoted White as saying that “almost everything he has written about me is untrue”. But Zonfrillo’s publisher Simon & Schuster stood by their author.
In 1996 Zonfrillo moved to Australia, where he took a job at the Sydney restaurant Forty One. Returning to the UK when his visa expired he was appointed to his first head chef position aged 22 at Olga Polizzi’s Tresanton Hotel in St Mawes, Cornwall. He returned to Australia as head chef of Forty One in 2000, taking what he claimed was his last shot of heroin in the gents at Heathrow Airport.
In 2002 Zonfrillo, in what he later said was a practical joke gone wrong, set fire to the trousers of an 18-year-old apprentice chef whom he had accused of working too slowly. The apprentice suffered burns to his hand and was awarded damages of A$50,000, prompting Zonfrillo to file for bankruptcy in 2007. The apprentice claimed he was “never paid a cent”.
During his time in Sydney, Zonfrillo became fascinated by traditional Aboriginal cooking ingredients. Moving to Adelaide, in 2013 he opened his own restaurant, Restaurant Orana (“welcome” in Aboriginal Wiradjuri), and in 2016 founded the Orana Foundation to promote the cultivation and use of native Australian foods in the country’s cuisine.
Early on, Zonfrillo’s innovations had been damned by one critic as “a horrific reminder of the bush-tucker era”, but reviewers of the Orana were soon waxing lyrical about such dishes as Port Lincoln squid with sunrise lime; kangaroo tail pie; mud crab with bunya and native thyme; crocodile with Australian botanicals and paperbark with macadamia and native honey.
Restaurant Orana won a slew of awards and Zonfrillo went on to open two more restaurants, the Bistro Blackwood in 2017 and Nonna Mallozzi in 2018.
That year he was named Australia’s Hottest Chef by The Australian newspaper and won the Basque Culinary World Prize, made annually to the chef doing the most to improve the world through gastronomy. In 2019 he joined the judging panel on Masterchef Australia. But his restaurants ran into financial difficulties and closed in 2019 and 2020. He had to sell his home in the Adelaide Hills and subsequently moved to Melbourne.
Shortly before his death Zonfrillo, who was reportedly being treated for bowel cancer, had returned early from a family holiday in Italy to promote a new series of Masterchef Australia. He was staying in a hotel where, in the early hours of May 1, police carrying out a “welfare check” found his body.
Jock Zonfrillo is survived by his third wife, Lauren Fried, whom he married in 2017, by their son and daughter, and by two daughters from his previous marriages.
Jock Zonfrillo, born August 4 1976, died April 30 2023