MasterChef’s Jock Zonfrillo death: The Glasgow-born chef and former drug addict who became a culinary star – obituary

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 drug 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, and his father a barber of Italian extraction.

Young Jock got his first job aged 12 washing dishes part-time in a restaurant. When, after three weeks, a chef called in sick he got his chance to cook. 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, via cannabis and LSD, to heroin. “Drugs were everywhere - we were surrounded, " he recalled. “A lot of kids got into trouble and I was one of them.”

Jamie Oliver paid tribute to fellow chef Jock Zonfrillo. Photo / Instagram

Sacked from his kitchen job aged 17 after swearing so loudly that the customers could hear him, he dodged the fare on a train to London and in 1994 pitched up at Marco Pierre White’s three-star 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 was sleeping in the restaurant changing rooms 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 accused him of “self-mythologising” and quoted White as saying that “almost everything he has written about me is untrue”.

But Zonfrillo’s publisher Simon & Schuster stood by their author, pointing out that the account of his first meeting with White, White’s help finding him accommodation and his awareness of Zonfrillo’s drug addiction had all featured in the 25th-anniversary edition of White’s own memoir White Heat, published in 2015, albeit as recounted by Zonfrillo and told via White’s co-author, James Steen.

Chef and MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo has died. Zonfrillo died aged 46. Photo / Supplied / Ten network

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 at St Mawes in 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 trying to put out the flames and was awarded damages of AU$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 spent time touring the outback and 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 after initial financial difficulties, reviewers of the Orana waxed 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 was named Restaurant of the Year three years running (2017-19), and the Orana Foundation was awarded The Good Food Guide’s Food for Good Award in 2017. 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 Australian MasterChef, alongside Andy Allen and Melissa Leong. However, his restaurants ran into financial difficulties and closed in 2019 and 2020 with combined debts estimated at $3.2 million.

Zonfrillo had to sell his home in the Adelaide Hills and subsequently moved to the Carlton Suburb of Melbourne where, in the early hours of May 1, police carrying out a “welfare check” found his body. The death is not being treated as suspicious.

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