To label Jock Zonfrillo a chef is factually correct. It’s also a gross understatement. Advocate, ambassador and researcher of Australia’s finest ingredients via his Adelaide restaurant Orana (which he owns) and not-for-profit research organisation Orana Foundation (which he founded)? We’re getting warmer.
The Scottish-Italian Zonfrillo may be a migrant to Australia, but it’s his dogged exploration of native ingredients that has won him accolades the world over – Gourmet Traveller‘s 2018 Restaurant of the Year and 2020 Sustainability & Innovation awards line his trophy cabinet, as well as the prestigious Basque Culinary World Prize in 2018. The awards are nice, sure, be he says it’s the concept of “giving back” to Australia’s indigenous community that’s more important, and more rewarding.
During Orana’s pop-up in Sydney in August, we sat down with Zonfrillo to talk the time Bruno dined at Orana, hunting bats in Vanuatu, and getting in trouble with Marco Pierre White.
