Chef Jock Zonfrillo Defines Australian Cuisine
LATE ON A HOT, dry spring afternoon, two men and a dog (a three-quarters dingo) cut across a barren stretch of the coastal outback. The younger man is a chef, 38-year-old Jock Zonfrillo, a rangy Scotsman who for the past 15 years has made Australia his home. His friend Bruno Dann—a 63-year-old Nyul Nyul elder who supplies Zonfrillo with ingredients native to this region—leads the way across a slow-flowing stream. “That’s karkalla,” says the chef, scrambling up a bank toward a thicket of edible succulents. “We use that on our lamb dish.” He snips a plump green bud and pops it into his mouth. “A bit salty but delicious,” he says. “You can get $26 a kilo for that.”
The chef won’t be picking a bushel to bring back to his two restaurants. His bar-food spot, Street, and its fine-dining sibling, Orana, are both in Adelaide, almost 2,000 miles away. As we march toward the coast, dense gray soil gives way to sugar-fine sand rising in ripples. The landscape changes fast in the Kimberley, an immense territory stretching from the Indian Ocean into the Tanami Desert. “Thousands of people used to live here,” says Dann, surveying his ancestral land from the wind-swept crest of a dune.
Up ahead, a carpet of sharp seashells makes walking a challenge. We’ve entered an old Nyul Nyul midden—an ancient feasting place—overflowing with the discarded husks of crustaceans. Around a corner the low tide reveals a moonscape of black craggy rocks; farther out, near a reef, oysters, sea snails and giant clams are all easy pickings. Few have ever made a meal from that natural raw bar, apart from the quickly vanishing Nyul Nyul people—just a few hundred remain in the area—who left those drained shells behind.
For Zonfrillo, only remote spots like this allow a perspective on what Australian cuisine ought to look like. From his home base in Adelaide, he’s been leading a one-man crusade to move beyond the muddle of post-colonial influences that typically passes for Australian cooking. “How is it possible,” he says, “that a country with such regional diversity and 40,000 years of culture doesn’t have a real cuisine of its own?” Sometimes it takes an outsider to shake the status quo, someone unburdened by historical baggage, in this case a legacy of policies and attitudes that pushed Aborigines to the margins of Australian society. “The country has this dark, troubled past,” he says. “Nobody wants to talk about it, and that comes across in the food.”
Zonfrillo has spent years exploring parts of the country that homegrown chefs have mostly ignored, traveling to indigenous communities in search of ancient wisdom, eventually translating what he learned to a contemporary restaurant setting using skills he acquired in Michelin-starred kitchens in Great Britain. His restaurants use only ingredients grown, raised or produced on the continent, many of them entirely foreign to the average urban Australian. “There are 20,000 edible native things in this country,” he says. “You could write six encyclopedias on the subject.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal Jay Cheshes June 22nd 2015
