It is sometimes assumed that to create a great restaurant, a chef must have grown up eating fabulous meals at home. Often, the opposite is true. The Australian chef and food writer Bill Granger, who has died of cancer aged 54, said that, during his Melbourne childhood, the family mostly ate meals separately. His father was a butcher and his mother, a vegetarian, was in the fashion industry. Both parents worked long hours and Granger learned to cook from a box of recipe cards from Women’s Weekly magazine.
In a 2008 interview with the Australian newspaper, he said: “My family ate together about three times in our whole childhood and I think that’s why I do what I do now – my business is about the joy of the domestic and having food on the table.”
The model of home that Granger created at his first restaurant, bills, in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst in 1993 was so powerfully sunny and appealing that it would generate a whole new breakfast culture in Australia and beyond. Granger has been described as the “godfather” of avocado toast because he was one of the first people to put this staple of every hipster cafe on a menu or in a recipe book (although Granger himself was modest enough to recognise that he had not invented it). In his original recipe (published in Sydney Food, 2000), the ripe avocado was not smashed but quartered, and dressed with olive oil, lime juice and coriander. But his influence was much greater than simply avocado toast.
More than anyone, Granger was the person who set the template for a modern cafe breakfast and made it seem like a treat. Any time you find yourself in any big city and you go to an independent cafe that serves flat whites and healthy juices and fluffy pancakes, and eggs cooked in interesting ways served at big communal wooden tables, you are imbibing a little of the home that Granger created.
By the time of his death he had published 14 cookbooks, which between them sold more than a million copies. As the Australian writer Chris Wallace says, what makes his recipes so good is that that they are not only likable but virtually “impossible to stuff up”. With his wife and business partner Natalie Elliott, whom he met in the late 1990s and married in 2006, he had 19 restaurants, some in Japan, South Korea and London, as well as in Sydney (the London ones are called Granger & Co, because someone else had already taken the name Bill’s).
The son of William and Patricia, Granger was born in Mentone, a suburb of Melbourne, and educated at Mentone grammar, a private boys’ school, before starting architectural studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, which he soon gave up to move to Sydney. Like many students, Granger first turned to food as a way to make a bit of money. In his second year of studying fine art at COFA (the College of Fine Art at the University of New South Wales) he took a job waiting tables at a restaurant called La Passion du Fruit. In his 2010 cookbook, Bill’s Basics, he wrote that he still craved the salade Niçoise served there. The owner, Chrissie Juillet, liked the way he cooked and he started renting the space from her to do his own dinner service three times a week before leaving to set up his own place, financed by $300,000 taken out against his grandfather’s life insurance.
Not many 24-year-olds would have the confidence to start their own restaurant but Granger said that “the idea of having a shop wasn’t so daunting” because his father and grandfather had always had butcher’s shops (and in the early days, he would send all the accounting home for his dad to do). He set up his first cafe with not much more than a four-burner gas hob, a fridge and a coffee machine. The fact that he specialised in breakfast was a pragmatic decision, because initially he was only allowed to open from 7am to 4pm.
He credited much of his later success to Natalie, who managed a lot of the business side, leaving him time to be creative. He described her in a 2014 interview as “amazingly energetic and disciplined”. The chef Jeremy Lee, who got to know them after they moved to London in 2009, said that the couple wore their “meteoric success so very lightly, never changing, always delightful”.
From 2011 until 2015 Granger was a regular food columnist for the Independent on Sunday; and he made numerous appearances on radio and TV series including Bill’s Food (2007), Bill’s Holiday (2009), Bill’s Kitchen: Notting Hill (2013), set in his first London restaurant, in Westbourne Grove, and Bill’s Tasty Weekends (2015). In 2023 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.
When I first went to Australia in 2007, the one thing I knew was that I wanted to eat Granger’s famous scrambled eggs at the original bills, which I had seen described in the New York Times as “soft, luscious, yellow clouds”. The secrets of these eggs are a non-stick pan, a lot of cream (half a cup for every two eggs) and very minimal stirring, with a 20-second pause between each stir. When I finally tasted them, the eggs didn’t disappoint (and nor did the toasted coconut bread, the sweetcorn fritters or the ricotta hotcakes with honeycomb butter, and the biggest blueberry muffins we had ever seen).
More than the food, what was striking was the feeling of unpretentious ease in that small but sunny room. Despite being a favourite breakfast spot for A-list stars (fans of bills include Nicole Kidman and Leonardo di Caprio), this felt like a space in which everyone was welcome. At the heart of the room was a communal oak table at which doctors, nurses and patients from the nearby hospital shared space with office workers, young families and solitary breakfasters reading newspapers.
In an interview in 2009 with the food blogger Lorraine Elliott, Granger said he would “like to be around for another 20 years making scrambled eggs and ricotta hotcakes”, adding that “the joy factor of food is often overlooked, even in reviews. Food should be about joy, it’s the flowers of life.”
Granger is survived by Natalie and their daughters Edie, Bunny and Inès, and his brother, Steven.
• William Granger, cook, restaurateur and food writer, born 29 August 1969; died 25 December 2023
