At the age of 46, Jock Zonfrillo passed away. He was an administrator on MasterChef Australia and a chef and author. His passing was confirmed by his family on Monday, who described him as an “irreplaceable husband, father, brother, son, and friend” who passed away on Sunday in Melbourne.
Jock Zonfrillo; image credit – Variety
Jock Zonfrillo’s Cause Of Death
The reason for the Death was not disclosed. A spokeswoman for Victoria Police said that there was no indication of a suspicious nature in the Death. The coroner will receive a report. The new season of MasterChef Australia was scheduled to debut on Monday night, however, Network 10 has announced that it won’t air this week.
Jock Zonfrillo’s Memoir
Barry Zonfrillo was born in Glasgow in 1976, and at the age of 13, he started working as a dishwasher in kitchens. One of the hotel’s youngest-ever apprentices, he dropped out of school at age 15 and began an apprenticeship there. Zonfrillo wrote in his memoir Last Shot from 2021 that he was homeless as well as addicted to heroin when he started working for renowned British chef Marco Pierre White at the age of 17. When he was only 22 years old, he was named head chef of the Tresanton Hotel in Cornwall.
Jock Zonfrillo’s Career
In 2000, Zonfrillo was appointed head chef at Sydney’s Forty One, but he was let go in 2002 after lighting a trainee’s trousers on fire for moving too slowly. It was an innocent prank gone wrong, according to Zonfrillo. Martin Krammer, an apprentice who was 18 years old, sued Zonfrillo and was awarded $75,000 in compensation in 2007. Zonfrillo declared bankruptcy in the same year. Several eateries, notably Restaurant Orana, Street ADL, Bistro Blackwood, and Nonna Mallozzi were subsequently opened by him in Adelaide. In 2018 Gourmet Traveller magazine selected Restaurant Orana Australia’s restaurant of the year, and the Good Food Guide did the same the following year. It terminated in March 2020 despite receiving 3 hats in both 2019 and 2020.
He replaced Matt Preston, George Calombaris, and Gary Mehigan as a judge on MasterChef Australia in 2019 together with Melissa Leong and Andy Allen. In chapters regarding Zonfrillo’s stay in London in the 1990s, White claimed that nearly everything he had written about him was false, which raised controversy over some of the accounts in his autobiography Last Shot. The assertion that Zonfrillo had visited “hundreds of Indigenous communities” was also called into question.
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