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.”
