Culture

Four Bizzare Takeaways From Jock Zonfrillo’s Chaotic ‘Good Weekend’ Feature

The feature calls Jock Zonfrillo out for all the alleged lies written in his memoir. Oh, and the fact that he lit his apprentice on fire for "working too slow".

by Michelle Rennex  10 August 2021
JOCK Zonfrillo Memoir Good Weekend Masterchef

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Between Michaelia Cash’s baffling profile last week and this week’s interview with Jock Zonfrillo, it really does feel like Good Weekend is intent on pumping out features people can’t help but eat up.

But while we only really learnt that the Attorney-General loves Margaret Thatcher and has absolutely no clue how coffee machines work last week, Zonfrillo’s Good Weekend profile is a truly wild journey in comparison.

You see, Tim Elliott’s ‘He’s very nice. The only problem is …’: chef Marco Pierre White on Jock Zonfrillo‘ feature seems innocent at first. Perhaps, at first glance, one would think it’s a puff piece designed to praise Zonfrillo, one of the new MasterChef judges, in the lead up to the release of the celebrity version of the beloved cooking show. Maybe one might expect the profile to be free promo for the chef’s new book.

But the Good Weekend feature is far from a story that talks up the accomplishments of Zonfrillo while ignoring his faults. Elliott’s article — all 6,000 words — actually unravels all the alleged lies the celebrity chef published in his memoir, Last Shot. 

So let’s break down the biggest and most baffling takeaways from Jock Zonfrillo’s unfortunate Good Weekend interview:

1. Everyone Reckons Jock’s A Liar, Including Marco Pierre White

According to Zonfrillo’s publisher Simon & Schuster, Last Shot is meant to be “a coming-of-age memoir of addiction, ambition, and redemption in the high-stakes world of Michelin star kitchens”.

However, Elliott very quickly discovered that there was very little truth to the tales told in the memoir with former colleagues sharing that Zonfrillo is “a Walter Mitty-type character” and a “famous bullshit artist” who “burns people and moves on”.

Among those who refute what Zonfrillo writes is Marco Pierre White, the British chef who’s had a hand in the careers of other notable chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Curtis Stone. Despite referring to White as a “father figure” and mentioning him a whopping 159 times in Last Shot, White claims that most of what Zonfrillo says about their relationship is just simply untrue.

For example, in Last Shot Zonfrillo writes that White’s restaurant became like a “home away from home… a family” but White recalls that he actually “never saw much” of the MasterChef host because he only worked in his kitchen for “a very short time”.

In his memoir, Zonfrillo also claims that White did little things for him, like finding Zonfrillo accommodation when he was homeless, lending money to help him get back on his feet, and taking him fishing after tough services. White embarrassingly denied all these claims.

“Jock is not a bad man,” White told Elliott. “He has a natural intellect and he’s very nice. The only problem is that almost everything he has written about me is untrue.”

2. Jock’s Colleagues Don’t Quite Believe His Stories Of Addiction

Jock Zonfrillo hinges a lot of his story on his heroic rise from “reckless drug addict” to “one of Australia’s top chefs”.

He says that he was introduced to cocaine and weed at 13 as a young chef, which was soon followed by heroin at 15 — an addiction that allegedly remained for years. However, the people mentioned in Last Shot remember a lot of Zonfrillo’s stories of addiction differently from how they’ve been written.

Take Zonfrillo’s claim that he allegedly drunkenly begged for a job at fine dining restaurant, Forty One, over the phone in 1996, for example. Dietmar Sawyere, Forty One’s head chef, notes that Zonfrillo actually just rocked up sober and handed over his CV because “had he phoned me drunk he would definitely not have gotten an interview, let alone a job”.

The MasterChef judge also alleges that he would shoot up heroin almost daily while at work, but his colleagues and bosses deny ever seeing “any indication of Jock using heroin” on the job.

“I have read several ‘bad boy’ articles about Jock over the last few years and his ‘fight with heroin’ etc… makes a good story but I saw no evidence of that while he worked for me side-by-side for 12 hours a day for a few years,” Sawyere continued.

“If I know Jock (and I think I do) [Last Shot] should probably be lodged in the historical fiction section of the library.”

3. Jock Literally Lit His Apprentice On Fire Without Consequence

One of the most bizarre revelations in the Good Weekend feature is that Zonfrillo lit Martin Krammer, an 18-year-old apprentice, on fire for “working too slowly”.

“Zonfrillo was at the time using Sterno, a flammable gel used for keeping plates warm,” Elliott writes. “In order to spur [Krammer] along, Zonfrillo used a spoon to dab some of the burning gel between Krammer’s legs, setting his pants on fire.”

“In trying to get them off, Krammer severely burnt his left hand.”

However, Zonfrillo takes no accountability for the “extensive burns” and “excruciating pain” noted on Krammer’s medical report, which left him out of work for three months.

Instead, Zonfrillo laughs the incident off as “a couple of little burns on his finger” and claims that Krammer’s mother said her son was “all right” and was “out surfing” the very next day. But Krammer says Zonfrillo lied, and the chef was ultimately fired from Forty One after the incident.

“For one, I don’t surf and never have. I was actually at my GP’s surgery getting new dressings put on my hand [the day after the incident],” Krammer told Elliott, who sued Zonfrillo for $75,000 in damages before the chef filed for bankruptcy which quashed the charges. “He never paid me a cent.”

4. Jock Kept “Visiting” Indigenous Communities When Elders Told Him To Leave

Jock Zonfrillo has made a name for himself as a chef who has a passion for native ingredients — and in Last Shot, Zonfrillo claims that this led him to Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara, or APY lands, multiple times in the early 2000s.

In his memoir, Zonfrillo writes that he tried to visit the local community of Amata in the heart of Australia — because “Arnhem Land was too far” — seven times before being knocked back by local elders and then, on his last trip, by police.

After being told by law enforcement that he needed a permit to be there, Zonfrillo shared that he was so mad about white men policing indigenous land that he, very dramatically, “pulled over, got out, sunk to my knees and hammered my fists in the red dirt. I started weeping, and then screamed with rage until my throat gave out”.

However, contrary to the emotional experience Zonfrillo allegedly had at Amata, General Manager of APY Lands Richard King notes that the first record of Zonfrillo ever being in the APY was a two-day Tourism Australia trip in 2015.

Despite all the glaring inaccuracies pointed out by Tim Elliott in the Good Weekend feature, Jock Zonfrillo’s publisher has decided to stand by their author and the memoir.

In fact, Simon & Schuster’s managing director Dan Ruffino told the Sydney Morning Herald that “he would consider taking legal action” if the publisher felt that “sales prospects have been harmed by this article”.

“We work intimately with the writer and fact check everything. We see what’s on the public record, we pick up any inconsistencies and run anything legally contentious via lawyers,” Ruffino explained.”Obviously our industry is redhot on this stuff post-Helen Darville and James Frey. It’s something we take very seriously.”

While Zonfrillo hasn’t publicly spoken out about the article, Ruffino says the celebrity chef was “very upset” by the feature but that “Jock Zonfrillo stands by the historical account he has given in his book”.

“This is the story of my life,” Zonfrillo said in a statement issued by Simon & Schuster yesterday.

“I’ve lived every minute of it, the highs and lows, and I stand by it.”

 

You can, and should, read the entire Jock Zonfrillo Good Weekend feature here for all the juicy revelations.