When Bill Granger opened his first cafe in Japan in 2008, he flew his entire Japanese senior team to Sydney. Driving them around in a little van, he tried to explain what bills was about, and where it had come from. The experience made him realise, he said, that Australian food is not just something formed by our cultural mix and migration patterns, but is more of an attitude.
“And it isn’t stuck,” he said. “It changes. That’s the magic.
” The irony is that as soon as anyone takes their first bite of Bill Granger’s avocado on toast , silky scrambled eggs or ricotta hotcakes, they’re not going to let them change at all. Whether your first bills experience was at the original corner cottage in Darlinghurst, or at any one of the other 18 restaurants across Sydney, London, Korea and Japan that he built with his wife Natalie, we wanted what he was cooking. Bill Granger was Australia’s sunniest culinary ambassador, feeding his vision of Australian home cooking to the world.
He wrote 14 cookbooks, made five television series and was honoured with the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in January 2023. He died in December, 2023. Veteran chef and restaurateur Neil Perry remembers walking into bills in Darlinghurst in the early 1990s.
“It was always just about the beautiful, simple things that Bill did really, really well,” he says. “There was a simplicity to it, but also sophistication. He always made sure that sunny Australian nature came through.
” Award-w.