Bill Granger, chef who brought avocado toast to the world, dies at 54

Mr. Granger had an early interest in food. He brought his parents a ‘silver service’ of breakfast in bed from the age of five and worked his way through recipe cards in magazines, before turning his attention to food writers Elizabeth David and Margaret Fulton. He enjoyed Melbourne’s richly varied cuisine, ate dim sum with the Chinese parents of a childhood friend and sought out Lebanese kofta, African curry and the ‘sharpest’ Parmesan, he wrote in his most recent cookbook, ‘Australian Food’ ( 2020). .

Like his father, he attended Mentone Grammar School, then a private boys’ school. In high school he alternately struggled and excelled; he took three attempts to graduate but scored top marks in art. He then studied architecture for a few months at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

He thought the field was too ‘rigid’, he said the podcast “Grillen” in 2021, he quit and moved to Sydney, where he attended art school. These studies would also ultimately be short-lived, but traveling around Japan, waiting tables and working in kitchens eventually inspired him to open his own restaurant, Bills.

“I have no formal training as a chef, and ironically I have always said it was a great education,” Mr. Granger wrote in “Australian Food.” “I was not bound by rules about food and good food. I didn’t even know the rules I wasn’t allowed to break. It places me in a parallel with the Australian way of eating: a joyful lack of fixed assumptions or a strict culinary history.”

At Bills the real breakfast started. When he found few owners willing to rent a site to a 22-year-old with no commercial experience (and only 30,000 Australian dollars, borrowed through his grandfather’s insurance policy), he settled on a site with a few dozen seats, without a liquor license and a mandatory closing time of around 3 p.m., and began transforming it into the communal dining environment of his dreams.