Why Bill Granger’s legacy is more than avocado on toast

Most chefs would be happy if their legacy was a single memorable dish: a cake or curry or one-pot-wonder that chefs and home cooks passed around for evermore. Others aim to popularise a cuisine: a nation or a region whose food they evangelise beyond home. It takes a special kind of talent to change an entire meal.

Bill Granger, the Australian chef and restaurateur who has died from cancer aged just 54, was that rarest of birds who could claim to have done all of the above. His sunny, fresh, optimistic vision of Australian cooking helped change menus around the world – if you have eaten a ricotta pancake, or avocado on toast, you have been touched by Granger’s hand. Now there are imitative versions available in every caff in the country, it is difficult to imagine how thrillingly radical it once was to be offered an avocado instead of a bacon sarnie. He was an innovator and an ambassador, who taught diners that a proper breakfast could be tasty and satisfying without sending you straight back to bed. It is not too much of a stretch to say that without Granger, there would not be brunch as we know it.

Granger was born in Melbourne in 1969 but moved to Sydney to go to art school. He dropped out to open his first cafe, Bill’s, a cafe in Darlinghurst, in 1993. There was an artist’s quality to the space, which was light and airy, with white walls and a large communal table in the centre. The menu, too, revealed a knack for visuals, full of colourful and inviting dishes, most of them meat-free, like the cloud-light ricotta pancakes, served with banana and honeycomb butter, or the avocado toast.

While Granger can’t claim to have been the first to put an avocado on toast, he was the handmaiden of its global boom. Healthy and vegetarian yet indulgently fatty, with good coffee, avocado was the right dish at the right time for anyone who wanted to feel like they were having a treat that justified the excursion. In keeping with the casual aesthetic, this avocado was not sliced or mashed, but “smashed”: sort of half-mashed, which is much more exciting.

Consumers couldn’t get enough of it. Granger moved into cookbooks and broadcasting and expanded within Australia and then internationally, first to Japan. In 2011 he opened his first restaurant in London, Granger & Co. Britain took to him with relish: here was a new kind of breakfast, often without a fried item in sight. For the Lululemon-clad “yummy mummies” of Notting Hill, it was as if a temple had opened for a religion they did not yet know they belonged to: they could go to yoga and then hit Granger’s gaff for a breakfast that felt celebratory but low on calories. A BBC series followed, more books, more restaurants. His wife Natalie Elliott, with whom he had three daughters, ran the business side of things, leaving Granger free to focus on what he did best. He had the grace not to mind when he was mistaken for that other sunny antipodean export, Jason Donovan, which happened increasingly often.

Bill Granger’s Christmas brunch photographed for The Telegraph in 2018 – Andrew Crowley

As Granger’s empire grew, so too did the general appetite for the dishes he had popularised, which were imitated everywhere. The lust for avocado toast reached the point where hand-wringing editorials would lament its impact on the environment. More ridiculously, by the mid-2010s avocado toast was being held up as a reason young people could no longer buy their own homes. In 2017, Tim Gurner, an Australian property entrepreneur, was widely ridiculed for an interview in which he said: “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.” As millennials were quick to reply, few of them had spent £20,000 on avocado toast, but as a measure of Granger’s impact on popular culture it was clear. Forget being in every kitchen: the dish Granger helped give to the world was the reason people couldn’t own kitchens in the first place.

The food world has paid tribute to Granger since news of his death broke on Tuesday. On Instagram, Nigella Lawson said she was “heartbroken,” adding that Granger “was the loveliest man, and the joy he gave us – whether through his food, his books, the spaces he made for us, or in person – came from the kindness and generosity and sheer, shining exuberance of his very self… it’s too cruel.”

Jamie Oliver posted, too. “I loved Bill Granger so much, he was such a wonderful man, warm, charming, and had an extraordinary ease and style of cooking that could only come from Australia,” he said. Granger’s home country recognised his contribution: earlier this year he was honoured with the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM). As the novelist Kathy Lette, a friend, told the Telegraph: “Bill was as bright and brilliant as a Bondi ray of sunshine.” The vision of Australia he exported with his food was like the man himself – generous and optimistic and forward-thinking. As I attempt to haul myself out of the festive slump I will be smashing an avocado for Granger, who always looked on the bright side of breakfast.

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