by Mr. Granger had an early interest in food, bringing his parents a “silver service” breakfast in bed from the age of 5 and reviewing recipe cards from magazines, before turning his attention to food writers. Elizabeth David and Margaret Fulton. He reveled in Melbourne’s rich and diverse cuisine, eating dim sum with a childhood friend’s Chinese parents and seeking out Lebanese kofta, African curries and the “hottest” parmesan, he wrote in his most recent cookbook, “Australian Food” (2020). .
Like his father, he attended Mentone Grammar School, a private boys’ school at the time. In high school, he alternately struggled and excelled: he made three attempts to graduate, but earned straight A’s in art. He then spent a few months studying architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Finding the field too “rigid,” he said the “Grilling” podcast in 2021, abandoned his studies and moved to Sydney, where he attended art school. These studies would also be short-lived, but trips to Japan, stints waiting tables and working in kitchens eventually inspired him to open his own place, Beerus.
“I had no formal training as a chef and I have always said that, ironically, this was great training,” Granger wrote in “Australian Food.” “He was not bound by any rules about food and fine dining. He didn’t even know the rules he wasn’t supposed to break. He parallels me with the Australian way of eating: cheerfully devoid of fixed assumptions or strict culinary history.”
It was in Bills where the real breakfast business began. Finding few landlords willing to rent any place to a 22-year-old with no business experience (and only A$30,000, borrowed against his grandfather’s insurance policy), he settled on a place with a few dozen seats, without a license. of alcoholic beverages and with a mandatory closing time around 3 in the afternoon, and he set out to transform it into the community kitchen of his dreams.
