MasterChef host Jock Zonfrillo struggled with heroin addiction trends now

MasterChef star Jock Zonfrillo's extraordinary culinary life began aged 13 as a dishwasher at Turnberry in his native Scotland and ended in tragedy as one of the biggest names in Australian cooking.

The Glasgow-born father-of-four credited his mentor Marco Pierre White with saving his life after giving him a job and accommodation when he was a homeless heroin addict.

Jock, who was found dead in Melbourne this morning, said his life could be compared to Trainspotting before cookery saved him, claiming said most of his friends back home in Scotland were 'dead or in jail'.

Jock became a huge star Down Under after a life and career of extraordinary ups and downs. He was declared bankrupt in 2007, five years after setting a trainee chef on fire for working too slowly.  

But after some extraordinary ups and downs, by 2017 he was the hottest chef in Australia, with his restaurant Orana winning awards across the world. But Orana closed in 2020 with debts of millions of Australian dollars. His 2021 memoirs Last Shot was criticised, including his mentor Marco Pierre White, who said: 'Almost everything he has written about me is untrue'.

The 46-year-year certainly packed plenty into his life. He claimed he lost his virginity poolside in Yugoslavia aged 12, to an older French woman. 

The Glasgow-born chef enjoyed living far from the comfort zone.  Describing his life he said: 'I always have,' he said. 'Cram it into your mouth, snort it up your nose, bang it into your vein; if it doesn't kill you, you never know: it might make your life more interesting.' 

The chef, who was born in Glasgow, started working in kitchen aged 13 and later battled heroin addiction and crippling anxiety, trained under Marco Pierre White and moved to Australia in 2000. He famously carried worry beads to help him cope with 'stress'.

At just 46, the father of four was found dead in a hotel room in Lygon Street, Carlton, at 2am on Monday by police.  There was no suspicious circumstances.

Zonfrillo opened up to Daily Mail Australia in 2021 about his battle with anxiety, revealing he carries worry beads with him at all times to keep him calm.

'I don't classify myself as having a super crippling anxiety but it's certainly there. It's challenging and it's tough,' he said. 

'For me, if you have any kind of difficulty or mental health - you're embarrassed or ashamed, it makes you feel vulnerable. But I think at the end of the day, for me the worry beads were calming. It eases my mind.' 

One moment he did come to regret took place in 2002, when he set fire to an 18-year-old apprentice during a heated moment in the kitchen.

He took 'full responsibility' for the incident, but insisted it was a practical joke gone awry. He dabbed a flammable gel used for keeping plates warm into the teenager's lap, setting his pants on fire. In an attempt to rip them off, he suffered extensive burns to his hand. He was unable to work for three-and-a-half months, the apprentice said.

'There was no malicious intent to deliberately set the poor lad on fire,' he said. 

The teenager, Martin Krammer, sued and Zonfrillo was ordered to pay $75,000 in damages. Zonfrillo later declared bankruptcy and Krammer said he was 'never paid a cent'. 

Zonfrillo insisted he turned things around having 'replaced heroin with the insatiable need for success'. 

He arrived in Australia seeking a fresh start in January 2000. He injected his last hit of heroin immediately before boarding the plane, and was in the throes of withdrawal by the time he landed.

About as far away from his former home in Scotland as humanly possible, Zonfrillo hit the ground running and in 20 years became one of Australia's most formidable chefs.

In the early days, he managed to keep details of his addiction under wraps, but it emerged in the press.

In his memoir, Last Shot, Zonfrillo shared never-before-heard details of his life story, including a memorable trip to Yugoslavia when he was 12 in which he lost his virginity to a 'much older French woman'.

'I was 12, she was French and much older. It was very wrong, now that I think back,' he said.

It was also a defining moment in his culinary journey. The street food amazed him. 

Shortly after returning home, Zonfrillo asked his parents to buy him a bike. It cost a fortune, he said, and his dad told him if he wanted it, he'd have to get a job to pay for it.

First, he tried Marks and Spencer. Then he approached Top Shop and Greggs bakery. All said no.

Finally, he was hired to wash dishes for cash in a local restaurant. Shortly after, he was moved onto vegetable duties. From then on, he knew he wanted to be a chef.

A year later, he moved on to a French restaurant, where colleagues introduced him to cocaine for the first time.

'That was my entry point into that whole world,' he said.

Eventually, he sought out the big city of Glasgow, lying to his parents with friends about weekends away and running amok while they were none the wiser.

'Then the drugs started creeping in. This was the late 80s and Glasgow was absolutely awash with narcotics of all types. Vast amounts of heroin and no shortage of party drugs or weed. Even the ice cream vans sold drugs,' he said.

'We'd pool our money and go buy a gram of weed off the ice cream man, plus a couple of choc-dip cones to go with it – because when it came down to it, we were still children.

'We'd smoke a joint or we'd buy a pill, which were about £25 each back then, and split it four ways. So technically we were doing class A drugs, but not in a serious way: it was a lark. That line between boyhood shit and too-real grown-man s**t was barely there for us.'

But the 'lark' soon progressed into heavy heroin use. 

He described the first high as 'unlike anything he'd every had before' and, soon afterwards, began seeking it out himself.

'I realised that smoking heroin was a waste of time and injecting was the faster way to the high I needed,' he said.

'If I wasn't shooting up at least twice a day I'd get sick with the first symptoms of withdrawal: shakes, muscle pain, nausea.' 

In 1994, he landed a role in the kitchen for Marco Pierre White. He was homeless, and quietly began sleeping in the change room in work, a month behind on payments to his heroin dealers and struggling to survive.

He claimed that he had told Marco Pierre White all about his addiction and not having a roof over his head. 

'He didn't fire me. Instead, he picked up the phone, put in a call to the hostel and asked them to fast-track me on the waiting list and find a bed for me,' Zonfrillo recalled.

'In the meantime, he put me in touch with a couple of boys from Canteen, the other restaurant he owned, and arranged for me to sleep on their sofa until I could get my shit together. He even advanced me some cash to tide me over.'

Following the release of the memoir, White said much of what was written about his exchanges with Zonfrillo were untrue. 

He has no recollection of ever speaking with him about his living situation, and says he did not loan him money.

In fact, despite being referred to 157 times in the memoir and being described as Zonfrillo's lead source of inspiration and a father-figure, White says the pair actually had very little to do with one another.  

'I never saw much of [Zonfrillo], and he worked in my kitchen for a very short time,' he said.

Zonfrillo doubled down on the 'story of his life', and maintained finding cooking set him on the path to greatness, crediting it for saving him. 

'If I hadn't found cooking as a career path, I would have ended up just another statistic of the Glasgow heroin epidemic,' he said.

'Having a career working for amazing people, in outstanding restaurants

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