The Masterchef presenter John Torode has a reputation for telling it like it
is and happily recognises that “in most people's minds I'm a fat ugly rude
Aussie who shoves too much food in his mouth”. Yet underneath this bullish
exterior he seems a rather sensitive plant, who emigrated at 25 because he
didn't fit in with the Australian psyche, who was brought up by his
grandmother after his mother died when he was 4, hated being separated from
his father, and who battled with asthma and went on to develop terrible
eczema as an adult - until he found relief in running and acupuncture
respectively.
A father of four, he has strident views on parents' responsibility for healthy
eating. His two older sons, Marcel, 11, and Casper, 9, live with his first
wife, Angela, in Cornwall, and he and his second wife, Jessie, a project
manager for a building company, have a son Jonah, 4, and daughter Loulou, 2.
Torode, 43, who regularly attracts more than six million viewers on Masterchef
with co-presenter Greg Wallace, looks like a man who likes his grub. His new
book, Beef, a minute dissection of his favourite subject, is published this
week, and on October 1 he becomes the controversial new president of the
Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE).
Despite being Australian and the chef largely responsible for introducing
Australasian food to these shores, Torode has long been a champion of
British produce. At his restaurant, Smiths of Smithfield, opposite London's
meat market, even dishes such as Five Spice Duck are made with British
ingredients, and all butchery is done in-house.
He turns heads as he strides through one of Smiths' three dining rooms in
scuffed brown boots, jeans and a man bag. With the lunchtime clatter of the
restaurant's open kitchens in the background he drinks white wine, rants
cheerfully, and swears like a trooper with a hint of an Australian accent.
One minute he's declaring, “There is nothing worse than a f***ing food bore;
they really sh** me off!”, the next he's gushing, “You rock, sweetie!” to an
assistant and waxing positively poetical about “the dark pinkness on an
undulating field of oats”. Of his appointment as president of RASE, he says:
“I think a few eyebrows have been raised, but slowly they're getting a bit
of trust in me. At the Royal Show in July the guy next to me in the judging
ring said: ‘You really know your animals don't you?' I told him I wouldn't
be involved with RASE if I didn't know the difference between an Angus and a
Dexter. I think my role is to come in as an urbanite and be excited. And
hopefully I will be able to get farmers and restaurateurs to talk to each
other more.”
With his team at Smiths, Torode insists on an emotional frankness that seems
rare in British restaurants. “We have an honesty policy,” he explains. “If
somebody is p****** you off you tell them and if that doesn't work we end up
with small groups to discuss it. The idea is for everyone at the meeting to
have that cathartic experience because it's better for them to get rid of it
than worry about it. Otherwise relationships quickly deteriorate.”
He is disarmingly honest about his own past too, and has worked hard to sort
out his feelings about leaving Australia and the sadnesses of his early
life. When I ask whether he has had therapy to deal with his mother's death
he replies: “Yes, indirectly I think. I used to get very bad eczema and I
went to this wonderful acupuncturist. She cured my eczema and at the same
time she talked to me quite a lot about other things that were going on. I
changed the way I thought about things.”
His mother died suddenly when he was 4
When he was 4 his mother, aged 30, died suddenly of cardiomyopathy, a weakened
heart, possibly triggered by an infection following thyroid surgery; his
older brothers were 5 and 7. The three boys were brought up by their
maternal grandmother in rural Maitland, north of Sydney, for the next six
years. During that time Torode saw little of his father, who travelled the
world on business. “I missed my dad like hell; I found it really difficult,”
he says. “When he came I'd try to sit on the kitchen bench next to him the
whole time and I wouldn't let go of him. My Auntie Mary always used to tell
me to go away so I didn't like her for a long time.
“I remember once when he was going to Europe for five weeks he dropped me off
to school in his yellow Mercedes and everyone was watching us. I cried and
cried and I said Dad, next time you go away please can we come with you? I
was an eight-year-old kid just wanting his dad. It was pretty tough for a
single parent in 1970s Australia and what do you do if, like him, you're 31
and you've lost the woman you loved most? You'd go party. And he did - he
partied for a few years. He had his Mercedes and a Porsche and grew a beard
and wore safari suits and a peace sign round his neck.”
Torode grew up on standard Australian grub: grilled lamb chops and caramel
slice pie. His grandmother kept chickens and grew limes and peaches. But
there was a more colourful influence, unusual in Seventies Oz: his White
Russian uncle's family cooked wonderful piroshki, small meat pies, and
stuffed peppers. They had to grow their own chillies and peppers because
Australia imports little food, and Torode believes that Britain should
minimise it too.
When Torode was 10 and his older brother was about to start secondary school
his father moved back in with his sons and uprooted them to a house by the
beach outside Melbourne. It sounds idyllic, with fishing for stingrays and
scallops, sailing and surfing, but Torode's asthma affected him badly at his
fee-paying Catholic boys' school. “I hated football and rugby because I was
scared that if I ran I would get tense and not be able to breathe. At school
you got beaten to death if you couldn't run. But I was never bullied because
I was a good-sized lump and I knew what I was doing.
Undeterred by the general prejudice that anyone who liked cooking was “a big
gay boy”, Torode left school at 16 to work in a kitchen. “My father was so
disappointed,” he remembers. “Because he wanted me to be a vet or a hotel
manager. The idea of me going through paid education, then to go on to be a
chef - a dirty, hard job - what would you ever get out of it? Of course now
it's very different but I still think he's got that small thing in his mind.”
When I remark that his father must be very proud of what he's achieved Torode,
looking decidedly moist around the eyes, demurs: “Let's not go into that
...” He had few second thoughts about leaving Australia. “When I left - it's
only now I really think about it - it was because I didn't really fit with
the Australian psyche,” he says. “A chef in Australia was never going to be
anything but a cook. Leaving was the easiest decision in my life, although I
got homesick quite a bit. I've taken a few years with my own psychology to
work out where I am with it.” In London, Torode hitched his star to Terence
Conran, first at Pont de la Tour, then Quaglino's and Mezzo, where his
informal, eclectic Aussie style really took off. He also had a four-year
stint as resident chef on Richard & Judy.
Nothing helped until he tried acupuncture
But in his private life Torode was plagued by eczema for 20 years from his
early twenties.
“It started when I was going out with a hairdresser; I thought it was a rash
caused by stray bits of hair from her,” he remembers. “But it got worse over
the years until the backs of my legs and arms were completely covered. I
used to scratch and see piles of white skin on the floor. I would literally
take a hairbrush to my arms, or if that got too bloody I would get the
shower as hot as possible and scald my skin - that felt fantastic.”
For years Torode tried conventional remedies, including aqueous cream, but
nothing helped until three years ago a BBC colleague recommended an
acupuncturist. After 18 months of regular sessions, and a change of diet, it
cleared up. At around the same time Torode set about overcoming his asthma,
which he felt was “as much psychological as it was physical”, by teaching
himself to run. He discovered a system of alternate running and walking,
which gradually built up his confidence and stopped him panicking about not
being able to breathe. Two years ago he ran the London Marathon.
He still suffers from asthma, but only uses an inhaler very occasionally. He
runs or cycles the seven miles from his house in Streatham to Smiths at
least four days a week. He reckons he's a bit on the heavy side, and that he
probably drinks a bit more than he ought. But then 12-hour days are average
and he is working hard on The Luxe, a new music and art venue, which will
also have bars and food, and is due to open in fashionable Spitalfields in
March. When we met in July he was “knackered” and looking forward to two
weeks in Majorca with all four children.
It is taken as read that his brood all eat healthily (his four-year-old's
favourite salad is olive and beetroot) and in his view it's about time
parents took more responsibility for their children's eating habits. The
subject sets him off on a right royal rant: “Do you not think there's got to
be some onus put back on the parent? If the kids can afford to buy junk food
have people not worked out that they could probably afford to bring a
sandwich to school? I think now with the way the state benefit system is -
this is very controversial - most people can probably afford a loaf of
bread, a slice of ham, a tomato and an apple for their kids' lunch.” But
then he relents: “I think we've got a lost food generation, and actually we
should let them go - it's not worth trying to teach old dogs new tricks. I
want to take the kids from a young age and get them to know the difference
between a dairy cow and beef cattle ... so that they grow up understanding
where food comes from.”
John Torode's Beef (Quadrille, £20), photographs by Jason Lowe, is available
at £18, free p&p. Phone 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
