Kate Emery: How one man changed the way we eat (and made brunch cool)

If you do not know the name Bill Granger, you have probably tasted his eggs.

If you are not familiar with the Sydney institution bills you might have heard of a little dish called avocado on toast.

Whether or not you had ever heard Granger’s name before news of his death on Wednesday, from cancer at the age of just 54, he has changed the way many of us eat.

Quite simply Granger is the father of the modern Australian brunch.

If it is possible to credit one person for the heaving state of many Perth cafes come Saturday and Sunday morning, it would be Granger.

Most famously Granger popularised avocado on toast as a morning staple — his cafe bills was said to have been the first to serve it, even if Granger was never quite confident with the mantle.

“A few newspapers have flatteringly described me as the ‘inventor of avocado toast’,” he wrote in the introduction to his 2020 cookbook, Australian Food. “Fake news? Suspect it might be, but who would turn down such an accolade?”

Avocado toast is now so ubiquitous in Australian cafes it has been — unfairly — blamed for locking millennials out of the housing market and appears on menus around the world.

Granger also perfected a way of cooking scrambled eggs that has been widely copied and can be sampled in cafes all over Perth. The secret? More cream than you want to believe possible and a gentle hand.

But Granger’s influence goes well beyond fluffy eggs and smashed avo. He made brunch cool via bills, in Sydney’s achingly hip Darlinghurst, where his very Aussie way of cooking attracted hordes of hungry diners who would form lines out the door.

Going out for breakfast and brunch was not then an Australian institution. Granger didn’t have a crystal ball seeing what our world would look like in 2023: he made the morning meal his focus because the only decent site he could find for his cafe had restricted hours of 7am to 4pm.

At the time he was told opening at 7am was crazy. Nobody, he was warned, would come. They did.

Reflecting on the way in which Australia’s cafe culture has exploded since the 1990s, Granger told this reporter in a 2020 interview to discuss his latest cookbook that it was millennials who deserved the credit.

“I think it’s easy to forget how much better things are,” he said. “I think that millennials have really embraced the idea of enjoying life and enjoying the community and connections and going out for meals and I think that’s great.

“It’s better than baby boomers where you go buy your house in the suburbs and lock yourself away.

“Cafes have really become hubs of people’s local community. . . it’s not pubs any more, it’s cafes people want to go to. Get to know all the locals and the locals get to know you, in the way that pubs used to do or churches used to.”

In the decades since bills opened its doors, Granger has sold more than a million copies of his 12 cookbooks, appeared in TV cooking series and opened restaurants in Australia, Japan, England, Hawaii and Korea.

In January he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.

Granger died on Christmas Day and his death was announced on social media on Wednesday morning.

A post on his Instagram page said he was surrounded by his wife Natalie Elliott and three daughters, Edie, Inès and Bunny, at their London home. He was reportedly diagnosed with cancer months earlier.

Granger’s family and friends will be left mourning a food legend taken too early.

The rest of us can, perhaps, celebrate what he gave to us all: the best brunch culture in the world (yes, I said it).

If ever there was an excuse to scarf down some eggs and smashed avo this weekend — and wash it all down with a mimosa — then doing so in Granger’s memory is good enough for me.

FIVE PERTH CAFES TO RAISE AN AVO TOAST TO BILL GRANGER

Chinta, North Perth

Good Things, Mosman Park

Chu Bakery, HIghgate

Bib and Tucker, North Fremantle

Hylin, West Leederville