Zonfrillo's tragic death is not being treated as suspicious by Melbourne police. Creditors included Zonfrillo and his wife, Lauren Fried. It's understood the business owed about $1.4million, but settled for about $90,000. Everything we'd fought for had been a struggle not one thing about that place had ever been easy, and this was the hardest thing we'd ever had to do.' It felt like a funeral to have to close the place. 'The decision to shutter was gut-wrenching,' he said.

He and his staff had no idea how long it would take for the pandemic to pass, but running on such tight margins to begin with meant that keeping afloat was untenable. 'It was clear that wouldn't happen for a long time.' Zonfrillo said in his memoir he 'ran the numbers with lockdowns looming and realised even if we could open again in a few months, we'd have to sell out every sitting at every service in order to break even'. Shortly after, it moved into a permanent space on Rundle Street, just down the road from his other two venues He launched a casual food truck called Nonna Mallozzi after his Italian nonna in 2018, serving pastas, fries and paninis our of a blue van lodged between a barber shop and a bar. Orana was the first to bring Indigenous ingredients into the fine dining scene and won international acclaim.ĭownstairs, beneath the restaurant, he launched Bistro Blackwood, a more casual eatery.

'I had a s**tload of credit cards I kept maxing out - whatever it took to keep the restaurant going until the Australian people realised what we were trying to do.'Īt the time, he was hot off a job as Penfolds' head chef and was highly respected on the culinary scene.ĭespite running at a $360,000 loss in that first year, 2014 saw a turn of the tide and the bookings started rolling in - until Covid hit. 'It was so expensive to run,' he wrote in his memoir. He had just enough money to pay the overheads for two weeks. On opening night, not a single diner came, despite glittering reviews from critics a week earlier. He'd been scouring potential locations for the restaurant and workshopping new recipes for his cookbook, which was in development with the backing of Simon and Schuster

The Scarlet Flush by Carter Brown