Byron Bay Chef – Latest News

Byron Bay Chef is now Chef In The City!

Keen to see how the values and tastes of the beach translate to the city, Julian and Gary are now resident in Melbourne.  Is Melbourne ready for Byron Bay Chef?

 Is the Chef ready for Melbourne?

These and many other questions answered soon as www.byronbaychef.com goes Metropolitan.

Julian Phillip

Julian Phillip has been cooking for nearly 20 years and is firmly of the opinion that a barbeque is every chef’s friend although he would like to make it plain that he hasn’t ever been that friendly with one.

Originally from Melbourne, Julian worked in various different restaurants in that city including an extended term as a travelling chef catering functions at the Rod Laver tennis centre and at Flemington racecourse. Indeed, whilst working at the tennis centre he acquired a racquet previously owned by world number one Pete Sampras. The racquet was subsequently used in a smash and grab robbery from a parked car but Julian was fully exonerated from any involvement, the Police forming this opinion after watching him play and noting that he couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo.

After a spell in St Paul’s, London where he tended the bar and prepared grub for a succession of ‘toffee nosed Hooray Henry’s and Henrietta’s’, an opinion he formed readily and completely without prejudice, Julian moved to Western Australia working in many of Perth’s top eateries and some of their bottom one’s too.

He re-located to Byron Bay in 2002 where he cooks, digs holes, plays football and generally enjoys life.

Julian is a single father of 2 year old Eva.

Gary Johnston

A Glaswegian, Gary has worked in the media for many years as a journalist, comedy writer, playwright and filmmaker. A staff writer with BBC Scotland for a decade, Gary contributed to numerous comedy shows as well as finding time to write and direct plays including ‘The Frustration Game’, ‘Blootered ’and ‘Going Nowhere Fast’ which premiered to enormous acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe. (Due to the fact that the author stacked the audience with a bunch of his mates who had been assured the show would feature ‘excessive nudity and wanton depravity’. It didn’t. They were disappointed but got over it. Eventually.)

In the early 1990’s Gary established Cat A Theatre Group and this led to his directing a number of productions in various Scottish high security gaols including an extended commission in the experimental Rannoch Unit at Polmont Young Offenders Institution.

In 1998 he was Assistant Director on the well regarded movie ‘My Daughter’s Face’. The Director of this film was Irvine Allen who subsequently went on to win the prestigious Prix De Jury at Cannes.

Gary moved to Australia in 2000 and since that time has continued to write and make films including ’The Culmination’ and ‘88.9’ a fly on the wall doco about a local community radio station.

Despite being old enough to know better, he plays football, rides mountain bikes and has recently taken a full time job attempting to keep the wolf from the door.

Gary lives a beachside lifestyle with his girlfriend, a cat called Mo Johnston and Ebby, an occasionally psychotic Kelpie.