Bill Granger, a chef who combined an easy Australian manner with a talent for making simple food sing, selling the world on the infinite potential of breakfast, died on Christmas Day in London. He was 54.
His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. The cause was not specified.
To many Australians, and particularly Sydneysiders, Mr. Granger was just Bill: the frontman, originator and head chef of a Sydney corner cafe called Bills that eventually expanded to nine outlets across three countries, as well as an offshoot, Granger & Co., with five locations in London.
His facility for food that was straightforward yet stunning propelled him onto television screens — his “Bill’s Food” and “Bill’s Holiday” were both on the air for multiple seasons — and bookshelves, making him a national treasure.
Though he wrote about a dozen books that included more than 500 recipes, he became best known for two dishes in particular: a zesty avocado on toast, which his cafe is often credited with being the first to serve, and scrambled eggs with luxuriously creamy curds.
The avocado toast, sold at Bills for 18 Australian dollars a plate, or around $12, would take on a life of its own, becoming an international food trend and held up as an example of millennial frivolity and excess that was preventing a generation from becoming homeowners. (Mr. Granger, speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020, responded: “It’s always been impossible to buy a house. Always!”)
In many respects, said Jane Morrow, his publisher at Murdoch Books, Mr. Granger exemplified the very best of his country’s national attitude: warm, open and generous, with an understated commitment to excellence.
“He reflected that back to Australians themselves,” she said, “and then he sold that to the world — and that gave us, as Australians, confidence.”
William Granger was born in Mentone, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, on Aug. 26, 1969, to — as he liked to note — a butcher and a vegetarian. His father was one in a line of Williams (and butchers), and his mother, Patricia, worked in the fashion industry.
Mr. Granger had an early interest in food, bringing his parents a “silver service” of breakfast in bed from the age of 5 and working his way through magazine recipe cards, before turning his attention to the food writers Elizabeth David and Margaret Fulton. He feasted on Melbourne’s richly diverse cuisine, eating dim sum with the Chinese parents of a childhood friend and searching out Lebanese kofta, African curry and the “most pungent” Parmesan, he wrote in his most recent cookbook, “Australian Food” (2020).
Like his father, he went to Mentone Grammar School, a private boys’ school at the time. In high school, he by turns struggled and excelled — he took three attempts to graduate but scored top marks in art. He then spent a few months studying architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Finding the field too “rigid,” he told the podcast “Grilling” in 2021, he dropped out and moved to Sydney, where he attended art school. These studies, too, would ultimately be short-lived, but travels in Japan, stints waiting tables and work in kitchens eventually inspired him to open his own place, Bills.
“I had no formal training as a chef, and I’ve always said that, ironically, this was a great training,” Mr. Granger wrote in “Australian Food.” “I wasn’t tied down by any rules about food and fine dining. I didn’t even know the rules I wasn’t supposed to be breaking. It puts me on a parallel with the Australian way of eating: joyfully lacking in fixed assumptions or strict culinary history.”
It was at Bills that the real business of breakfast began. Finding few proprietors prepared to rent any site to a 22-year-old with no commercial experience (and just 30,000 Australian dollars, borrowed against his grandfather’s insurance policy), he settled on a site with a few dozen seats, no liquor license and a compulsory closing time of around 3 p.m., and set about transforming it into the communal dining setting of his dreams.
“As an ex-art student, I had a bit of a feel for design,” he wrote. “I liked minimalism, and it was cheap. So was breakfast.”
Bills brought together Mr. Granger’s talents for unfussy, fresh fare; his Melburnian fondness for artisanal, espresso-based coffee; his taste for sophisticated international flavors; and his eye for breezy, beachy beauty, at a time when people were dining out more than ever before.
It would eventually become the blueprint for the modern Australian cafe culture that has been exported worldwide, inspiring the coffee chain Bluestone Lane and the restaurant Sqirl in Los Angeles, among other establishments.
“That was 30 years ago, and there have been very few adjustments to it,” Besha Rodell, a food writer and critic based in Melbourne, said. “You’re still going to get those same dishes, you’re still going to get that same feel. It was kind of this perfection of the genre.”
Mr. Granger met Natalie Elliott in the late 1990s at his cafe in Darlinghurst, a suburb of Sydney. Within four weeks, they had purchased a ring and planned their nuptials, he told an Australian newspaper in 2002, though they did not marry until 2006, after having three daughters.
Ms. Elliott was a critical part of Mr. Granger’s professional world and his constant partner in virtually every pursuit. “She loved and protected and sought his good in everything,” Ms. Morrow said. “It was the two of them there, step by step.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Granger is survived by his daughters, Edie, Bunny and Inès Elliott Granger, and his brother, Steven. He had lived in London for 14 years with his family.
While Mr. Granger was famous for simple dishes, his tastes evolved with the growing sophistication of Australian breakfast cuisine. In recent years he published recipes for chilled coconut rice pudding and harissa-accented buckwheat bowls.
“When I first opened, people were really conservative with what they’d eat for breakfast,” he told The New York Times in 2015. “At dinner they’d eat the most exotic things, but at breakfast they wanted what they knew.”
“Now,” he added, “I find we’re all much more adventurous.”