John Torode

Some cooks arrive in public life fully formed, all polish and catchphrase. John Torode took the long way round: a suburban Melbourne kitchen, a grandmother who put a wooden spoon in his hand before he was ten, catering college at sixteen, and then the better part of a decade of hard graft in some of London’s busiest dining rooms. By the time British audiences properly met him, he had already cooked his way across two continents, and it shows in everything he makes.

Born in Melbourne in 1965, Torode became one of the most familiar food faces on British television, fronting MasterChef on BBC One from its 2005 relaunch through to 2025. Away from the studio he has been a restaurateur with two well known London dining rooms behind him, a prolific cookbook author, a curious and generous travel presenter, and since 2019 one half of a warm Sunday morning double act with his wife Lisa Faulkner. In 2022 he was appointed MBE for services to food and charity.

TL;DR

• Australian and British chef, restaurateur and broadcaster, born in Melbourne on 23 July 1965.
• Trained in Melbourne from the age of 16, then moved to the United Kingdom in 1991 and joined Terence Conran’s kitchens at Le Pont de la Tour and Quaglino’s.
• Founded Smiths of Smithfield in 2000 and The Luxe in Spitalfields in 2009, two of London’s better known independent dining rooms of their era.
• Presented MasterChef on BBC One from the 2005 relaunch until 2025, a run of two decades that made him a household name.
• Author of more than a dozen cookbooks, from The Mezzo Cookbook to Sydney to Seoul and John and Lisa’s Kitchen.
• Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to food and charity.

John Torode key facts

John Torode: career timeline

A Melbourne boyhood and a grandmother’s kitchen

John Douglas Torode was born in Melbourne on 23 July 1965, the youngest of three boys. His mother died when he was four, and for the next six years he and his brother Andrew lived with their grandmother in Maitland, New South Wales. That house is where the cooking started. His grandmother taught him at the stove, not as a lesson but as a matter of course, and the habits she passed on (taste as you go, feed the people in front of you, waste nothing) still run through his food today.

He has always been refreshingly honest that the food of his childhood was ordinary in the best sense. No truffles, no theatre. Roast chicken remains one of his favourite things to eat and to cook, precisely because of what it connects him to, and crumbed lamb cutlets were the meal he looked forward to most as a boy. Anyone who has watched him talk a nervous amateur through a simple dish on television has seen that instinct at work: he treats plain food with real respect.

When he was ten he moved back to Melbourne, living in Edithvale with his father and brothers. His father’s work took him away from home a great deal, which meant a teenage Torode spent more time than most in the kitchen, cooking for himself and for other people. It was less a hobby than a job description waiting to be filled in.

Leaving school for the stove

At sixteen he left school and went to catering college, which in Australia at the time meant learning the classical French repertoire alongside the pragmatic realities of a busy service. His first proper kitchen was Le Coq Au Vin in Aspendale, on Melbourne’s bayside, and his apprenticeship took him through several establishments in nearby Beaumaris. This was hands on training in the old style: long hours, hot passes and a chef breathing down your neck, and it gave him the technical grounding that later let him break the rules on purpose.

Landing in London and the Conran years

Torode moved to the United Kingdom in 1991, arriving at a moment when London dining was about to change completely. Within a year he was working for Terence Conran, first at Le Pont de la Tour beside Tower Bridge and then at Quaglino’s, the enormous, glamorous, brass and mirrors basement restaurant that more or less defined the mid nineties in the capital. He was a sous chef in kitchens that served hundreds of covers a night, and the pace of it stayed with him.

Those were formative years in more ways than one. It was at Quaglino’s that Torode first met Gregg Wallace, whose company supplied the restaurant’s vegetables, a piece of kitchen door trivia that turned into one of the most durable partnerships in British food broadcasting. The Conran connection also produced his first book: The Mezzo Cookbook, published by Conran Octopus in 1997, which went on to win a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Food Photography in 1998. Winning a Beard award for a British restaurant book was no small thing, and it put his name in front of a much wider audience.

In 1996 he began cooking on ITV’s This Morning, a slot he has returned to for the best part of thirty years. Daytime television is unforgiving: you have six minutes, a live audience of millions and no second takes. Torode turned out to be unusually good at it, largely because he cooks on camera exactly as he cooks off it, talking through what he is doing rather than performing it.

Building restaurants of his own

In 2000 he opened Smiths of Smithfield, taking over a handsome old warehouse building opposite London’s historic meat market and stacking it across four floors, from a ground floor bar and cafe up to a serious dining room at the top with a view over the market roofs. It was an ambitious piece of thinking about how a restaurant could work: one address, several moods, breakfast to late night. Smiths became a genuine London institution and a fixture of the Clerkenwell scene for two decades.

A second site followed in 2001, a smaller place called Cafeteria near Notting Hill Gate, which he later closed to make room for bigger projects. The biggest of those arrived in October 2009, when he opened The Luxe at Spitalfields Market: another multi level building, another mix of bar, cafe and restaurant, in a corner of east London that was changing fast. Under his leadership the combined turnover of The Luxe and Smiths of Smithfield reached 9.2 million pounds before he sold his shares and moved on.

Running kitchens at that scale is the part of his career that gets talked about least and matters most. It is why his television judging carries weight. When he tells a contestant that a dish will not survive a real service, he is speaking from years of standing on a pass at half past eight on a Friday night.

Twenty years of MasterChef

In 2005 the BBC relaunched MasterChef with a new format and new presenters, and Torode was chosen for the job alongside Gregg Wallace, taking over from Gary Rhodes. What followed was one of the most successful reinventions in British food television. The show grew from a modest afternoon programme into a primetime fixture, spawned Celebrity MasterChef and Junior MasterChef, and by 2011 had been sold to twenty five countries.

Torode has often said that what he liked most about it was that nothing is scripted. The cameras are there to catch what actually happens between the judges and the cooks, including the silences. His own approach on the show was consistent: taste first, talk second, and always explain why. He fronted the programme from that 2005 relaunch until 2025, a twenty year run that few presenters in any genre manage.

Alongside MasterChef he has popped up across British television, from New British Kitchen on the Good Food channel to guest turns on The One Show, Loose Women and The Graham Norton Show. He is also a keen cyclist, which explains a memorable 2014 appearance on ITV4’s The Cycle Show.

The travelling cook

The second half of his broadcasting career belongs to the road. John Torode’s Australia, ten episodes made in 2014, retraced the flavours of his childhood and the people who shaped his appetite, and became the most watched programme on Good Food that year. He followed it with John Torode’s Argentina for BBC Two in 2015, a study of a country that thinks about beef more seriously than almost anywhere else, then John Torode’s Malaysian Adventure in 2016, The Korean Food Tour in 2017 and the broader John Torode’s Asia across 2017 and 2018.

John Torode’s Middle East arrived in 2018, and John Torode’s Ireland premiered on Food Network in July 2022. The format never varies much and that is the point: he finds the best local cook he can, gets in their kitchen, cooks their dish their way, and only then works out what he would do differently. It is a generous way to make food television, and the cookbook Sydney to Seoul, published in 2019, gathered up much of what he learned.

John and Lisa: a partnership in and out of the kitchen

In March 2019, Torode and the actress and food writer Lisa Faulkner were given a weekend cooking show of their own. John and Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen has been running on ITV on Sunday mornings ever since, and its charm is that it is not really a cookery show at all. It is two people who genuinely like cooking together, making the sort of food they would actually eat, bickering gently about seasoning.

The pair have since taken the partnership on the road with John and Lisa’s Food Trip Down Under, a five part ITV1 series broadcast in early 2024 exploring the food and drink of Western Australia, and into print with John and Lisa’s Kitchen, published by Quadrille in 2024. A follow up, John and Lisa’s Weeknight Dinners, is due from Quadrille on 24 September 2026, aimed squarely at the midweek problem of getting something good on the table quickly.

Faulkner, who won Celebrity MasterChef in 2010, brings a home cook’s perspective that balances his professional training nicely. He sharpens her technique, she keeps him honest about what people will actually make on a Tuesday. It is a good arrangement, and it comes across on screen.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch John Torode

See John in action in this video.

Signature dishes

Torode’s cooking sits at the meeting point of classical French training, Australian directness and a genuine appetite for Asian flavours. Roast chicken is the dish he returns to most often, the one tied to his grandmother’s kitchen, and he cooks it plainly and very well. Beef is his other great subject, serious enough that he devoted a whole book to it, and his steak masterclasses have become something of a signature on daytime television. From his travels come the dishes that have widened his repertoire: Malaysian curries, Korean barbecue and banchan, Middle Eastern mezze, and the salt and pepper squid that has followed him around for years. He is also, quietly, a very good baker of the everyday kind, and much of John and Lisa’s Kitchen is built around exactly that sort of unfussy home cooking.

Cookbooks

John is the author of books including The Mezzo Cookbook, Torode’s Thai Trip, MasterChef Goes Large, Good Mood Food, John Torode’s Beef, John Torode’s Chicken and Other Birds, Everyday MasterChef, MasterChef Kitchen Bible, My Kind of Food, Sydney to Seoul, John and Lisa’s Kitchen.

Personal life

Torode has four children. He has been with the actress and Celebrity MasterChef winner Lisa Faulkner since 2015, and the couple married on 24 October 2019 at Aynhoe Park in Oxfordshire. They live in London with their dog, Rory Gilmore, who has become a minor celebrity in his own right at book festivals. Torode is a committed cyclist, holds both Australian and British citizenship, and has supported a number of food related charitable causes, work recognised in his 2022 MBE. In June 2022 he was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the Birthday Honours, and he received the award from Prince William at Buckingham Palace in February 2023.

John in context

John Torode is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Gary Rhodes and Anne Burrell.

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John Torode FAQ

Where is John Torode from?
He was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, on 23 July 1965, and spent part of his childhood in Maitland, New South Wales, with his grandmother. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1991 and holds both Australian and British citizenship.

How long did John Torode present MasterChef?
He fronted MasterChef on BBC One from the show’s relaunch in 2005 until 2025, a run of twenty years that also took in Celebrity MasterChef and Junior MasterChef.

Which restaurants did John Torode own?
He opened Smiths of Smithfield in London in 2000, Cafeteria near Notting Hill Gate in 2001 and The Luxe at Spitalfields Market in 2009. Earlier he cooked as a sous chef for the Conran Group at Le Pont de la Tour and Quaglino’s.

Is John Torode married?
Yes. He married the actress and food writer Lisa Faulkner on 24 October 2019 at Aynhoe Park in Oxfordshire. The two present John and Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen together on ITV.

What cookbooks has John Torode written?
More than a dozen, including The Mezzo Cookbook (1997), Good Mood Food, John Torode’s Beef, My Kind of Food (2015), Sydney to Seoul (2019) and John and Lisa’s Kitchen (2024). A new title, John and Lisa’s Weeknight Dinners, is due in September 2026.

Does John Torode have an MBE?
Yes. He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to food and charity, and received it from Prince William at Buckingham Palace in 2023.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, The Guardian, Penguin Books, BBC Good Food Show.