BRISBANE restaurateur John Kilroy, a loyal ally and committed supporter of the Australian beef industry, has passed away in Brisbane aged 73.

John had been suffering from cancer for some time and was in great pain during his final days.

Nobody should underestimate the impact that he had on the evolution of the Australian beef industry, through his high-profile, up-market Brisbane steak restaurant, Cha Cha Char, established in 1997.

In so many ways, John was a pioneer and trailblazer in exploring the connection between restaurant diners and what they are prepared to pay for the piece of red meat on their plate.

In our opinion, his defining contribution, and greatest legacy to the beef industry, was in giving quality beef its identity.

John seized on the value of giving each beef item on his menu a back-story, a provenance and a production history that engaged diners in ways never seen before. He treated menu beef descriptions the same as the wine industry does with the story behind a fine shiraz.

Up to that point, beef steaks appearing on restaurant menus were described by cut; occasionally days on feed or words like ‘grainfed’; and perhaps including a brand name.

And customers loved it. Restaurants across Australia took their cues from John’s trail-blazing in menu descriptions and explanations for beef. Virtually every steak restaurant and up-market pub steakhouse menu in Australia today carries his fingerprints.

Cha Cha quickly became nationally renowned as a steak dining venue when it opened almost 30 years ago, attracting the rich and famous. People like golfer Greg Norman and Hollywood movie stars regularly took a booth.

The venue closed in 2020 when the waterside Eagle Street Pier precinct in which it was located was closed for redevelopment.

Hospitality in his veins

A natural hospitality host, John grew up in St George in western Queensland, and got his financial start buying run-down bush pubs and revitalising them with quality food and live entertainment, before selling them on and repeating the process.

He stepped into the metropolitan market opening Cha Cha Char in Brisbane in 1997, and also operated the successful Wanganui Gardens reception venue, an equally successful Darwin restaurant called Char, and other steak restaurant joint ventures in Singapore and elsewhere.

Hospitality was in his veins, and he did it better than just about anybody else. Every single patron in Cha Cha’s felt welcome, and appreciated. The fact that the wine list had eye-watering mark-ups didn’t matter to customers – it was all about the sense of occasion. John would sit down and join patrons at their tables, often sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of red meat, production systems, meat science and specific brands.

Apart from menu description, he was an early pioneer of secondary cuts on high-end steak restaurant menus. Few had seen slow-cooked Wagyu beef cheeks on high-end menus before Cha Cha came along. Unusual items like Brahman hump, flatiron steaks and intercostal meat suddenly had a following, and all this happened long before they became mainstream.

In 1997 or 1998, Cha Cha Char became the first restaurant in Australia to offer Wagyu beef to customers. The price – $100 a serve – looked eye-watering at the time, but it did not deter curious patrons. The first intake of purebred Wagyu animals bred by Peter Cabassi were fed at Dugald Cameron’s Aronui feedlot near Dalby, and left a blockbusting impression on the small group (including this correspondent) who sampled highly-marbled Wagyu beef in Australia for the first time.

Aronui and the Cabassi business, Kobe Cuisine, were later bought by AA Co, and arguably became the genesis from which sprouted today’s massive AA Co Wagyu business – arguably among the largest in the world.

Cha Char became the venue in 1998 chosen to launch the nation’s world-leading Meat Standards Australia grading program, trialled in Queensland’s southeast region a year earlier.

As the Wagyu industry in Australia progressed, in around 2001 or 2002, John hosted a Hilton Foods Masterclass at Cha Cha to celebrate the milestone of the first Australian Wagyu carcases to grade marbling score 12, the equivalent of Japanese A5 grade.

John was a primary driver of the earliest branded beef taste test competitions in Australia, via the Paddocks to Palates movement that explored the subtle changes that ration ingredients, pasture species and time-of-year could have on flavour profiles. For many years he continued to actively support, through sponsorship, branded beef competitions across the industry, including the annual AWA Wagyu branded beef competitions and Brisbane Show branded beef events.

Re-thinking beef

“John was an absolute innovator – he was a one-of-a-kind, who made everybody in the industry re-think the way they looked at beef,” said Frank Correnti, who worked alongside John as head chef at Cha Cha Char from its early days through to 2006.

“I don’t think I have ever seen anyone with that much passion or knowledge for the topic of what constitutes good beef. He was an out-of-the-box thinker, that’s for sure,” Frank said.

“Suddenly the history and provenance behind a piece of meat on a plate had a value. That had never happened before.”

“It also helped make suppliers (brand managers) accountable for what was being served. There was still a lot of eating quality inconsistency in the industry when Cha Cha first opened, but brand managers were lining up, trying to get their product on the menu. It really meant something to be on the list.”

“He was definitely out there, and way ahead of his time in this,” Frank said. “His fingerprints remain across the entire restaurant food service industry.”

“Above all else, John loved to learn, and constantly pumped industry people he was associated with for information and knowledge about latest trends.

“At one point he came up with a scratch-and-sniff card carrying the aroma of a fine piece of beef, as a novelty promotional item. His ideas were endless. He developed a high-end mobile food catering unit for up-market remote events like bush race meetings, designed to produce high quality steaks in remote locations. He tried numerous steak cooking technologies including conveyor grills and pizza ovens, used for early forms of reverse sear.

“John would be overseas somewhere and ring me at 2am, enthused about a new idea or cooking concept he’d just seen – such was his passion. His knowledge of food, and beef in particular, was outstanding,” Frank said.

Outside of the restaurant industry, John was a keen sports fisherman, and often travelled with this correspondent to compete in North Queensland game finishing tournaments.

By any measure, a life well-lived.

• No funeral or memorial notice has yet been posted. We will add it here, should some information be forthcoming.