How a Perth chef turned a love of barbecue into one of the planet’s best open-fire dining restaurants

Burnt Ends in Singapore is my favourite restaurant on the planet.

Bookings for the restaurant – not least at its 16-seat counter that faces the open fire kitchen where chefs grill over charcoal – disappear immediately.

Full disclosure: I’m far from a neutral observer when it comes to Burnt Ends. I’m

lucky to count Dave Pynt – the restaurant’s Perth-born chef-partner – as a close

friend, plus I’ve worked with the Burnt Ends crew in various capacities over the past 11 years.

Burnt Ends chef Dave Pynt is bringing his amazing food to Perth

Thankfully, there’s enough empirical evidence at hand to support my argument that Burnt Ends is a restaurant of substance.

The restaurant was awarded a Michelin star in 2018 and has maintained its one-star rating since. Burnt Ends has also featured in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list since 2016 and has been ranked as high as 34 th on the influential albeit controversial industry-voted list.

(Pro-tip: although the main restaurant books out fast, the cocktail bar also serves food including a menu of the restaurant’s greatest hits and usually has seats available.)

Pynt has also airlifted the Burnt Ends party to destinations around the world including Tokyo, Los Angeles, Bangkok and back to London: the city where the Burnt Ends story started after Pynt’s original Burnt Enz pop-up at an East London roastery during the summer of 2012.

In May, the story comes full circle when Burnt Ends takes over beachside Cottesloe restaurant Indigo Oscar for the weekend and brings its smoky brand of modern barbecue cooking to town.

Guests can make a play for one of three services: a 10-course dinner tasting menu on Friday May 10 or Saturday May 11; or an eight-course lunch on Saturday May 11.

Indigo Oscar.

For diners, this pop-up will be their chance to taste Burnt Ends signatures such as the burnt flour grissini with taramasalata, smoked quail eggs, Jamaican jerk chicken wings, steak frites and pavlova. For Pynt and his team, it’ll be a chance to cook (in-situ) with some of the West Australian ingredients served at his Singapore, open-fire restaurant: a restaurant, incidentally, that buys ingredients as well as serves diners from all over the world.

“I really think Western Australia is home to some of the best produce in the world,” says Pynt who also buys black truffles from David Coomer’s Manjimup-based Hound & Hunter and carries plenty of West Australian wine in the restaurant’s all-Australian cellar.

“We can buy in octopus from anywhere on the planet, but we use Fremantle

octopus because it cooks really well on our grills and it’s delicious. When we choose to put marron on our menu, it’s because we feel that it’s better than any lobster or crayfish in the world.”

While it’s been a joy to track Pynt’s career trajectory as a friend (in a nutshell:

Balthazar, a stint at trailblazing Sydney restaurant Tetsuya, helping open Restaurant Amuse in East Perth, then heading to Europe to work at places such as legendary Basque barbecue restaurant Etxebarri and Copenhagen’s Noma) the pro-WA booster in me is equally delighted.

Here, after all, is a West Australian cook that’s gone out into the world, put in the

hard yards and is reaping the rewards of that effort.

(See also Shane Osborn – the first Australian chef to helm a two-Michelin-starred restaurant – of Hong Kong’s Arcane; and Luke Armstrong of The Kitchen in Bacc hanalia in Singapore.) By the end of next year, Burnt Ends will have opened a London outpost at luxury department story Harrods as well as released its first cookbook.

(More disclosure: I spent the past year co-writing it with Pynt.)

If Pynt could parlay a high school job washing dishes at a City Beach restaurant into a world-renowned restaurant in Singapore that’s on the up, it stands to reason that any other WA cook with similar drive could reach similar heights.

“Always eat more, drink more, read more,” says Pynt when asked about advice for

young chefs.

“It’s actually simple. Go and eat as much as you can in as many different places whether it’s high-end or low-end. Go and build a library of all these different flavour profiles in your mind and collect all these experiences. Try and learn

from what other people are sharing.”

Pynt also encourages young chefs to learn about the business side of running a

restaurant sooner rather than later. Admittedly, this side of the industry isn’t quite as structured as the cooking side of things, yet it remains crucial knowledge for any cook that hopes to one day own their own business.

“It’s not as simple as just reading a book,” says Pynt who studied cooking at TAFE.

“Get a little bit of hustle in your life and make yourself feel a little bit uncomfortable and force yourself to learn about and deal with things like managing food costs.

“You’ve got to work hard in this industry and buy into it. You’ve got to read books. You’ve got to eat out. If you don’t, you won’t succeed.”

Tickets to the Burnt Ends pop-up at Indigo Oscar go on sale at 9am on Thursday

April 18 and are available online.