David Pynt is as true blue as they come. He’s a larrikin who loves to play with fire. He laughs and says “fuck” a lot. He also loves a good yarn, and after a decade at the helm of Burnt Ends, the Michelin-starred Aussie barbeque restaurant he started in Singapore’s Chinatown in 2013, he knew it was time to tell his story.
“We’d just moved [the restaurant] to Dempsey Hill, and we were getting asked by a lot of our guests, what’s your story? What do you stand for?” he tells Broadsheet. “It got to 10 years and we were like, fuck, if we don’t do it now, are we ever going to do it?”
As the showbiz saying goes, you gotta give the people what they want. Pynt has delivered. Burnt Ends is part memoir, part cookbook and a complete statement of intent from one of Australia’s heavyweight culinary exports.
What’s striking about Burnt Ends is how eclectic its pages are. Co-authored by respected Aussie food journalist and Broadsheet’s former Perth editor-at-large, Max Veenhuyzen, the tome is as much a distillation of the restaurant’s inner workings as it is the no-rules attitude that powers it.
There are sections devoted to the machinations of the kitchen; its custom four-tonne, dual-cavity oven and four elevation grills. There are stories shared by MVPs in the Burnt Ends journey from pop-up in East London (then Burnt Enz) to a regular entrant on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants long list. There’s even a six-page comic.
But unlike some of the other cookbooks authored by Australian chefs this year, the 70 recipes and 16 techniques contained within are “pure product”, according to Pynt.
“I never wanted to do recipe tests or adapt these for someone’s two-burner gas grill at home. I was like, we use these recipes every day. It’s literally, pick it up, put it in the book. Go have some fucking fun.”
Included are some of the restaurant’s iconic dishes, from the Burnt Ends sanger to the duck liver parfait tartlet. Most requested from diners was the beef marmalade, but he loves the idea of people peeling smoked quail eggs and “hard-grilling” Wagyu steaks, à la Burnt Ends.
When it comes to revealing his acclaimed restaurant’s secrets, Pynt says he has altruistic reasons for leaving nothing off the table.
“If you want things to improve and grow, you need to share. I look at what the future holds and what my contribution could be. And if I hold everything back, am I hindering that growth or helping it?
“We’re an open kitchen, so what the fuck are we gonna hide anyway?”
Burnt Ends is on sale now.
