Matt Moran

Matt Moran AM (b. 1969), chef and restaurateur, grew up on a dairy farm at rural Badgery’s Creek, near Sydney, and left school at fifteen to pursue an apprenticeship. Having trained at La Belle Helene and with Stefano Manfredi of Restaurant Manfredi, he launched his first restaurant, the Paddington Inn Bistro in Sydney with business partner Peter Sullivan in 1991. Three years after it opened it received a Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide chef’s hat. Moran, with Sullivan, proceeded to run Moran’s at Potts Point before launching ARIA in 1999. Located in the controversial ‘toaster’ building beside the Opera House, ARIA achieved instant renown. In its first year of operation it was given two hats in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food Guide, and although it subsequently lost a hat, Moran had managed to win it back by 2006, and it still had two hats in 2018. (ARIA Brisbane, opened in 2009, has two hats also.) While expanding his restaurant empire, in recent years Moran has acted as a consultant to Singapore Airlines and appeared on television in MasterChef, My Restaurant Rules and Matt Moran’s Paddock to Plate (meat for his establishments comes from his own Central Tablelands family farm). His most recent books include When I get home (2009), Dinner at Matt’s (2011) Matt’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook (2014) and Matt Moran’s Australian Food: coast to country (2017).

This photograph was displayed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Shoot the Chef exhibition in 2004, and the National Portrait Gallery’s Masters of Fare exhibition in 2004 – 2005.

Gift of the artists 2005
© Murray Fredericks and Lisa Giles