Everybody loves George. That’s certainly how it seemed in Pretoria last weekend, when all three of the outgoing MasterChef Australia judges, plus several of their satellite hosts, descended on the Time Square casino and hotel complex for an exhilarating three days of food, glorious food. While you know, if you read, that not everybody loves George Calombaris – certainly, some of his staff or former staff would beg to differ, what with his having landed in a pressure cooker of uncomfortable hot water over his habits in the matter of paying his restaurant staff – you could have been forgiven for concluding that all that must have been put in the past.

If Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan both got warm and appreciative audiences in Pretoria – they did – George’s bordered on adulation. He’s a lovable little guy, empathetic and very funny – his off-the-cuff humour is such that it’s no stretch to imagine he could have been a stand-up comedian – and the crowds in his packed masterclasses and public food demos just lapped him up.

Everybody wants a piece of these food show hosts, and it took me the full three days to finally pin Calombaris down, in a tiny corner of a VIP suite adjacent to the huge demo theatres, where he and his Endemol colleagues and sundry Time Square officials were having Champagne to toast the end of a highly successful event. Unsure of whether he’d be contractually prevented from talking about the controversy that has dogged him for three years, or even whether he’d want to at all, he immediately disarms me with a warm “Of course! No problem with that, mate.” And warm is the word for the 40-year-old Calombaris. He has a personality that simply won’t be turned off, which perhaps explains why his fans won’t easily turn their backs on him. The man is charm personified.

Which must be annoying for those who were affected by his bad old habits, for which he calls himself “the pin-up boy”. In a pistachio shell: Australia’s Fair Work Ombud fined Calombaris’s company, Made, Aus$200,000 for failure to pay, to his waiting staff, set rates, penalty rates, casual “loadings”, overtime and other allowances that were due to them. No excuse-making would be welcome for that by any of his present or former staff. Nor does he make one.

Calombaris told his country’s ABC network at the time: “It’s called not having the proper infrastructure in the background to make sure that the classifications are being checked and done correctly. To be on top of that, all this stuff, there’s a whole myriad of stuff that needs to be ticked and checked and checked and tripled-checked that weren’t being done.

“There is no excuse for what I did. There is no excuse.”

In Pretoria last weekend, Calombaris did not try to bat off questions about the imbroglio. “Firstly, I’m grateful. To the 600-odd team members that work for me; I owe them a lot, because they’ve stood by me through what has been a really tumultuous three years.” This from a man who takes a bus load of “his team” once a month to a tough prison near Melbourne to counsel “young first-offenders” and try to coax them into a better life once paroled. Calombaris spends time in prisoners’ cells, and the passion with which he speaks of this would be hard to fabricate.

That controversy is a subject he turned to more than once during his paid masterclasses (where everyone in the audience is served all the dishes he makes, plated up) and in the free public demos: he’s keen to make amends, he’s regretful; and while he sees himself as the poster boy for such bad behaviour – to wit, he got caught, thousands of restaurateurs around the world didn’t – it’s prevalent throughout the industry (worldwide) and he knows, now, that it needs to be dealt with. But there are those, understandably, who don’t buy his apologetic line, who think his latterday stance is disingenuous.

He perseveres with his line regardless. “The industry’s an interesting place and it has been for a long time. I wanna jolt it, and the practices that we all practise. It’s the same everywhere, I’m not the only one, but I wanna make change. I’ve obviously been the pin-up boy forever – don’t get me wrong, it’s pushed me to some very dark places. I’m lucky that I’ve got my family, I’ve got my kids, I’ve got my team members.”

There are seven head chefs back in Melbourne, he says. “Some of them have been with me for 12, 13 years, and I’m not saying that should be the validation of why I should believe I’m an okay person; I just know that hospitality needs to change worldwide, globally; it shouldn’t be an industry where it’s based on how many hours you worked.”

It’s not clear at first where he’s headed here, but it becomes clear – he’s talking about mental health and the industry’s care of staff, or lack of it.

“You don’t need to do hundred-hour weeks to be a great chef. People burn out. There’s so much going on in the world – of chefs taking their lives – you need to wake up and think, what is this? Is it mental health? And that’s something that I’m working very hard on at the restaurant.

“I’ve learnt how to meditate … I’ve got my team involved in that. Not only that but the way they eat, exercise; we’ve got GPS trackers on my chefs, a bit like football players. Why should football players be treated in a different light to my chefs? My chefs are elite athletes. My waiters, my waitresses, they’re elite. I should be measuring them, giving them the support they need.

“What I’ve gone through in the last couple of years I don’t wish upon anyone, and I say that with my hand on my heart. And I know I’ve divided a whole society of people globally where there’s obviously people that will absolutely love me and understand it and have read past the headline, because obviously, knowing journalism, I’ve learnt that it’s very ‘clickbait’ these days; it’s all about a name and a word, and that’s sad, but in saying that there’s been some incredible journalism that’s given me renewed faith and value that there are people out there doing the right thing and people that read beyond the first line and go, okay, shit, is that what he’s trying to do?”

The weekend in Pretoria has seen both Calombaris and his judge-mates Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan immerse themselves in South African culture. They each made many mentions of chakalaka and “Klippies and Coke”, and their reception clearly moved them – fuelled, perhaps, by the controversy and claims that have surrounded the trio’s decision not to renew their contracts for a new season. It was presumed that the three resigned in support of Calombaris, in solidarity, but all insist that a severing of their relationship with the show had been coming for a long time.

What’s next for the three? They’ve formed their own production company, called GGM (after Gary, George and Matt), and are focusing their minds on an initial slate of what Mehigan, in one of his masterclasses, referred to as “four or five” new food television projects.

“You know,” Calombaris continues, “I came here thinking, George, you’ve got to leave the hard times that you’ve had behind you and come here and give people your time, your effort, your everything, because they’ve paid money to come and see you. This country’s a wonderful country [he’s remarking on the level of support he’s felt in Pretoria]. Don’t get me wrong, even in Australia, not once has someone walked up to me in Melbourne and gone, ‘how dare you’? – not one. Of course, there’s the keyboard warriors, there will aways be, and I’ve always said it – I’m gonna be the lamb in the middle of the arena, I’m not gonna be sitting in the bleachers judging and heckling, I’m gonna be in the arena, so judge me all you want and heckle if you want, but I’m gonna stay true to my values.”

Despite his attempts to paint a picture of an easy, amicable departure from the Ten Network, he inadvertently casts light on perhaps a less rosy picture when he elaborates. On the GGM venture, he says: “The three of us have been looking at doing something outside of MasterChef for some time. We probably wanted to do another year; it didn’t happen, because the stars and the moon didn’t align – but that’s okay; there’s a lot of moving parts, there’s production people, there’s networks, they’ve each got their agendas and I respect that.

“I loved my time (at Ten) and I respect the network. I respect Endemol Shine that have made the show, because without them… they’re the only ones that got me to do it. They gave me a platform…”

In that, there does seem to be a hint of embarrassment in how things turned out in 2019 – a year when the trio clearly did not expect to terminate their relationship with Ten.

But, water under the bridge. Now, the three are open to ideas. “If, say, UK television want the three of us to come and do something that’s bespoke and interesting and meets the values that we want, we’ll do it. We know that between those three names there’s a brand in itself, and we’ve worked hard to produce that brand in the past 11 years.”

This Greek Australian had, he says, a lightbulb moment while in Pretoria.

“It’s been an emotional couple of days being in South Africa,” says Calombaris, who says he’s toying with a possible series about the Greek community in South Africa. He is the champion of modern Australian Greek cuisine, and his newest book is titled simply Greek. It is so new that a pre-release batch was dispatched to Pretoria. I bought one (full disclosure: I paid full price) and it is a seriously beautiful and rich collection of his Greek recipes given his own twist, with a few of his mom’s traditional recipes thrown in.

“I know there’s a lot of shit going on here; there’s shit going on everywhere, but I really do love this country, and what I did think is jeez, there’s a massive Greek community here, there’s a lot of similarities in South African culture and my culture; I’d love to spend a month here filming, find an amazing production company here, do 12 amazing episodes, even find a migrant story here, find those migrant Greeks that have come here and they’re doing amazing things, look at their food, look at South Africa and meld it together…”

If George Calombaris does return to South Africa to make a food series about our Greek community – there’s clearly potential there, although there’s a leap from idea to fruition – one thing he won’t be short of is a respectful and appreciative audience. The Appetite Fest in Pretoria was the proof of that slice of syrup-laden baklava. DM