Editor's Note:
This is an edited transcript of the interview.

Today's Australia is not just known for kangaroos, koalas and the Uluru. It is fast becoming a centre for gastronomical delights, offering different cuisines.

Traditional Australian cooking has much in common with the English pot roast meal - heavy, lacking imagination and dull.

Two things can be said to have rescued the country from culinary destitution - immigration and Tony Bilson.

Long hailed by many as the Godfather of Australian cooking, chef Tony Bilson almost single-handedly revolutionised Australian cuisine.

He started his first restaurant - La Pomme d'Or - in 1971... and went on to work in many famous hotels.. and to open more restaurants, each one more spectacular than his last.

His latest and eighth restaurant, The Canard is low-key, has unpretentious simplicity, and delivers simple luxury on a plate.

Hailing from Melbourne, and having studied in a Grammar school, the path of a chef was the last thing anyone would have expected him to have taken.

SHANKAR:
Tony Bilson, welcome to In Conversation..

Tony: Thank you.

SHANKAR: A lot of people call you the godfather of Australian cooking. What's Australian cooking?

Tony: Well I guess since the post war the first Second World War, the society in Australia changed a lot. Now we've now one of the biggest and best wine producers in the world. And along with that, there's been a lot of cultural change.

It's my point I guess that cooking is very central to culture. And I think it was one said was peripheral to culture if you like on the side of culture but now it's firmly in the main stream and a lot of people think I guess I had a lot to do with that. I'm certainly not entirely responsible but its been as one does ... you do what you can as you go through life and that's where a great privilege to be able to do the things open up to them.

SHANKAR: But there's a lot of influence in the French, isn't it?

Tony: Very much so. And that's because as I said I think Australia is really changed to a wine culture at that time. Mind you I've always been a great admirer of French culture anyway. I was fascinated with French culture from a very young age. I love the material of nature of belly pork in Paris. And I was very attracted to the Bohemian way of life I guess.

SHANKAR: So you think you've introduced basically a French influence into what was being just a roast and potatoes dinner in Australia.

Tony: Well, I think so. The roast and potatoes dinner started changing very early and you must remember that the most popular exotic food in Australia was always been Chinese. We have a very strong Chinese population in Australia since the gold rush days. And every Australian town has its local Chinese restaurant. If you think about the flavoured structures, beer and tea since the flavours of Cantonese cuisine. Wherereas I don't see wines ... I think that if you are going to drink wine then I think that French cooking is the most highly developed and sophisticated has the most sophisticated way of flavours within that cooking.

SHANKAR: But how did that switch happen. I mean with a lot of Cantonese cooking taking place and being that popular, how was that switch to wine growing and therefore cooking with influence of the French happen?

Tony: I think that really the post war migration of European migrants then in the late forties and till the mid fifties was very important. Not that we have a lot of French people coming up, we certainly have a lot of Italians. The styles of wine made in Australia are very unlike Italian styles. Italian styles tend to be a lot flatter and maybe not as much fruits as Australian wines. My particular interest happens to be in French food. I read from a very young age and I love the whole romanticism of the history of French cooking and I guess there wasn't it didn't seem to be any sense of culture or didn't have a sense of culture or continuity in Italian cooking that I got from from French cooking.

SHANKAR: Well when you said the romanticism of French cooking, what do you mean?

Tony: Well, from the development from the early days of in the 18th century through to the classics of 19th century to late 19th century early 20th century. And then the way of the craft as you like, the artist developed through modern cooks like Alexander dermain ??

I love the way that there is progression of handing on with the cultures .. through restaurants and through cooking. It is a constant quest for excellence within the new culture environment, I mean to live in a day when sort of two days to get from Lyon to Paris by car, and now takes you one and a quarter hours by train.

So life is speeded up enormously and over that time, there's been a lot of different influences on cooks. We can now get produce from all over the world and cook in Singapore. I can food flown in from France, or Australia or Italy or South America, wherever depending on what I want to cook. With somebody in the early days, of course I had to rely completely on the local produce that was available. So I guess the thing that limits us now in cooking is the range of our imagination. Some people I think, tend to make food a lot more complex because of that. They tend to get confused and start to throw a lot of different ingredients together and sometimes there is confusion and a lot of us call it confusion cooking. Whereas I tend to like to keep things simple and I tend to use the Japanese sense of ecstatic I guess. It was in my food.

SHANKAR: So would you say that Australian cooking is basically fusion cooking with a domination of the French influence?

Tony: French food for me when I am in France doesn't tend to be as strongly flavoured as French food or French influence food in Australia. Our flavours tends to be stronger sort of gutsy if you like. And I think that reflects the difference between Australian wines and French wines.

SHANKAR: So in what way do you think Australian cooking, what direction do you think it is going now?

Tony: Thai food was having a rather large influence on Australian cooking but I think that's now diminished and French food the French influence are becoming dominant again. But there's no doubt it's more of the cooking of the individual now. You can't talk in generalisations about Australian cooking... I think it's the way that one person cooks, I mean the way that Tetsuya cooks is Tetsuya's food, the way that Neil Perry cooks is Neil's food and the way that I cook is my food.

And I find even within my own food, sometimes I'm cooking really very classical classical French with no alterations, very classical, and other times I am using all sorts of other influences to do dishes. Its not as though you can infinity as we used to be able to I guess.