Sumac. Rosewater. Pomegranate. Saffron. These ingredients are now so common in Australian cooking that you can find them on any decent cafe menu. But that wasn’t always the case.

And while it’s hard to credit one person with a whole cultural shift towards the acceptance of Middle Eastern flavours, now and then a chef comes along who changes the way a neighbourhood, a city, a country thinks about the food of its residents.

In Melbourne, where the Lebanese population has influenced how we eat for half a century, one of the chefs who made that influence undeniably integral to our identity was Greg Malouf, this year’s winner of the Vittoria Coffee Legend Award, which celebrates an inspirational individual who’s made an outstanding contribution to the hospitality industry over many years.

Malouf, who died in September at the age of 64, was raised in Melbourne by Lebanese parents who did not approve of his cooking ambitions. But the call was so strong that he left home at 18 to pursue his passion. Study turned to work, which eventually turned to travel, and he cooked in France, Belgium, Austria and Hong Kong before returning to Melbourne in 1991.

Once home, his career received a push from Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack, food writers with The Age’s Epicure, as it was then known.

“Greg had just returned to Melbourne from cheffing overseas when my friends John and Di Dixon – part of a consortium of brilliant film and media types who had just bought a pub in South Melbourne called O’Connell’s – asked Terry and me who they should install as chef,” Dupleix says.

“We said Greg Malouf. He cooked for them, they loved it, and he went on to shape that slightly random opportunity into a lifetime of creating wonderful food in Australia and around the world.”

O’Connell’s was the restaurant that brought him back to his origins, and it was there that he forged his own style of cooking – a melding of his Lebanese background and the modern techniques and plating styles he’d learnt along the way.

Apart from his restaurants, which laid the groundwork for other genre-defining venues in the Middle Eastern space, Malouf was integral to teaching a new generation of cooks – both home cooks and professional chefs – about the wonders of Middle Eastern food.

His eight cookbooks, written with his one-time wife and lifelong collaborator Lucy Malouf, have been massively influential, and rightly stand alongside the works of Maggie Beer, Stephanie Alexander and others, as literal guidebooks to our evolving tastes as a country. Their acclaim was international in scope too – in 2019 his book SUQAR: Desserts & Sweets from the Modern Middle East won the James Beard Award for baking and desserts.

Those books were the starting point for chef Tom Sarafian, who came across one of them at a bookshop in 2010 and was blown away by the elegance with which Malouf presented the flavours of a Lebanese childhood. It was inspirational enough that Sarafian sought Malouf out as a mentor, working with him in both London and Melbourne.

The stories he tells are the opposite of the screaming, demanding cliche. “He was very, very knowledgeable, and very patient and kind and generous with his time,” says Sarafian, whose last permanent chef gig was in 2021 at Bar Saracen.

Wouldn’t that be a fitting legacy for Malouf to leave us? To know that genius in the kitchen can be wed with kindness, with multiculturalism, with the desire to pass on a passion for life and all of its edible bounty? That is my hope for the way that Australia remembers and honours Greg Malouf.