‘I don’t have a death wish’: Meet the Aussie chef who swapped restaurants for the wild

Cooking shows are boring, and supermarket shopping is too easy. So says Mario Kalpou, a Sydney chef who ditched restaurants to hunt his own food in the wild. His debut TV series, Man Eats Wild , saw him travel from the Amazon jungle to the ice floes of Greenland.

Still firmly of the belief that food “tastes way better, and the reward is much sweeter, once you’ve almost killed yourself catching it”, he’s back with a new action-adventure foodie travelogue, Deadliest Dinners Australia . Over eight episodes, Kalpou dodges sharks and crocodiles, hunts wild buffalo, abseils down cliffs to fish off rocks lashed by waves, and maroons himself for a week on a raft on the Great Barrier Reef. And when he’s dodged death and caught his prize, he pops on a singlet and cooks it right then and there, with a fancy French sauce.

“The whole point is me showing these elements in an exciting and adrenaline-fuelled manner, because I find food shows very boring,” says Kalpou, on the phone from the Greek island of Tinos. He’s there attending a family wedding with his Australian wife, Danielle, with whom he lives in Florida.

“I’m a chef, and even I can’t watch a cooking segment on TV for 20 minutes. You lose interest! But if you’ve got some crazy guy abseiling down a 600-foot cliff to catch a fish and then he cooks for you, well, that’s a bit more interesting.”

Having grown up between his mother’s home near Sydney’s Wentworth Hotel, where she worked as a waitress, and his grandparents’ pig farm in rural western Sydney, Kalpou’s appreciation for both ends of the food industry is ingrained. He went on to open the Zagat-awarded Old Library restaurant in Cronulla, before deciding he was done with commercial kitchens.

“I don’t miss drunk patrons and staying up ’til three in the morning every night. But I have a lot of respect for hospitality. For me, now, it’s all about reconnecting people to the outdoors, getting them to eat clean food, respecting nature and getting healthy. I think that’s a really big missing part of today’s culture. I’m hoping this show can get people to start thinking more adventurously.”

After a stint in New Zealand operating an extreme adventure lodge, he left for the US nine years ago, where he now divides his time between Miami and his Montana ranch. “It’s a perfect mix for me – I’m out on the ocean, and then I’ve got the mountains.”

In the new series, Kalpou also garners knowledge from traditional owners.

“Everywhere I go in the world, I meet local indigenous people. They are the original harvesters of the land. They have knowledge that is far beyond anything that I can bring to the table … The Aboriginal community in Tiwi was no different. They taught me a lot and I had a great time with them. Understanding how they’ve been doing it for thousands of years was one of my highlights of making the show.”

He’s disappointed that some of the most dangerous aspects of the shoot weren’t caught on camera, though. Specifically, when he was charged by a wild buffalo in the outback, and the camera operator stopped filming and ran.