Burnt Ends: WA chef Dave Pynt’s love of wood-fire cooking earned him a Michelin star and a foodie following

How did Dave Pynt go from studying commercial cooking at TAFE in Perth to head chef and owner of Burnt Ends, the one Michelin-starred barbecue joint in Singapore currently ranked the 24th-best restaurant in Asia? Chatting from the popular 99-capacity Dempsey Hill bar and restaurant, which serves Blue Ridge marron from Yanmah with Manjimup truffles and woodfired pavlova alongside crab with chilli, black, or white pepper (a must in Singers), the 39-year-old describes a journey that has seen him work alongside some of the world’s culinary heavyweights. It all began growing up in Floreat, City Beach and Scarborough. “Every house we had, my dad would put a wood-fire oven in,” Pynt chuckles. “My mum and my grandma were really good cooks. “I got to eat pretty well as a child and I suppose I liked eating more than I liked cooking to start, but then that reversed.” His first gig was washing dishes at an Italian restaurant during high school. After TAFE, he worked at Balthazar and Restaurant Amuse, where he enjoyed the high pressure and standards of fine dining. Pynt also got some gilt-edged advice from a Balthazar chef, who told him to “show some initiative . . . go and buy some books, some knives, eat out at good restaurants”. In a nutshell: teach yourself the only way possible and explore the culinary world. So, after a stint at famed Sydney eatery Tetsuya’s, Pynt, in his own words’, “f…ed off overseas” in 2010. Rather than join Australia’s army of boozy backpackers, the ambitious sandgroper traversed the globe from one kitchen to another, landing at Copenhagen’s legendary Noma, Spain’s Asador Etxebarri, and London’s St. John Bread and Wine — restaurants boasting Michelin stars and nosebleed rankings on world’s-best lists. He also helped Nuno Mendes on his Loft project, which saw the celebrated London-based Portuguese chef invite diners to his own home for avant-garde tasting menus. Pynt’s MO was to simply inquire about a job via email, arrange his own travel and accommodation, then show up. Over a few years, he clocked up plenty of hours in different roles in globally renowned kitchens. “I got a lot of experience, which was awesome,” he says. “It’s really intense and the energy levels are really high, but that’s what you want.” Around 2011, Mendes put Pynt on the grill at Burnt Enz, a pop-up tucked under a railway arch in East London. As per his instructions from that Balthazar chef, the young West Aussie had absorbed lessons about working under pressure, nose-to-tail cooking, and the long, late hours required to make it happen. But, of all the different kitchens he’s banged around in, Pynt says Victor Arguinzoniz’s one-Michelin-starred Asador Etxebarri in Spain’s Basque Country, where every dish is cooked over a wood fire, sparked his desire for smoke and flame. “The biggest take-away from my time there was that barbecue can be a real restaurant,” he says. “Cooking on wood was f…ing amazing, so that’s what I wanted to do.” Pynt got his chance a decade ago, when Mendes’ business partner Loh Lik Peng called out of the blue, asking him to be head chef at a new barbecue restaurant in Singapore. “Me and the missus were travelling around South America over winter,” he explains. “While we were travelling we got a phone call: ‘Do you want to open a barbecue restaurant in Singapore?’ “And it was like ‘Why the f… not?’.” Burnt Ends started with only 18 seats in 2013 but found a keen, and growing, audience for Pynt’s modern Australian menu, which changes almost daily. Last year, Burnt Ends opened its Dempsey Hill venue. It is an area known for its upscale eateries, boasting 55 seats in the main restaurant, plus a private room for 14 and a space at the bar for 30. White-hot demand means diners usually need to book a month — or two — ahead. The kitchen has a four-tonne, dual-cavity oven with four elevator grills. Pynt says 90-95 per cent of the food is done on wood fire. “The style of food we do is hopefully just really tasty, easy-to-understand food,” he explains. “We’ve got a pretty diverse menu with lots of seafood, a lot of poultry and a lot of meat. We try to keep it well-balanced and not too meat-heavy.” Even after all this time, cooking over wood is “magic”, the acclaimed chef says. “It makes a lot of things taste absolutely delicious and it’s never the same,” Pynt says. “It’s not mechanical or boring. It’s something you’ve got to watch, you’ve got to manage and you’ve got to work with. You’ve got to have a bit of understanding to get the best out of it. “It’s that constant challenge you face every day which makes it really interesting and exciting.” Burnt Ends consumes a ton of ironbark hardwood from north-nast Queensland every week. Pynt would prefer to use jarrah but the WA Government recently banned its export. However, there is a strong WA flavour to the menu at Burnt Ends, which blends Singaporean favourites like chilli crab with woodfired South West marron topped with truffles. The pavlova is a particularly unexpected inclusion at a barbecue joint. “Pavlova is an awesome dessert,” Pynt says. “We burn it in the woodfired oven, and we have some macerated fruits that also go through the oven.” The down-to-earth chef says he was “definitely not expecting” to earn a Michelin star in 2018. “It’s great for the team,” Pynt says. “Getting a Michelin star is a pretty big honour but definitely not something we were expecting. At the end of the day, we’re a casual barbecue restaurant.” The West Aussie, who has two young children with English-born wife Katrina Wheeldon (who leads the marketing team for Burnt Ends), is clearly doing something very, very right. In addition to Burnt Ends, which has just celebrated its 10th anniversary, Pynt and his partners have two MeatSmith smokehouses in Singapore, and one in Jakarta. Four years ago, they opened The Ledge by Dave Pynt, a poolside bar and grill at the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives. They also recently announced they’ll open a second Burnt Ends at luxury department store Harrods in London mid-next year. “It’s pretty all-consuming but I try to get the kids out for a wakeboard every weekend,” Pynt says. While it sounds like he’s burning the candle at both ends, Pynt wouldn’t have it any other way. “I am very lucky,” he says. “It is something that I love to do and I find it pretty easy to get up and go to work every day.”

Burnt Ends: WA chef Dave Pynt’s love of wood-fire cooking earned him a Michelin star and a foodie following

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