The powerful journey of two young chefs who now share one big award in common

Lily McGrath first fell in love with cooking not through a love of food, but for routine. She was a trampolinist as a teen and lived a heavily scheduled life.

“I liked regimentation. I loved the idea of the strict hierarchy of cooking in professional kitchens. To me, it felt familiar. And it kept me busy, which kept my mind off everything else.”

Cameron Tay-Yap was 17 when he dropped out of culinary school. He’d started showing up at Ripponlea fine diner Attica looking for work experience, and eventually owner-chef Ben Shewry and his team gave the ambitious kid a shot.

“I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t let me enter through the back door all those years ago,” he says. “I was like a lost puppy and they took me in.”

It is this type of focus that has resulted in these chefs being crowned joint winners of The Age The Good Food Guide Smeg Young Chef of the Year.

From a record number of entries, six rising stars were grilled by the Young Chef award judges – leading chef-restaurateurs Victor Liong, Thi Le and Karen Martini and two senior Good Food Guide critics. After the interviews, it was down to McGrath and Tay-Yap.

“I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t let me enter through the back door all those years ago. I was like a lost puppy and they took me in.”

Cameron Tay-Yap

“We are looking for someone to fly the flag for the future of hospitality,” Liong said. “And they represent two different things that are both very powerful.”

It’s the fifth time in the award’s 22-year history that twin winners have been crowned. Brothers Matt McConnell (now at Bar Lourinha) and Andrew McConnell (Gimlet, Supernormal, Cutler & Co. et al) started the trend, sharing the inaugural award in 2002.

After stints at Attica, Core by Clare Smyth (London) and Omnia restaurants, Tay-Yap is now head chef at Amaru, a hatted fine-diner in Armadale, where he works with executive chef Clinton McIver to develop imaginative, innovative multi-course feasts.

“Cam has so many qualities that will make many other chefs better chefs,” says Martini.

By contrast, McGrath has spent her entire kitchen career at one company. In her first year at MoVida Next Door in 2016 she developed duck jamon, and as she worked her way up to the senior sous chef role at MoVida she helped introduce house charcuterie such as blood sausage mortadella, and clever low-waste ideas like rabbit-bone jam.

McGrath is trans, and says that for the most part, her colleagues have been “wonderful, respectful and extremely kind.”

“But being a trans chef, you look and act female but many people don’t see you that way, so they feel they can be more crass and more inappropriate. There was one person who used to call me an abomination every day.”

She channelled her energy into recipe testing, pushing boundaries with the support of her mentors at the restaurant, and soon found the confidence to stand up for herself.

“I also realised that a lot of the time, you’re the only trans person this person has met in their life. You do end up being something of an ambassador without really meaning to, or even wanting to.”

“Lily has this massive creative energy,” says Liong. “And she’s proof that a chef doesn’t need to globe trot or role-jump to perform at a high level.”

Malaysian-Australian Tay-Yap major hurdle was winning the support of his family.

“Cooking was strange and unfamiliar. In Malaysia it’s blue-collar work. You have to slave away, you can’t really make a lot of money,” he says. “For my mum and uncles, they’re used to hawker-style food, where people slog it out every day for most of their lives just to get by. They were very fearful of that sort of future for me. But they have come around.”

Tay-Yap has had many mentors throughout his career, but one piece of advice from Shewry has stuck with him.

“We’d gone out foraging and someone yelled racial slurs at me from the carpark. For me, that’s not that out of the ordinary,” he says. “It seemed to hurt Ben more than it hurt me. He pulled me aside and asked me not to let this affect my view of the world. It was so important for me to know then that there were people on my team.”

Now, Tay-Yap takes pride in mentoring young apprentices at Amaru. “Seeing them become more confident and become better cooks and leaders, it’s quite a humbling experience.”

For McGrath, too, contributing to a positive workplace is a priority. “We have an emphasis on the team being happy and feeling good first, because if you’re stressed out you’re not going to turn out good work no matter what.”

“The industry at this moment needs both of these future leaders,” says Martini.

The Smeg Young Chef of the Year award is part of The Age Good Food Guide 2024, on sale in newsagents, supermarkets and thestore.com.au from October 31.