Ben Shewry

Ben Shewry is a New Zealand-born Australian chef, born in 1977 in rural Taranaki on New Zealand's North Island. He grew up on a remote sheep and beef farm and has spoken extensively about an outdoor childhood — foraging, fishing, hunting eels — that became the foundation of his later cooking. He began working in restaurant kitchens at the age of ten and trained through his teens at restaurants around Taranaki and in Wellington and Christchurch before moving to Melbourne in 2002.

He joined Attica as head chef in 2005, when the small restaurant in the unfashionable bayside suburb of Ripponlea was struggling. Over the following five years he transformed it: a complete rewriting of the menu around native Australian ingredients — finger limes, wattleseed, lemon myrtle, saltbush, native pepperberry, kangaroo, marron — and a tasting-menu format built on long, dialogue-driven service. Attica entered The World's 50 Best Restaurants for the first time in 2010 and has been on the list continuously ever since, peaking at #20 in 2017.

He purchased Attica from its previous owners in 2016 and has run it as chef-owner since. He has been deeply engaged with Indigenous Australian foodways, working in long-running collaborations with Aboriginal communities — in particular with members of the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land — both to source native ingredients on terms set by the communities themselves and to be public about which traditions Attica is and is not entitled to draw on. He has spoken openly that this collaboration is the centre of Attica's project, not an aesthetic add-on.

Shewry was featured in Season 1 of Netflix's Chef's Table (2015), in an episode that did more than any other single piece of media to introduce modern Australian cuisine to a global audience. His memoir Use It All (2022) won multiple Australian book awards and is widely cited in the Australian restaurant industry as an unusually candid account of the personal and economic costs of running a fine-dining restaurant.