Do we like George Calombaris?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, but he admitted a $7.8 million pay failure at his restaurants and pleaded guilty to an assault.
George Calombaris grew up in Melbourne's suburbs in a Greek family where food was the centre of everything. He trained at Box Hill TAFE, apprenticed at the Sofitel, and placed 16th at the Bocuse d'Or in Lyon. The Press Club was named best new restaurant by the Good Food Guide in 2008, and at 30 he landed a judging gig on MasterChef Australia.
The fall started in 2017, when his company, Made Establishment, disclosed it had underpaid staff. It first put the figure at about 200 workers and $2.6 million. Fair Work later found more than 500 workers were owed about $7.8 million. In 2019 the company back-paid $7.83 million to 515 current and former staff and paid a $200,000 contrition payment, and Calombaris apologised. Unions and former staff said the penalty was too light.
On ABC's 7.30 he said “I take full responsibility for this. I'm sorry.” He blamed back-office systems and his own inexperience as a young chef expanding fast. Whether that reads as honest ownership or a boss who should have known is where people split, and the Ombudsman itself later said it could have weighed the size of the underpayment more heavily.
Then there was the 2017 A-League grand final, where he was charged with assaulting a 19-year-old fan. He pleaded guilty, said he'd been offended by heckling, and apologised. He was fined $1,000 with a conviction recorded. A judge later set the conviction aside on appeal and put him on a 12-month good behaviour bond.
The business didn't survive the mess. In February 2020 most of the Made Establishment group went into voluntary administration, with about 400 jobs expected to go. Administrators blamed tough trading conditions and delivery apps. Calombaris posted that he truly regretted it had come to that, and Network 10 had already parted ways with him, Gary Mehigan and Matt Preston, saying it couldn't reach a commercial agreement.
On the harm test, the searches came up empty. We found no comments from him on LGBTQ+ or trans people, no vaccine or climate rubbish and no culture-war grifting. His recent work is TV and food: the jungle show and a Greek festival line-up. That is a thin record rather than a glowing one, so it's a pass on what we could find, not a ringing endorsement.