Mark started his career in cooking straight after high school in 1999 and landed an apprenticeship under Klaus Huber, the executive chef for Bennelong and the Opera House restaurants. He went on to work at Tetsuyas where he met fellow mate and Duck, Darren Robertson. Opting out of fine dining, he was invited to run café Morso on Jones Bay Wharf and became a registered buyer at the Sydney Fish Markets, where he selected fresh fish for services daily (right up his alley).
In 2004, he left to live the dream, snowboarding and cooking in chalets during the winters and surfing the French, Portuguese, Spanish and Moroccan coastlines during the summer with his well-earned Swiss Francs. In 2008, Mark set up residence in Zurich where he worked at Josef and quickly became the sous under the owner/head chef, loving the progressive style of cooking in an otherwise traditional cuisine city.
It was 2010 when the penny dropped and the idea behind Three Blue Ducks came to fruition. The Ducks found instant success and became the first café to be invited to the Good Food Guide restaurant awards under a new category 'best breakfast'. Three Ducks became five when they joined forces with Jeff Bennett and Darren Robertson to open for dinner. Six weeks later, they were awarded their first hat.
In 2014, The Ducks built and opened Three Blue Ducks on The Farm in Byron Bay for which they were awarded Gourmet Traveller’s Best Regional Restaurant. In 2016, Three Blue Ducks Rosebery opened with co-owner Andy Allen, which was awarded a hat in the 2018 Good Food Guide. The Ducks newest venture is a restaurant at the W hotel in Brisbane. Mark has co-written three books, The Blue Ducks (2012), Real Food (2014) and Blue Ducks in the Country (2017), and is an OzHarvest ambassador.
Passionate about subsistence hunting, Mark largely hunts wild animals considered pests, such as deer, rabbits, kangaroos and goats, and spearfishes for Spanish mackerel, tuna, snapper, mahi-mahi, squid, cuttlefish, lobster and sea urchin – everything he hunts, he eats. For Mark, hunting is an important way of engaging with the environment, and becoming an advocate to protect it.
Away from the tools Marky, as he is affectionately known, is as avid road bike motorcycle racer, cyclist, forager, surfer and loving partner to his wife, Hannah.
