Lauren Zonfrillo has shared how supportive Andy Allen and his wife Alex have been since Jock Zonfrillo passed away.
In her new book, Till Death Do Us Part, Lauren recalls Andy and Alex cooking for her on Mother’s Day. It was exactly two weeks after Jock’s untimely death and one day after his funeral.
“For them to do this for me, even to cook me a meal after the day we had all just had, was really special. But it was even more special to me that they had missed Mother’s Day with their own mums so they could be there for me,” she wrote.
Lauren also shares that Andy and Alex flew from Melbourne to Sydney “for the day” to make sure she wasn’t alone on her birthday.
“When I saw them standing there, I walked up to them and burst into tears, and they both just hugged me until I stopped.”
Unsurprisingly, the couple were (and still are) so helpful; after all, Andy and Jock weren’t just MasterChef Australia judges together. They were best friends.
And the support goes both ways. In April 2024, Andy credited Lauren for giving him the courage to return to MasterChef.
“It’s nearly a year [since Jock died]. Sometimes it feels like yesterday, and other times it feels like it was a long, long time ago. It was hard. It was really hard. I didn’t actually know if I was going to do it [MasterChef] again,” Andy told Carrie Bickmore and Tommy Little in a candid interview.
“It just felt so wrong to do it without him, because we just loved it so much together and walking back into that kitchen was huge. It was… There was just this weight of grief over me,” he continued.
“[But] I spoke to Loz, Jock’s wife. The people around me, as well, my parents. They said it’s what he would have wanted.”
You can pre-order Till Death Do Us Part by Lauren Zonfrillo now via Dymocks, Big W and Amazon.
You can read an extract from Lauren’s book in the May 2025 issue of The Weekly – on sale now!
