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Cooking shows are boring, and supermarket shopping is too easy. So says Mario Kalpou, a Sydney chef who ditched restaurants to hunt his own food in the wild. His debut TV series, Man Eats Wild, saw him travel from the Amazon jungle to the ice floes of Greenland.

Still firmly of the belief that food “tastes way better, and the reward is much sweeter, once you’ve almost killed yourself catching it”, he’s back with a new action-adventure foodie travelogue, Deadliest Dinners Australia. Over eight episodes, Kalpou dodges sharks and crocodiles, hunts wild buffalo, abseils down cliffs to fish off rocks lashed by waves, and maroons himself for a week on a raft on the Great Barrier Reef. And when he’s dodged death and caught his prize, he pops on a singlet and cooks it right then and there, with a fancy French sauce.

“The whole point is me showing these elements in an exciting and adrenaline-fuelled manner, because I find food shows very boring,” says Kalpou, on the phone from the Greek island of Tinos. He’s there attending a family wedding with his Australian wife, Danielle, with whom he lives in Florida.

“I’m a chef, and even I can’t watch a cooking segment on TV for 20 minutes. You lose interest! But if you’ve got some crazy guy abseiling down a 600-foot cliff to catch a fish and then he cooks for you, well, that’s a bit more interesting.”

Having grown up between his mother’s home near Sydney’s Wentworth Hotel, where she worked as a waitress, and his grandparents’ pig farm in rural western Sydney, Kalpou’s appreciation for both ends of the food industry is ingrained. He went on to open the Zagat-awarded Old Library restaurant in Cronulla, before deciding he was done with commercial kitchens.

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“I don’t miss drunk patrons and staying up ’til three in the morning every night. But I have a lot of respect for hospitality. For me, now, it’s all about reconnecting people to the outdoors, getting them to eat clean food, respecting nature and getting healthy. I think that’s a really big missing part of today’s culture. I’m hoping this show can get people to start thinking more adventurously.”

After a stint in New Zealand operating an extreme adventure lodge, he left for the US nine years ago, where he now divides his time between Miami and his Montana ranch. “It’s a perfect mix for me – I’m out on the ocean, and then I’ve got the mountains.”

In the new series, Kalpou also garners knowledge from traditional owners.

“Everywhere I go in the world, I meet local indigenous people. They are the original harvesters of the land. They have knowledge that is far beyond anything that I can bring to the table … The Aboriginal community in Tiwi was no different. They taught me a lot and I had a great time with them. Understanding how they’ve been doing it for thousands of years was one of my highlights of making the show.”

He’s disappointed that some of the most dangerous aspects of the shoot weren’t caught on camera, though. Specifically, when he was charged by a wild buffalo in the outback, and the camera operator stopped filming and ran. Another time, he narrowly missed being stung by a box jellyfish.

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“Thankfully, my spear caught the tip of the tentacles before my shin did,” he says. “That would’ve killed me. I had sharks attacking my raft at one point. I was caught in a storm out at sea. Once, when I went spearing for stingrays, I said, ‘Why don’t we just throw the drone up, just in case?’ And sure enough, there was a massive crocodile right where we were going to go in. So there were a few close calls.”

Unsurprisingly, the late Steve Irwin was an early influence.

“For me, it’s very important that there’s an abundance of game out there,” Kalpou explains. “We only take what we need for the plate. I had a lot of respect for that guy, and it was definitely a very, very sad moment for everyone when we lost Steve … Obviously, you have to be as careful as you can. We are dealing with a lot of uncertainty and with wild animals, nothing’s guaranteed.”

Kalpou is often stopped by celebrity fans in America, from UFC mixed martial arts fighters Luke Rockhold and Chuck Liddell to (once) Matt Damon. And that success suggests the trope of the rugged and fearless outback Aussie still holds appeal.

“It doesn’t matter where we are in the world, anyone will tell you, ‘Those Australians are crazy!’ So we’ve got to keep that reputation going,” he says. “A lot of Americans have that idea of Australia being deadly, which it is. We have some of the most dangerous animals on the planet. But among those dangerous animals also live some of the freshest ingredients in the world. Our oceans have got some of the tastiest protein, and we have an abundance of it, so I think this show is going to be really well received.”

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He’s not suggesting that everyone risk their lives for their evening meal. Rather, that Deadliest Dinners Australia encourages a closer look at what’s on our plates.

“I understand that not everyone can jump on a raft and catch their own fish, or go out and hunt … And no one should be doing anything that’s not within their parameters,” he says. “I’m a professional. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I don’t have a death wish. If anything, I’m telling people, ‘Hey, this is a beautiful line-caught fish. If you can access it in the supermarket, this is what you should be buying.’

“We’re getting a lot of processed foods, and there’s a lot of nasty stuff coming out of the food industry on a mass scale. So watch me do the crazy stuff, but you, at home, should be able to start thinking more about where your food comes from.”

Deadliest Dinners Australia is streaming from September 9 on Binge.

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