Charly Pretet on Terra Firma Dining and Open Fire Cooking

If you're on Bali food Instagram at all, you've probably seen Charly Pretet. A whole tuna hanging off a tripod over fire. A dome structure smoking in the middle of a field. Open fire cooking is so niche it almost shouldn't go viral, but somehow Charly has.

I finally sit down with him at the end of a long day. He's been cooking since the afternoon and you can see the tiredness in his eyes, but he's still up for a chat. He's also the kind of chef who comes out from behind the fire himself to ask if you enjoyed the food. That ends up being kind of the whole point.

Half an hour in, I realise Charly keeps coming back to the same word: connection. Not fancy chef talk. Just connection. And the more he talks, the more it's obvious that Terra Firma is basically built on it.

A French Childhood, Two Restaurants in Paris, and One Chef Hat-Winning Fine Diner in Yamba

Charly grew up on his family's property on the West Coast of France. Fishing, hunting, riding horses, growing organic vegetables. It's the kind of childhood that becomes a foundation later, even when you don't realise it at the time.

He came up through hospitality the long way. He started behind a bar at 17. Moved onto the floor. Became an operations manager. He didn't cook professionally until 2014, when a friend who was a head chef in a restaurant in Paris took him under his wing for six months and taught him the basics. After that, he taught himself everything else.

"It's pretty funny because I've never done any cooking before. I'm a self-taught chef. Even when I had my restaurants, I never worked in a big restaurant, in a big kitchen."

Those restaurants were Cuistance in Paris and, after his move to Australia in 2015, The French Pantree in Yamba on the New South Wales coast. There were three years of Chef Hats from the Australian Food Guide. 2018. 2019. 2020.

"I was doing a bit more fine dining, very focused on local produce."

And then COVID.

The Kitchen Without Walls

Charly closed his restaurant in 2020 and moved to Queensland. He set up a private chefing and consulting business in the in-between. But in the back of his head, an idea had already been forming for years.

He had spent his whole career inside enclosed kitchens, and the walls had quietly become the wrong thing.

"I always had this passion project where I wanted to get out of the kitchen. I wanted to create an outdoor kitchen where all the guests would be able to gather around the fire and be part of the experience. For me, having the boundaries of the enclosed wall of a restaurant kitchen wasn't working for me anymore. I was getting really frustrated."

He wanted something else. A kitchen without borders. An outdoor space where guests could see exactly what was happening, where the cooking wasn't a secret happening on the other side of a service window.

"It's very important as a chef. You're cooking for people. You're cooking with your heart, straight to dishes."

Inspired by the traditional Argentinian Asado method, he launched Terra Firma Dining in May 2021. The name is Latin for "solid ground", which works on two levels: the ground he cooks over, and the same Sunshine Coast soil that grows his produce.

It turned five on May.

Fire Is a Live Element

The first thing to understand about Terra Firma is what Charly cooks with. Not charcoal. Only firewood.

"Fire is a live element. As a chef, it's always a big challenge. You can cook a piece of meat 10,000 times over the open fire. It will never cook the same way."

The wind. The sun. The rain. The outdoor temperature that day. The kind of wood. The size of the fish, the texture of the meat. Everything is a variable. There are no buttons to press. No appliances. No dockets.

"You're really working with your senses, which is quite rare these days. We've got more and more technology, and I go completely the opposite way."

When I ask Charly how on earth you master that, he doesn't give me a technique. He gives me a ritual.

"Every time I light the fire, I always take a moment. 10 to 15 minutes, watching the fire burning. I'm outside, in nature. It's very calming. It's a really bright moment of connection within myself."

Then he walks me through the actual mechanics. Fire has five stages: ignition, smoke, flame, embers, ashes. When you buy a bag of charcoal, you're already at stage 4. You've skipped the first three. The first three, he tells me, are where the play is.

"There's a lot of things you can actually do during those first 3 stages."

So he hangs octopus. He cooks fruits, vegetables, whole fish. He wraps things in banana leaves and lays them on a bamboo mat the way they do across tropical Indonesia. He pulls from Nordic techniques: fish on the plank. He pulls heavily from South America: Argentina, Patagonia, Brazil. From the hills of France. He doesn't see any of this as invention.

"I did not invent anything. I'm just cooking over fire. I'm just basically doing what we used to do, but what we forgot."

The Tuna That Came From a Missing Grill

I bring up the story I had heard, about Charly forgetting a grill at an event and improvising on the fly. He laughs.

"And then comes out a really good dish that I've been doing for four years now."

It's a small story but it tells you everything about how Terra Firma actually works. The constraints aren't obstacles. They're the work. The fire changes. The recipe changes. Some days the fish takes two hours. On a windy day, it takes three.

"You've got recipes, but the recipe always changes. Because the fire changes and the timing changes."

This is what he loves. The slow pace. The constant adjusting. Cooking that actually feels like cooking.

"You actually feel like you're cooking. And it's a slow cooking process. It's a slow pace in a way. We don't have machines, docket machines, or a bell in the past. It's quite unique in its own way."

From a Half-Farm, Half-Campground to 100 Events a Year

Terra Firma didn't start out as private catering. At the very beginning, Charly partnered with a countryside venue, parked his semi-permanent fire pit on a half-farm, half-campground property, and produced his own ticketed events. People came for the day or the weekend, enjoyed the property, and were served a plate of food cooked over fire.

After about a year, the shape of the business changed. He moved into private catering. Weddings, from early 2022 onwards. He started designing his now-signature dome structures. The events kept getting bigger.

Now he does about 100 a year. Weddings. Corporate events. Food and Wine Festivals. Farm to Table dinners. International collabs. He travels 60,000 kilometres a year around Australia alone, working in seasons that are upside-down to most of the world.

And, predictably, he's the first one to the venue and the last one to leave.

"It is a very niche market. Because it's also very challenging. You're always stepping out of your comfort zone. Which is something I love doing as well."

For all the logistics and all the scale, the part that keeps Charly in it is small and specific. In a traditional restaurant kitchen, you put your passion into a dish, send it out, and that's the end of your relationship with it. Wait staff handle the rest. You never meet the person eating it.

With Terra Firma, there is no wait staff. There is no service window. Charly cooks the food, Charly brings the food, and Charly stands beside the fire to talk you through it.

"It's really from the fire to the guests. And the guests get to interact, to understand, to immerse."

A Social Media Sensation Who Runs His Own Social Media

It seems impossible that Charly runs his own Instagram. He confirms it without hesitating.

"Because I spend a lot of time on social media doing all these videos."

Yes, it's all Charly. From day one. No one has ever managed it.

"I've been doing everything on my own since day one. And I'm not ready to leave it to someone else."

It's also the engine behind everything that's happened beyond Australia. Social media exposed Charly to collabs he otherwise wouldn't have found.

He's flying to New York in June for two events on a small island just off Manhattan. There's a tour planned in Sri Lanka next year. There's a tour booked in the mountains in France, where he'll be cooking in the snow.

"I get the opportunity now to really travel to absolutely amazing places."

Bamboo Cathedrals, Beaches, and the Jungle in Sumba

When I mention Nihi, his eyes change. The collab at Nihi Sumba is one of the things he brings up unprompted, more than once. It's the kind of project Terra Firma was actually built for.

In Bali, where we're sitting now, the fire pit in front of us is beautifully manicured. In Sumba, none of it was.

"In Nihi, all the cooking structures were made out of bamboo. I had a tripod, everything was hanging off the bamboo. I had a big bamboo mat to smoke the meat, smoke the fish. It's just completely wild."

Cooking on the beach. Cooking in the jungle. Cooking in places that don't normally invite a chef in.

"That's quite incredible to have the ability now to create very wild setups."

A Niche That Found Its Moment

We talk about the timing. Why this is taking off now, of all moments. He thinks people are craving the opposite of how they live.

"Especially in a world like in 2026 where you're more and more disconnected. App, platform, everything goes fast. People crave nature, going back to basics. They want to reconnect with being human again, basically."

I say something offhand about how twenty years ago we didn't even have ovens that displayed precise temperatures, like fire is some lost technology. He gently corrects me.

"We don't have to go back that long ago. Like 100 years ago, this is how people cook meat."

And not in one place. In every place.

"It speaks to every culture around the world. And I feel very connected in that sense as well."

When he says "I did not invent anything," it isn't false modesty. It's the whole thesis. He's bringing back something almost everyone's grandparents would still recognise.

"It's bringing the past with the twist of all the influences and cooking techniques that I've learned over the years."

A Terra Firma Venue, a Project in Sumba, and the Chef He Wants to Keep Bouncing Off

When I ask Charly about the future, he hesitates a little. He's still figuring it out. But there's a shape to it.

"In the near future, I would love to have a Terra Firma venue somewhere where I can actually create a little world of fire and nature, where I can host people and get into the incredible food and fire dining experience."

A space he can grow into. He says "venue" first, then "restaurant," then trails off. Whatever it ends up being, it sounds less like a cafe and more like a Terra Firma world.

He wants to keep pushing internationally. More travel. A possible extension in the US. Another project in Sumba.

So I think the future of Terra Firma, in his own words, would be more international collabs, and one day, maybe, a Terra Firma space.

I sit with Charly while the fire we cooked on is still warm. The plates are gone. The guests have mostly left. He's still here, like he always is.

What I keep thinking about is the line he said earlier, almost in passing. About cooking being from the fire to the guests. About the wall that doesn't exist here.

You can build a brand around novelty. Around aesthetic. Around a viral moment. But Terra Firma works because Charly is doing something almost embarrassingly simple. He's making food over an open fire and bringing it to people, and the rest takes care of itself.