Dave Pynt was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia, in a family with strong ties to food; his grandmother and mother were both accomplished home cooks, and his father was known for backyard barbecuing, an early influence Pynt has pointed to directly, according to Tatler Asia. As a teenager he began washing dishes at a local pizza restaurant on weekends, and after finishing school he deferred a university place to apprentice instead under head chef Wayne Boatwright, learning to make wood-fired pizza and developing an early passion for fresh seafood through fishing and diving trips around Western Australia, per the same profile.

Pynt’s formative training took him through some of the most demanding kitchens in the world. He worked at Tetsuya Wakuda’s namesake restaurant in Sydney, did a stint at Rene Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen in 2010, and trained under Victor Arguinzoniz at Asador Etxebarri in Spain’s Basque Country, an experience he has called his most formative and whose live-fire technique still shapes his cooking today. He also worked with Fergus Henderson at St John Bread and Wine in London and with Nuno Mendes at The Loft Project in East London, where he got his first real exposure to the business side of running a restaurant, according to Tatler Asia.

In 2012, Pynt ran a five-month pop-up called Burnt Enz out of a railway arch in East London, an opening night so busy that the kitchen ran out of food within the first ninety minutes. The pop-up caught the attention of Singapore-based restaurateur Loh Lik Peng, whose Unlisted Collection hospitality group had already backed ventures including Andre Chiang’s Restaurant Andre, and who proposed bringing Pynt’s concept to Singapore, according to Forbes. Pynt relocated in 2013 and opened Burnt Ends in the city’s Chinatown district, building the restaurant’s identity around a custom dual-cavity wood-burning oven that remains central to the kitchen today, per Burnt Ends Hospitality Group’s own account of its founding.

Burnt Ends earned a Michelin star in the first Michelin Guide Singapore in 2018 and has held it every year since, according to the restaurant’s own awards and accolades page. Pynt won the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants Chef’s Choice Award in 2017, a prize voted on by the chefs featured on the list itself rather than by critics, which he described at the time as a humbling recognition from his peers, per World’s 50 Best. Burnt Ends has appeared on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list every year since debuting at number 30 in 2014, reaching as high as number 10 in 2017 and 2019, and has featured on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants extended list since 2016, according to the restaurant’s official accolades page. In 2025 it was named the highest new entry on the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants list, debuting at number five.

Twelve years after opening, Burnt Ends remains one of the hardest tables to book in Singapore, with new reservation windows released roughly a month ahead and snapped up within minutes, as reported by the South China Morning Post. Pynt has been recognized individually as well, named to The Best Chef’s Top 100 list in 2021 and 2023 before being elevated to the guide’s “World Class” tier in 2024 and 2025, and Burnt Ends has repeatedly been named Singapore’s best restaurant and best dining experience by outlets including Singapore Tatler and the Singapore Tourism Board, according to Burnt Ends’ own accolades page.

Rather than fronting consumer product campaigns, Pynt’s outside commercial relationships have run mostly through hospitality and drinks-industry partnerships tied to his restaurants. Burnt Ends’ 13th anniversary kitchen takeover series in 2026, which brought chefs from Chile, Australia, India and Brazil to cook on his wood-fired ovens, was backed by brand partners including HSBC, Dom Perignon, Highland Park and ButcherBox, according to FACT Singapore. He has also lent his name to hotel tie-ins such as a two-night anniversary dinner series at Waldorf Astoria Bangkok’s rooftop steakhouse Bull and Bear, where he built a menu drawing on dishes from The Ledge by Dave Pynt, as reported by Time Out Bangkok.

Burnt Ends has grown from a single restaurant into a multi-brand hospitality group. Alongside the flagship, which relocated to a larger site in Dempsey in December 2021, the group now runs an on-site bakery, bar and wine cellar, the wood-fired barbecue concept Meatsmith in Singapore and Jakarta, and The Ledge by Dave Pynt, an Australian barbecue restaurant operated in partnership with Waldorf Astoria Maldives Ithaafushi, according to Burnt Ends Hospitality Group. In April 2026, Pynt opened a venture outside the restaurant format entirely, People People Brewing Co, a 9,000-square-foot tank-to-tap brewery at Resorts World Sentosa developed with Loh Lik Peng, brand builder Pete Thew and strategist Jason Moy, with the brewing program led by 2024 Australian Brewer of the Year Nick Calder-Scholes, per Tatler Asia. In 2025, Pynt also released his first cookbook, a 368-page volume covering 16 techniques and 70 recipes that took two years to produce, according to High Net Worth.

Pynt has not made any personal real estate holdings a matter of public record, and no outlet has published verified details of a home or property portfolio in Singapore or Australia. His major identifiable assets sit inside the business itself: the built-out Dempsey Hill site that houses Burnt Ends, its bakery, bar and cellar represented a significant capital investment undertaken as part of the group’s December 2021 relocation, and Pynt has continued to invest in specialized kitchen equipment, including a roughly 25,000-US-dollar offset smoker imported from Texas, according to High Net Worth. His ownership stake also extends to the Meatsmith restaurants, the Ledge partnership in the Maldives, and his interest in the newly opened People People Brewing Co.