What’s that? You’re not going to shove your friend under a truck and I’m a bad person for suggesting it? Well, moving briskly along then. If you’re determined to go ahead and enter this restaurant caper and would like to ask my advice, gleaned from dispassionate professional observation over the past decade-and-a-half of the types of businesses that succeed versus those that fail, then it is only polite to spill my secrets and answer honestly.
I have absolutely no idea.
As far as I can see, the places that fly versus the places that thud out of the sky are a simple matter of dumb luck. Not even dumb luck. Dumber than dumb luck. Imbecilic luck. The kid-who-sits-in-the-sandpit-eating-his-own-snot luck.
I will simply say this: figure out your thing and stick to it. If you have a healthy little French bistro, for example, it’s probably best to treat little French bistros as your blood type, as the very nucleus of your being, instead of trying to develop a diverse empire of bars and nightclubs and food emporiums and all the rest.
One of the typical yet reliably horrific casualties I’ve witnessed involved a man who had a very successful cafe that spawned a hundred imitators. It was a heart-warming rags-to-riches tale: one minute he’s scraping by thanks to a close relationship with Centrelink, the next a small loan from relatives has turned him into Mr Unexpectedly Successful. For a number of years he could hardly believe his luck, but eventually the glow wore off and he started getting restless with his sweet little set-up that was busy from early morning until late at night. Now, the obvious, risk-averse move would have been to open another cafe much like the original in a suburb twice removed, but of course he decided to treat cafe number one as a gateway drug to bigger and better things. It’s the human impulse to trade up. Cars and houses; spouses and businesses. In his wisdom he decided to open a fancy-pants modern restaurant in an empty warehouse shell with the help of the expensive designers du jour. Even the tiles had to be made specially which, quite frankly, seems like overkill—unless, of course, they conducted a poll and found the target market wouldn’t visit a place without bespoke tiles.
But wait, there’s more. Because he was determined to make it a Restaurant That Counts he signed up a well-known, highly respected and therefore expensive chef before the tradies were even on-site. So the chef’s on a massive wage while flipping eggs over at the cafe, the build’s delayed, as builds invariably are, and the owner’s bleeding money from every orifice to the point where he’s now camping out upstairs. But the dumbest thing he did in a very long line of dumb things was to sell the cafe, which was still pulling a healthy, dependable profit, to try and save his vanity project. It was a decent restaurant but it only managed to limp past its first birthday and in its passing left a long line of angry creditors screaming impotently about the money they’ve probably kissed goodbye forever. The last conversation I had with him was completely one-sided: ‘The number you have dialled has been disconnected. Please check the number and dial again.’
I’ve been looking over the fence for a long time now and I still can’t figure out the economics of these massive restaurants—these visual, tactile, audio-phile wonderlands that seem to be opening every other week with grand parties and PR fluff tailor-made to actively discourage people from going to the restaurant. (‘Imagine the night stars glimmering through a canopy of trees as a young woman in hip-hugger jeans sips a Dolce Flirtini on the patio’—I cannot believe people are paid to write this stuff.) I’ll sit at a table feverishly calculating that the owners have conservatively dropped northwards of a million on the fit-out and with X number of seats that means they need to sling a hell of a lot of green papaya salads or crusted scallops or tuna tartares just to pay for the actual space before you even factor in wages and stock, and that’s assuming that the place is a success, which given the high rates of restaurant morbidity is a very risky assumption. The only reasonable response is to think: ‘Shit. The wine mark-ups must be pretty high.’
Really, I’d love to tell you that a Mexican-Japanese fusion restaurant with an oyster bar will be THE sure-fire thing you should plow all your borrowed cash into, but I can’t. Please don’t think I’m keeping the good oil to myself. The same principle underscores why business journalists aren’t all driving around in Ferraris despite writing about stocks for a living. It’s a fickle market, and unfortunately the job doesn’t come with a crystal ball. I do have a pretty finely calibrated sense for when a place isn’t going to fly, however. The X-ray goggles of doom. Not such a fun party trick when a nervous restaurateur is asking for feedback on the place he’s tipped his life savings into.
Food is the art of the twenty-first century (one of the peyote-drinking elders told me that and I’m stealing the line, with thanks). It’s culture high and low, in edible form. What’s not to love? Sure, it’s the only branch of the arts that leaves a legacy no more valuable than fertiliser but that’s proven no hindrance to the grand, sweeping food statements that blow through with the drama of a chill southerly cutting inland on a scorching hot day. Things like molecular gastronomy, once so revered as the very essence of avant-gardism, now looked on with the fond bemusement reserved for the big-haired band posters papering a long-ago teenager’s bedroom walls. The smears and swooshes, the spheres and foams, the movement’s faithful handmaidens, now so witheringly yesterday.
Or how about the foraging era which followed it, in which chefs muddied their clogs traipsing through fields in order to feed their customers weeds—so very real, as opposed to the lab chefs with their test-tubes—but ultimately so drippingly worthy it gestated a Tourette-like reaction in the embrace of street food with a devil-may-care attitude towards the local, sustainable, organic orthodoxy.
And how about that street food? A movement that started off as legitimately exciting and then became a handy excuse to soak dud produce in trans fats and cheap commercial sauces and charge a motza. From sexy to sleazy, almost overnight. So disappointing. Most of it is like bondage with vinyl instead of leather. But it goes to show that where one place succeeds another hundred will follow. One establishment does well with southern-US barbecue and all of a sudden there’s a contagion of southern-US barbecue joints pumping out sliders and Buffalo wings with blue cheese sauce. There’s another one, and another one, popping up like mushrooms after rain, until everyone has their fill and suddenly their stocks tumble like it’s Black Tuesday for smoked brisket and ’slaw.
Same goes for fit-outs. Depending on whether you were a Beatles or a Rolling Stones kind of person, the 60s were over either: a) when Woolies started selling Beatles wigs, or b) when the Hells Angels stabbed a hippy to death at Altamont. In a similar vein, the neo-industrial-handmade-reclaimed design ethos that has dominated the market over recent years perished the minute Kmart started selling jam jars for drinking glasses or when the McDonald’s ‘testing lab’ served burgers on wooden boards. Eat your hearts out, hipsters.
The next big thing? Peruvian. Part of any food writer’s job is to pen the annual piece predicting upcoming trends and for the past five years everyone has been pointing to a South American country known best for ceviche (fabulous) and barbecued guinea pig (can’t comment). If we keep writing it with confidence long enough, it will come true, right?
I’d be happy if it was Peruvian, mind you. Peruvian is easy to grasp, except perhaps for the guinea pig bit. Too many restaurants are a clutter of fascinating ideas that make no thematic sense. They might try very hard to sell their broad, sweeping technicolour ambit (Pacific Rim, I’m looking at you) but I’m old-fashioned. If you can’t explain a job in a single word—journalist, engineer, lawyer—I don’t want to know about it. Same goes for restaurants.
But don’t listen to fusty old me. The types of restaurant are limited only by the imagination. Korean’s pretty scorching right now. Mexican isn’t cooling its boots anytime soon. Sichuan’s hot (get it?). Cambodian has surely got to get a few runs on the board soon, especially with insects featuring in my most recent list of the next hot dining trends. W
hat about Inner Mongolian, Outer Mongolian, bars that seat ten people in a reclaimed firehose cupboard? You could open a breastaurant. They’re a thing. Hell, even a few brave Peruvian joints have popped their heads up, although not enough yet to constitute a bona fide trend. We shall see. The churn and burn of food fashions means some will wind up in the chumbucket before they’ve had a chance to stake their claim. Some will do well for a while then struggle to keep traction as the crowds go galloping after the new. (Blame the media cycle—‘Three-year-old rather good restaurant remains rather good’ doesn’t make a particularly compelling sales pitch to the food supplement editor.) Hysteria has taken over—restaurants open amid scenes reminiscent of a military coup in Central America, then struggle forevermore to appear as relevant as they first did. Some will do okay. A select few will have more Instagram followers than the Pope, and they will be truly blessed.
On that subject, be sure to follow the cardinal rule of hospitality: if you succeed, take all the credit. If you fail, blame external forces. Look no further than George, who took the Rising Damp’s success as acknowledgement from the heavens of his rare gifts. His ability to read the market, predict the future, blah blah blah, although underneath the swagger of the self-made man you could occasionally get a whiff of the fear that led to outbreaks of weirdness such as the nacho machine on the bar. A gastropub pretending to be a classy Italian joint and there on the counter materialised one of those perspex boxes with interior warming lights usually seen at foreshore carnivals. On seeing it for the first time, the regulars would get a look on their faces like they’d just seen a cyst pop. It didn’t last long. Someone must have had a quiet word that such a thing was not a good look for leafy Barton Square.
As for the Rising Damp, after the Cold War between George and the other owners had raged silently for many months, it was decided through their emissaries that they should sell. A couple of thoroughly decent fellows bought the place for a fair market price (translation: not a bargain). They spooked everyone at first when they insisted on things like decency and respect, but it caught on.
As for George, well, he believed his own press so much he thought he could walk on water. He put his hospitality superpowers to work on another pub. This time he chose a fixer-upper a few kilometres away. He renovated it with the help of Jimmy and started the hard slog of winning the hearts of the local business crowd, but unfortunately his chef overdosed five minutes before their first big lunch service. With the chef carted off to hospital, there was nothing for it but for George to get in the kitchen, apron round his fat waist, cooking and swearing. I love that story with all my heart. The business didn’t go under immediately, but it did go under.
I guess the lesson is a simple one. Go and workshop your high-falutin’ restaurant concept all you want. There’s no alchemy. Smarts count for some, but there are so many variables clanging around it’s more like a game of pinball. The fates may be kind or unkind. If you’re successful, count your lucky stars. Go and say a few hosannas or lay freshly harvested sheaves of wheat at the Temple of Artemis or whatever it is you do to say thanks. Just remember that whatever your circumstances in life may be—rich or poor, kind or mean, generous or tight—there is one great equaliser and it is quite simply this: no one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow.
So Ben opened a cafe. His own place. He did it. After fifteen years working at the Duke, he got the hell out of Dodge and bloody well did it. I cheered him all the way, being the kind of endlessly supportive, quietly encouraging and generally wonderful wife you read about in nineteenth-century novels. Actually, I wept. He and his chef buddy Matt took the lease on an old, run-down milkbar on a semi-industrial stretch of road and I didn’t sleep for six months.
* * *
OLIVER
A customer brought her double-cooked duck and mushroom risotto to the counter and showed me a small foreign object and her chipped tooth. It was actually a rock, but I told her it was a duck gallstone that had snuck through the system in processing. She seemed happy with the explanation and the free risotto, and we never heard from her—or, more importantly, from her lawyers—again.
* * *
I am temperamentally ill-suited to being the owner of a hospitality business. I break out in hives at the week-to-week fluctuations of profits and losses and—shudder—projections. Which makes it a very good thing that I am not an owner of a hospitality business. I no more own Pope Joan—for that is the cafe’s name as well as my one small contribution towards it—than Ben writes restaurant reviews. I leave it up to him. We’ve adopted our own version of the US army’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. How’s business? Dunno. I figure if it has burned down, he’ll let me know. Otherwise, I’d rather be left out of it. Too stressful.
It’s been a real bitch for my work. It’s so much harder now because I have first-hand, close-up and terrifying insight into the hard graft—the endless, arduous slog—that goes on behind the scenes. Even getting the doors open is like running three marathons back-to-back in 40-degree heat with no visor or sunblock. The endless lonely miles of red tape. The regulations governing everything from how far up the wall the tiles in the kitchen have to go, to the distance from the kitchen hand basin to the prep areas and the size of the sinks. For the uninitiated with no experience of dealing with local councils and government departments, the vagaries of liquor licensing, building codes and many, many more officious pieces of officialdom, it’s a pretty close simulation of parachuting into Turkmenistan without a guidebook or map, praying that the locals are helpful and don’t rip you off too much. And then if it’s an old building you’ll have to hope against hope that the plumbing has been updated sometime in the past century, that the wiring isn’t about to burn the entire joint down, that termites haven’t been secretly snacking on the floors and supporting beams.
Set-up stories are boring. Get a bunch of hospo folk together and they’ll sit around trading war stories like they’ve just been evacuated in the last helicopter from Saigon, but to the general public they’re about as interesting as watching a fly crawl up a wall without even the consolation of a second fly so you can place bets. So I will spare you the details. Suffice to say that if this stuff is interesting it’s for nefarious reasons.
My absolute favourite involves one of the industry’s more mercurial characters who opened a happening little joint that sparked a huge trend (in what, I won’t say—partly to protect his identity and partly because I like being mysterious). He’d work like crazy for six months then take the rest of the year off. One time he’d disappeared to a sunny beach up north and the manager he’d left in charge turned up to work one afternoon to find the rear laneway awash in raw sewage. The incident quickly revealed this most happening of joints had been trading for years with no permits of any kind. Not one. He’d simply found a shop, installed his kitchen and opened his business without any contact with the clipboard carriers. He had plenty of chutzpah but the problem was this: legally (and, let’s face it, ethically) a food business needs a grease trap, because flushing this stuff right into the system is toxic and dangerous. But the owner had his tradies tap straight into the sewerage system and, after living on borrowed time, something finally went wrong because on this day there is a river of shit lapping at the back door. His manager rings him frantically. He remains as calm as ever. Eternally chillaxed. ‘What you’re not going to do is not work tonight,’ he tells his freaking-out employee. ‘What you are going to do is go to the safe, take out $2000, call a plumber, hand him the cash, and he’ll look after it for you.’ There was one important addendum: ‘You don’t have to pick up any turds.’
It’s hard to beat that story. Pope Joan had issues with the ceiling and installing three-phase power but I suspect you just fell asleep halfway through that sentence. No matter how bad things got, however, there was the comfort of knowing they could have turned out so much worse. It’s embarrassing to admit but we nearly got suckered into the world of Marcello. Just imagine it. Being beholden
to an alarmingly bushy monobrow attached to a short lickspittle Italian with the charm of a dead houseplant. But this is what happens when you are desperate, and the leap from waiter to owner seems so ridiculously . . . quantum.
Among his impressive property portfolio Marcello owned a pub in a godforsaken country town. It was a regional centre, to be polite, but one suffering a chronic drought that pummelled the surrounding landscape into endless fields of brown and an economy on life support. I remember driving there with Ben through never-ending nothing into the sun-bleached heart of nowhere, trying to buoy our spirits against mounting evidence that this was not the place for us. Marcello had promised we could take over the lease of his pub for free if we cleaned the place up. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Would you be surprised to hear it was too good to be true? The pub, an ornate monolith that would have been beautiful 150 years ago, turned out to be the hellmouth, or an approximation thereof. It hadn’t served a drink in more than a year and its boarded-up windows hid a treasure trove of legless tables, random bags of rubbish and the occasional decomposing small mammal. It smelled of stale beer and death. We swung by the local cops, who laughed bitterly and stroked their moustaches when recalling the time when their Friday and Saturday nightshifts were punctuated by endless summons to the roughest bloodhouse in town, but even then we left thinking: ‘We could, couldn’t we? Maybe . . .?’ What really clinched it for the ‘no’ vote was seeing a girl who couldn’t have been older than fifteen pushing a pram down the main street. She sported a black eye impressive in both its size and shimmering gradients of colour. Skulking along next to her was a boy who couldn’t have been older than seventeen. His right hand was in a plaster cast. They were two sides to a story that said everything we needed to know about this town.
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