Queensland restaurant closures
Fortitude Valley French restaurant Madame Rouge has closed for good (image supplied)
Queensland restaurants are shutting down because of soaring wages and electricity costs.
A host of top restaurants, like Esquire, Madame Rouge, The Survey Co, and Mariosarti, have closed because of financial pressures.
“The profit margins are quite thin in the restaurant and cafe sector because they have a high cost base, so there’s often not a lot of buffer in the bank to see them through a bad year, or it might just be one bad winter and there goes the business,” Restaurant & Catering Australia CEO Juliana Payne told the Courier Mail.
The problem is even worse on the Gold Coast with many of the locals fleeing the Commonwealth Games and the promised tourism dollars failing to materialise.
“It’s one-off things like that, where a conjunction of events is the thing that leads to people tipping over the edge and they can’t make ends meet,” Ms Payne told the Courier Mail.
And the restaurant closures continue. Fortitude Valley French eatery Madame Rouge closed its doors last week. The owner Mary Randles – the partner of well-known Brisbane chef and E’cco owner Philip Johnson – decided not to renew the restaurant’s lease. She cited stress and said she was trying to regain her work-life balance.
She put some of the problem down to the high labour costs that went into sustaining a quality team.
“Labour costs are huge and that’s the downfall of many restaurants, that unless they’re busy every day of the week it’s kind of hard to keep them running and keep the doors open,” she told the Courier Mail.
“But the hours chefs put in versus what they’re paid … these guys can’t really survive on getting less money, so I don’t know what the answer is there.”
She also said her electricity bill had tripled over the past year.
But , Gold Coast restaurateur Shannon Baier-Fry, who was forced to close his celebrated Palm Beach restaurant 8th Ave Terrace last week, said it was more than just electricity and wages. It was about public expectations. “I think that public expectations of value for money is sort of being muddied a little bit – made more complicated by people feeling these pressures and then undermining their own value by doing food discounts, that sort of stuff. Or not putting their best food forward, to combat these extra expenses,” Mr Baier-Fry told the Courier Mail
“They might want to cut expenses so all of a sudden they’re importing seafood from overseas, they’re getting cheaper cuts of meat, they’re undermining their product and then they’re putting something out for cheaper.”
Leon Gettler - 7th August 2018
