Ben Shewry looks to reboot Attica post Covid-19
Renowned chef ben Shewry says the challenges of the Covid-19 restrictions have forced him to take Attica on a new path when it reopens.
The award-winning chef says the last eight weeks have been some of he hardest of his life as he looked for a way to keep the business afloat during the lockdown.
“I could just see the tidal wave coming, and I knew that we would go broke,” Shewry told Good Food.
“We couldn’t operate the business the way we had done for 15 years, as a restaurant … we were just bleeding money, pouring out of all the windows and all the doors.”
When the restrictions hit back in March, an estimated 441,000 Australian hospitality jobs evaporated. But Shewry did not want to see his 38-staff follow the same fate, and so he launched an online delivery model.
The “Attica At Home” resurrected some of the restaurant’s most popular menu options. Despite a shaky start, the online business model has thrived, enough so that he actually had to hire more staff to cope with demand.
He says he works over 120 hours a week to keep the business running including stints as a delivery driver three times a week.
“I have at least 1000 ideas in my mind, and 100 written down in notes [on my phone], and 20 that I’m working on at once,” he told Good Food.
The team developed an in-house online ordering system which handles around 100 deliveries per night.
Shewry says he is “not losing money right now” but whether that lasts remains to seen.
“You can’t employ more people when you’re losing money,” he said. “Whether or not it’s profitable across the next few months.”
But when things return to normal, Shewry is unsure the restaurant will return to the same winning format of a $300-plus degustation menu when it needs to operate at a minimum of 62 customers, five nights a week to be viable.
“And I wonder as well about the need for a tasting menu that’s $310 in these tough economic times,” he said. “Pragmatically it doesn’t make that much sense … we might open something else. That’s what I mean about being fluid and looking for new opportunities.”
Sheridan Randall, 9th June 2020
