Gastropub diet for Town Hall Hotel

It’s hard to keep a good gastropub chef down. To prove it, Melbourne veteran Sean Donovan is back in the game, having just bought Fitzroy’s Town Hall Hotel.

Chef Sean Donovan is now in Fitzroy. Source: News Limited

Donovan had a long restaurant career (some of it with Paul Wilson at Radii and the Botanical) before nailing a gastropub formula built on serious produce and sound technique. It saw him build, and subsequently sell last year, two excellent businesses: the Wayside Inn (South Melbourne) and the Station Hotel (Footscray). Now he plans to replicate his successful culinary formula in Fitzroy where, for the past five years, chef turned publican Harry Lilai has successfully plied the waters of wine bar and Italian trattoria at the Town Hall. “I’d be looking to take the place back to more of a fair dinkum pub,” says Donovan, who may settle the deal next month. “I think the pub needs to be a place where you can walk in from the street and get a beer, so I hope to take the Town Hall back closer to its roots.” He says he probably will close the business and make some architectural changes before launching. For Lilai’s part, it’s a great result. “I’m really happy for Sean, he’s a great match,” the former Cecconi’s chef says. Lilai plans some consulting and travel before looking for sites for the next business he will do with wife Michelle Lilai.

The nexus between millionaire Singaporean businessman Loh Lik Peng and Australia gets stronger. Loh has appointed Sydney’s Emmanuel Benardos as his group general manager across four of the businesses he has a key stake in: Restaurant Andre, Burnt Ends, Meatsmith and Bincho. Burnt Ends, one of Asia’s most talked about restaurants of the past year, is headed and part-owned by Aussie chef David Pynt while Meatsmith has ex-Ms G’s chef Tim Dopson on the barbecue. Loh is the developer behind Chippendale’s forthcoming boutique hotel the Old Clare, where three much-anticipated, young chef-driven restaurants will open over winter.

Former Esquire (Brisbane) head chef Ben Devlin has emerged from brief retirement to head up the kitchen at Halcyon House, a just-launched boutique hotel described as “a former surfer motel turned luxury hotel” on the NSW north coast at Cabarita Beach. Halcyon’s restaurant, Paper Daisy, is a 90-seater with a “cuisine manifesto” of “clean, produce-driven and with an accent on health”. Naturally, there’s a wood grill and talk of vegetables, fruits and herbs from “the organic garden”. Devlin was an important part of Esquire’s rise to prominence and worked at Noma, in Copenhagen, before that, when Noma was first named best restaurant by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2005. One to watch.

The momentum of Adelaide’s Peel Street continues, with young first-time entrepreneurs Annie Liang and Tuoi Tran behind new spirits bar and Asian eatery Gondola Gondola. They come to a street already groaning (by Adelaide standards) with quality wine bars and restaurants. Gondola Gondola’s lavish, joyful look is by local interior designer Matiya Marovich, and the food will be of the mod-Asian persuasion with Thai-born chef Sek Suntharaphai, a protege of local Thai chef Nu Suandokmai. They open Friday.

A Melbourne woman committed to the cause of reducing food waste has launched an app described as a “mobile marketplace for surplus or unsold food”. Katy Barfeld’s idea is to connect food store, cafe and restaurant proprietors faced with disposing of perfectly good food that cannot be sold next day with consumers looking for a bargain. The app facilitates the transaction and uses GPS to match offers and nearby potential customers. Barfeld was founding chief executive of national food rescue body SecondBite. “Yume takes the best of modern technology and connects a community of like-minded people who see surplus or unsold food, not as a problem but as a chance to make a huge impact for our planet,” she says. We agree. theyumeapp.com

Does good service matter? New York City multi-millionaire Robert Ellsworth certainly thought so: he left two waiters $US50,000 each when he died recently. Maureen Barrie and her niece, also Maureen Barrie, work at Donohue’s Steak House on the Upper East Side, where the late art mogul was a very regular customer.

Source : The Australian   John Lethlean   <ay 28th 2015