Star chef Peter Gilmore and the $4m-plus restaurant gamble

For months now, one of Australia's most celebrated chefs, Peter Gilmore, has been wedged into the crummiest station at the back of a packed kitchen, surrounded by Tupperware containers and boxes of fruit and vegetables, working to reinvent the upper reaches of Australian cuisine.

It's not the kitchen of Quay, the restaurant that made him famous. That fine-dining institution, with its panoramic views of Sydney Harbour, from the Bridge to the Opera House and Circular Quay, made it into the world's top-50 list of fine-diners five times. It was ripped apart at the start of April as part of a wholesale reinvention into which Fink Group is sinking more than $4 million.

It's a huge investment – but then, Quay has always been the jewel in the crown of the quirky Sydney restaurant empire owned by the 81-year-old patriarch, Leon Fink, a legendary spotter of chef talent, and his three children with his former wife, filmmaker Margaret Fink.

That Fink Group crown also includes Quay's sister restaurant, Bennelong, at the Sydney Opera House, Otto and its Brisbane sibling, Ross Lusted's three-hat The Bridge Room, Lennox Hastie's two-hat Firedoor and the single-hat Beach Byron Bay, the last three as 50 per cent partnerships. But Quay has always been special, and Gilmore "the rock on which Leon has built the whole Fink Group", says chef Neil Perry.

When Good Weekend meets executive chef Gilmore in May, Quay, that 900-square-metre jewel, is being recut into what has been dubbed "the biggest little restaurant in Australia" by John Fink, Leon's heir apparent and the group's creative director.

Quay closed on March 28 with a $500-a-head, six-course, 17-year retrospective of its signature dishes. At this point, Gilmore consigned the entire menu to history. Gone is the eight-textured chocolate cake that Sydney Morning Herald chief food critic Terry Durack declared one of the "10 dishes that changed Sydney". Gone too is the mud crab congee that Good Food dubbed "the country's most luxurious comfort dish". Even the famous "snow egg", the poached-meringue dessert seen by 3.9 million people (a non-sport TV ratings record) when it featured in a MasterChef challenge in 2010, has been jettisoned.

Gilmore, a gracious, quietly spoken 50-year-old, is halfway into his three-month race to create a whole new Quay from the menu up. He's working 10 to 12 hours a day, experimenting with vegetables from the test garden he keeps in his yard at home – four-by-10-metre raised beds set on railway sleepers – as well as from gardeners and farmers around NSW. "It can be anything," he says of the little volts of inspiration feeding into the new menu. "It could be a texture, or an ingredient – maybe a new kind of cabbage I haven't worked with before that has a really surprising texture if you grill it. Or it might be a beautiful new sea urchin I have that is being hand-dived for in Tasmania."

To Gilmore's right, sous chef Tim Mifsud breaks eggs into his hands, chef-style, catching the yolks, letting the whites slide. Somewhere else, planning and recruiting, is the third member of the research and development team, Rob Kabboord, who became a sous chef at Quay after Gilmore took over in 2001. Kabboord rejoined Gilmore three years ago, leaving his own 30-seat Melbourne establishment, Merricote, to become Quay's chef de cuisine.

"We've divided it up," Gilmore says of the task. "Rob is co-ordinating the logistics, doing all the order sheets, writing out the standard recipe cards. My job is to come up with the ideas, and Tim does all the trial work, then we narrow them down – what's working, what's not."

What's working right now are the boxes of feijoas, a small green fruit, also known as pineapple guava, jammed under Gilmore's bench. Because the fruit has a relatively short season, Mifsud is freezing the juice for Quay's new ice-cream. "I don't want to give too much away, but we're working on a dish that also incorporates a couple of other flavours, and the possibility of extremely aerating a white chocolate mousse," Gilmore says. "We've also bought a freeze-dry machine and we're doing lots of tests with that."

He pulls that morning's trial from the tower of clear Tupperware containers that surround him. A freeze-dried riff on an oloroso nougat Quay used to serve, it is almost weightless, exploding in your mouth before disappearing in a puff of smoke. "Because all the moisture's been taken out, the nougat, which is normally quite dense, is super-light," he explains. "The moisture in your mouth rehydrates it and all the flavours – the oloroso alcohol, the nougat, the almonds – come back out."

A lesser chef might have been tempted to just evolve his menu's greatest hits, add a few more. Quay was hardly broken, after all, managing to maintain an unprecedented three Good Food Guide hats for each of the past 16 years, while also being crowned restaurant of the year six times in that period. Before Quay closed its doors, 70 per cent of diners still ordered the snow egg, more than half a million of which have been hatched over the past decade.

In the end, though, Gilmore and Leon and John Fink agreed that if millions were going to be spent evolving the place, the menu had to be radically overhauled. "You cannot rest on your laurels," says Gilmore. "This says we are serious about this renewal. To be true to yourself, you have to let go of the past and be fully committed to new creativity."

And if the risk of starting from scratch was significant, the risk of not doing so was greater still. Much of Quay's design dated from its power-dining days as Bilson's in the 1980s (a venture between Leon Fink and chef Tony Bilson). Fink had been saying the restaurant needed a revamp since Bennelong opened in 2015 at the Opera House, immediately garnering two hats and best-new-restaurant gongs. "I'm sure a bit of cannibalising went on with Bennelong," he says.

Then there was the question of Gilmore, who admits he and John Fink were pushing Leon hard for about five years to renew Quay. "It mattered," says Gilmore, "because I was having people say to me, 'The food is amazing, when are you updating the dining room?'

It was put into words in several of our last reviews, that the reason you come to Quay is to have an incredible dining experience, but the dining room looks like a nightclub when the lights come on." While hardly grounds for divorce, "it was said that it was paramount for me that renewal happen if I was going to continue at Quay."

The former Quay restaurant: “People always asked me, ‘When are you updating the dining room?’” says Peter Gilmore.

When it reopens on July 19, the restaurant will offer a 10-course tasting menu, with a six-course option as the only alternative. À la carte has been banished. That, too, is a risky move at a time when the death of fine dining in general – and the dégustation in particular – is regularly pronounced in Sydney, where a host of feted establishments have closed or are closing, including Neil Perry's Eleven Bridge and Jade Temple, Mark Best's Marque, former Quay chef Guillaume Brahimi's Guillaume in Paddington, and MoVida Sydney. (Several top Melbourne venues have also shut their doors in recent times, including St Kilda's Circa, Albert Park's The Point and Philippe Mouchel's PM24 in the CBD.)

Rents are an obvious factor, but customers – particularly younger ones – are also increasingly attuned to higher-volume, no-tablecloth, deliver-on-the-plate venues such as Bennelong.

Leon Fink is unperturbed by the local closures. "They're doing us a favour," he says. "The more they shut down, the more important we become. Sydney is an international city – millions of international tourists, plus Australian tourists on top of that – and it's only growing. We don't need a very large percentage of people to be well-to-do and have something to celebrate, and there is plenty of evidence to show that there are plenty of people who want somewhere very special to go."

"Very special" is where Quay is looking to cement its place. Prices will increase to $275 a head for 10 courses and $210 for six, up from $185 for four courses, à la carte, and $245 for the eight-course tasting menu. While hardly cheap, that "could look like pretty good value compared to many of the top 50 international restaurants", says Gourmet Traveller's chief restaurant critic Pat Nourse. Quay itself will slim from 100 seats – huge by fine-dining standards, where less than 60 is the norm – to 80.

Peter Gilmore prepares a tasting menu for the new restaurant. Credit: Nic Walker

The theatre of dining, too, will be accentuated, from directional lighting to more personalised service. "Other restaurants at this level tend to be more intimate, to make you feel a little bit special," says Nourse. "If you wanted to take a glass-half-empty view of [the old] Quay, it sometimes felt like you were just a cog in the machine. It wasn't nimble, the menu didn't change often, and they never really had the sort of host who brought it the way Peter's food brought it. They need to make it feel like 'Quay is there for you,' not 'you are there for Quay'."

Helping to close that loop will be its new general manager, the London-trained former Rockpool Group head, Jeremy Courmadias, who joined Fink Group last November.

Of course, the scale of the reinvention – menu, room, service, experience – only increases the risk. "It could be Ishtar," Nourse says, referring to Warren Beatty's expensive and indulgent 1987 film flop. "Just because you have a bunch of talent there doesn't guarantee a result. Peter might sail too close to the wind."

"I hope we have got it right, and that will only show over time," says Leon Fink. "It's a gamble. I know it will look beautiful. I know Peter will do wonderful food. It's just the general acceptance from the reviewing world – and more importantly the customers who come regardless of what the reviewers say – that will tell us whether we've got it right or not."

He has certainly given the gamble time to pay off. The major delay in renewing Quay, he says, was contract negotiations with Quay's landlord, the Port Authority of NSW, which owns the Overseas Passenger Terminal that houses the restaurant. With only a few years left on the lease, Leon Fink was unwilling to invest millions without an extension. "We had to commit to an element of [capital expenditure] to demonstrate that the place was going to remain top-end," says Fink. "In return, and for that to be worth taking on, we have received a new lease for the next 20 years."

Fink Group patriarch Leon Fink: “There are plenty of people who want somewhere very special to go.”Credit: Nic Walker

Twenty years is a long time in the life of an 81-year-old. Then again: "Leon's a bit of a freak of nature," says luxury goods publicist Naomi Parry, who worked with the Fink Group for a decade. "He has this uncanny ability to spot where the action is at 100 paces, he does it with property and he does it with talent – so, who knows, he may just live to be 110."

Fink's eye for talent is, indeed, legendary. When Tony Bilson left Bilson's, Fink renamed the restaurant Quay and hired Guillaume Brahimi, a chef he'd spotted at a small Kings Cross restaurant called Pond. He would later bring in Gilmore to resurrect Quay when it lost its mojo after Brahimi's departure – ironically to start Guillaume at Bennelong at the Opera House. Tetsuya Wakuda, Mark Best and Peter Kuruvita are also among those who have passed through Fink's kitchens.

"Leon is a star-maker," says Terry Durack. "The two restaurants that have totally shaped Sydney dining are Tony's Bon Gout in the 1970s and Tetsuya's in the 1990s. The common threads were Leon Fink and Tony Bilson. The flashpoint came in 1983, when Tony Bilson hired a young and inexperienced Tetsuya Wakuda at Kinselas. It was here Wakuda learnt the fundamentals of French cuisine, eventually combining them with his own in-built Japanese ethic at Tetsuya's. A new cuisine was born that was somehow uniquely Australian.

"So without Fink, we wouldn't have Bilson, and without Bilson, we wouldn't have Tetsuya, and without Tetsuya we wouldn't have Martin Benn of Sepia, Dan Puskas of Sixpenny, Dan Hong of Mr Wong …" Durack reels off several more names. "That's one hell of a legacy, in chefs alone."

But design, not food, was the first trick Leon Fink learnt when he fell into the restaurant business, almost accidentally, half a century ago, when his family bought Melbourne's Southern Cross Hotel and decided to manage it themselves. "I noticed that the restaurants didn't do well. The food didn't occur to me; I decided it was because the rooms were pretty ugly," he says. "So we stripped them out and got a smart young architect in."

This makes the first glimpse of Fink Group's newish headquarters, down an alley in inner-city Sydney, something of a surprise. A bunch of CDs – Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, Brahms' A German Requiem, Annie Lennox's Diva – are laid out like a busker's wares in the stairwell, in case anybody wants them. Upstairs, above the Philatelic Association of NSW, the Fink Group occupies two floors.

Leon's office is like something out of Steptoe and Son. A battered copy of Thames & Hudson's The Earth from the Air lies open on a table outside his office, which has no door – just the hinge marks where one used to be. Inside are mementos of Fink's six decades as a farmer, father, restaurateur and property developer. In one corner, a 1947 bottle of Seppelt Para liqueur sits in front of a small marble bust from the foyer of Sydney's historic Regent Theatre, which Fink demolished – amid outrage – in 1989.

Family photos mix with a stack of panoramas stuck together – Earth from the Air-style – from prints: Clovelly baths; an aerial shot of his farm in Eden, on the NSW South Coast. An older, larger panorama hangs on the wall opposite his desk. There's also a limited-edition 1823 etching by Major Andrew Taylor of an idealised landscape of Governor Macquarie's new colony – soldiers in the foreground, sparkling civic buildings in the middle ground – against the backdrop of Port Jackson. Almost 200 years later, it might be a military map for Leon Fink's ongoing campaign to own Sydney Harbour.

While Quay and Bennelong already give him prime views of the harbour, Fink is going for the trifecta: a third property that would sit between them. "I'm in the middle of conversations about where," he says.

Otto, at Sydney’s Woolloomooloo.Credit: Edwina Pickles

The Fink Group has already tripled in size in the decade-and-a-half since Leon became a full-time restaurateur. From Quay and the celebrity commissariat Otto, on Sydney's Finger Wharf at Woolloomooloo, to seven restaurants. And the slim, impish Fink shows no signs of slowing down, as Quay's new 20-year lease underlines.

"I'm looking all the time, it's all I've got left to do," Fink says. "The management we have put together now is so good that I'm virtually superfluous." He recently moved his partner, Libby McNeil, 43, into his house on the edge of Clovelly beach in Sydney's east, where he spends the early morning in the garden before putting in a full day in the office.

The eldest son of a prominent Melbourne Jewish émigré family, Leon Fink initially ran the property development side of the family business. "Leon and my grandfather Jack did their first property development by getting a book, How to Build a House, out of the library," says John Fink. "Jack fell into the hotel business by default, after the company running the hotel went broke, and Jack snapped up the shares at a cent each."

Leon moved to Sydney in his mid-20s, because "Sydney was exciting – and I discovered there were commercial rent controls on buildings in the city, which had been cancelled in Melbourne some time before," he says, "leading to a very healthy period of redevelopment of older buildings."

Moving to Sydney was also liberating for Fink, "being out of the constraints of Melbourne, which was a very traditional town, and the life that I led. I engaged with a wider range of people and became interested in a lot of things." He moved on the fringe of the Sydney Push – "they thought I was on the fringe because I wasn't clever enough," he quips – funding the publication of the banned book The Trial of Lady Chatterley in 1965 to challenge Australia's archaic censorship laws, and going out – or staying in – with Germaine Greer before marrying her best friend, Margaret Elliott.

And from the very start, the business of property and the business of "exciting" moved in lock step. In the early 1970s, he put Tony and Gay Bilson into the Mansion House, the ramshackle hotel he had bought in Sydney's Elizabeth Street, which would eventually become the Southern Cross hotel. The bistro, Tony's Bon Gout, sparked not only his food education but a contemporary dining revolution in Australia. "It was a new level of food altogether," Fink says of the bistro. "It also became an extremely popular place for people of ideas to meet; the conversations were often as interesting again."

When Bilson was looking to leave his next venue, Berowra Waters, in the 1980s, Fink turned a former funeral parlour into a restaurant and theatre, Kinselas, modelled on the jazz and comedy rooms he'd seen overseas. It came to symbolise the heyday of Sydney's Taylor Square, on Oxford Street in the city, launching the likes of comedian Max Gillies nationally, and helping to save the Sydney Dance Company from liquidation. "It didn't work long-term, but what it did for Sydney!" remembers Neil Perry. "If it was here today, we'd be going crazy for it."

What killed Kinselas in the end "was the arrival of Australian talent on television", says Fink. "They were being paid for a half-hour show what we were able to pay them for a couple of months to be on the stage."

Meanwhile, Fink was having his share of well-publicised travails in the property game that made his fortune. He was a lessee of Sydney's Luna Park in 1979, when a fire killed seven people. The then NSW premier Neville Wran had refused to honour an agreement to have the lease converted from week-to-week to long-term, he says, to undertake improvements. The demolition of the Regent Theatre a decade later, a flashpoint for widespread protest, was followed by the stratospheric interest rates of the early '90s, which forced the sale of the Metro, the music venue Fink had opened on George Street in Sydney's CBD.

The Bridge Room at Circular Quay, co-owned by the Fink Group and Ross Lusted. Credit: Louise Kennerley

As with Luna Park, the Regent deal still rankles. "My intention was always to try and find a way to keep it, but it was just impossible, physically and economically," Fink says. But more than any of that, what turned him into a full-time restaurateur were the shortening horizons that come with age, coupled with an apparently undiminished appetite for making things happen. "I was getting older, I'd been through the ups and downs of the property world. I became much more interested in restaurants, where you can have an idea and 12 months later, it's a complete project in operation."

Things have now reached a point where continued growth has its own inexorable logic. "There's a tipping point in this industry where your percentages begin to perform better," says John Fink. "Not because you're doing anything differently, but because you have greater volume. It's the scale thing."

To hear Leon Fink tell it, his whole career as a restaurateur has been accidental. "What you're seeing is me responding to unexpected events. Whether they're always the most rational thing to do is another matter; I've had lots of downs as well as ups on the way through."

That is how Bennelong – a coming-of-age for Fink Group – happened, he says. The first successful tenderer for the space, Melbourne's Van Haandel Group, withdrew after its Stokehouse restaurant burnt down. When the restaurant tendered again for an upmarket operator, it became an opportunity for the restless Gilmore to spread his wings at a critical time.

But the "accidental restaurateur" tag undersells his consistency and achievement. "It's a pretty impressive track record," Pat Nourse says, pointing to the calibre of chefs – such as the acclaimed Ross Lusted and Lennox Hastie, stars with plenty of options – who have chosen to partner with Fink. As for Gilmore: "He has really developed a distinctive style and voice at Quay," Nourse says. "He's found his sound, in the Glenn Miller sense, and in the Finks he has found a patron that has supported him a way that few other operators could or would."

That comes down, everyone agrees, to the fact that Fink Group is, as it says on its website, a "family-run business". "Leon owns most of it," says John Fink, "but we all have a cut and we all have a say."

John Fink (centre) watches over as Peter Gilmore prepares a tasting menu for the new restaurant. Credit: Nick Walker

It's a bleak wintry day in early June, and John Fink is rattling the pans in the kitchen of his Clovelly house, making chicken soup and matzo balls for his daughter Mahalia, who is studying for her midwifery exams downstairs.

Slightly shambolic in glasses, a black T-shirt and shorts, he could be a 52-year-old dish pig, which is about the only job he hasn't had in his 35 years in and around the family business. Huge stainless-steel pots – relics of John's time operating Blackwattle Cafe in Glebe – hang from the ceiling, over a wall of copper pots. A wire sculpture of floating wooden spoons is suspended over the window. Fink's former bachelor pad is being renovated to accommodate his newborn son, Eliot Jack Fink – named after both John's grandfathers, Jack Elliott and Jack Fink – and his partner Estelle Hoen. Leon and Libby live next door, in a sort of ad hoc Fink compound.

The grand piano – John's maternal grandparents were opera singers and his younger brother Ben was a member of the band The Whitlams – is still at the centre of the living room, but the drum kit, mandolin and Marshall amp have been pushed to one side. The fact that Eliot, who arrived early, was due around the time Quay opens – and that he is renovating his own house as Quay is being renovated – underlines the fluidity between family and business milestones.

From the outside, John is the "X factor" in the Fink Group equation. Creative director is, after all, a moniker that can mean a lot or very little when applied to a scion. Fink himself is unconcerned about defining his role. The website credits him with maintaining "the vibe". Jeremy Courmadias, Fink Group's general manager, says John "sets the culture and the feel".

Whatever it is that John adds to the equation, it shouldn't be underestimated, says one long-term insider. "John is a true creative who perfectly complements Leon, who's a brilliant property developer and judge. Leon can get entrenched and penny-pinching. John has the ability, perhaps because it's his money too, to get into Leon's ear."

It's that chemistry – beyond the alchemy Gilmore is working in his test kitchen, and what will appear in the design and service – that will help determine the new Quay's fate. Connectivity will be more vital still if Fink Group is to negotiate the elephant in the room, its founder's mortality. "I'm healthy and of sound mind," says Leon Fink. "But my whole focus now is to make sure that if I drop out of the restaurant game, we have the nucleus of a very powerful team."

That includes the team's non-family members, such as Gilmore, and ensuring "they are happy, which means that they are professionally incentivised to continue to develop their skills," says Fink.

As for Quay's launch, it immediately puts him in mind of another launch, closer to the beginning of his career, when Mansion House was converted into the Southern Cross.

"It was so dilapidated, it took a couple of years," he says. "Finally, I came in one morning and into this beautiful foyer with all this polished timber and the new carpet and the wonderful marble desk – and everything was polluted by a whole lot of people walking through. I grabbed the manager and said, 'What the hell is going on?' And he said, 'Leon. They're customers. We're open.'"

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