When Bei Bar & Bistro served its last steak with house-made fig custard last weekend, the modern Mediterranean restaurant’s closure felt like another nail in the coffin for a corner of Darlinghurst already on its knees.

Bei’s owner, the seasoned Sydney restaurateur Leigh Cholakos, had been holding out for an uptick in the precinct where the sprawling Oxford & Foley development on the northern side of Oxford Street – which promises to eventually inject new food operators and commercial tenants – is under construction.

In May, Big Poppa’s restaurant closed on Oxford Street and Cholakos warned she might also be looking to close in Darlinghurst. “This site needs young energy,” Cholakos says of Bei’s home, a modernist building on the corner of Bourke and Foley Streets.

Now it has found it with Stefano Marano, the former head chef at The Apollo, and his business partner, Jack Reid. Next month, they’ll relaunch the site as Avia, a 60-seat European restaurant.

Cholakos believes the duos’ timing is promising. Oxford & Foley is slated to finally open next year, with restaurateur Ibby Moubadder (Nour, Ito) to launch a Japanese-Peruvian restaurant there, and a revised development application for a Sydney branch of private club Soho House behind Oxford & Foley, approved in June.

“The area feels like when we opened Apollo, and everything grew around us,” Marano says of the choice of location for Avia. The pair, who met in 2014 working at Apollo, certainly have the required experience for the challenge.

After a decade working at Apollo in Sydney and Tokyo, Marano moved to Denmark to work at Hart Bakery and Sanchez, before returning to Sydney in 2022 as executive chef at Swillhouse venue Le Foote, in The Rocks. Marano says his departure from Le Foote in May was part of long-held plans to open his own venue, and unrelated to the recent Swillhouse allegations.

Meanwhile, Reid set off and managed the floor at Melbourne’s Supernormal, and Brisbane’s Greca.

“Everything I do [with food] is related to my grandmother in Naples,” Marano says of his food philosophy. The opening menu will feature sausage with black cabbage pesto and fennel ice-cream with spiced carrot and burnt honey, plus freshly baked bread customers can dip in sugo of the day. While there’ll be plenty of Italian, “we also cross into the south of France, or Spain”.

With Big Poppa’s to return when the Oxford & Foley development is completed and new attractions such as the recently opened 45-seat Qtopia substation theatre, Cholakos believes revitalisation of the precinct will happen, “but might take a few years”.

“It’s probably a crazy time to be opening a new restaurant,” Marano says of Avia’s impending launch. “So it’s just as well that we’re both a bit crazy.”