Manu Feildel: My Kitchen Rules judge on dying restaurant business
Chef and TV host Manu Feildel has revealed why he has sworn off the restaurant business in Australia. The popular My Kitchen Rules judge also spoke out about his former business partner George Calombaris.
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One of Australia’s top chefs has revealed why he won’t be going back into the restaurant business, labelling it “crap” as rising costs are killing off local eateries “one by one”.
Popular My Kitchen Rules judge Manu Feildel has put his restaurant ambitions on hold due to increased rents and the high cost of produce due to the drought.
“It is crap. Look at it, the rent is going up, as we know staff pays are going up, the drought so the food is going up and there is very little margin,” the 46-year-old told The Daily Telegraph.
“The landlords don’t care. It is tough and the public just wants more and more and they don’t want to pay more either so it is a very difficult time for the restaurateurs. Only the big ones are surviving and all the little ones are dying one by one.”
Last November Feildel announced that he had closed his World Square restaurant, Duck In Duck Out after just one year in business.
In 2011, Feildel and then business partner Miguel Maestre called time on their Kings Cross restaurant Aperitif, again after less than 12 months in operation.
Three years later, Feildel’s Paddington restaurant, L’Etoile, closed before he went into business with former MasterChef judge George Calombaris on Melbourne’s Le Grand Cirque with that eatery open for just four months.
“The restaurant world has been very difficult as we all know the last few years and I kind of gave it another go last year and it didn’t work out,” he said, speaking to the Telegraph at Channel 7’s recent 2020 programming launch. “I looked at my life and saw I have been given another opportunity, a new career (in TV) I suppose, and I am going to give that a go because that is what works for me at the minute. I have been offered a few gigs so the stars are aligning. It is the right time of my life.”
That’s not to say the father of two doesn’t want to return to the food business.
“I miss it very much so,” he said. “I was born in it and I have been doing it all my life but I had to make a choice for my future. I miss it and if things change in Australia, I would love to do it again. When you are young, you are full of energy and passion and you’d do anything but when you’ve got a family to raise and a mortgage, if you keep on losing money in restaurants, what is the point of trying to do it again.”
Calombaris meanwhile in August vowed to be a “voice for change” in cleaning up wage theft in the food and hospitality industry after being blamed for the $7.8 million underpayment of 515 staff members that was exposed in an audit of his Made Group when new investors joined the business in 2017.
Of his mate and former business partner, Feildel said the broader industry needed to step up.
“To be honest, I think he was the scapegoat,” he said. “They have jumped on him but it is not him to blame, it is the industry to blame. It has always been like this but it has never been pointed out and they had to choose someone to make a change. It is sad that it is him, it could have been us, it could have been anyone. He is not the guy who signs the contracts, he’s not the guy who agrees the contracts or not. He is the face of the business and because he is the face of the business he is the one who gets slapped in the face.”