Sydney restaurants’ casual service trend ruining fine dining

PAPER napkins and swearing waiters wearing shorts — it is the new normal in Sydney’s dining scene. And one of the city’s most successful restaurateurs from Catalina says it is spelling the demise of fine dining.

Owners of Catalina Restaurant in Rose Bay: Michael and Judy McMahon and their son James and daughter Kate. Picture: Tim Hunter.

PAPER napkins and swearing waiters wearing shorts — it is the new normal in Sydney’s dining scene.

Now one of the city’s most successful restaurateurs says it is spelling the end of fine dining.

Michael McMahon, long-time owner of Rose Bay’s famed Catalina restaurant in Sydney’s east, has slammed what he sees as Sydney’s “trendy casual” culture, where linen tablecloths are a thing of the past, and waiting staff wear shorts and swear in front of customers.

Since taking over Catalina 23 years ago, Mr McMahon has observed a huge drop in standards as professional waiters have made way for students and travellers.

Catalina Restaurant at Rose Bay. Picture: Bob Barker.

“Our waiters wear long pants and not shorts. We don’t throw a basket of bread on the table when people sit down and we treat people like grown-ups,” said Mr McMahon, who paid $1.5 million for the Rose Bay eatery in 1993.

The business, which he runs with his wife Judy, son James and daughter Kate, is now estimated to be worth about $15 million.

“We went to a restaurant a few weeks ago and I won’t say what it was, but it was a nice room and it was one of those places that everyone is talking about and is quite popular at the moment,” he said.

“And we had this waiter that kept coming up to us saying, ‘Too easy, too easy.’ You’d ask for something and he’d say, ‘Too easy.’ I just think it’s horrible.”

Things are just “too easy”.

Son James, who serves as floor manager, also criticised Sydney’s hipster service culture where swearing has ­become commonplace.

“I went to a place yesterday that I really like and I go there a lot, but the maitre’d was like ‘F … yeah mate, f … yeah’. Now I’m not too precious about stuff like that, but I thought ‘steady on’,” he said.

Catalina, meanwhile, has posted a record summer according to Mr McMahon and is poised to undertake its first major renovation since 1993, with the addition of 220sq m to the property that overlooks Sydney Harbour.

It’s a rare success story in a city that has seen several high-profile restaurants close in the past year, including Mark Best’s fine diner Marque, Sam Miller’s hipster favourite Silvereye, Frank Camorra’s MoVida, The Resident on Hyde Park and the critically lauded Master Dining in Surry Hills.

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“Restaurants are a serious business in this city and if you go in undercapitalised, corners start to get cut … and that’s when it all goes wrong,” Mr McMahon said.

“If you’re not turning over $10 million in a restaurant like this in Sydney you may as well buy a cab. And if you are making 10 per cent off your bottom line, then you are doing extremely well.”

Angus Gordon, of insolvency experts Macquarie Gordon, said something as simple as good service could often be the difference between a successful restaurant and a dud.

“The thing that we often suggest to owners is that they have mini key performance indicators, or an average idea of the average spend per customer that they want, and they need to share that with their managers and wait staff,” Mr Gordon said.