Powerhouse restaurateur Paola Toppi is used to putting out fires. The 55-year-old force of nature has spent a lifetime doing it, ever since her SP bookie dad died when she was 22 and her Italian mamma handed her keys, an $80,000 cheque and six weeks to convert a cockroach-infested grease trap.
The result was the famous establishment Machiavelli Ristorante in Clarence St.
Since then there has been a fallout with her sister, legal battles with her Bar Machiavelli investors, bad business deals, liquidations, out-of-court settlements and now a fight with the City of Sydney Council over trading hours and terms of use for her restaurant in Rushcutters Bay, Bar M.
With a new restaurant and bar opening in October, Toppi Martin Place, Toppi is prepared to lock horns and win. It’s in her Neapolitan blood. After all her mother, at 83, still rules the roost and cracks the whip at Bar M.
All of the dramas have meant Toppi, who should be living la dolce vita sailing around the Mediterranean on the Sardinian super yacht she was invited on for summer, is instead today battling a minor plumbing problem at Bar M in the middle of Sydney’s winter.
“You have to have a very positive attitude,” says the fast-talking and bubbly mother of two.
“Don’t cry over spilt milk. Don’t look back. Always look forward and from everything bad that has happened, something good has happened too.
“My kids, Marco and David, went through a period where we were well off — then things went crazy and we lost a lot of money,” she explains. “But they turned out better for it. They studied hard, went to uni, got good jobs. They are beautiful boys and have beautiful girlfriends and fiancees.
“It might take me another five years to get back to where I was 20 year ago. But I’ll get there. In the meantime I’m happy. My life is good. I’m working harder than ever. But that too will come good at some point.”
Back in 1988 matriarch Giovanna Toppi was running the successful silver spoon Italian eatery La Strada on Macleay St in Potts Point which served Elton John Christmas turkey and catered for celebrities ranging from Sammy Davis Jr to Michael Hutchence and Johnny Depp. When her husband died, she threw Paola into her trade, even though Paola admits she never felt a calling and had “never wanted to cook”.
Machiavelli opened with a bang.
Bold-faced names like Packer, Stokes, Laws, Howard and Keating were regulars. Business billionaires made deals, media magnates made careers and plots to knife prime ministers were hatched, all under the infamous looming black-and-white portraits whose placement signalled the town’s power positions. By 1999, married and close to giving birth to her two sons in the kitchen, the hardworking Paola decided to leave the family fold. Her other business with her husband Neil Cunningham, a string of 20 two-dollar shops called King Kong, were doing well and she’d had enough.
She signed her nine shares over to her younger sister Caterina, who worked the floor of the restaurant. Years later, in 2016, Caterina sold Machiavelli, the name, the menu and the recipes to Nicolae Bicher and Paul Pellarini.
Caterina opened Mach 2 across the road. The sisters haven’t spoken in five years. Paola wanted to take a DNA test to see if they were related, saying: “I just couldn’t see it — we didn’t agree on anything.”
Another business debacle with her best friend from school, Dolores Lavin, involving two fashion studios and millions of dollars followed. The bad investment inspired her to return to the restaurant trade.
She then succeeded where others hadn’t, opening Bar Machiavelli, later renamed Bar M, in Neild Ave, Rushcutters Bay.
The tricky dining location in an old tyre warehouse had failed in its three previous incarnations: Once as Neild Avenue under Maurice Terzini and Robert Marchetti of Bondi Icebergs fame, then The Keystone Group’s Rushcutters and finally the Porteno pop-up, Popteno. “Every place I’ve ever taken over was jinxed,” Toppi says. “Machiavelli’s was. Scuie Scuie (her Double Bay restaurant prior to Bar M) was. I’m the white elephant queen, I mean give me a white elephant and I’ll turn it into a black one.”
She did what she does best: Simple, fresh, uncomplicated and delicious. “Most of my dishes take between three and six minutes,” she says, citing her famous pappardelle with blue swimmer crab as a favourite and her handmade pastas and cured meats as what draws the crowds.
Like the original Machiavelli, which had a bad review early on, the first week was a disaster.
She planned a soft opening, but it was the Autumn Racing Carnival and the Inghams and Nick Williams, son of Lloyd, had a big win.
“They came in on a busload with no booking. That was OK for the VIPs, not so good for the rest of the room. Then a food critic gave us our worst review in the history of restaurant reviews, but it actually worked in my favour. I got so many calls saying ‘don’t worry we support you’ — maybe there is no such thing as bad publicity!”
Barely open, a legal dispute with investors Bicher and Pellarini — who had sunk almost $830,000 into Bar Machiavelli — arose about the amount of money Toppi was entitled to take out of the business. Toppi tells the Wentworth Courier she was working 80-100 hours a week and “they wanted to pay me $1000 per week regardless of the hours I worked”.
“I said ‘you’re mad’ and paid myself the correct money and it all went crazy. They want the success to happen overnight. That’s where it all started.
“After 18 months they called on the $830,000 loan. I couldn’t pull it out in the month they gave me, so I was forced to bring in the administrator, David Hurst. As the director I couldn’t trade insolvently.”
During the Bar Mach dispute, Easts Leagues chairman Nick Poliltis — whose WFM Motors controlled the premises and was a fan of Toppi’s cooking since her Scuie Scuie days when the Roosters frequented the restaurant for their Christmas parties — refused to assign the lease to anyone else. It was a vote of confidence in Toppi, whom he believed was best equipped to trade the business successfully. In the end she purchased the business for $1 million and extinguished the Bicher and Pellarini loans. The whole dispute was settled out of court.
She then took her company out of voluntary administration and repaid all of her creditors and signed a brand new lease, trading under the name Bar M.
“I borrowed it to get them out of my life. And that was it,” she says.
By October last year as all the dust was settling she filled in the routine paperwork to apply for her extended DA trading hours till midnight at Bar M. It was rejected by the City of Sydney Council. “I finally got rid of all my dramas, finally in the clear when I got this letter saying you’ve got to close at 10pm.”
Shattered, she complained to the council who told her it would not only take six months to appeal but that she wouldn’t be able to trade in that time. Toppi saw red.
Realising the restaurant could not survive without opening for six months, she pleaded with everybody she knew, including Keep Sydney Open councillor Jess Scully, Kerryn Phelps and Christine Forster. She created a media hullabaloo. The council up-ended their decision 24 hours later, so she could at least keep trading while the review is in process.
“I don’t want people think I’m closed at 10pm because I’m not! I am still trading till midnight!”
At its heart is her distress a once-bustling city will close down.
“They pander to one neighbour; they’ve got only two negative submissions (out of the 25 lodged, the rest were positive). There are 1200 residents. They will consider to close a world-class restaurant which serves dinner after 10pm because of one guy spending three years of his life writing letter after letter? Clover (Moore) says she wants a world-class city but doesn’t do anything about it.”
The battle has since escalated. One resident is now asking the council to look at Bar M’s terms of use, and whether it can operate as a function room when the DA says the primary use is as a restaurant, giving her only 12 functions a year, even for weddings.
She says the ramifications for the restaurant industry are huge.
“If they create a law for one, it’s bad for everyone. Sydney is in trouble … restaurants are struggling, bureaucracy is drowning us, our kids all over-educated, our kids won’t do this job. Waiters, managers, bar staff — I’ve had ads in the paper for two years — I’ve never had a local apply for a job! I’ve never seen it as tough as it is now.”
Toppi is a good barometer for the industry. “If I’m quiet then things are tough.” The recent kerfuffle lead Toppi and her husband to their latest, and arguably most ambitious find, Toppi Martin Place.
With a 30m frontage on Martin Place and 20m on Macquarie St, she excitedly describes the venture — currently undergoing a luxurious fit-out by Steel and Stitch — as “phenomenal”.
“You’ll never get another location like it. Out of the bad came Martin Place. It’s the ripple effect. It’s why I never look back; I never regret mistakes. I don’t cry over it, I learn from it.”
How does she keep so passionate about an industry that keeps knocking her down? “Because it’s what I do best,” she says without hesitation. “Seeing people appreciate great food, original recipes, beautiful customers who keep coming back.
“Sometimes I think I won’t let them get me. They will try and knock you down every single time. It just makes me stronger. I refuse to lose. I refuse to give up. I can go home and cry in the dark but you won’t get me in public,” she says fighting back tears of frustration.
“You have to (keep going). I do it for my kids, my husband, my mother.”
With her fighter’s stance and the battle with the council still raging, Toppi, confident the DA will be approved, will keep putting out those fires. She’s no white elephant. She’s a phoenix. Rising time and time again.