Julian Gerner selling Sorrento restaurant Morgan’s after 30-years in hospitality

The man behind some of Melbourne’s best nightspots is calling time after 30 years in the game, selling this Sorrento restaurant and bar.

Julian Gerner (left), with Nicholas Smedley, is getting out of the hospitality game after 30 years in the business.

The Sorrento set are the worst of all clypes, so it comes as a surprise word has not got round the 19th hole that favourite local haunt, Morgan’s restaurant and bar, is up for sale.

Owner, former Melbourne pub baron Julian Gerner, says it is time to call last drinks.

“Essentially after 30 plus years and a long undistinguished and chequered career, I’m hanging up the boots,” Gerner laughed.

Preferring sparkling water to the French stuff these days, Gerner was the posterboy against Premier Dan’s draconian lockdowns, launching a bid, that was ultimately deemed invalid, in the High Court of Australia, claiming the restrictions on his business was unconstitutional.

Gerner’s hospo entrepreneurial skills started back in the late 80s in the Mornington Peninsula coastal town when he and fellow bar baron, Grand Final border breacher and Morris Jones owner Hayden Burbank, would hold parties on whichever beach the cops couldn’t find them.

Not long later Gerner went to uni and became legit, going on to work at almost every nightclub, from Silvers to Chevron, before turning the Melbourne pub scene on its head.

Morgan's Beach Shack is on the market.

Cries of gentrification followed.

Loved and loathed depending on who you talk to, Gerner along with the Ryan family, in what was then known as the Melbourne Pub Group, took ownership and reinvented venues from sticky carpeted floors to sophisticated one stop bar and restaurants, including the Royal Saxon, Newmarket Hotel, Albert Park Hotel and Public House among plenty of others.

“Richmond was just Dimmeys and $2 shops. We put Public House in there and it ignited a fire. Now if you walk down Swan St it is a hospitality mecca,” he said. “It was a game changer.”

Later splitting with the group for a sea change back to Sorrento, Gerner quickly took on the Hotel Continental development before things soured and changed ownership, with his focus again on Morgan’s.

But as someone who has seen it all, from the good, the bad, and some of the ugly, Gerner says it is time to try something fresh, putting Morgan’s on the market.

“I’ll just quietly fade away into the sunset,” he laughed mineral water in hand. “I’m okay with that.”