Chris Lucas reveals his secret to ongoing restaurant success
Maverick restaurateur Chris Lucas’ growing empire is rooted in presenting plated foreign fancies through a Melbourne lens. And he has no intention of putting his feet up just yet.
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It’s a weekday morning, before the lunch rush.
Big-time restaurateur Chris Lucas sits in a corner of Society, his Collins St restaurant complex which hosted a few prime ministers earlier in the week.
He points at the enormous aluminium chandeliers, each weighing two tonnes, which swayed as he watched in stunned horror during a late night earthquake in September 2021.
For once, he jokes, he was glad the restaurant was empty.
Lucas, in a trademark T-shirt, is sharp and self-deprecating. If he’s blunt, it’s not for effect. He’s been called “nuggety”, over and over, but it’s those big eyes that command your attention.
He was a “plodder” at school, he claims. Yet he wields intellectual clout, offering thoughtful views about Facebook and injecting rooms, and annoying politicians who “just bullshit everybody”.
You may know Lucas from his restaurants, which include Society, Hawker Hall and Grill Americano.
Lucas materialised during Covid in the unlikely role as an aggrieved critic of Daniel Andrews’ lockdowns. Covid was a period of seemingly inexplicable expansion for Lucas, given restaurants could not serve patrons throughout much of 2020 and 2021.
It goes to his singular approach. Lucas is different. Astute of judgment, he is also grand of vision.
He rails against political correctness, but is savvy enough to premise his hardest thoughts with “off-the-record”. His network stands to rival that of Eddie McGuire. Lucas belongs in that reserve of Melbourne that mostly goes unseen, where power resides in a quiet chat at a corner table.
He abides by his own ethos. He hopes that you will like his latest venture, but he will be unfazed if you do not.
Lucas takes risks; instead of pandering to the fashion, he presents new visions, in a kind of “build it and they will come” self-belief which is more often right than not.
Lucas is an outsider, if you like, who is also a key player, informed by a loyalty to Melbourne which infuses every one of his restaurants, whether they are inspired by Paris charcuteries or New York’s hotspots from a lost age.
Lucas sat down with V Weekend on the eve of a new venture, a restaurant project that is one of the more unique of his vaulting vision. But it’s the only venture, perhaps, for which he cannot mask his childlike pride.
The idea for new restaurant came when Lucas was hosting mates in his Toorak home. Geelong coach Chris Scott, like Lucas, loves good red wine. He was there. As was the footy club’s chief executive, Steve Hocking, along with Andrew Mackie, best known as a Geelong triple premiership half-back flanker.
Since taking over the club administration in 2021, Hocking has pursued a vision for the Kardinia Park precinct. Pokies were out; food and beverage options were in.
As Lucas remembers it, his was a throwaway line, almost as if his mouth was working ahead of his mind.
“Mate,” he said to Hocking, “we should do a restaurant there…”
Hocking pondered the novel idea of a glamorous venue in a football stadium. “Well, what restaurant would you do?” he replied.
Chin Chin, Lucas said, referring to the highly successful flagship in egalitarianism which has inspired waiting queues, night after night, since it opened in Flinders Lane in 2011.
“I’m thinking, shit, what’s happening here,” Lucas says of the chat six months later. “He (Hocking) said we will do it if you’re prepared to do it. And I thought, well, why not?”
Fine food and football are not a traditional match. It’s one of the main reasons why the notion of Club Chin Chin, as it’s to be called, appeals to Lucas. He starts trends rather than follows them. “Cookie-cutter” (along with “retirement”) is almost a dirty word in his restaurant business, which boasts 11 venues and counting - including in Melbourne Society, Yakimono, Grill Americano, Chin Chin, Gogo Bar, Kisume, Hawker Hall and Baby and a Sydney Chin Chin.
At 63, he speaks of legacies. He has built an empire, but rails against any sense of accumulated ambition. He loves the challenge, one by one, of creating restaurants unlike any others, of foreign fancies, from Europe, the US or Asia, presented through “a Melbourne lens”.
His face lights up at the prospect of renewing an old building - at the top end of Bourke St, for a new french-themed restaurant, Batard. He conjures timeless restaurants that double as “flag bearers for Melbourne”.
He doesn’t need to do more restaurants, to fuss over details such as the placement of commas on the menus. But he wants to.
Lucas agrees that his latest restaurant, a Chin Chin at Kardinia Park, is not among his biggest enterprises. But up-market Thai cuisine at a footy ground makes sense to him. It bows to the growing norm of fine dining at US stadiums, as well as the Australian Open tennis, widely considered the best of the majors because of its food and beverage delights.
The idea also closes a circle that began in the early 60s, when a Greek kid from Belmont would ride his bike on a Saturday to Kardinia Park, to queue up with Anzacs and pensioners for a wooden seat in the stand.
Lucas is a footy groupie. He admits to a “man crush” on former captain Joel Selwood. His early days were steeped in footy rituals, such as gawking at Polly Farmer in the change rooms.
On Mondays, he recalls, you chatted about last Saturday’s game. Tuesdays were speculation about the next Saturday’s game. Wednesday and Thursday were for selection questions, and Friday was about preparing for the following day.
Lucas counts the defection of full-forward Doug Wade as one of his more painful memories, along with four Geelong grand final losses before the club’s belated premiership win, over Port Adelaide in 2007.
Lucas goes to the footy all the time; mostly, he eats before he goes. The Chin Chin restaurant will be open on match days, as well as for lunch and dinner on weekends.
“The more I thought about it, the more I thought that this solves my ambition of wanting to open a restaurant in Geelong and doing it with a club that is still the biggest thing in Geelong,” he says.
“If it works, it means we don’t have to be relegated to eating basic food or takeaway from here on, and if this really works well, then why wouldn’t we look at doing something like this at the MCG or Marvel Stadium?
“This could be the way of the future.”
Not long ago, Lucas asked a big London restaurateur why he hadn’t opened in Melbourne.
“I’m not crazy,” the restaurateur replied. The market is too good, he said, too competitive.
“I think Melbourne in many ways is still the jewel in the crown when it comes to food culture,” Lucas says. “There’s something very organic and natural. I think we have a great sense of integrity about what we do and we sit as a food city as equal as anyone else in the world.”
Lucas knows almost everyone, it seems, and speaks of exchanges in which he disagreed with the nation’s most powerful people. A father of three (and stepfather to two), it doesn’t hurt that he is married to Sarah, an A-list Melbourne fixture.
Not that Lucas will discuss his offstage life. Besides business promotion, he shrinks from the gossip pages.
Still, Lucas makes news. The Society restaurant had three “openings” during lockdown. Problems multiplied. The earthquake shorted the electricity box, killing the power to the refrigerators and spoiling the food in them. A water pipe blew in the ceiling, flooding the joint a week before one opening – it was “like Niagara Falls”.
Lucas and his team defied the advice of lawyers, bankers and accountants to build four restaurants in the uncertainty of a pandemic, in what has been estimated as a $70m expansion phase.
It’s possible his risk-taking approach to the crisis went unparalleled anywhere in the world. Lucas won’t be told to follow a script.
He’s not one for groupthink, which he describes as “suffocating” and “boring”.
Some of his restaurant plans could not be erased. He figured, rightly, that if he could survive until the pandemic’s end, diners would rush to embrace the liberating pleasure of new restaurants.
“I was in the psychological trenches,” he says. “I was dealing with everything from suicides to addictions to breakdowns to family break-ups to all sorts of things. That was not something that I was prepared for. I don’t think anyone was prepared for it.”
He had been stung by claims of underpayments to staff in 2019 (the company was cautioned by the Fair Work Ombudsman).
And he was nonplussed by the limits of government assistance. Yes, JobKeeper was great, but what about visa workers who could not receive it?
His company employed maybe 100 or more visa workers. It established a crisis management team, which gave each employee a colour-coding according to need.
Ineligible JobKeeper employees came in. How much was their rent? Utilities? Food? When a number was tallied, Lucas agreed to pay their living expenses. “I took it upon myself to personally do what I thought the (federal) government should have done,” he says.
Lucas was speaking with high-flyers who resented a premier, in Dan Andrews, who they felt was “out of control”.
Lucas had the least to lose by airing their collective grievances. And so he did, starting with Neil Mitchell on 3AW, instantly earning a place in the crowded “freezer” of former friends and acquaintances of Andrews. Lucas stood to polarise opinion, never a plus in hospitality. Yet he was overwhelmed by the response – in the end, something like 200,000 emails and texts, not one of them negative.
He thinks he resonated with the public because he channelled wider frustrations by speaking from the heart.
“I think just now we’re starting to see some normality, but I personally think we still have a very long way to go because obviously the buildings and the workplaces are not anywhere where they used to be,” he says.
“People have changed their patterns and that’s to the detriment of the CBD.”
In Covid, he felt helpless for the first time in his life. “I get PTSD just thinking about it,” he says, “and I’m a pretty robust character.”
If there is one person who has an insight intoLucas’ success, it is Fab Nicolao. He recalls bonding with Lucas in the late1980s over fine Burgundy wine. Then one day in 2002, Lucas asked his close mate to lunch. Nicolao questioned Lucas’ choice of venue, the Botanical Hotel in South Yarra.
“Shut up, idiot,” Lucas replied. “I just bought it.”
Nicolao couldn’t understand why. Lucas explained that he planned to flip the layout – dining room at the front, public bar at the back.
“I thought, shit I would never have thought of that,” Nicolao says. “It became the biggest success story at that time. It really changed the scene and the face of Melbourne dining.
“Every man and his dog have copied him – that’s his ability to see the market before the market.”
Lucas later convinced Nicolao, who had been working in the US, to run his business. They’re both in their 60s, and both convinced that the finest Lucas restaurants lie ahead.
Lucas describes a deepening wisdom as a product of age, arguing that he could not have designed Society 10 or 20 years ago because he then lacked the intellectual know-how and experience.
His fact-finding trips are legendary, or notorious, for their intensity.
His head of marketing, Celia McCarthy, was among a group that covered 27 venues in France – in five days – as research for Lucas’s upcoming Batard in Bourke St.
Onlookers couldn’t figure it out. Once Lucas had what he wanted, the team might depart a venue with a dozen dishes still on the table. “It was like a marathon,” McCarthy says. “I should have trained for it.”
Nicolao says that Lucas is unafraid. Risk is an occupational hazard.
“I don’t mean in an irresponsible way, but he’ll put his balls on the line knowing that he knows what he’s doing and that he is surrounded by some very good people who will help him deliver,” he says.
“He beats most people to the punch, but not because he’s racing to beat people. It’s just that he sees shit before other people can see it.”
The tales of Lucas’s early restaurant leanings are well told. He was an only child, the son of Greek migrants.
His dad Kon cooked in working class pubs in Geelong, while his uncles also cooked, including Harry (and his high chef’s hat) at the Southern Cross. They all gave the same advice to the impressionable kid. Do not grow up and run a restaurant. Too hard.
Yet his lifetime in salesmanship started young. At five, he would serve plates at his dad’s pubs. Kon would sometimes cook Greek food – souvlaki or moussaka, say – and send his kid out to convince diners who had never heard of feta to try what they labelled “stinky garlic”.
Kon died when Chris was 15. It was sudden, and drastic – mum Areti would get by on a widow’s pension. Some lessons were instilled. He would go to university, as demanded, before taking a job at IBM, and would spend 10 years travelling the world as a computer marketer. That was the other lesson that Kon gave, the one that the son followed – get out of Geelong, travel the world.
Lucas still remembers the taste of wood oven bread from a childhood stint in Lemnos. His appreciation would deepen in work-related jaunts to some of the world’s biggest restaurants.
His IT proximity to innovation steered his outlook. He inflates to history’s trailblazers. It’s not the idea that excites Lucas, but the gift for bringing the idea to the masses.
He never met Steve Jobs, whom he rates as the most influential innovator ever. But he sat in a briefing when Bill Gates unveiled something called Microsoft DOS.
“I don’t need to be famous and I don’t need to please anyone,” he says.
“You come to a stage in life when you’re not interested in impressing anyone. I certainly don’t need anyone to slap me on the back and say that I’ve done a great job. If I’m happy within myself you know that’s all that really matters.”
Lucas thinks his latest venture will work. Of course he does.
Success has many fathers, he says. And if Geelong wins a flag in 2024, he will naturally claim that Club Chin Chin’s arrival at Kardinia Park had everything to do with it. ■
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