City’s top restaurants to shun outdoor dining unless indoor trading allowed earlier
The Andrews government may have announced a package to help restaurants and cafes trade outdoors but many owners of Melbourne’s top establishments say they will refuse to open. See why.
Victoria
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Top Melbourne restaurants will refuse to open for outdoor dining only amid a warning that the state government faces massive legal action over its lockdowns.
The industry fears that up to 5600 Melbourne eateries will go to the wall unless indoor dining is phased back in from late October, weeks before the government’s road map.
Chin Chin owner Chris Lucas said the government’s $290 million plan to expand alfresco dining across the city would not work for most restaurants.
“They are basically trying to bully us into accepting this plan, it’s just spin and rhetoric from a government that can only see the industry through its own lens,” he said.
Mr Lucas is leading a group of top restaurateurs demanding that limited and safe indoor dining be allowed from late October provided that daily coronavirus cases fall under 20.
“We have scientific backing for this, we won’t open just outdoors, and if we don’t get anywhere with this we will hit them with a multi-billion dollar legal challenge,” he said.
Mr Lucas said he was backed by the owners of restaurants including Flower Drum, Grossi Florentino, Stokehouse, Botanical Hotel, Matteo’s, Lucy Liu, Tipo, Ginger Boy, Bacash, Reymond group and Di Stasio Citta.
Owner of St Kilda’s Stokehouse restaurant, Frank Van Haandel, said outdoor dining sounded idyllic, but Melbourne’s weather was too unpredictable to sustain a business.
“We are not Port Douglas or Noosa down here. The wind can pick up your food, gets blown off the table and it’s cold within two minutes,” he said.
“We absolutely have to have internal dining and it needs to be 50-plus patrons.”
The Flower Drum’s Jason Lui said outdoor dining was not viable for his up-market Chinese eatery.
“We haven’t got a footpath, let alone a wide one, and it’s not ideal of rme to be serving my food in the laneway,” he said.
“We just want to plead our case — given the chance we want to do the right thing to get us open.”
Grossi Florentino owner Guy Grossi said that despite already having outdoor tables at his Bourke St restaurant he will probably not reopen just with alfresco dining.
“We still have to staff it, but then we won’t have enough opportunity to make any enough revenue just with the outside area,” he said.
“It’s riddled with issues, it could actually mean that you are losing more money than being closed.”
ord Mayor Sally Capp: “We will continue to advocate for flexibility so restaurants and cafes can open indoors in a COVID safe way sooner because we know outdoor dining won’t be suitable for all venues.”
“Bringing back our world famous hospitality industry is critical for Melbourne’s economic recovery.”
Premier Daniel Andrews flagged the possibility of a quicker return to indoor dining within Melbourne based on the opening up of regional Victoria.
“As these weeks pass, as we see this model actually working - and we’ve got real data...then, of course, we don’t rule out monitoring that and being informed by that,” he said.
“All of this work in regional Victoria will help to inform the early steps and subsequent steps that we will take in metropolitan Melbourne as well.”
Mr Andrews said the risk of infection was dramatically higher inside, but public health experts had advised two groups of up to 10 could be seated inside providing there was sufficient space.
Deputy Chief Health Officer Professor Allen Cheng said it was not clear if there had been any COVID-19 outbreaks linked to Victorian hospitality venues.
“Just because we don’t know of them doesn’t mean they don’t occur,” he said.
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