The jumbo prawns at my father’s restaurant, Danny’s Seafood La Perouse, had superpowers. Each was made with two prawns, really – a duo of kings group-hugging a stuffing of spinach, pine nuts, eggs and parsley, all encased in a crunchy beer batter and served with a pot of chutney. Raising them to my little mouth, I always thought they looked like cartoon torpedoes. When they hit their target, the explosion could right all wrongs.

Don’t believe me? Ask Ivana Trump. I was on seating duties the night in 2004 that Donald’s first clip-clopped up the front steps to our entryway. I probably gave her a nervous “hi” and she probably gave me a dismissive “umph” – I recall the vibes, not the verbatims. But I do remember she looked out of sorts, like a puffed-up Patsy Stone without her Eddie.

Ivana was in town to slap the family name on some garish development in Queensland and had likely expected this business dinner to be close to her CBD hotel. For the Upper Eastsider, “La Pa” might as well have been Mars, a quiet patch of untamed Botany Bay bushland famed for its weekend snake show and the waterfront restaurant where the vibes were 1982 and the music came courtesy of two roaming balladeers named Fernando and Bobby.

Arriving, she seemed unimpressed, but that didn’t faze my dad, Danny Meares, who swooped in with the kind of friendly “Good evening” that felt like they’d been friends for life.

In the two or so hours that followed, something changed. Perched by the moon-twinkly bay, under the care of my father and his team, Ivana feasted on freshly grilled scampi, Sydney rock oysters done three ways (natural, mornay and kilpatrick) and more. On her way out, she was smiling, cheeks flush with pink satisfaction. She even stopped for a moment at the desk to say – and I do remember these words – “I loved the jumbo prawns”.

I’d seen that look so many times before. I first came to recognise it from my perch at table 35 of the restaurant, a two-top just by a tank of live and pugnacious mud crabs, where I spent most of my childhood Friday nights eating (it was dad’s night with the kids). I came to know it more intimately working the front desk in my late teens and early 20s.

From the mid-1980s until 2013, the steps that led to that desk were some of the most eagerly trodden in Sydney’s south-east. Danny’s at La Pa was an institution at a time when Sydney was defined by such places: Rudi Dietz’s Stuyvesant House in Crows Nest, Beppi Polese’s eponymous Italian institution in Darlo. Places that could feel stuck in time, but had a habit of standing its test. “The decor is so 1980s, it’s almost worth heritage listing,” a critic once quipped of dad’s, before quickly adding: “Consider it as a reminder that restaurants trying to catch your eye with multimillion-dollar fitouts tend to go bust.”

Cashed-up folks would trek out for long lunches there in those years (I’d sometimes park their Rollses – nervous work for a P-plater). Local pollies held court in the restaurant’s less crowded corners; prominent defence lawyers met with notorious clients in corners less crowded than that. The celebrity guestbook was signed by Our Kylie, Our Russell and the rest.

But dad’s was defined by the everyman more than the elite. When families I knew from school had special occasions, they’d book a table at Danny’s. When local couples got serious, they’d make it official on Danny’s balcony. They might get married there a few years later – and christen their kids there, too. Fernando and Bobby had songs for each occasion.

Danny’s at La Pa was an institution at a time when Sydney was defined by such places: Rudi Dietz’s Stuyvesant House in Crows Nest, Beppi Polese’s eponymous Italian institution in Darlo.

Joel Meares

They came for the food, and what dad had created, but mostly for dad. “Your father’s a gentleman, plain and simple,” says actor and writer Bruce Venables, a long-time regular with his wife, the novelist and “Ailsa from Home and Away!” Judy Nunn. “Danny was the number one reason people went to Danny’s.”

It’s only lately, though, talking to dad, that I learned the steps he had to take to get there – and how much what he created, my childhood second home, meant to so many.

Like me, dad got his first taste of the business through a parent. Unlike me, he was a natural.

My grandmother, Stella, owned a small corner store in Queensland’s Mackay. Dad began working there when he was eight. When he moved to Sydney after leaving high school in his mid-teens, it was only natural he would become a waiter.

He worked for the Omeros brothers, a Greek family who ran a number of seafood restaurants mostly around Botany Bay. “Danny’s section” was a popular front-door request. He started getting ideas and at 28, took over the lease on a restaurant in Pagewood. “It was scary at the time,” he says. “I was young, I was stepping out on my own, and I had to take out a mortgage on our house to put in a new kitchen.”

There he established what Danny’s would become known for. First, he hired a team of mostly Portuguese chefs and conjured a menu of fuss-free Mediterranean-style seafood. There was whole baked snapper and seafood platters heaving with crowbar-sized prawns and blossoming mussels.

For the floor he sought waiters who saw serving as a career. “I looked for people who cared about the work,” he says. “And I looked for characters.”

I wasn’t alive in those early years, but it sounds like a good time. Every night at 11pm, the restaurant transformed into a piano bar crowded with hospitality workers, cops, nurses and other creatures of the night. The criminal element was strong. “There was a bit of a gangland war going on in Sydney at the time,” dad says. “I’d pick up the paper in the morning and go, ‘Oh my god, I’ve lost another customer.’ I was losing one every week.”

It was at Pagewood, too, that the NSW Rugby League team began its yearly tradition of eating at dad’s restaurants before local State of Origin games, signing footballs between gobfuls of chilli-slathered mud crab.

Dad poured his soul into the place, but the hours were tough. When a restaurant called Mariners, overlooking the serene Frenchman’s Bay in La Perouse, came up for lease, he went for an inspection. There was a lot to like: the place seated more than 400 and came with a small downstairs cafe he could turn into a fish-and-chip shop. And there were quirks: a small fishing boat protruded precariously from one wall. But for dad, the wraparound balcony with room for 250 was the thing.

“Outdoor dining wasn’t actually big in Sydney at the time – councils tried to suppress it – but that balcony was something special,” dad says.

His instincts proved right. By the time of the 1988 Bicentenary of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia, business was rocking.

“That was one of the craziest days of my life,” says waiter Kiriakos Kiriakopoulos, who worked with dad for more than 20 years. “We served 1100 people over lunch and dinner. At one point, a regular arrived and we had not a single seat left. Your dad said ‘No worries’ and got us to set up five tables on the balcony of his own apartment [which was above the restaurant]. We ended up carrying food up and down the backstairs.

Judy Nunn tells me she would sometimes come to dad’s with her bathing suit under her clothes. “I’d go downstairs and take a dip in the bay between courses,” she says. “There was something magical about La Perouse.”

Bruce and Judy’s Sunday lunches were epics: 10 or so friends, booze and banter passed around until sunset. I can still hear burly Bruce belting out Amigos para siempre (Friends for Life), the anthem of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, with Fernando and Bobby. “If we ever wanted to stay beyond closing time, your dad would give us the keys to close up,” Bruce remembers.

That was La Pa in its heyday. Prawn cocktails and Crown Lagers, big laughs and big bills – often paid with a Diners Club card. If there was magic, though, it was conjured not through tricks but hard work and a scorching drive. Dad was up at dawn for the fish markets, chatting with regulars all day, sending food from the kitchen until close, and taking absolutely no prisoners in between.

Out front, he was all charm; on the pass he was a beast with zero time for nonsense, smashing his little gold bell the moment a dish was up and dressing down anyone who didn’t rush to its tinny siren call.

“Your father had a go at me a few times, sure, but it always came from the standards he wanted to set for customers,” Kiriakopoulos says. “He taught me so much: Make the customer feel welcome, ensure they have the best time, and if something goes wrong, fix it.”

While La Pa was the main event, there were side quests. The first came in 1992 when dad took over the Grotta Capri in Kensington for two years. Built in the 1950s, the Grotta looked like an underwater cave inside, with cement stalactites hanging from the ceiling, plastic crustaceans clinging to its craggy walls, and an exterior covered by an acne-like breakout of oyster shells. A review from before dad’s time described it as “one of Sydney’s great monuments to bad taste”.

Famously, the production crew for Muriel’s Wedding took over the venue for several days in 1993, transforming one section into the Porpoise Spit cocktail bar where Muriel’s friends tell her they don’t want to hang around with her any more. “Toni Collette had to keep her weight on, so I made milkshakes for her the entire shoot,” dad says.

More famously, perhaps, the restaurant was a favourite of Sydney’s underworld, attracting what Bruce, a former Hong Kong cop in addition to his other pursuits, euphemistically describes to me as “various well-known racing world figures”. I always wondered what deals they made there, gorging on oysters in a rocky nook, with only a rubber crab to bear witness.

Amanda Bilson, wife of the late Tony Bilson – the legendary chef known to some as “the Godfather of Australian cuisine” – first met dad in the late 1990s. He had stepped away from La Perouse again, this time to open the first restaurant in the Bondi Beach Pavilion, and the Bilsons would stop in.

Dad seemed nice enough, but Amanda didn’t think much about him until late 2011. By that stage, dad had been back in La Perouse for a decade and business was once again thriving.

For Tony, it was a different story. Just a few weeks after earning three chef’s hats in that year’s Good Food Guide, his Sydney CBD restaurant Bilson’s went into receivership, along with its sister venue, Number One Wine Bar. Within weeks of that, the owner of the apartment the couple had rented for 17 years called to say it had been sold.

“Tony and I were sitting on the sofa in that apartment one day saying ‘What are we going to do now?’,” Amanda says. “Then the phone rang and it was your father.”

Dad heard Tony was in trouble and had a proposal: Why didn’t he come over to La Perouse and help out as a consultant? When he heard about the eviction, he went one further. There were now three apartments above the restaurant: dad lived in one, my brother the other, and the middle one was empty. It was the Bilsons’ if they wanted it.

Tony’s menu tweaks earned mixed reviews. Personally, I loved the seafood boudin, but it didn’t quite connect with a crowd who liked their seafood grilled with lemon and oil or, on cheat days, interred in a flood of molten mornay sauce.

“In some ways, Danny and Tony were diametrically opposed,” Amanda says. “Tony could have six people in his restaurant and say he was going to give them the best experience they’d had in their lives. Danny was much more about delivering comfort food, bums on seats and turnover. But there was this special bond there, this mutual respect.”

Tony’s years at Danny’s coincided with the restaurant’s last. Dad would sell in 2013 and head to Townsville to take over another seaside restaurant. Within months, that once-flailing place would be packed too. He remembers his final La Perouse years as good ones. A big part of that was the Bilsons’ companionship. “They were good neighbours and good friends,” he says.

Last January, a friend sent me a picture of a digital JCDecaux street advertisement in La Perouse. Next to a giant green can of Cooper’s Pale Ale were the words: “As local as missing Danny’s Seafood.”

It inspired me to head to La Pa for the first time since I moved back to Sydney from the US. Walking towards the steps I’d once known so well, I felt a bit of the confusion Ivana must have felt arriving there 20 years ago. Abandoned now, the restaurant’s concrete exterior was cracked in places and stained in others, with splotches of green moss and the occasional graffiti tag. Awnings bearing dad’s name were spattered with grime. A couple of tables and chairs remained on the empty balcony, many overturned.

I sent a few photos to dad. He said he was sad to see what it had become, then quickly texted back with a bunch of ideas for how he’d bring it back to life.

He never stops, I thought to myself driving away home that day. But you’d be crazy to doubt him.