The first vegan venue awarded two hats in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, Potts Point’s seasonally driven Yellow restaurant, has delivered an early autumn surprise. Its owner, Bentley Restaurant Group, has sold the plant-based fine-dining jewel.

Bentley Group co-owner Brent Savage said they haven’t offloaded the restaurant to an unknown operator; the sale is an old-fashioned management buyout. Yellow’s long-serving head chef Sander Nooij has purchased the restaurant with his business partner Mark Hanover, another local chef with fine-dining pedigree. Hanover moved to Australia from Britain in 2012 before doing a stint at Quay and joining Gastro Park in Potts Point, where he met Nooij.

Yellow opened in 2013 as a French-leaning bistro with a predictably meaty arsenal, before Savage spotted what he gambled was a pumpkin-sized hole in the Sydney dining market. Menus at Sydney’s upper-end restaurants weren’t kind to their plant-based clientele. “I knew that because my wife is vegetarian, and everywhere we went she was offered mushroom risotto,” he said.

Yellow trod carefully at first, dipping its toe into the market as a vegetarian restaurant in 2016, before taking the full vegan plunge in recent years under the kitchen watch of its incoming co-owner, Nooij. The awards have always flowed thick and fast at Yellow, and Savage praised Nooij’s technique and fermentation program. “Every vegetable that comes out of that kitchen is from a small producer,” Savage noted.

“I’ve been here for five years,” Nooij said. The plan is to freshen up the space and tread carefully with change, although the chef hinted customers might be tucking into some even “more refined” dishes to go with the likes of black garlic emulsion and a cured eggplant dish one reviewer described as a lookalike for kingfish. Yellow hasn’t repeated a dish in the past five years, Nooij said, primarily because it is constantly changing the menu due to its devotion to seasonality and selecting what’s best on the day.

This seasonality and attention to detail, as well as the intensive challenge of making vegan dishes from scratch, are some of the challenges Sydney’s plant-based venues have struggled with in recent years (see below).

“The food cost is lower [at plant-based restaurants] but the labour cost is higher,” Savage said. And when a restaurant aims high with its food, as Yellow does, that labour cost can be especially rich.

Nooij knows Yellow’s clientele, and loves the broad, passionate demographic the restaurant’s lunchtime a la carte menu and $115, six-course tasting menu attract. “We don’t want to raise the price point,” Nooij said. Indeed, Yellow’s new chef owners want to add more bang for the buck, expanding its fermentation program and adding more house-made products, such as vinegars.

While Nooij doesn’t have any dietary restrictions of his own, he does believe veganism is a “morally superior” outlook and philosophy, and consumers are spending more time thinking about what they eat.

Yellow has overcome the hurdle of enticing non-vegan diners by creating a menu that pushes beyond the ubiquitous mushroom risotto.

“Our goal is to create a dining experience that is not just for vegans but for anyone who values creativity, refinement and the beauty of nature on their plates,” Nooij said.

Having recently added Eleven Barrack to a portfolio of restaurants that includes Monopole, Bentley and King Clarence, Savage said they aren’t selling Yellow because it isn’t doing well. “We just want to focus on our city venues,” he said.

When Nooij started to look at venues to open his own restaurant, Savage and his business partner Nick Hildebrandt mulled over the idea of succession. “It just made sense to hand over the baton,” Savage said.

Savage likens Yellow to Claude’s restaurant in Woollahra, which eventually passed through four sets of owner-chefs.

“Even though it hasn’t been around that long, I think it [Yellow] is a bit of an institution,” Savage said “Some people have said it’s their favourite Bentley Group restaurant.” Not for much longer. Yellow will be unveiled by its new owners when it opens on Thursday this week.

A tough ride for Sydney’s plant-based restaurants

To understand Yellow’s success, it helps to look at the casualty rate of plant-based venues in Sydney. While Newtown and surrounding suburbs have boomed, with Flora restaurant the latest to add to the suburb’s plant-based collection, it has been a tougher ride in suburbs such as Bondi, where multiple venues have closed.

Campbell Parade eatery Eden – where the spag bol was made from three different types of mushrooms – announced its closure just over a year ago, as did Flave, the casual venue on Hall Street serving cauliflower steak with “creamy baconnaise”. Flave even had an executive chef with credentials to hit the plant-based brief running, having trained under celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay before spending a decade as the private chef to vegetarian ex-Beatle Sir Paul McCartney. Peppe’s, on Bondi Road, also departed.

Last month, entrepreneur Amit Tewari ditched the exclusive plant-based pitch at the Randwick location of Soul Burger, which first opened in 2015. He has renamed it Umami House. (Other locations in Glebe and Newtown remain branded as Soul Burger.)

“I’m really proud of the part Soul Burger played in popularising plant-based burgers, but ironically it then meant we were only catering to a specific market. We wanted to create a novel burger concept that appeals to everyone –meat- and plant-eaters,” he said.

Perhaps the biggest blow to the plant-based movement was the 2022 closure of Bodhi restaurant at Cook and Phillip Park in East Sydney. Bodhi was a 34-year-old vegan pioneer that charted a path for the city.