Richest 250 - Billionaire Justin Hemmes on hospitality after the pandemic
The Sydney bar tsar reveals what his plans are for expanding his empire beyond his home turf.
The List is the biggest annual study of Australia’s 250 wealthiest individuals, with final figures calculated in late February 2022. See the full list here.
Justin Hemmes went on his first overseas trip since the pandemic shuttered our borders for a fact-finding food and drink mission, but what he learnt took him rather by surprise.
The billionaire pub and restaurant mogul went to California to check out the Super Bowl for tips on how best to provide hospitality for his new venues at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and ate in the hottest restaurants in Los Angeles and Miami to get up to speed on the latest dining trends.
But what he realised after a couple of weeks travelling is that Australians haven’t been missing much when what’s on offer here is compared with some of the best places to eat and drink in the US.
“I thought I was going to come away with ideas, and I did about set-up and how they execute it, but the quality of food didn’t excite me at all,” Hemmes tells The List, just hours after he gets off his private plane in Sydney. “The trip I have just done makes me realise how good our food offerings are in Australia. We were going to some of the most renowned restaurants in Miami and LA and it was no better than anything in Sydney. Some of the venues I went to in America, if you delivered that food and that service here you would go bankrupt. It is good to know we do things very well here.”
This trip may not have inspired Hemmes the way he thought it would but it has further energised the billionaire – who increased his wealth slightly on The List from $1.24 billion in 2021 to $1.31 billion in 2022 – about the future of hospitality and his ever-expanding Merivale empire.
Hemmes will open his first venue outside his home state of NSW this year, after purchasing Tomasetti House on Flinders Lane in Melbourne for $43 million and Lorne Hotel, the 145-year-old oceanfront pub, in the seaside playground a couple of hours south-west of the city for $38 million. It has topped off a $200 million pub-buying spree that Hemmes has been on since 2019.
He has hired young-gun chef Jowett Yu from Hong Kong to head up the food at Tomasetti House, which will have an Asian-inspired menu. Yu was born in Taiwan, grew-up in Vancouver and trained in Sydney with Merivale executive chef Dan Hong, and was one of the original team of the famed Mr. Wong’s in the CBD. He left to open his acclaimed Chinese restaurant Ho Lee Fook in Hong Kong.
“Yu is a wonderful talent and a beautiful man, and he’s come back from Hong Kong to do this with us,” Hemmes says. “So Tomasetti House is going to be built around him. We are also designing it around the building [which dates back to 1853] as it’s so beautiful.”
There is also a family connection to Hemmes’ first Melbourne property as it is just a few steps from where his parents John and Merivale had one of their famous fashion boutiques in the 1970s.
“If you go diagonally across from Tomasetti House there is a little laneway, and if you walk up the laneway, that was their building,” he explains. “They had a men’s and women’s fashion and bridal shop there. It’s like a $2 shop now with a fake façade on this beautiful building but it is a very similar building to Tomasetti House, which is also what made me go for it.”
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The bar and restaurant mogul who started with one venue called Hotel CBD in 1996 and now has more than 80 across NSW is not worried about his first venture down south, or how a Sydneysider will be received by a place that takes its food as seriously as its football.
“I don’t look at it like that,” he says of any interstate rivalry between the two biggest cities. “I would never look at Sydney and Melbourne as different offerings because I think every venue we open is a different offering. It’s in a different location, a different suburb and it’s for a different customer base, so I always just look at what I think the customer will want from that venue.”
Hemmes also says he has been encouraged by Melbourne customers who would often frequent his Sydney and NSW venues but couldn’t continue thanks to the many lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. They would constantly email him and ask when he was opening up a restaurant or a bar closer to their homes.
One of the positives of Covid is that it’s forced us to explore our own backyard and it has actually encouraged investment in our own backyard
“It just felt right and I just felt we were in a position with our staff and our systems that we could afford to do it,” he says. “Also my staff encouraged me to expand as well, and I think it also came down to the passion for my industry, which was actually heightened by Covid.”
The other significant shift that has come out of the pandemic, according to Hemmes, is the rise of the regions. He has invested millions of dollars in property across NSW and in particular in Narooma, five hours south of Sydney, where he bought a 61ha beachfront estate in 2015 for himself and has since bought three hospitality venues – The Whale Inn, Quarterdeck and The Inlet.
“I think one of the positives of Covid is that it’s forced us to explore our own backyard and it has actually encouraged investment in our own backyard,” Hemmes says. “This gives Australians better options in their own country instead of them always going overseas for that holiday experience. And now that people are coming, the industry can afford to invest in regional areas and improve the offering.”
The 49-year-old has also faced challenges in the past few years, keeping staff morale up throughout various lockdowns as well as dealing with a class action led by Canberra law firm Adero which alleges unpaid wages. The matter is currently in the Federal Court with no date set for a hearing or any mediation and Merivale denies any wrongdoing.
But what the pandemic has shown Hemmes is that nothing can dampen the need for that physical human connection – sharing a delicious meal with friends, meeting new people at a bar, dancing until the early hours. Zoom, Netflix and takeaway doesn’t even come close to replacing it.
“There is a renewed passion and respect for our industry, and it revolves around that innate desire, that human desire for connection,” he says. “We’ve been suppressed for so long that we came out stronger than ever, but dancing. I have seen more people dance than I have ever seen before.”
Hemmes says he couldn’t get over how busy his venues were when we came out of the first initial pandemic lockdown in early 2020. “We were running our clubs at more shifts than I’ve ever done in my 30 years of trading,” he recalls. “Pre-lockdown, you would have a dancefloor and there would be people hanging out and some dancing, but after it, everyone was dancing. It was like this tribal revival of human connection. It actually made me want to invest even more in the industry, because I thought the industry and our human desire to connect over a meal is bulletproof.”
This optimism about the future was only reinforced by the most recent relaxing of restrictions in Sydney – including finally allowing people to dance after the Omicron wave – and it happened the evening after The List interviewed Hemmes at his newest venue, MuMu, in the CBD.
“I have never seen anything like it,” he says when he calls a few days later to relay the dancing he was again delighted to witness. “It feels like our roaring ’20s. This is our time. This is our moment.”
