After the frying pan comes the fire for restaurateurs

When the worst of this is over, restaurateurs like Scott Pickett wonder what will be left of their industry.

Scott Pickett at his restaurant Matilda 159 Domain. Picture: David Geraghty

Scott Pickett reckons he’s having sleepless nights on top of 18-hour shifts, and hasn’t had a day off in a month. It’s hardly surprising. Pickett’s a chef, first and foremost; one of those guys who started adult life straight out of school in an apprenticeship.

Twenty years later he has a staff of 250; well, he did up until a few weeks ago. It’s down to about 25 right now. Leases, liabilities, three restaurants closed, another three businesses in suspension, and when he’s not worrying about how to keep the whole lot from going under, he’s worrying about what the whole business model will be on the other side of the void. The great unknown.

The world’s restaurant industry has gone into involuntary hibernation; it just doesn’t know when spring will be sprung. What will be left? What the market will want? How it will work? Will there be consumers prepared to spend? A lot of players are asking themselves if they’ll even be there to throw a hat in the ring when the green light does eventually go on for an industry that employs nearly one million Australians, directly and indirectly.

“I’ve got my balls on my line, I might lose my house,” Pickett says from the kitchen of Matilda, his flash restaurant in even flasher South Yarra where he is prepping Thursday’s takeaway menu: rotisserie chicken with roast potatoes, green sauce and burnt lemon mayo, “$50, serves two”. It’s come to that for so many in his professional peer group.

“We can handle this phase, if we’re lucky … but I’m re-evaluating, every day, what I cook and what I want to cook … do I want to be keeping up with the Joneses any more with refined food? Or something else?”

One thing Pickett knows about business life on the other side is that there will be less competition. “Let’s face it,” says the veteran of some of the toughest and most prestigious kitchens in London, “it’s a saturated market”.

Like most in the industry spoken to by The Weekend Australian, there are more questions than answers.

“Are people going to be able to afford to eat out?” Pickett asks. “What is the new business model. Does local become special? And what about the suppliers and the staff … how do they keep going?”

All very good questions. Success has many fathers, but when it comes to the growing sophistication of Australia’s dining scene during the past decade, the ability to support niche producers and professional wait staff — often from abroad — have been a key part of the DNA.

“People are desperately going to need to socialise again, to connect again as humans,” says Melbourne-based restaurateur Chris Lucas, whose diverse group of restaur­ants, from Chin Chin to Kisume, used to connect a lot of people in Melbourne and Sydney, “and restaurants are a key part of that”.

“People will come back to going to restaurants but it will take time. A negative wealth effect’s going to wash through the market,” he says.

Like most, he acknowledges the playing field will be different. “The longer the shutdown goes, the more challenging it’s going to be for businesses to reopen.”

When they do, it will be to a whole new hygiene paradigm. Patrons may need to be temperature-checked; staff almost certainly will, and they may need to wear face masks, gloves or both. Table spacing, in many places, may have to be completely revised, which goes directly to the profitability of the new model. Bar seating cheek-by-jowl with fellow patrons may be a no-no.

Bookings could become necessary as operators seek to manage their new seating quotas. And dining rooms may have to be cleared every two hours for complete sanitising.

Waiters who touch, or get close and point at food elements, will disappear. Will menus, as such, be seen as a hygiene risk? And supply chain transparency will become more important than ever.

“All hospitality venues are going to struggle … a lot just get through week by week,” Sydney hospitality entrepreneur Luke Mangan says. “But I think where it’s going to hurt most is the middle market to top end. It’s going to be a new game. Restaurants and cafes struggle already, so I think we will see smaller menus and smaller staff.”

Prominent regional Victorian chef Michael Ryan says: “There will certainly be fewer restaurants. Many restaurants will not be reopening after this, but there will be opportunities for those who are in a position to reopen. We will always talk of restaurants in a pre and post COVID-19 framework.”

Melbourne restaurateur Shane Delia says: “What’s been done in the past won’t be there any more. You can’t hold on to yesterday. It’s gone.”

According to John Valmor­bida, one the country’s biggest wine distributors, the crisis should be the catalyst for industrial relations reform in the sector.

“If ever the whole penalty rates issue is to be examined, this is the time,” he says.

One stakeholder with a different perspective on the industry crisis is Sydney PR operator Jeanine Bribosia, whose agency — The Cru — has built a substantial portfolio of hospitality industry clients during the past decade, only to see a sizeable chunk of her business dissolve in the past month.

“From the restaurateurs’ point of view, there’s no doubt they’ll be back. We see such an entrepreneurial spirit, innovators; there’s no way they won’t reinvent themselves,” she says.

“By the very nature of their industry they are people who have to think outside the box, work with thin margins, legislation, staffing, costs. In this industry, a trying situation is normal.”

As for the marketplace, what it will be and what it will put a premium on, her feeling is that diners — the public — will seek more than ever to be “nurtured”.

“The restaurants that have always been good at that are the ones people will crave more than ever,” she says. “We’re going to seek out true hospitality, and connection, and wanting to be taken care of, more than ever, when this is all over.”

And her own predicament as a restaurant specialist? “We see ourselves as part of hospitality, and we’ve lost the majority of our business,” says Bribosia, who had a staff of 16 before the crisis.

“But restaurants have never been an industry that’s simply stable and booming. It’s always been an industry that's difficult, fraught, up and down, high risk. It’s certainly not an industry for the faint-hearted.”