Chloe’s Bondi: the restaurant bringing fun back to dining

This hole-in-the-wall restaurant is an oasis far away from the Instagrammers of Totti’s and the bankers at Rockpool. Some top chefs could learn a thing or two from Chloe’s.

Chloe's is culinary therapy in an era when eating out has become a bit too nutty, writes Janet Albrechtsen.

Chloe, what a joy you are. Among restaurants in Sydney named after some chef or another, Chloe’s – a wood-panelled oasis far away from the Instagrammers of Totti’s and the bankers at Rockpool – stands out. This hole-in-the-wall restaurant and wine bar in Bondi is named after a dog.

I’m no restaurant critic, so I won’t wax lyrical about the jus on the perfectly cooked steak or the crust on the sublime fish or the wickedly salted meringue or explosion of radish and other flavours in the tuna tartare. But I will tell you that the reason I first stuck my head inside this place was because there was a big, happy labrador lying smack-bang in the middle of this tiny room.

Beatrice Gottardo, the north Italian dynamo, her partner, Sam Ratcliff, along with Peter Wrigley are responsible for this Bondi gem. I watched as Gottardo happily stepped over and around the large dog while delivering plates of magical food to relaxed and equally happy diners. This place is culinary therapy in an era when eating out has become a bit too nutty.

I have returned to Chloe’s many times with family and friends, sometimes with my golden retriever in tow, for many reasons. To bask in the simple, exquisite joy of eating food created with ease and love in mind. To avoid the quest of big-name restaurateurs to deliver patrons a wanky philosophy or unintelligible experience that often morphs into a vanity project. And to support with our cash our admiration for the hard work, risk taking and creative joy such small business people add to our lives.

I have returned to Chloe’s many times with family and friends.

Sometimes it’s just the two of them – Tasmanian-born Ratcliff (who was head chef at Bronte’s Three Blue Ducks) in the tiny kitchen, and Gottardo out front serving, talking to diners, laughing, explaining the food. And the wine. Gottardo’s father is a winemaker in Italy, and she brings mischievously interesting wines to diners from mostly small, organically farmed Australian vineyards. With wines from Little Frances in Beechworth, Victoria and Orbis Wines in McLaren Vale, South Australia, diners are fortunate that Gottardo, a wine martyr, does several tastings just about every week.

My first visit to Chloe’s on Bondi’s hip Gould Street a year ago coincided with reading about the closure of Noma, the famous Copenhagen restaurant.

The New York Times journalist Frank Bruni – a White House correspondent and chief restaurant critic and admirer of Rene Redzepi, the genius creator of Noma – wondered aloud whether the restaurant that topped the world’s best restaurant list for many years since 2010 had “travelled from its truest mission to an altitude that too few people can reach”. It makes sense that Bruni has written about politics and food. There is a growing bullshit factor in both industries that regularly needs exposing.

This, for starters. According to Noma’s Redzepi, the joint that charges about $US500 for a meal had become unsustainable. “We need to completely rethink the industry,” he said to the NYT in January last year when announcing his world-famous restaurant would close at the end of 2024. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way … It’s unsustainable. Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.”

Hang on. Noma was busted for not paying its army of eager and overworked interns. After it started paying them, the coveted Danish restaurant decided it was too hard to make a krone and announced it was closing in two years? Was this foreshadowed shutdown a stunt? When the numbers don’t add up, who hangs around for another two years serving unsustainably foraged nosh to select diners?

One doesn’t need to be a food critic to critique culture. And I’m as qualified as the next person to notice some of the most celebrated chefs and restaurateurs have lost sight of their mission. They’ve become full of themselves. If you can’t get the fundamentals right, perhaps it has become too much about the chef, not the patron.

That’s not to say running a business, let alone a restaurant, is easy. The margins are tighter than ever. Regulation grows and grows. The Albanese government is intent on making it even harder to turn a profit and survive. And of course, Covid was a nightmare for lots of our big and small businesses.

Everything about Chloe’s is a lesson for some of the big names behind Sydney’s most expensive restaurants.

All the more reason to applaud a small business that does dining so damn well. Everything about Chloe’s – from its unpretentious name to its one-man chef kitchen – is a lesson for some of the big names behind Sydney’s most expensive restaurants. Indeed, we are blessed in my part of Sydney that we have several other marvellous local gems – Bronte Road Bistro is another triumph of small business entrepreneurial flair surviving in the face of overwhelming re-regulation of the workplace.

As Gottardo moves around the tiny 24-cover Chloe’s suggesting wines that don’t appear on the menu, delivering perfectly chilled glasses to the table on a hot summer night, there is a cheeky ease to the food, to the room, to the service. It makes eating out fun, a genuine joy, not a performance of orchestrated vibe so practised, and rushed, that any sign of spontaneity has been squished out of it like a mistreated burrata.

Most important, there is no rush. Chloe’s is a testament to an unhurried night out of top-class food, a quality combination that some of the finest chefs have lost.

I have limited sympathy for the Noma culties who pay 1000 bucks to go to the world’s most famous restaurant only to whinge about the reindeer brains in custard or toasted pig foreskin, or whatever scraped scalp-to-toenail morsel is served by the Danish foragers. But it’s reasonable to expect that when you’re dining at a top Sydney restaurant, you’ll get the pre-dinner drink you ordered before the entree arrives. But that didn’t happen when we dined at Neil Perry’s Margaret, the Double Bay restaurant named after his mum. I’m no lush or stickler for silly rules, but I couldn’t help thinking that my mum, a great cook and wonderfully fun host, would look dimly on me if I served a meal, even a great one, before filling a guest’s wine glass. It’s naff to rush guests, let alone paying ones.

And we’re not alone in that rushed experience. On other occasions, main courses have arrived before entrees have been eaten, even when the table reservation wasn’t close to bumping up against the two-hour limit.

Chloe’s is a testament to an unhurried night out of top-class food.

I once asked politely if we could possibly have the mains re-delivered when we finished the first course. The waiter at Margaret snipped that I should have explained that at the start.

Nah. Just like it’s my job, with the help of my editors, to produce sparkling grammar, the role of the waiter, in tandem with the kitchen, is to work out how to serve drinks and meals in the right order.

When simple things go awry more than once, there is usually a problem higher up the chain. Maybe restaurateurs who imagine they are artists could relearn the power of an effortless pause. It heightens the pleasure.

Chefs or owners of these establishments (sometimes one and the same person) are taking themselves – rather than what they do – too seriously. Or perhaps they are taking the piss out of patrons who care more about dropping a restaurant name than looking for a place that understands the pleasure of dining well.

Perry is no newbie to the restaurant business. The two-hour time limit placed on reservations at Margaret seems to be driving the dining “experience” down the wrong path. At other places, too, this regimented booking culture makes dining out more akin to pre-booking a parking place at the airport. If Chloe’s can get the pace right – they have two seatings on weekends – why can’t the big boys of the restaurant industry?

I recall Perry’s Blue Water Grill days when I first moved to Sydney in the 1980s, a not-so-posh place atop the rocks of North Bondi. It was bliss because it didn’t take itself too seriously. Back then, the mission was clear as day: a night out should be fun, not a numbers game where dining has become a game of beat the buzzer.

I may be blacklisted from Perry’s Double Bay noshery for saying so, but I’ll make do with one of the very good green goddess poached chicken sandwiches at his bakery a few doors down the road. At the risk of opening a different can of worms, (I hear) there is a half-decent version of the same in the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge.

Food critics, a genre of people also prone to being full of themselves, don’t always help stem the decline in standards. When they stopped awarding top marks to restaurants that get the simple pleasures just right, it was inevitable that being in the presence of a celebrity would matter more than having a great meal out.

Don’t get me wrong – a vodka shot and caviar bump at Merivale’s Mimi’s is fine food theatre worth every penny. Everything about this aesthetically artful Hemmes restaurant is pitch perfect. But Instagram heaven can come at the price of warmth and spontaneity.

That’s why we go back to Chloe’s where both thrive, where the theatre involving a big dog in a small space is gratis, and a chilled wine glass is filled before the exquisite food arrives.

And at the risk of finishing with politics rather than dessert (did I mention the dreamy salted meringue?), Chloe’s is evidence of something more. The vibrancy, energy and initiative that these small business entrepreneurs bring to our lives should be celebrated and nourished, not squeezed into submission by the mind-numbing proliferation of government rules inevitably drawn up by people who have no clue about business. Who wouldn’t want that nourishment on the menu at the next election?