The rise and steep fall of George Calombaris
George Calombaris has gone from prince to pariah in a way no other celebrity chef has. But the signs were there from the very start.
Try to picture the scene. It’s 2003 and to anyone outside the insular, pre-social media Melbourne restaurant industry bubble, George Dimitrios Calombaris has just emerged as the unlikely, baby-faced debutant of the year.
An audacious and seemingly lavishly funded new restaurant — Reserve — has opened at Melbourne’s Federation Square and from apparently nowhere Calombaris has been installed as head chef, his first big job. At 24. And along with the “wild, slutty, Versace-like interiors”, as I wrote at the time, Calombaris’s strategy was crash or crash through.
The food is wild, unpredictable, occasionally stupid, often brilliant. Definitely polarising. Talking point of the city’s foodies.
Yet the restaurant is fun, too, a wacky moment in Melbourne dining history. Again, as I wrote then: “Nobody is going to sit down to a dish of spiced venison carpaccio served with a potato crisp full of raspberry ice-cream and keep talking about the football.”
Calombaris crashed through all right, even if the restaurant, despite awards and accolades aplenty, including young chef of the year for Calombaris in 2004, did the Icarus thing and melted in a sea of debt surrounded by a surging crowd of angry creditors.
It didn’t matter; Calombaris was on his way.
It was the kid’s first taste of failure (although he had no fiscal skin in the game) and with an almost unprecedented smorgasbord of success between then and now, it wasn’t to be his last, as we learned this week when Made Establishment, the company behind a slab of Melbourne restaurants and food businesses in which Calombaris is a shareholder, put itself into voluntary administration.
Of course, it didn’t all start there.
Ambition beats love
Calombaris grew up in the outer-eastern suburb of Mulgrave, the son of a Greek-Egyptian father and a Greek-Cypriot mother who came to Australia in the mid-1950s. Theirs was, by all accounts, a no-nonsense, work-hard-and-then-work-harder kind of family. They sent Calombaris to a Catholic school where he was a famously low achiever; he actually did not open his VCE results envelope until 2003, seven years after he finished school, while presenting an “inspirational speech” to the winners of the Premier’s 2003 VCE awards. He got 17 out of a possible 99.95.
It was a moot point. Calombaris had known from the age of 10 what he wanted to do and had found his way into an apprenticeship course at Melbourne’s Sofitel, where he came under the eye of then executive chef Raymond Capaldi, a firebrand Scot.
“I was a tyrant, it was a tough environment,” says Capaldi. “To slam a scared little boy like George into that environment was nerve-racking for him. (But) he started to grow because everyone loved him, they wanted George beside them. George was a machine that soaked in information.”
That was when Melbourne restaurateur Matteo Pignatelli first met Calombaris. They have stayed close since. “Ray (Capaldi) told me ‘this kid’s going to be star’,” Pignatelli says. “He was a really good kid, passionate, really hungry to learn. He wasn’t an egotist but he was always wanting to do something different. Really caring. And he had an obsession with food.”
Calombaris was writing his own ticket. Capaldi lured him to his new venture, Fenix, in 1999, where Capaldi was immersing himself in molecular creations of his own with Calombaris by his side, absorbing.
Andrew O’Brien, proprietor of the ill-fated Reserve, poached him for the new venture in 2003, and Capaldi took him back when it tanked, two years later.
The next move proved pivotal. “I remember chatting to him after Reserve closed,” says Chris Lucas, a major restaurant operator in Sydney and Melbourne. “He was at a loose end, unsure of his next step, when I suggested Greek. It was staring him in the face.”
Enter Made founder George Sykiotis, a veteran Melbourne restaurant and property investor developing a site on Flinders Street he had bought, who came a-courting the young chef with a shared Greek heritage.
Calombaris brought in his girlfriend and later wife Anita Bucciarelli’s bosses — steel industry heavyweights Joe Calleja and Tony Lachimea — and The Press Club was born, opening in 2006 as a neo-Greek fine diner with a free-spirited approach to tradition. It’s rumoured his parents put up their home as collateral to fund Calombaris’s stake.
“There is something warm and cosseting about this elegant new platform for George Calombaris, hewn from the solid stone of the former Herald and Weekly Times Flinders Street edifice,” is how I reviewed it at the time. “It’s in the attitude — or rather lack of it — of the waiters; the generous portions, full flavours and careful cooking of the food … the way another house-made pistachio sourdough roll just arrives without some grand gesture as to whether ‘sir’ would like more bread. 16/20.”
Melbourne had seen nothing like it and success was immediate; it soon triggered a number of joint ventures, notably with chefs Shane Delia (Maha) and Philippe Mouchel (PM24) and expansion into different concepts, starting with Hellenic Republic in the inner north, a prescient move.
With an early marriage behind him and another still ahead, Calombaris’s commitment to his career had become pretty much the central pillar of his life, according to those who know him well.
“Anita told George ‘it’s the job or me’,” says Pignatelli. “George told her ‘I love you but I love the career more’.”
Television juggernaut
His first book was published in 2008; eight more followed. Regular appearances on a food show, Ready, Steady, Cook, were a great way to keep the restaurants in the public eye. Calombaris was the increasingly public face of a growing restaurant business, he had a new partner, Natalie Tricarico, soon to be his wife, and life was very, very good.
In 2008 Calombaris’s life changed completely. A cattle call of wannabe judges for a new television show saw half the chefs and restaurateurs of Melbourne, and probably all the local food media, assembled to test for the gig.
Matt Preston stood out like the proverbial dog’s; Gary Mehigan less so, but a safe, articulate pair of hands. And Calombaris? It was a roll of the casting dice that turned the chef into a celebrity overnight.
“Nobody knew what it was going to be,” says Sykiotis, who agreed to talk to Inquirer only on the subject of Calombaris’s career, not the implosion of Made, “due to a very tight nondisclosure agreement around my exit (from Made in 2016)”.
“We thought it was just another cooking show, a new opportunity for George, an opportunity to put Greek food out there and a chance to highlight George as an individual, not just a chef.”
The ratings juggernaut had accelerated like a Tesla and, with it, Calombaris’s fame and fortune. By 2012, his speculated financial year earnings of $6.9m placed him at No 15 in Business Review Weekly’s top 50 entertainers rich list. “We all worked stupidly hard,” says Sykiotis. “We had an exceptional business relationship; if we did something, we did it together.”
In 2016, with a string of food businesses and about 400 employees, Calleja and Lachimea were replaced at the boardroom table by entrepreneur Radek Sali who, having founded and sold vitamin company Swisse, was flush and looking for opportunities built around celebrities such as Calombaris.
But by 2016, says Sykiotis, who left the operation mid-year and sold his shares not long after, Calombaris “was being pulled from pillar to post”.
“MasterChef was at its peak. If it wasn’t television it was appearances, or recipe testing, or business meetings, plus he had a young family. I used to scratch myself and wonder how he did it all. And we had become a huge operation, we’d become a corporation,” Sykiotis says.
Sali bought out Sykiotis to become major shareholder at Made. It was only shortly after that the ticking time bomb of staff underpayments surfaced amid internal auditing. And it started a slow turning of the tide against Calombaris, culminating in last year’s revelations of a far greater discrepancy in staff entitlements than had at first been the case.
Personal attacks
While other prominent restaurant companies with chef figureheads such as that of Neil Perry and Heston Blumenthal have been put through the wringer by Fair Work Australia for staff underpayments, the Made scandal led to an unprecedented pile-on, at first from coalface hospitality workers and then the dining public. In just 12 months, Calombaris went from being one of the country’s most recognised and popular celebrity chefs to a pariah, the public whipping boy in a classic workers-versus-management wages stoush.
The backlash against the perceived villain was brutal. Comedians from Shaun Micallef to Tom Gleeson and The Betoota Advocate piled on. A very public person had become very fair game.
“George is very, very family,” says Pignatelli, who has known Tricarico, Calombaris’s wife, independently for many years. “She’s been at the supermarket and been heckled. The kids have been teased and bullied at school.
“George told me: ‘I can handle it, but not Natalie and the kids.’ ”
And beyond personal, it was shocking for business.
As the Calombaris barometer started plummeting in the second half of last year, right in the midst of negotiations with the Ten Network for further series of MasterChef, trade at Gazi, The Press Club, three Hellenic venues, seven Jimmy Grants and two Yo-Chis started falling.
In short succession, The Press Club became Elektra, the three Hellenics were rebranded and relaunched; the de-George-ing was swift. But the damage was done.
A big organisation creates economies of scale but loses the ability to respond quickly to falling turnover.
Eight days ago, staff learned of a crisis meeting that would probably lead to voluntary administration for Made.
Three days later, with Sali holding most of the cards, it was a fait accompli.
On Tuesday, none of the businesses opened their doors.
Calombaris himself has gone to ground — he declined an offer to talk with Inquirer, graciously — and his friend Pignatelli speculates a move to Singapore would make sense because of the schools there. “The kids matter most,” he says.
About 400 staff members have been left out in the employment cold and suppliers are hoping to be paid. It’s not how Calombaris might have imagined it would be just 12 months ago, even if the wages underpayment scandal was quietly brewing.
It’s certainly not how a chef, first and foremost, would have wanted things to end.
“That’s my father’s approach. Push and push,” Calombaris told the Herald Sun back in 2009 amid a heavy MasterChef publicity blitz.
“What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? He’s going to crack, then pick himself up again. Hitting obstacles in life should only be a point to pick yourself up and raise the bar even further.”
For the brilliant chef who spread himself way too thin, they have proven prophetic words.
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