Catalina restaurant celebrates 30 years in business
Eateries come and go - especially in Sydney - but Catalina is the great survivor. The family who own and run one of Australia’s most spectacular dining spots share the ups and downs of three decades of service.
Judy McMahon is showing me how her late husband Michael would lean over the shoulder of diners at Catalina, the iconic Sydney restaurant the couple opened in 1994, and show them how to eat oysters properly.
“He used to just walk through the dining room and if he noticed someone wasn’t eating their oysters the way he thought they should be, he would sometimes come over and say, ‘now I’ll just, if you don’t mind, I’ll just show you how’,” she says. “He couldn’t bear seeing someone destroy an oyster, so he took it upon himself. He was funny. Gosh, he was funny.”
“We always talked about getting him a badge that said, ‘I’m the owner of the restaurant’,” adds Judy’s daughter, Kate, who now runs Catalina’s events.
The badge might have come in handy when Michael barrelled up to Sienna Miller when she was dining in the restaurant in the mid-aughts. Windswept from a day of boating, he assured the British actor, then at the tippy point of her fame, that he could accompany her through the kitchen to avoid the waiting paparazzi pack.
“Didn’t introduce himself or anything. Didn’t know who she was, really, other than the fact that she was so beautiful. Probably a deciding factor and why he was being so helpful,” laughs Judy’s son James, who is in charge of the restaurant’s floor as operations manager.
When Michael died in 2020, tributes from the Sydney hospitality community included this one from chef and restaurateur Neil Perry: “RIP Michael McMahon. Legend and wonderful mentor. Thank you for giving a young 25-year-old nobody an opportunity of a lifetime at Barrenjoey House in 1982.”
Judy, Kate and James (Judy’s older son Paul no longer works in the family business) say his presence is felt everywhere.
“His spirit’s well and truly still alive in all the attention to detail you have, that I see in you,” Judy says fondly to James. “That noticing of everything.”
Noticing the details can mean many things in making a fine dining restaurant run smoothly. The thing is, while you might not remember the foam reduction or the snapper and Sydney Rock oysters that Catalina can never take off the menu, you will remember the way the staff made you feel.
For the family, hospitality is in their veins.
“Michael and I always believed that restaurateurs who actually work the dining room rather than cook in the kitchen actually have the opportunity to give a far more well-rounded experience,” says Judy.
“Food is extremely important, but service is every bit as important. And we’ve always been service oriented because Michael and I both worked the floor from the time we met each other. We worked at Berowra Waters Inn, we had Barrenjoey House, we worked at Bilson’s at Circular Quay.”
“It’s part and parcel of ownership, right?” adds James. “To have the three people who own the joint working in it every single day and on the floor, it’s unusual. And I think it means that there’s a level of care you don’t necessarily get everywhere else.”
This story appears in the December issue of WISH Magazine, out on Friday, December 1.
Joining the family business was never something Judy and Michael pushed on their children. “I wanted them to go to university and get a real job!” laughs Judy.
“I think we just wanted them to have the opportunity to do something other than this. It’s so all encompassing, and certainly I think things have changed. Hopefully [James and Kate] are getting a bit of more of a work-life balance. I’m definitely trying to make sure of that. We never had it; there was no delineation between work and play for Michael and me, the whole time,” she says.
“I think that’s probably why Dad always ended up having so much fun here,” adds Kate. The family says they still love working together. “We spend a lot of time with each other at work, obviously, and we spend time with each other outside of work a lot too,” says James.
“I think we’re our favourite people to do things with,” adds Judy. “We have a holiday together twice a year. We did Greece this year. We always go away for family holidays in January for a couple of weeks together. We don’t seem to get sick of each other, do we?”
The restaurant will mark its 30th anniversary in 2024 with a year of celebrations. It has just completed a renovation of the interiors, which according to Judy some of the regulars have barely noticed. It must be said that it is very hard to compete with Catalina’s sweeping panoramic view of Sydney Harbour. To visit as a local is to be reminded of just how lucky you are to live in a place like this.
But oh, if those walls could talk. Catalina has hosted a who’s who of guests, including, earlier this year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“I think it was the second of March, for his birthday,” muses James. “How do you remember that?” asks Judy, impressed. “It was the day after the Pride Party and there was glitter all over the floor!”
Paparazzi know to train their long-lens cameras from the nearby Rose Bay ferry wharf. Everybody from Beyoncé to Bono has dined at Catalina. But nobody caused quite so much commotion as Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, better known as Edina Monsoon and Patsy Stone, the original Bolly-quaffing ’90s It-girls from Absolutely Fabulous.
“Obviously we’ve had lots of celebrities in here,” says James, “but no hysteria has ever equalled Patsy and Edina coming to Catalina. Kate was here, I wasn’t. I’m so upset.”
The pair visited when the Absolutely Fabulous film was released in 2016.
“So they came in and there were quite a few regulars who were here quite a lot. And everyone inside was whispering to each other and was super excited,” says Kate. “They were sitting outside, happy as Larry, and slowly all the customers started coming up and asking to buy bottles of Bollinger to send over to them.
“When it got to three or four or five, it was a bit bizarre. So we kept bringing them over unopened bottles. They were like, ‘oh we’ll just take them back with us’. Anyway they get in their car and they have five bottles of Bollinger. And I remember getting a phone call from the concierge of their hotel who said that they had some things that needed to be returned to the restaurant, and it was all the bottles of Bollinger because the women weren’t drinkers. I said, oh, ‘they’ve been paid for, you could just keep them!’”
Still, it takes more than being a must-visit for celebrities to become an institution. It includes such things as the two women who dine at Catalina twice a week, every week, always eating the same thing (not from the menu). It’s the legendary events, the Melbourne Cup parties, the way the restaurant has seen generations of family through to celebrate birthdays or Mother’s Day. It’s a place to mark the beginning of stories with engagements as well as the later chapters – the ruby anniversaries, a second chance at things.
“When my husband and I opened this space in 1994, Kate was eight, James was 10,” says Judy. “And so a lot of the customers who were the same age as us, in their late thirties, had children. Their children have had children, we’ve had christenings, weddings.
“It is about being in this community for that long, and having lived in the eastern suburbs for much longer than that. You can’t really go anywhere without seeing people you know. Then I wonder why they haven’t been to us for a while.”
The restaurant has also weathered a lot of change – the way people eat has changed, tastes have changed, even the way you book a table, via an app or because you saw it on social media, has changed. As all of the family will note, too, the restaurant game is not an easy one, with its tight margins, long hours and high pressure. None of them would have it any other way though.
“I was thinking about it the other day, a family that’s all been involved for such a long time that hasn’t brought other people in for things,” says Kate. “Instead, we’ve actually bought people out to make it just ours. I think it’s really special.”
This story appears in the December issue of WISH Magazine, out now.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout