MoVida to close Surry Hills, Sydney restaurant
The doors are set to close at one franchise of Frank Camorra’s mini-empire.
The MoVida experiment in Sydney is over. For now anyway.
The Holt Street, Surry Hills restaurant, an extension of chef Frank Camorra’s mini-empire that includes three Melbourne restaurants and several franchises (including Bali), will shut its doors at the end of the month. Staff were notified this morning.
The restaurant has been on the market for nearly 12 months with no serious offers forthcoming.
“We got a few lowball offers but nothing worthwhile,” said MoVida’s Camorra. A deal has been struck with the landlord to hand back the keys and cut short the lease.
The news comes on the back of a decision not to go ahead with a Bar MovVida site in Sydney’s CBD, near Martin Place.
“This business model needs to be full all the time and turning over customers constantly, and that wasn’t happening,” says Camorra. “I think we made the wrong call not going to the CBD in the first place.”
MoVida Sydney opened nearly four years ago in the site that originally played host to chef Jared Ingersoll’s short-lived Cotton Duck.
Camorra said that for the immediate future, there would be no attempt to find an alternative site for the Spanish brand.
The imminent closure comes on the back of a news earlier this week that Rockpool’s fine dining approach had finally run its race and would be remodelled as something more casual. Another fine dining Sydney restaurant, Marque, is closing this month while in Melbourne, the owner of Fitzroy’s Builders Arms, Andrew McConnell, this week announced he was killing off its Moon Under Water restaurant and Builders Arms Bistro to turn the whole site into a Chinese restaurant.