QT, Sake, Garden State Hotel add a Sydney flavour to Melbourne
A number of new eating establishments in the southern capital are based on what has worked best in Sydney.
In one short year, Melbourne’s CBD food and wine scene has taken on a few decidedly Sydney influences. Where once there was talk of a Melbourne-to-Sydney osmosis of talent and ideas, 2016 has seen the flowering of some very Sydney ideas down south.
In the past 12 months the southern capital has seen the opening of a QT hotel with its bundled restaurant, rooftop bar, cafe and fast casual Asian eatery, the whole modelled largely on the success of QT’s sibling in Sydney’s CBD.
It has seen the arrival of the Sydney-based Urban Purveyor Group, opening another outpost of the Sake chain in Flinders Lane as well as Melbourne’s first iterations of The Cut and Fratelli Fresh in Alfred Place.
Another establishment that has opened its doors in Flinders Lane is the vast Garden State Hotel, a project by local entrepreneurs that takes inspiration from the Merivale Group’s Sydney flagship, Establishment, and which has already been shortlisted for an Eat Drink Design award for its Techne Architects design.
What has proved itself in Sydney is now being given the opportunity to do so down south.
“Melbourne still has a greater sense of style and an intrigue with its network of laneways and discoverable spaces,” says David Seargeant, managing director of QT’s Sydney-based parent company Event Hospitality and Entertainment. “It is also driven by a program of major special events which are totally embraced by the local community, in addition to driving tourism demand.”
Wangaratta born and raised, Seargeant has overseen every aspect of QT Melbourne’s design and construction. His hope is to emulate the success of the quirky QT Sydney, whose Gowings Bar & Grill and Parlour Lane cafe have all, he says, performed beyond expectations since the hotel opened in September 2012.
“When you are looking at investing over $90 million, you need much more than purely a site we happen to own (the former Greater Union cinema complex in Russell Street),” he says.
The bigger factor has been a resurgence in the Little Collins/Flinders Lane precinct east of Russell Street, with a number of exciting new restaurant and bar concepts — Embla and Oter to name just two — attracting a following that is “very much in the style of QT”.
Interestingly, while Sydney has several high-end hotels with restaurants of note, Melbourne’s accommodation scene has languished outside the restaurant and dining spotlight — a situation QT clearly aims to change.
Meanwhile, at the top end of Flinders Lane is a nearly 2000sq m site that hasn’t seen this much action since its incarnation as Rosati in the 1980s and 90s. Apparently operating to a brief that — like Justin Hemmes’ many multipurpose venues in Sydney — you can please all of the people all the time, Garden State Hotel might not offer accommodation, but it has pretty much everything else: public bar, beer garden (indoors, not outdoors, and the “garden” is not euphemistic), smart restaurant (Garden Grill, helmed by former Circa chef Ashly Hicks) and raw bar, basement cocktail saloon, sandwich kiosk, private dining room and functions space. And already the four-level hotel’s capacity for 840 people is being stretched, as evidenced by the weekend queues.
Andy Mullins, a partner in hospitality group Sand Hill Road, says it was a risk to open a large-format venue in Melbourne.
“Traditionally, large-format venues have done well in Sydney and Brisbane, less so Melbourne,” he says. “So when we looked at the site, we looked at developing it in a very Melbourne way, in a laneway in the heart of the city.”
Now, Mullins says Garden State does about 50 per cent of its trade on weekends, showing it’s not just office workers who are lapping up the new-style pub culture.