Rebecca Yazbek is turning the Melbourne Stock Exchange into a restaurant
Rebecca Yazbek is growing a food empire, one empty building at a time. What she’s doing inside the abandoned Melbourne Stock Exchange is nothing short of extraordinary.
Rebecca Yazbek walks into an empty building and falls in love. That is what she does, that is where she starts. It is a habit that costs lots of money, means years of dealing with architects, contractors, layers of bureaucracy and so much paperwork. But the thing is, when she walks into an empty building and falls in love, she turns the uninhabited rooms into bustling, vibrant restaurants.
“It’s about finding a space that really speaks to me and that I want to work in,” says Yazbek, one half of the duo behind the successful Nomad group, which will soon have four venues in Sydney and Melbourne. “All our restaurants have come about because of the building, which is a bit different from the way hospitality professionals think. Doing it this way does create challenges for our team, as I don’t think a chef or someone who runs the front of house would ever do a restaurant in this way. But I have this drive and this vision, and I like selling it to the team and seeing how customers react to it.”
Yazbek is chatting to WISH at Nomad’s new Beau Bar and its day-time lunch spot Beau Kitchen in Surry Hills. The adjoining venues are in an architecture award winning building on Reservoir Street that came with a newly created laneway between Reservoir and Foster streets. It took two years from when Yazbek first saw the space to finally opening the restaurant and bar, due to the fact it was originally designed as a showroom and did not have any of the basic services needed for hospitality.
“I walked in here when it was a shell and it was so beautiful, but my husband, Al, who is also my business partner, was like Bec, we have signed on to do this other project in Melbourne,” Yazbek recalls, laughing. “And I said, it’s going to be little and it’s going to be easy and we can finally get to do our little wine bar. Our original concept with Nomad was to do a wine bar with elevated food, but then it became this 200-seat beast of a restaurant because I fell in love with that space.
“But Beau was anything but easy. Turning this space into a wine bar ended up being a really, really difficult thing to do. You have to get change of use through council, you have to notify residents; is there enough power, how do you get your grease trap in, what about your water? It has been hurdle after hurdle after hurdle so our lovely little wine bar took two years.”
Having studied interior architecture, Yazbek looks at restaurants differently. She has always been interested in the built environment, in the way it informs our experience and how people interact with it, as spaces to live, work or dine in. She loves cities, especially New York, and decided on graduating that being a “big corporate architect” was her meal ticket to the Big Apple. “The work was so boring, but I was over in New York interviewing for jobs when my dad got cancer, so that all went out the window because I wanted to be back here with him,” she says. “So I moved back and that is when I met my husband, Al. He was a restaurateur and in business with his brothers and I started to tell him how to run his business, and he was like ‘can you go and do something maybe for yourself?’”
That’s when she realised her love of food could be combined with her architectural background for a foray into hospitality. “When all my mates were doing Contiki Tours and getting drunk in bars in Greece, I was on a tour of France and going to the best restaurants in the world, dining by myself, because that was what I enjoyed,” she says. “I have always been an avid consumer of restaurants.”
So she came up with a concept with Al to do a small neighbourhood wine bar in Surry Hills. Then she walked into a turn-of-the-century warehouse on Foster Street – a very large old warehouse – and Nomad the “beast” was born. The food was inspired by the couple’s travels through Spain, Morocco and the Middle East, and the extensive wine collection was a result of many visits to Australian wineries and realising the city lacked that cellar door experience. It opened in 2013.
“My dad died just before we opened Nomad in Sydney, which was really sad because I was very much a daddy’s girl and he never got to see of all of this, what we built,” says Yazbek. There is no doubt Yazbek’s father would have been incredibly proud, as Nomad was a success almost immediately, won prestigious awards within two years, and has become a Sydney dining institution. The space, the service, the food and the wine combine to create a fabulous experience people keep coming back to.
Nomad’s next chapter began when young chef Jacqui Challinor, who was working in the kitchen, was elevated to head chef. She and Yazbek began working closely together, became good friends, and starting planning what was going to come next. “Part of our story is that Jacqui and I are so aligned creatively. We finish each other’s sentences, we design spaces and menus that go hand-in-hand together,” Yazbek explains. “Al is my husband and business partner, but from a creative perspective it has always been Jacqui and I working together and I think that is a beautiful part of Nomad, especially to have that female perspective.”
Challinor couldn’t agree more. She tells WISH that there is deep respect between the pair. “It is 10 years since I was appointed head chef at Nomad and Bec and I started working together. She is also one of my best mates, and I think we manage to do the friendship and professional thing well. I trust her vision for the restaurants and also trust her with my career, because she sees the best in me. She trusts me with the food and where I am going to take the business.” The chef says Yazbek has become her culinary sounding board and is not afraid to question her when it comes to the menu. “She loves my food, except when she is pregnant,” Challinor adds. “I have picked all three of her pregnancies as she flat out did not like any of my dishes.”
Challinor talks to WISH while in Sydney overseeing the opening of Beau Bar, but she is based in Melbourne, to which she relocated to design the kitchen and menu for Nomad. It took five years for Yazbek to find the perfect site, in Flinders Lane at the bottom of the Adelphi Hotel, and she, Al and their kids moved to the city for two years to oversee the process. “We wanted to be part of the dining scene in Melbourne because we think it is amazing, and we targeted Flinders Lane because we wanted to do a refined entry into the city,” Yazbek explains. “And it is not a replica of the Sydney Nomad, it is a more refined, grown-up version. The Adelphi Hotel is considered a very significant building architecturally – it was designed by Denton Corker Marshall – and the space is quite austere but beautiful. So we wanted to insert Nomad into the building respectfully and quietly. I didn’t want to be known as people from Sydney just coming into Melbourne.”
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When Nomad Melbourne finally opened, local diners did anything but turn their nose up at the Sydney import; it was packed and earned rave reviews for the food, the service, the atmosphere, and the use of local Victorian produce and wine
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Bubbling away, however, in the background of opening Nomad Melbourne, building Beau Bar, and even dealing with electrical fires and renovations of the original Nomad in Surry Hills, has been the biggest challenge Yazbek, her husband and Challinor have faced: creating a restaurant in the heritage-listed Cathedral Room. The former main trading room of the Melbourne Stock Exchange on Collins Street was built in 1890 and has extraordinary Gothic arches, columns and stained-glass windows.
“We saw the space five years ago when it was still derelict and the developers for the big tower behind it, The GPT Group, had to restore it as part of the deal,” explains Yazbek. “The sad thing is that no one has been able to experience this room and enjoy it for years, and I fell in love with the space and we, very naively, spoke to GPT and said we were interested in doing something with it.”
She says Heritage Victoria approved the site for a restaurant but they still had to run the fitout past it. She and Al initially thought it would be easy as GPT had done the hard work to get the approval, but it was quite the opposite. It took 18 months working almost full-time with a heritage architect to get their plans passed.
“It has been really hard,” Yazbek says. “But I feel so passionate about bringing it back to life and making it a hospitality space, because it could have just become a gallery or an event space that no one really goes too. With dining, you get two to three hours sitting in your favourite restaurant multiple times a year to experience this incredible built environment. Then we add the layers of service, and music, and wine and food and lighting, to create an amazing evening.”
Yazbek has been working with architects Akin Atelier to create a fit-out of the restaurant and bar – to be called Reine and La Rue – that basically sits on top of the existing floor and doesn’t alter any of the extraordinary grand ceilings, columns or windows. The carpentry is being done by a specialist craftsman in Braidwood, NSW, and then driven down and put together like jigsaw pieces on site.
“We have done an insertion into the building, so the whole idea is that when you are standing up and moving around the space it’s this reverence for the history of the building, and then when you are led to your table and you sit down, you’re immersed in the design that we have built,” she explains. As for the menu, Yazbek and Challinor are looking at French-influenced cuisine, which also explains the venue name. “I don’t want a French restaurant because I am not French, I am an Australian who has an appreciation for all things French and I really do love the food,” Yazbek says. “We are heading down a European/French path,” adds Challinor, “as we want it to be a bit more of an elevated offering for Melbourne.”
The restaurant, Reine (Queen) and La Rue (The Street), a tiny bar at the back are due to open in August – construction delays notwithstanding – and Yazbek cannot wait to see what her customers make of the extraordinary venue and building; whether they see what she saw when she walked in and fell in love, just as she has done with all the locations that make up the Nomad group. “We are trying to create restaurants people want to make memories in,” she says. “Whether they get engaged there or have birthdays, or simply sit at the bar and have a cucumber dish and they are the most incredible cucumbers they have ever eaten. Those are the stories I love to create.”
