Rockpool Dining Group: Neil Perry parts ways with Urban Purveyor Group

Neil Perry, Australia’s most recognisable chef, has always been about the produce, the farm. Now he’s buying it back.

‘I went down one path and now I’m lucky enough to be able to go down another,’ says Neil Perry, at Sydney’s Rockpool Bar & Grill on Monday. Picture: Jane Dempster

Neil Perry, Australia’s most recognisable chef, has always been about the produce, the farm. Now, metaphorically speaking, he’s buying it back.

Perry announced on Monday that he was taking back control of the seven premium restaurants he established and, as strange as it sounds, leaving the Rockpool Dining Group behind. “It’s been a little bit difficult not being my own boss,” Perry conceded. “I went down one path and now I’m lucky enough to be able to go down another. (It’s) time to reboot and start again.”

The chef and his business partner/cousin Trish Richards were forced into an uncomfortable business alliance back in 2016 with the private equity-owned Urban Purveyor Group. It followed a decision by Perry’s largest backer, Californian multi-­millionaire David Doyle, to sell to the highest bidder.

It was a deal that saw the chef with strange business bedfellows including Bavarian-style pubs and Mexican cantinas. UPG took over the Rockpool Dining Group name to leverage the brand, and while the group expanded rapidly — mostly at the fast-casual end of the market — Perry’s reputation as a chef and restaurateur ­suffered.

Under the banner of Rockpool Dining Group, the merged entity grew from 17 venues and $150m revenue to more than 85 venues and turnover in excess of $400m in three years.

Yet rumour persisted that the chef and his American CEO, Tom Pash, were on different pages.

“We didn’t fit together,” Perry said yesterday. “I thought it was a good idea, but it turns out there was a better idea.”

The announcement — which means Perry, 62, will regain control of favourite business haunts Rockpool Bar & Grill, Spice Temple and Rosetta — comes with a decision on a wages underpayment scandal for the group, now with Fair Work Australia, to be handed down shortly.

Noted chefs Perry, Heston Blumenthal and George Calombaris have been caught up in the underpayments scandals ­uncovered at several major ­hospitality businesses in the past two years.

Calombaris’s corporate vehicle Made Establishment went into voluntary administration this year.

This was just one of the bumps in the road for Perry since the formation of the Rockpool Dining Group. “We now have the squeakiest, cleanest books in the industry,” he said “but let’s face it, (the industry is) not the world’s best record-keepers, and not always financially viable.”

Perry will now operate under the new, if slightly confusing, “Rockpool Group” banner. His restaurants will include the recently opened R Bar and premises in Bridge Street that formerly housed the Jade Temple restaurant. It will mean about 800 employees in the new entity, less than a quarter of the current RDG employee pool of 4000.

“It was an experiment that didn’t quite come off,” said the chef, who jumped on to the nat­ional food stage in 1986 at Blue Water Grill, at Bondi Beach.

He declined to name his new backers. “For me the focus is on getting back into the kitchens … Getting the restaurants to where I want them to be.”

“We will stabilise, get our act together and I’d love to open more restaurants, but it will grow organically. I don’t want to be the biggest (restaurant) group in the country.”

Rockpool Dining Group’s executive team of Thomas Pash, Frank Tucker and Michael Campbell will form Pacific Concepts and retain the balance of the business, including Sake, The Cut, Munich Brauhaus and the Burger Project chain.