Sunny side up

Bill Granger is the golden boy of hot breakfasts and now serves up his fare to millions of British and Japanese viewers

Bill Granger is the golden boy of hot breakfasts and now serves up his fare to millions of British and Japanese viewers. But with four restaurants, books and TV series on his plate, fatherhood still gets top billing

Bill Granger has just finished writing up the day’s menu on the chalkboard at his Darlinghurst restaurant, with the help of his youngest daughter, Bunny. She has also left her mark – with an artful flutter of butterflies in the bottom corner. But what really surprises me about the moment is that this man, with six books, four restaurants, a couple of TV series and countless international media commitments, is actually doing his own chalkboards, and allowing his daughter to mess around with it, too. But he has. That is the lovely contradiction of Bill Granger, and possibly the secret of his success.

Being a self-taught cook shows in the straight-up ease of his recipes, and the comfort factor of what appears on his tables at Bills in Sydney (Darlinghurst, Surry Hills and Woollahra) and Tokyo (in Shichirigahama, an hour out of the city). The opening of Bills Darlinghurst in 1993 was a revelation for Sydneysiders. Its interior spoke of the warm, nurturing food to come. And the eggs! Those amazing scrambled eggs. I didn’t want to mention the eggs but I had to. After all, Bill changed them forever and is apparently known in Britain and the US as “The Master of Eggs”.

Pivotal to Granger’s success is his wife, Natalie Elliott. They met through one of his employees while she was working as a film producer. Her ability to manage talent and get their best work out of them was the perfect fit for him. “To be honest, while I do have a good head for business, I’m instinctive. I don’t have good follow-through,” says Granger. “Our relationship is great because Natalie produces me as a creative and allows me to have time, because that’s a struggle when you work in a creative business – having enough time to be creative.”

To be a successful restaurateur these days, you’re almost expected to have a media career as well. With her film skills, Elliott manages that side of the brand, leaving Granger to concentrate on the food. Since 2000 he has written six books and sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide. He and Elliot have also set up a company, Bills Films, which produced the second TV series of Bills Food, which has been shown in 26 countries. While the program airs on Foxtel’s Lifestyle channel here, it’s had dream runs on BBC1 and BBC2 in the UK, and WOWOW in Japan.

To date, the Bills brand is entirely owned by Granger. Despite several offers of outside investment over the years, which would have enabled rapid expansion of the restaurant empire, he prefers to remain independent. “For us, the most important thing is control,” he says. “Bills is a family business. It’s old-fashioned in a way, but I remember my mum helping in my dad’s shop. I like the nature of a family business – I love the independence.”

Granger says that over the years he’s worked out how to succeed in the notoriously tough restaurant business and remain inspired at the same time: “The secret is knowing how not to burn yourself out, and I try to do that by keeping balance and rhythm in my personal life. I go to bed at 9.30 every night. I’ve got young children. And I exercise.” As well as running, swimming and taking spin classes, Granger has done the unthinkable for someone essentially in the cafe business – he’s switched to decaf.

There’s no doubt Granger relishes his role as a parent and is more than happy to get his three daughters ready for school (and make their lunches, of course), collect them afterwards and organise their dinner. Meanwhile, Elliott oversees the business side of things.

Such routine was apparently lacking in his childhood. “My family ate together about three times in our whole childhood and I think that’s why I do what I do now – my business is about the joy of the domestic and having food on the table,” he says. “At times it’s a struggle when we finally get the girls to bed at 7.30pm and there’s (still) piles of work to do. The flip side is that one of us can pick them up from school every day and we feel really involved in their lives.”

Born in Melbourne, Granger is the son of a vegetarian mother and butcher-shop owning father. He moved to Sydney at 19 to attend art school and, while studying, worked at the now-defunct La Passion De Fruit in Surry Hills. The cafe’s main trade was breakfast and lunch, but Granger rented it from the owner three nights a week to do his own thing for dinner. Although the experience taught him a lot about working in a kitchen, it was a financial disaster.

“I went through a lot of money,” he says. “It was a good introduction to the restaurant business, but what it really did was show me that I wanted my own place. It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it and worked with some great friends … when you do business at that age it’s very much a co-op feeling. You’re all young and doing it together.”

By 22, Granger had opened his first restaurant in Darlinghurst. A second Bills opened in Surry Hills in 1996, and a third in Woollahra three years ago. His first international restaurant is near the Japanese town of Kamakura, at Shichirigahama beach.

Granger insists that he and Elliott run their business instinctively and don’t have a grand plan for its expansion. In fact, one of his favourite words seems to be “no”. “We find we’re saying ‘no’ a lot because we’re very protective of what we do,” he says. “How big you grow, or how small you go – whether we have a small family business or a bigger business with partners – is the question, because to grow you really need to get that extra capital in, especially in restaurants as the (industry is) so cutthroat.

“We also want to work with people we really like, so it’s a matter of keeping things small and tight and the brand intact. After all, I don’t want to sell it. Although Bills is me, in a lot of ways it’s so established without me, but I want to do it for a long time yet. And the great thing about food is that there’s longevity in it if you do it well. It’s a good business. I’ve been here 15 years and I’d like to do another 15.”

Restaurateurs aren’t particularly known for their business acumen – the Australian dining scene is littered with financial disasters. Granger, however, is aware that the collaborative aspect of working in a kitchen also applies to the money. “The best thing we’ve ever done is get a financial controller,” he says. “We’ve always had these sort of glorified bookkeepers and we thought it was time to go with someone who was a lot better. It’s only been a couple of months, but the change is incredible. I wish someone had told me 10 years ago about the benefits of getting someone really good in that role. But you get scared, especially when it’s an area you know absolutely nothing about.”

Bills employs 90 people in Australia and, in an acknowledgment that his business is only as good as the people who work for it, Granger recently hired a human resources manager to look after the staff. This now includes 30 people in Japan.

Having his first restaurant outside Sydney in Japan, when many expected him to embark on a safer option such as Melbourne, is typical of the way Granger has grown the brand. Indeed, in the early 1990s when Bills opened in Surry Hills, it was far from the bustling restaurant precinct it is today.

“The Japanese side is exciting,” says Granger, who met his Japanese business partners through Britain’s Monocle magazine editor Tyler Brule and editor-at-large Hidetoshi Nakata (a retired Japanese soccer legend). “I think you need a party in every market working on the ground with an interest in it.

“Arriving in Japan is like landing in outer space. I spent some time there as an art student. Everything they do is different – and the way they do business is really different. It’s about maintaining relationships, and they are lifetime relationships. I quite enjoy that side of it, but for the serious side of the business, like negotiations, it’s quite hard. To negotiate is considered uncouth and lower class. I’m lucky I don’t do that side – Natalie does that.”

Next on Granger’s horizon is a possible London branch – a no-brainer when you consider his impressive media profile in the UK. “I’d love to open a restaurant there,” he says. “That’s what we’re working on now; how to make that happen. It would need to be a partnership like Japan.
“The British market is probably our biggest market. We’re on BBC1, which is huge, so I’m better known in the UK than here. Over there I’ve got taxi drivers recognising me; and here in Australia, no one knows me. Here, the TV show’s on cable and it’s a bit more niche, but in Britain it’s just, well, bigger.”

In fact, Granger and his family left for London immediately after our interview and he plans to spend more time there while he works on the London project. “We’ll be back and forth more and we’ll try to do it in the school holidays like Gordon Ramsay does – he spends his time in LA in the term breaks,” he says.

In the meantime, Granger has shelved plans to open a fourth branch in Sydney’s CBD, in part because of his London ambitions but also in light of the global financial crisis. “It’s a time to be conservative, to keep it a bit tight. It’s also a time when you need to be a little more creative and not take things for granted,” he says.

Whether or not the financial environment is right for a move to London remains to be seen but Granger is not willing to take the gamble on whether a city the size of Sydney can sustain four restaurants bearing his name just yet.

Yet he is confident his media career won’t be compromised. “Historically, book sales are not so affected by economic downturns – sometimes they even go up. And TV, well, we have a couple of years locked in there,” he says. However, he does concede that the restaurants are suffering a little. “Just this year, I reckon we’re five per cent down, and I think that will go to 10 (per cent).”

To combat the loss of trade, Granger says his strategy is to keep evolving. “The hard thing with restaurants is that people want it exactly the same every time they come in. But they don’t really want it exactly the same, because if you don’t change it, they get bored.” One thing he won’t be changing, of course, is his signature scrambled eggs.

“If it all goes tomorrow, it doesn’t really worry me,” he says with a grin. “The thing about having had success is that at least you’ve had it. I would open up a little place somewhere and start baking and making coffees. It doesn’t scare me. That’s exactly where I started, and that was fun as well.”