‘Sometimes I lose it’: Famously direct restaurateur sells up after more than 50 years
German-born Rudi Dietz took over Stuyvesant’s House in Crows Nest in the 1970s. Now he’s set to serve his last pork knuckle as he farewells his life’s work.
As the June 24 auction date looms at one of Sydney’s oldest restaurants, Stuyvesant’s House owner Rudi Dietz talks about retirement but is determined to go out swinging for the hospitality industry.
The famously direct restaurateur is down a chef for lunch service, and clearly under the pump at his Crows Nest restaurant. He excuses himself to answer a call on another line: “Please don’t ask me how I am, what do you want?”
It isn’t a show, you only have to read some of the restaurant’s online reviews. But it’s the industry Dietz loves the most he wants to talk about. How governments and trade associations have in his eyes neglected hospitality, and not worked hard enough to bring skilled workers to the country. They also lost opportunities for boosting tourism, he believes.
“Australia is a beautiful place,” he says. The same beautiful place the German-born Dietz eyed on promotional posters in Europe in the late 1960s. He arrived in Australia in 1970, and three years later took over Stuyvesant’s House, which had originally opened in 1961 as a Dutch restaurant. Dietz put his own imprint on the menu and personality in the place, while his brother Max joined him on the floor.
With a menu that sweeps schweinshaxe (German pork knuckle), schnitzels and duck with red cabbage and spaetzle, customers dip into an exotic mix that includes German and broader European dishes, including nods to the restaurant’s Dutch origins. The Dutch/Indonesian section of the online menu has a fillet steak with nasi goreng, and broader culinary inspiration found with chateaubriand and Hungarian goulash.
The restaurant’s encyclopaedic wine list has been compared to a fine-wine auction catalogue. Its cellar – crammed with precious wines and rarely seen vintages – is the stuff of local legend, surviving a 2015 fire that broke out on the restaurant’s second floor. The restaurant itself was rebuilt and reopened, another chapter in its long history.
Dietz is full of stories from his 50-plus years’ reign at the Alexander Street restaurant. The time he had to chase a famous English actor to the carpark to settle his bill. The love and fastidious care he’s put into the wine collection. The restaurant critic who received a jocular phone call after mentioning the “knick-knacks” on the restaurant’s walls in his review.
“Why lie, why pretend,” Dietz says when asked about his manner. “Sometimes I lose it,” he added.
“This has been my life, I’ve put my work first,” he says of the unsociable hours and sacrifices many restaurateurs make.
He admits to having “a tear in my eye” when an old customer recently visited. “He was here with his children, the little boy looked just like he did when he came here 45 years ago.”
The timeline on Dietz’s last service will depend on the outcome of the auction later this month. “I don’t know yet, but my son is going to come in from America for it.”
As for retirement, Dietz says the plan is to spend more time travelling. And eating in other people’s restaurants.
Scott Bolles writes the weekly Short Black column in Good Food.Connect via email.