Surry Hills’ era-shaping Bodega eatery and its sibling venue Bastardo CBD will shut this month. The closures are a planned restaurant recalibration from hospitality operator Porteno Group.

Co-owner Ben Milgate says Bodega will fall just short of reaching its 18th birthday, with its last service on Saturday, April 13. “It is turning into a private dining room for Porteno,” he says.

With strong demand for private dining rooms across Sydney, the closure is a prudent commercial move, if not without some sentimental attachment. “It’s where we all got our start,” Milgate says of Bodega and its role in launching what has evolved into the sprawling and influential Porteno Group.

When it opened in 2006, Bodega ushered in a mix of tapas menu, cool wine list, pop art and upbeat music. It was an ingenious venue that pioneered a Sydney-wide reboot of the tapas genre.

In 2019, it relocated from its original Commonwealth Street home to Holt/Gladstone Street, where it moved into the space occupied by Porteno-owned wine bar and bottleshop Wyno. While open to rebooting the Bodega brand in the future, Milgate says there are currently no plans to do so.

In the Sydney CBD, Italian restaurant Bastardo will serve its last eggplant parmigiana on Friday, April 12.

“The lease was up,” Milgate says of the decision to exit the Phillip Street site. “We have a few key staff we will consolidate at Surry Hills [the home of the original Bastardo restaurant].”

The transfer of personnel will enable the Surry Hills restaurant to open for extra services.

Continental Deli opened at the Phillip Street site in 2018, but it didn’t quite capture the zeitgeist of the Newtown original. In May 2023, the site relaunched as a Bastardo.

There is a lot of action surrounding the Continental Deli mothership in Newton; the team at the chef’s hatted venue is in the process of developing adjoining terraces on its Australia Street strip into a four-venue hospitality and accomodation hub. It will launch an all-day vegetarian diner called Flora, a seafood restaurant, Mister Grotto, and an Italian steakhouse, Osteria Mucca, with the first two venues to open in October. Three boutique holiday apartments are being built on the upper floors.

Milgate says they remain bullish about the city as a food destination. Later this year, Porteno Group will open a new outlet of its Humble Bakery brand at Kent Street in the Sydney CBD.