Chef Peter Gilmore will serve his final snow egg at Sydney’s premier harbourside restaurant in February, before one of Australia’s biggest pub groups takes over the site.
In a crushing blow that will redefine the top end of Sydney dining, Quay will permanently close on February 14 after a 37-year run as the flag-bearer for Australian haute cuisine.
The Circular Quay restaurant spent most of those nearly four decades at Australia’s dining summit, and holding three Good Food Guide hats for 23 consecutive years under executive chef Peter Gilmore is a record unlikely to be matched. Iconic is an overused word in connection with restaurants, but Quay etched itself as the dining equivalent of its neighbours on Sydney’s golden pond, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.
Yet, there were tables available on both Friday and Saturday last weekend, in the party season, just weeks out from Christmas. Quay owner Leon Fink has fears for the current three-hat dining model. Oncore by Clare Smyth recently announced it will also close in February; Tetsuya’s served its final confit trout last year.
Fink said it isn’t one factor but many that threatens the future of ambitious restaurants like Quay. Inbound tourism – the seat-filling lifeblood of high-end dining – is still lagging in growth. (Pre-COVID, overseas visitors accounted for 40 per cent of Quay clientele, a figure that hasn’t returned.) The pandemic fuelled an explosion of good neighbourhood restaurants and there has been an overall shift towards more simple food. Meanwhile, food prices are increasing and cost-of-living pressures are ongoing.
“I would also add the high staff ratio of running a fine dining restaurant,” said Gilmore. “It’s so labour intensive, and wages have gone up so much.”
Fink recalls making the first “design sketch” for Quay with late chef Tony Bilson – a joint pledge to create “the best restaurant with the best food”.
“Tony kicked that off beautifully,” Fink said, and when it opened in May 1988, the restaurant had Bilson’s name above the door. Rising star chef Guillaume Brahimi took over the kitchen in 1995 and the fine-diner eventually changed its name to Quay.
“The coup of all coups was Peter wanting to be with us,” Fink said of Gilmore’s arrival in 2001, plucked from a restaurant at Whale Beach. Fink rates their partnership as a highlight of his Quay tenure.
In 2018, Fink spent $4 million on a Quay redesign and signed a new 20-year lease with the Port Authority of NSW, owner of the Overseas Passenger Terminal where the restaurant is located. The site’s new leaseholder will be Australian Venue Co., which operates Squire’s Landing in the same waterside building, plus Kingsley’s Woolloomooloo and more than 200 other bars and pubs across the country.
The Quay name wasn’t part of the sale, with talk down at the terminal over the weekend that the incoming restaurant will look to one of the old ocean liners that used to dock there for its moniker, possibly the SS Oriana.
The signature snow egg, axed from the menu in 2018, will make a return for Quay’s run to the finish line, but Gilmore wants to look ahead rather than back, skipping the oft-trodden “best of” carte restaurants offer in their closing months and sticking with the five-course $275 menu and $365 “Quay Experience” option. If that sounds expensive, Gilmore is quick to counter: “in Europe, you’d pay $600 a head.”
Both Gilmore and Fink think there’s a future for ambitious fine dining in Sydney, but it will most likely be away from larger, high-rent locations – smaller venues such as Stanmore’s three-hatted Sixpenny provide more of a blueprint.
Fink, who last year sold his stake in Surry Hills’ Firedoor and its Basque-inspired wine bar spin-off Gildas to owner-chef Lennox Hastie, will oversee a smaller restaurant group post-Quay, with Bennelong at the Sydney Opera House and Otto Ristorante in Woolloomooloo still in his stable.
Gilmore, who cites his relationships with farmers and suppliers, and growing niche produce and heirlooms for the restaurant as one of his proudest achievements, will spend more time at Bennelong after Quay closes. “My current contract ends in June, so for the first time in a long time I’ll be a free agent.”
He’s open to exploring new local projects, and flagged Hobart as somewhere he would love to open a restaurant. The top level isn’t dead, Gilmore said, but “leaner, tighter” restaurants serving a smaller number of diners could be its future. And he might end up one of those chefs ready to give it a go.
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