The Year That Was

From battling illness and drought to opening and closing restaurants, we talk to key industry players about their year. Here, they reflect on 2019 and their hopes for the future.

- Larissa Dubecki

CAM FAIRBAIRN

When the time came, the conversation was simple. At the start of the year, Cam Fairbairn and Mitch Orr stopped, and asked each other, “Do we want to keep doing this?”

“This” was Acme, the Asian-inflected, not-Italian pasta restaurant in Rushcutters Bay that helped usher in a new blueprint for Sydney dining. A place that made haute bar snacks of devon sandwiches and star turns of Jatz and pig’s-head macaroni and backed it up with a service style that was fresh and refreshing all at once.

In closing, Orr (food) and Fairbairn (floor) were recognising that the lows had come to outweigh the highs. Come July, they were ready to turn out the lights. When they did, it was after a flood of bookings that saw them do it with a bang. When Fairbairn looks back now, it’s with pride on where Acme sits in the city’s eating and drinking history.

“You lose some perspective when you’re in the day to day, so at the end it was nice to realise what an impact Acme had,” he says. “When we opened in 2014 no one was really doing pasta at a starred restaurant level. It was always three stars, or Bar Reggio. And no one was really doing the kind of laid-back, friendly, casual-but-professional service we did either. I think there were a lot of things Acme influenced in a positive way.”

Practically, closing was simple. They made the call, they told the staff, then they squeezed as many people in as possible so everyone could have a last experience. What stood out in those final weeks, Fairbairn says, was the support from the locals, and the personal stories – people who might have had their first date at Acme who were coming back as married couples.