Age Of Empire

The newly formed Rockpool Dining Group is a game-changer in Australian restaurants. But how does it work? Who’s running it? And why? Sharon Verghis gets the inside word.

Australia is the hardest place in the world to run a restaurant: Tom Pash, the American chief executive of Australia’s newest dining group, calls it as he sees it. Pash has big plans, and doesn’t shy from facing the facts about the country’s business life with an amiable smile and blunt pragmatism.

Sitting next to him in the Rockpool Dining Group’s Sydney headquarters in The Rocks, Neil Perry – arguably Australia’s most celebrated culinary name – concurs. High costs including labour and rent, the fickle discretionary dollar and equally unpredictable local economic conditions: the roll call of formidable trading circumstances is long, says Perry, and makes for slim profit margins in the fine-dining sector.

And any edge you may earn can disappear in a second. Perry snaps his fingers to underscore the point. He has just announced the closure of his fine-dining Sydney restaurant, Eleven Bridge, the last incarnation of what had been Rockpool. Opened in 1989, it was his flagship, and the restaurant that made his name.

Right now is a pivotal moment in the restaurant trade in Australia, and Perry and Pash are at the centre of the action. In November last year, Perry signed a deal described as one of the biggest in Australian hospitality, featuring the acquisition of his restaurant businesses by the Urban Purveyor Group, a restaurant conglomerate backed by Quadrant Private Equity, for a reported $65 million. (Eleven Bridge, Perry’s work with Qantas, and his newer consultancy with David Jones were outside the deal.)