An essential ingredient of opening a restaurant
Chef Evan Hayter opens de'sendent in Margaret River
Have you ever considered what it takes to open a restaurant beyond having the capital, and an idea of its direction, especially in a regional town where the population expands and contracts with the seasons, and one that you know will immediately hold the interest of diners and press alike, where expectation is very high?
I think about this a lot. I’ve never run a restaurant as such[i], but I’ve been around enough to know that this is no mean feat; financially and mentally. A slog that is rewarded by long hours, fine margins, and sometimes entitled diners leaving one star Google reviews. It was brought to mind in the last week or so with the opening of de’sendent in Margaret River, the new restaurant from chef Evan Hayter formerly of Arimia Estate.
You may not have been to Margaret River, or even know where it is[ii]. If that’s the case you’d probably not be aware of Hayter and the reputation that he carved out at his former digs, a nationally known winery restaurant that you’d find at the bottom of a two-kilometre stretch of dirt road, off-grid, where he and his team had a market garden, raised pigs, and had a dam well-stocked with trout. The regional restaurant idyl that is so often a dream but not the exact reality.
While this newsletter is about Hayter, and to different degrees his new and old restaurants, it’s also about many more restaurants, because this story is being acted out the world over.
I recall a dinner at Arimia some years ago where Hayter worked with chef Kyle Connaughton of Single Thread Farm, a 3-Michelin starred farm, restaurant, and inn, in Healdsburg, California. It was a pairing that seemed apt in that here were two chefs concerned with knowing the produce that they cook; some grown themselves, and some coming from growers that they’d entered into more than just a transaction with. I’d say that relationships are a key ingredient for any good chef, but especially a country one. I’ve heard time and again from chefs who have swapped city kitchens for country ones, and that they needed to adjust their mindset, to not being able to simply ring in an order and expect to get everything they wanted.
In conversation with Hayter some years back he talked about a well-known market gardener in the Margaret River region, Jema McCabe. In fact, he waxed lyrical about the daikon that she grew and admitted that there was no point in him attempting to grow his own, because they’d never be as good. McCabe’s daikon the product of her time, soil, and meticulous seed saving. In fact, I subsequently recalled the conversation to McCabe during an interview in which she almost entirely collected and sorted seed. Her approach she told me was to make her business smaller, and that she wasn’t building a “veggie empire.” By virtue of that, in the restaurant space, she was only interested in growing for a select number of chefs. Again, relationships.
Earlier this week the WA Good Food Guide published my interview with Hayter, focusing on the opening of de’sendent (the name, the journey to opening, what to expect, and what Hayter will miss about Arimia). We chatted before opening, tradies still at work in the restaurant space. Again, we talked about those all-important relationships and the direction that Hayter feels that more chefs should be taking. It didn’t make the final edit, because between sitting in the restaurant, and walking to get coffee[iii] the interview was over two hours long.
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