A proliferation of new Sydney restaurants has led the high-profile hospitality group to do things differently at their just-opened eastern Mediterranean venue Watermans at Barangaroo.
The long, languid 7pm dinner has proven elusive for many Sydney diners in recent years, with more venues operating on a two sittings system, often strictly timed to a two-hour seating limit.
Now one restaurant is moving away from the approach, which keeps tables ticking over and maximises bums on seats, but can push customers to eat earlier or later than they’d like, especially during busy periods.
“You can book whenever you like,” says restaurateur Nick Hildebrandt from Bentley Restaurant Group of its new venture, Watermans. The venue opens at Barangaroo on Monday, November 24.
“We don’t want to be kicking people out, we want them to stay the whole night.”
The eastern Mediterranean restaurant, which launches in the One Sydney Harbour development behind Watermans Cove, is the latest venue from the Bentley hospitality team.
The same group operates CBD fine diner Bentley, Asian-inspired restaurant King Clarence, and the recently crowned New Restaurant of the Year, Eleven Barrack.
Hildebrandt said the proliferation of new restaurants in Sydney had left venues with fewer customers to go around. “So you [need to] look after them,” he said.
The restaurateur agreed that the number of sittings at Sydney’s hot restaurants had become “a bit ridiculous”. When Hildebrandt and business partner, chef Brent Savage, dreamt up their eastern Med concept, top of their list was “guest experience” as well as recruiting chef Darryl Martin, whose cooking they admired at now-closed Marrickville restaurant Barzaari.
Hildebrandt said the combination of Martin’s flavours with Savage’s finesse and plating had created some early kitchen alchemy. Their collaborative effort transformed musakhan – a chicken dish of Palestinian origins traditionally served with bread – into a roasted chicken reinterpretation coated with potato flakes instead of bread.
The chefs have taken their own approach to taramasalata, a now ubiquitous Sydney menu item. At Watermans, it’s served with Greek Easter bread, reworked into tiny slider buns topped with taramasalata and roe. “We pulled back on the sweetness of the Easter bread and brush it with pomegranate molasses,” Martin said.
Watermans, which seats up to 150 diners, isn’t the first Barangaroo foray for Hildebrandt and Savage. They operated the award-winning seafood restaurant Cirrus, just a few steps away from Watermans, from 2016 until their lease ran out last year.
“The John dory [at Watermans] has Cirrus vibes,” Savage said. “But we used to serve it with a green chilli salsa, it’s now a full-blown chermoula. They are talking the same language, but this version is a little more spiced up.”
While Savage insists that “Watermans isn’t a seafood restaurant”, the menu does lean in on seafood, with prawns and saffron orzo, pickled octopus and wood-fired scallop with pomegranate and brown butter.
Hildebrandt and Savage have lost count of the exact number of restaurants they’ve opened, but they think it’s 10 and remain hands-on with the pre-launch process. “I’ve been at Flower Power getting plants, and Brent has been painting,” Hildebrandt said.
It has been a busy year for the two, who have recalibrated their hospitality group. In March, they sold the plant-based Yellow to the restaurant’s long-serving head chef, Sander Nooij, and his business partner. Later in the year, they closed Monopole restaurant and stepped away from Brasserie 1930 at Capella Sydney hotel.
The two describe the new strategy as “pruning and preparing for growth” by focusing on restaurants they have full control over, and venues of a certain scale and size. This includes the February launch of Eleven Barrack, which proved to be one of the hottest openings of the year.
While sympathetic towards smaller venues, Hildebrandt said venues with fewer than 60 seats don’t make sense for the business any more. “You either need to be an owner-operator [working in the venue] or turn over the tables two or three times to survive. It’s part of the reason we let Yellow go.”
Open lunch and dinner daily
R1/88 Barangaroo Avenue, Barangaroo, bentleyrestaurantgroup.com.au/watermanssydney
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