The contemporary venue, which brought a coastal vibe and new seafood focus to the former Automata home, is one of several in the neighbourhood to shut in recent years.
A tough start to spring for chefs’ hatted Sydney restaurants is shaping as an even bigger blow for a high-profile Chippendale eat street, with Kensington Street’s Longshore restaurant to close this month.
Hot-on-the-heels of the closure of Monopole restaurant on Saturday, September 6, the chefs’ hatted Longshore will shut the following week.
Longshore chef Jarrod Walsh said the decision to shut followed his resignation to take up the head chef role at glamour CBD fine-diner Shell House.
“Since my resignation [as executive chef at Longshore and the neighbouring Old Clare Hotel], the management team has come to the hard decision that Longshore will no longer operate and the last service will be September 13,” Walsh said.
It’s a bitter blow for Kensington Street, which opened in 2015 with lofty food ambitions, but has churned through some high-end restaurant talent since. First to go was Silvereye restaurant in 2016, which had former Noma sous chef Sam Miller in charge in the kitchen. British celebrity chef Jason Atherton followed in 2018 at Kensington Street Social.
Local talent was drafted to take Atherton’s former digs, but when the Chippendale branch of Marrickville’s Barzaari restaurant closed after less than a year in 2019, The Sydney Morning Herald opined: “Thankfully, the precinct has a pin-up in chef Clayton Wells – it’s difficult to imagine what it’d be like without Automata.”
A year later, Wells had pulled the pin at A1 Canteen on the strip, and in December 2022, he called it a day at his award-winning Automata restaurant. “It’s the perfect time to zip up and move on,” Wells said at the time. Upmarket Korean restaurant Jung Sung joined the departees in 2023.
While the Spice Alley hawker area on the strip does well, Walsh said it was a tougher proposition for more upmarket restaurants, with uni students a large part of the foot traffic.
“We were more of a destination restaurant,” Walsh said. “When we did Hartsyard [in Newtown], we had a lot of people who ate there once or twice a week.”
Walsh has ticked plenty of boxes at Longshore since its mid-2023 opening in the former Automata site. With a seagrass matting feature wall and “freestyle cuisine” combining coastal ingredients with Asian techniques, the restaurant landed a coveted chefs’ hat and impressed the team at Shell House.
“We’re really excited to have Jarrod join us,” said Brett Robinson, group chief executive of The Point, the hospitality group behind the two chefs’ hatted Shell House.
Walsh will replace outgoing head chef Brad Guest this month, with Robinson enthused about their new hire. “It’s his creative energy, the detail … the way he plates his food,” Robinson said of Walsh’s skill set.
As for what’s next at the Longshore site, Walsh said the hotel would most likely bring in a new external operator to take the Longshore space.
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