Three Blue Ducks co-founder Mark La Brooy has jumped ship to The Boathouse Group, which has opened its first surf club operation in North Wollongong, serving upmarket bistro food such as snapper and wild game.
The humble Aussie surf club is already hot hospo property, and Palm Beach-born Boathouse Group has joined the trend by opening a restaurant and bar at North Wollongong Surf Life Saving Club.
“An American [customer] said she felt like she was on a cruise ship. You just can’t buy venues like this,” Boathouse Group’s head of culinary, Mark La Brooy, says of the views at The Boathouse North Wollongong, which opened over the weekend. The group previously plonked its venues in boat sheds, and dropped them on marinas, but this is its first Boathouse-branded operation in a surf club.
La Brooy says NSW has some catching up to do with the number of Queensland surf club restaurants, but the slow trickle of new ventures is expected to grow as clubs look for new revenue streams to maintain services and tackle growing costs. Leasing out little-used function spaces can provide a win-win.
The Boathouse North Wollongong has taken up residence on the top floor of the surf club. It has avoided a fine-dining approach in favour of a bistro and a “casual pub style” bar offering. La Brooy, who spends most of his time working at the group’s Sydney venues, is doubly invested in the launch as both he and head chef Lachie Houghton are Illawarra residents.
They want to champion South Coast producers, and while it’s a bistro, they aren’t dumbing down the food. “The snapper comes with a charred tomato sugo beurre blanc, we’ll also be using wild game,” says La Brooy, whose CV includes Three Blue Ducks and Tetsuya’s.
But opening a restaurant to help volunteer-run surf clubs pay for overheads such as vehicles and inflatable craft isn’t as easy as it sounds. Upgrading clubs to meet restaurant code and requirements can be a costly business, and the 1936 North Wollongong SLSC had $10 million pumped into it, with a generous chunk of that redevelopment cost tipped in by Wollongong City Council.
“You need a council that’ll invest the money,” says Doug Fraser, who opened The Basin Dining Room two years ago in Mona Vale SLSC, where he won the tender to operate a restaurant at the club after it underwent a $10 million upgrade.
The combination of sea and sand vistas with a serious food program has proved a success at The Basin, which recently snared Dan Bell, former head chef at the hatted waterfront restaurant Berowra Waters Inn.
“Surf clubs in NSW aren’t propped up by pokies like they are in Queensland,” Fraser says. While most food venues on Sydney’s northern beaches are cafe-only, Avalon SLSC is an exception to that model, with the recent opening of Lovat on the Beach, which features a restaurant as well as a ground floor cafe.
Elouera SLSC was early to the restaurant trend, when Summer Salt restaurant opened there in 2005. “The rent we pay helps run the club run the nippers program, and other club [expenses],” says a spokesman for Sydney Restaurant Group, which acquired Summer Salt late last year and has just refurbished the restaurant.
“There are four surf clubs near us in Cronulla – I think we are the only one with a restaurant,” the spokesman adds.
La Brooy stresses it’s important to maintain local identity as an incoming operator. “Surf clubs are a foundation of the community,” the chef says, making sure an accessible bar was part of the new mix at The Boathouse North Wollongong. “After they’d pulled the flags in, a group of surf lifesavers were in here having cheeseburgers and beers. You can’t get any more Australian than that.”
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Scott Bolles writes the weekly Short Black column in Good Food.
