The esteemed Palomar restaurant is one of three exciting venues to open at the former home of the Grand Pacific Blue Room in Paddington when it relaunches as a hotel later this year.
Paddington’s Olympia Theatre has a rich creative history stretching back to 1911. Now, the landmark Oxford Street building will be reborn as a hotel with three new venues from a fashionable London hospitality studio.
The Palomar restaurant, which has held an esteemed Michelin Bib Gourmand award since it opened in Soho in 2014, will bring its brand to Sydney, alongside its transplanted award-winning cocktail and wine bar sibling, The Mulwray. Coffee and bakery concept Jacob the Angel will also join the party.
The venues are part of Studio Paskin hospitality group, which includes Michelin-starred Evelyn’s Table in its London portfolio. The studio will strut its new Sydney venues inside the 25hours Hotel The Olympia, which is on track to open in the former Olympia Theatre building in late July or August.
The meticulous restoration and redevelopment of the hotel’s heritage-listed Oxford Street site has been plagued by delays.
One of Sydney’s earliest suburban cinemas, what was originally known as West’s Olympia Theatre, became the Odeon in the 1950s, then The Olympia again as a Greek movie house in the 1960s. A number of changes of name and usage followed, but many Sydneysiders remember it best for the reign as zeitgeist bar-restaurant the Grand Pacific Blue Room.
General manager of the forthcoming 25hours hotel Jeremy Colahan said The Palomar, The Mulwray and Jacob the Angel will all be located on the hotel’s ground floor.
“There’s a cool atrium at the back,” he said. Colahan, who is in Europe at present meeting the Studio Paskin team, described the venues as a coup for Sydney.
Studio Paskin’s founders, brother and sister team Layo and Zoe Paskin, charted an unusual path to restaurants. Layo Paskin started as a DJ, releasing four albums before branching out to open London nightclub The End with his sibling in the mid-1990s.
Eyeing a gap in the London market for a restaurant influenced by the cuisines of the Levant, southern Spain and North Africa, The Palomar proved a quick success, named by Tatler magazine as restaurant of the year.
Colahan said the Sydney version would mirror the seasonal menu of the London original, where guests tuck into braised lamb belly with anchovy and rosemary sauce, seabass crudo with blood orange, and ice-cream sandwiches filled with baklava and pistachio.
“The [Palomar] chefs are coming out, the team is coming out, they’ll be hand-picking some of the best talent available for the opening,” Colahan said.
The Mulwray – which takes its name from Faye Dunaway’s character, Evelyn Mulwray, in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown – will mix a sprawling wine list with a cocktail line-up.
Colahan said the 109 rooms will also have Sydney’s latest fashionable accessory: a rooftop venue. With sweeping views over Paddington, Monica will be an all-day venue looking at modern Sydney “through a nostalgic 1960s Hollywood filter”.
The rooftop venue won’t require any London input; Colahan said the hotel will take charge of the rooftop space, infusing it with some Santa Monica vibes.
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