Market Lane: Can you tell us a bit about your backgrounds in food and hospitality?
Simon: I’ve been in hospitality for about 25 years – after pubs, nightclubs, cocktail bars and all sorts of things, I started focusing more on wine bars and restaurant venues with a strong wine orientation. I’ve always been interested in wine. My parents had a fully stocked wine cellar, and we used to buy wine from vineyards and wineries, so I grew up tasting it. I decided to focus specifically on wine and went to the UK to study through the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. I worked in wine bars there and managed one, which is where I met Almay. She was a sous chef there.
It was around the GFC, visas got harder, and we couldn’t figure out how to stay in the UK any longer, so we came back to Australia. We worked in Melbourne at City Wine Shop initially, Almay in the kitchen and me on the floor. After that, we went to South Africa for six months while we were waiting on a visa for Almay, and we worked in a couple of venues there too. When we came back to Australia, I took a role as wine bar manager and head sommelier in Albert Park, then we opened Neighbourhood Wine about 13 or 14 years ago. After that came Old Palm, Bahama, and everything that followed. A lot of lessons were learned along the way, plenty of them the hard way. Now when someone says, why don’t you do it this way, I can usually tell you exactly why – because we’ve tried it every other way and it didn’t work.
Almay: My background is a bit different. I’m South African. My family is still back in South Africa on a farm growing table grapes. We export mainly to the Netherlands and China. The area that I’m from is about an hour and a half from Cape Town, and at some point, someone figured out table grapes grow really well there, so now everybody does it. Around us, however, a lot of people grow wine grapes. We’re on the edge of the biggest wine growing region in the Western Cape. My father studied viticulture and viniculture because that was basically the thing you could do.
After school I went to chef school first. Very classical, very French, it was intense, based on the Culinary Institute of America syllabus. When I finished, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it long term. My parents encouraged me to go to university and get a proper job, so I kept cooking for money while I studied at the University of Cape Town. I studied journalism, earned a degree in French, Greek and Roman history. If I could, I’d probably be a food historian, but there are about two jobs going in that field. The history of how we’ve eaten, why people eat the way they do, and how that changes, that’s what interests me. My current obsession is how Ozempic is about to change how we eat, in the same way TV dinners shifted things in the 70s.
I worked in a wine shop while I was at university, so I learned a lot about South African wine. After uni I decided I did want to be a chef. I had a mentor, a fantastic chef I worked for, and he had a big influence on how I cook. I ended up in the UK on a working holiday visa, like a lot of South Africans. I decided I didn’t want to work in fine dining kitchens because of the culture, so I ended up in wine bars, famously relaxed, and full of Australians. That’s where I met Simon. Then I came back here, and Simon has already told you the rest.
Now we’ve got two small kids. But I’m also responsible for the direction of the food across the venues and what we’d do if we open more places. I have a fancy title, but I forget it. Food director, something like that. Broadly, I make sure the kitchens run, but we have a group head chef and chefs who run each venue. Every now and then I step back into the kitchen, especially when we’re building a strong team, like at Old Palm Liquor. I’ll run the pass and help train and shadow chefs, but I’m not cooking as much anymore. It’s been 25 years; it’s the only job I’ve ever done. I’ve never worked in an office. Now it’s more management, planning and thinking. And the kids, the kids are important.
Was opening your own venue always part of your dreams, or did that come later?
Almay: Yes, it was. My plan was to have my own restaurant by the time I was 30, and I think we kind of nailed it. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, though. I wanted to open a really tiny place, like Brico or Suze, but Simon is a big ideas guy. Eventually you work so hard for so long that you sit down and think, I don’t know how much longer I can physically do this. I was working in the kitchen when I fell pregnant, and I worked right up until the night I gave birth. That was a real watershed moment. There are women who can balance the two, but it didn’t work for me. I didn’t have the kind of baby who was happy with me going to work at night.
I did keep doing it for years. There were babies sleeping in plastic tubs in the kitchen. We have photos of babies sitting in stockpots… not on a stove! When we opened Old Palm, we were living in what is now Bahama, it used to be a nursery, and there was a house above it. We had May in a cot next door with the baby monitor. I’d put her down, the monitor would sit on the pass, and I’d be working in the kitchen while she slept next door. Eventually it pulls you in too many directions. The chefs are annoyed because you’re distracted, the babies are upset because you’re gone, and it starts to feel impossible. I realised I couldn’t do it. It made me think hard about how I had to change my career. It was also timely because the business got a lot bigger. We needed to become more managerial. You have to resist the urge to fix everything yourself, like a misaligned table or something that needs cleaning. You have to ask someone to do it so they understand what the problem is and know what to do to fix it next time.
