Why the best restaurants are always more than just the food
It's an entire theatrical production
MY LOVE of food began young. Four Italian grandparents – and their shared propensity for child labour – meant an early and inevitable education in food and its importance. From the age of three I would stand, on a chair, next to my Sicilian nonna Maria in her little kitchen, and help make pizza, sugo and ravioli.
My nonna Mary was fierce in every sense. She loved fiercely, worked fiercely, and wasn’t afraid to tell you exactly what she thought. A powerhouse. When her father was interned in Ingham, Queensland during World War II, she took over the running of his café, making veal cotoletta and ravioli from scratch for American soldiers.
To have her teach me was a lucky start. To have an immediate family so obsessed with food was the perfect continuation. I remember being four, seven, 10, in Europe with my family, eating escargot in France, pasta alle vongole in Italy and paella in Madrid.
Food always brought us together, no matter the dynamic. But it wasn’t just the food I loved. It was the performance. The theatre of the restaurant. High end, low end, it didn’t matter. I loved the ritual. You sit, the napkin is placed, the water glass is filled, menus are studied, perhaps a cocktail is ordered. The excitement, the consistency, the variation.
Restaurant service itself has always been a kind of choreography. It evolved from ancient roadside inns and taverns to formal 18th-century French dining, shifting from communal, buffet-style meals to individual, waiter-served dishes. The progression from service à la française, where all dishes arrived at once, to service à la russe, where courses are served sequentially, and on to the precision of guéridon trolley service, only sharpened this sense of performance.
As soon as I turned 18, I wanted to see behind the curtain. To understand the other side. And I can tell you, if you love the theatre of a restaurant before working in hospitality, you appreciate it even more afterwards.
I wound up managing big, old pubs, iconic Sydney watering holes. One particularly rough one was where I cut my teeth. What a learning curve! I even did a stint as sous chef in the kitchen.
We witnessed a lot in that institution. It was a very different time. Feuding locals once had a brawl inside the pub, one wielding an axe, the other a tray of schooner glasses. Both lived, but there was a great deal of blood loss. We closed the pub for a few hours, then reopened it, blood-stained carpets and all.
You learn quickly that it is almost always about delivery. One particularly painful customer insisted her bottled beer be kept not in the fridge but on ice, which she claimed made it colder. Her instructions were to place a bottle in ice half an hour before her daily 4pm arrival, upon which we were to serve her promptly.
Not once did I put this woman’s bottle on ice. Sometimes I would take it from the fridge, pass it briefly through the ice well, and hand it over with a smile.
“Here’s your beer, it’s been on ice for half an hour.”
“Thank you,” she’d say. “I know. I can tell.”
Delivery. That’s what counts.
The theatre of the pub is more forgiving than that of a restaurant. Interactions are shorter, less can go wrong, and people are generally happier. The dynamics of a restaurant are far more fragile. Longer exchanges, higher expectations, more to lose.
From the highest-end restaurants to those where you’d rather not see the kitchen, it is all about delivery and theatre. When I was studying in London in my twenties and my family came to visit, I took the opportunity to insist on dinner at The Fat Duck by Heston Blumenthal. A year on the waitlist, and one very reluctant father later, we made it in.
We took a train two hours out of London, then a cab to a tiny, unassuming cottage where the culinary team was doing unimaginable things with food.
The interiors were quiet, restrained. There was nothing loud or ostentatious about it – a stark contrast to the per-person charge I knew was coming. This felt intentional, the space acting almost as a palate cleanser. It was not about the room. It was about the performance that was about to unfold.
Each waiter delivered a different course, 15 in total, each presented with precision and theatre. The “Mad Hatter’s Tea Party” arrived as a gold fob watch in a velvet-lined box, dissolving into broth, revealing a garden at the bottom of the teacup. The entire experience was so otherworldly it felt like we were ingesting something entirely new.
We ate the famous ‘Sound of the Sea’ dish while listening to ocean waves through antiquated Apple headphones hidden in a conch shell. Blumenthal, a pioneer in exploring the interplay of the senses, used sound to heighten taste, deepening the experience of the dish.
My mother, entranced, exclaimed, rather loudly due to the headphones, “How wonderful!” I was a mortified 14-year-old.
The meal went on for hours. By the end, we were in awe. We had eaten in a way we could never have imagined. Even my father, sceptical at the start and financially shaken by the end, admitted it was one of the greatest experiences of his life.
And yes, this may be the Opera House of dining experiences. But I find equal value in the humbler ones. A börek eaten in a gutter in Serbia as a young backpacker, trying to line one’s stomach before another day of drinking at a festival. I will never forget the old man who served me. He always made me remove my sunglasses so I could look him in the eye. A simple act of respect.
The taste of that plain cheese börek, the pastry impossibly light and crisp. I could have been in a palace. Instead, I was in a gutter, having ‘showered’ in a café sink. Heaven. There is nothing like the bond of hospitality or the appreciation of your server. In the words of Anthony Bourdain, “If you’re a cheap tipper or rude to your server, you are dead to me”. Thank your server. Order everything, unless you’re truly allergic. Let go of self-imposed constraints. Enjoy the theatre. Because there is nothing greater than good food, shared with good people.
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