New building hits the spot for old favourite
SIXTEEN years ago former champion tennis player Martina Navratilova bounced into town and, after a meal at a Broadbeach restaurant, rated the sushi she was served as second to none.
Should she revisit in the next two to three years to again savour that sushi, she’s likely to find things have changed on the restaurant’s Gold Coast Highway site.
Donto Sapporo, which has been trading for 28 years, is heading inland, albeit temporarily.
The go-getting Japanese lady who built Donto Sapporo’s home and operates the restaurant plans to demolish the building, along with an adjoining one that houses Persian restaurant Rumi.
The land will become home to an apartment building, The Spot.
The eight-level BDAdesigned building, with a frontage to Chelsea Ave, will have 56 apartments, with a long glass-fronted space at its base for Donto Sapporo.
The project appears to have been food for thought for some time for 51-year-old Sapporoborn Michiyo Tanabe.
She’s one of a flood of Japanese who developed an enormous yen for the Gold Coast in the late 80s and spent a lot of yen in the city when they arrived.
Many of the bigger players went home with their tails between their legs when Japan’s economic bubble burst but not Michiyo.
She and her family have spent millions of dollars on property, including the Donto Sapporo one, since they set up
company Shintaku Australia in 1988.
In 1990 another entity, Mortalodge, was registered and on company records is described as being “engaged in non-classifiable establishments”.
One of Shintaku’s early buys was an office building in Brisbane’s Margaret St which cost $9.15 million and was sold five years later for $7.25 million. Five years ago it traded at $33 million.
In 1995 the Tanabe family went rural, buying the creekfront Aussie Country tourist park at Canungra and operating it for 15 years before closing the business and selling in 2013.
There’s a Tanabe foothold, via Mortalodge, in the heart of Surfers Paradise in the form of three adjoining highway-front commercial properties bought for a tad over $4 million in 1991-93.
The site on which Michiyo plans The Spot is 2075 sqm.
When she puts on her developer hat her new building is to include one novelty – an animal play area on the seventh floor, where there’s also to be a vege garden, yoga area and gymnasium.
Donto Sapporo, while construction is under way, will be moving to the Sorrento Shopping Village to offer its cuisine, which is influenced by that of Hokkaido in southern Japan.
Meanwhile, hardworking restaurateur Michiyo hasn’t exactly been slumming it during her time on the Gold Coast.
In 2004 she sold a house fronting the Broadwater at Runaway Bay to Adco Constructions chief Judith Brinsmead for $2.5 million.
Six years ago she paid nearly $3 million for a hilltop mansion at Worongary, perhaps deciding it was just “the spot” at which to entertain. It had been marketed as once hosting a sitdown dinner for 100 people.