‘Fizzing & frothing’
Dressed in Vivienne Westwood and surviving on smoothies, Sean Connolly is using managed isolation to prepare for his restaurant opening. By Josephine Franks.
Sean Connolly has been up since 5am curating Spotify playlists for his new restaurant. The sunrise wake-up is part of his isolation detox. He’s into the second week of his stay at the Novotel by Auckland Airport, and halfway through his suitcase of food.
No quarantine-issue hash browns or foil-wrapped bangers and mash. Instead, he’s whizzing up spirulina smoothies in the blender he brought over from Sydney, working his way through his stock of dehydrated food and broths and getting daily deliveries of fruit and vegetables.
He needs to hit the ground running when he finishes his 14 days and moves straight from one hotel to the next: QT Auckland, the newest opening on the Viaduct and home to Esther, Connolly’s restaurant.
He’s reluctant to divulge the restaurant’s soundtrack – ‘‘people will think it’s a disco’’ – but breakfast is served with lo-fi trip-hop and dinner with a side of chilled drum and bass. He’s still working on lunch.
Getting the music right is about amping up the theatricality. ‘‘Theatre for me is more important than the food.’’
Esther will be ‘‘themed but not over-themed’’, taking in the breadth of the Mediterranean: tiptoeing from Morocco to Andalusia, island-hopping Greece and hopscotching from Corsica to Sicily. And three ingredients are central to everything: salt, lemon and olive oil. ‘‘Everything’s got to taste like the Mediterranean,’’ he says, which means 17 grams of rock salt to every litre of pasta water.
Esther is named after Connolly’s grandma. He wanted to give New Zealand something personal, he says, a version of himself that ‘‘Auckland has never seen before’’.
Bringing a taste of the Mediterranean to the Viaduct has become even more important with Covid-19 curtailing travel plans for the foreseeable; it’s about escapism.
The variety of food in the Med will also give Connolly a chance to express himself.
When he left his two Sky City restaurants in December, he felt he couldn’t do anything more for them. The Grill and Gusto at the Grand both have very clearly carved niches in steak and Italian cuisine – ‘‘once you’ve done that there’s nowhere else to go’’.
He had been talking to QT on and off for three or four years, and the opportunity to take on Esther came at the same time his seven-year itch needed scratching.
Setting it up through lockdown and across a closed border hasn’t been easy, although it’s not the first time Connolly has orchestrated a distance opening. Between smoothies and resistance-band workouts, his days in managed isolation are a stream of video calls – about staffing, crockery, pizza dough.
The Esther menu was developed with Tony Gibson in Australia and handed over to executive chef James Laird in Auckland, passing between the ‘‘brotherhood’’ of chefs.
For a long time, Connolly didn’t think he’d be able to make it over for the opening. ‘‘I was really worried that my new baby wouldn’t be looked after.’’
Cameras were installed in the kitchen so he could watch from afar, and the plan was for video seminars, daily phone calls and meticulous photographing of dishes.
A last-minute reprieve came in the form of a border exemption and Connolly will spend five weeks nurturing Esther into life before flying back to his family in Sydney.
Hats will be his thing at Esther, he’s decided, specifically the Vivienne Westwood design made famous by Pharrell Williams. He’s brought over a small collection, which he models from his hotel room.
He’s ‘‘fizzing and frothing’’ to get into the kitchen, but there have been some big hurdles of nerves to overcome. When he closed The Morrison, his Sydney restaurant, for lockdown, he watched the staff cleaning down not knowing when they would see each other again.
‘‘I cried that day because I’d never seen Sydney so quiet.’’
He still gets upset thinking about it, but he’s been buoyed by how people have embraced eating out since restrictions lifted. Go to Byron Bay and it’s like Christmas every day, he says. And if there’s anywhere he feels confident opening, it’s New Zealand – the envy of the world for how it’s handled Covid, he reckons.
Like Connolly’s other restaurants, Esther will be about doing simple food brilliantly: no foams, no frills, and definitely no flower garnishes.
He puts his trust in his chefs: ‘‘I build them the best kitchens in the world, get them the best ingredients in the world and then there’s nowhere to hide.’’