Top chef feared losing his home
hardest by the lockdown enabled Bayly to continue paying his staff, despite the restaurant not making any money for more than a month.
However, other outgoings, such as rent and suppliers’ fees, were quickly adding up.
A break from the frenetic atmosphere of restaurant kitchens was an opportunity for Bayly to take a good look at his budgets and reconsider what was really ‘‘essential’’ to the business.
He realised he could cut costs by asking staff to take over tasks he had previously paid contractors to do – like cleaning windows, doing laundry and pruning plants.
‘‘We have to be super clever. The restaurant could be classed as a bad investment. The returns are not huge. It’s really a lifestyle. It’s a passion,’’ Bayly says.
Opening a restaurant involves taking a huge leap of faith – and risks – at the best of times, but doing so during a global pandemic is particularly daunting, even for someone with Bayly’s profile and experience.
The former judge of the New Zealand version of the popular home-cooking reality TV show My Kitchen Rules sold his shares in the multi-award winning Auckland restaurants Baduzzi and The Grove 18 months ago to invest his time and money in Ahi, which will specialise in modern New Zealand cuisine.
For the past year, he’s also been travelling the country to find inspiration for Ahi’s menu. The Three series A New Zealand Food Story chronicles his trip from an organic chicken farm in Hawke’s Bay to diving for fresh pa¯ ua in Fiordland.
Every few months, he usually heads down to Arrowtown to help write menus for his Aosta, Fan Tan and the Blue Door restaurants, but Ahi will be his main focus in the lead-up to its opening on September 1.
The immediate future will no doubt be challenging for him, his colleagues and competitors in the industry.
Bayly says restaurants will have to get creative if they want to stay in business. The adage among restaurateurs that ‘‘you need to reinvent yourself every five years’’ will certainly ring true but, for many, this ‘‘reset’’ will come earlier than expected.
That’s not necessarily bad news for a sector that has a reputation for being somewhat cut-throat and unforgiving, though.
Bayly reckons now is the time for Kiwi hospitality to really come into its own. Although New Zealand has no shortage of talented chefs, we can do better when it comes to service, he says.
‘‘You’re selling an experience. You’re not selling a commodity. We’re selling a great time, basically.’’
Little things like staff taking time to get to know regular customers, greeting them by name and remembering their usual order, can make a big difference, but the change needs to start at the top.
Bayly aims to lead by example. He considers his staff ‘‘partners’’. ‘‘Business in hospitality should be [an] open book and [about] getting your staff to buy in,’’ he says.
Hospitality can be a rewarding and lucrative career, but Bayly says that working in a restaurant is often viewed as ‘‘a job you have at uni or something’’.
This isn’t the case overseas, he says. For example, in France, where Bayly worked for three years, ‘‘the restaurant manager was like the mayor of the town, everyone knew him’’.
He hopes Kiwis’ perceptions about working in hospitality will change post-Covid.
Although in the past there’s been a shortage of qualified hospitality workers, now, as the industry sheds jobs, there’s probably an oversupply.
Like many chefs and owners, Bayly has relied on migrant workers to fill the hospitality skill gap during the past decade. ‘‘A big portion of our teams don’t come from New Zealand. I’ve applied for a lot of visas for a lot of people because we could not find staff for the life of me,’’ he says.
Bayly hopes other hospitality employers will continue to support their migrant staff as more layoffs loom. After all, he says, New Zealand is like a ‘‘mini New York’’ – our multiculturalism is our best culinary asset.
‘‘All these different cultures have landed here in our country over the last 200 years. Everyone brings their own flavour.’’
It’s about time Kiwis started taking pride in our culinary culture, says Bayly, and he hopes opening Ahi, which will serve pa¯ ua cooked in a ha¯ ngi among other delicacies, will help encourage that.
‘‘We’re not a pies and mushy pea place. [It’s] time to stop fighting with Aussie over the pavlova.’’
A New Zealand Food Story, Saturday at 5.30pm on Three