IMPORTED IRISH EYES KEEP SMILING
Amid the Covid carnage, chef Liam Tomlin is expanding and thriving
ý Chef-restaurateur Liam Tomlin had five restaurants in Cape Town and Franschhoek before Covid slammed into SA a year ago. Today he has seven.
It’s an unexpected trajectory precisely because the hospitality sector was perhaps the hardest hit of all. By some estimates, as many as 3,000 restaurants closed in the past year, including top spots like The Kitchen in Woodstock.
But Tomlin has showed no sign of slowing down. Instead, he has expanded the business, and last December he launched Local at Heritage Square, a “market eatery platform” in the Cape Town CBD.
Other Tomlin ventures in Heritage Square include a Mediterranean restaurant, Mazza (a tribute to Beirut, where Tomlin originally planned to open the restaurant until Covid struck), and a charcuterie bar called La Cantina. He plans to open a Japanese-style yakitori bar soon.
It’s a location that’s hard to beat, lying as it does in the block formed by Buitengragt, Shortmarket, Bree and Hout streets. The building itself dates to the 1750s, and Tomlin said he couldn’t resist the challenge of returning it close to its original form.
Tomlin, though born in Dublin, where he began his career as a chef at 14, has become something of an institution in Cape Town. Before arriving in SA in 2004, he worked in some of Europe’s finest kitchens, then moved to Australia in 1991, where he and his wife, Jan, ran one of the country’s top restaurants, Banc.
Once in SA he built a consultancy company, Beyond Food, and opened the Chefs Warehouse & Cookery School in 2010. Now he has overhauled the Chefs Warehouse & Canteen restaurant and restyled it as a tapas bar under the name Chefs Warehouse Wine Bar & Pinchos. The Chefs Warehouse (CW) brand is hard to miss: the others are CW Beau Constantia, CW at Maison in Franschhoek and CW Tintswalo on Chapman’s Peak Drive. The seventh Tomlin eatery is Thali, an Indian restaurant off Kloof Street.
As for Local, Tomlin and his business partner Victoria Engelhorn (they started Brugarol in Barcelona together) wanted to create a marketplace where food businesses could rent space cheaply to launch themselves. But many were hesitant, given the pandemic, so, Tomlin says, “we ended up taking 85% of [the space] ourselves”.
During the lockdown, Tomlin was approached by the owners of the boutique hotel Tintswalo to bring the brand there. “It’s a no-brainer — it has one of the most amazing dining rooms,” he says. “I wasn’t planning on opening any of this, but opportunities came during Covid.”
There aren’t many in his industry who can say the pandemic actually helped them. But Tomlin’s group used the lockdown to tighten up in areas where it had perhaps become a bit slack, and consider what products or procedures it needed to improve upon.
As a result, Tomlin says the business is doing “all right” despite the Covid crunch. It has had great support from communities close to the restaurants, and it helps that prices range from the bottom to the top. “People still feel like a night out in a grown-up space and probably don’t want to drop R2,000 to
R3,000, where they might have done that pre-Covid. But they’re willing to spend R600 to R700,” he says.
It’s the kind of support that Tomlin is pleased to have — in a city that has traditionally marketed itself to foreign tourists.
“I’m in business because of locals,” he says. “We’ve always geared ourselves for locals, we’ve never been a tourist-driven business.”
Supporting local
But what is it that enabled Tomlin to stay afloat over the past year, when so many others have hit the wall?
He says that when the country first went into lockdown last March, his restaurants were coming off a great season and were in a solid position, which gave them a cushion. At the time, he was a few months away from opening restaurants in
Hamburg, Germany, and in
Fourways, Joburg — but neither went ahead, because of Covid.
“The funds we were going to put into that went into our other ventures,” he says.
And, as with most restaurants, the attitude of landlords was key. Tomlin says his landlords were “fantastic, and still are”. The property owners looked at the business’s record, and knew its operations made for reliable tenants. “So [they] helped us, and that was huge.”
Tomlin says many of SA’s restaurants that had to close did so not because they were bad operators, but because of narrowminded landlords.
It will still be many months before the industry emerges from the stultifying effect of the pandemic (SA’s dilly-dallying over vaccines hasn’t helped to reassure tourists). Once it does, how will restaurants be different?
Tomlin believes that the industry will focus more on local patrons, and on buying local products.
“We have a rule in our company that we don’t buy crockery from overseas, we don’t buy furniture from overseas; we buy and support local artists and support local as much as possible. I’d say 90% of our business is geared towards local, and I think the only way we will rebuild the hospitality and tourism industry is if we promote each other.”
It’s evident that Tomlin feels at home in Cape Town, despite being a relative newcomer. He says he feels there is still plenty of opportunity in SA today. “I find Australia a bit overruled and overgoverned,” he says.
Nonetheless, Tomlin would still like to start more restaurants overseas. He singles out three cities: Amsterdam, where he lived for three years, Dublin and New York. But, he says, “we’ll look at everything”.
Feisty and passionate, it’s clear that Tomlin likes a challenge and he is also perhaps more entrepreneurial minded than many chefs. “I’d much rather give our staff an opportunity, than that they have to go work for someone else.”
The larger companies, he says, are likely to survive financially — but that’s not necessarily true for smaller businesses. “It’s the small family business, the cheesemonger, the baker [that goes to the wall],” he says.
This philosophy of scale has served him well during the pandemic as so many of his peers have crashed around him. And it’s a philosophy that offers food for thought for all involved in SA’s fragile hospitality industry.