Hot Takes and Insightful Contemplations From Members of Sydney's Hospitality Scene on the Year That's Been

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It has been a colossal year for Australia's food businesses. It hasn't just been a rollercoaster, it's been the whole damn amusement park. Lockdowns, pivots, re-openings, new openings, saddening closures, a staffing shortage, and the collective social life that we are now reclaiming en masse (just try getting a booking at Hubert this side of February 2022). But nature is healing.

As the industry has returned to (relative) normalcy, it has experienced its share of remarkable success stories, challenges and a good hit of pathos. So when we brought together a few of Sydneys hospitality mainstays in one room (or more specifically, the bar at Tio's) for the latest instalment of our live panel show, Hot Takes & Takeaways presented by our partner Uber Eats, we knew there'd be a lot to talk about.

The episode streamed live on our Facebook page earlier this month, with Sydney comedy gem Gen Fricker hosting a panel made up of Jeremy Blackmore (Tio's and Cantina Ok!) and Issac Martin (@issac_eatsalot) and Kobi Morris (Paramount Coffee Project and Reuben Hills). It was entertaining, honest and thought-provoking (a particularly interesting line of conversation involved contemplating the impact that living in bubbles has had on young people in particular — will they ever make it to a club?!).

From the pressures of reopening to the joys of welcoming customers through the doors, scroll to watch the highlights and hot takes from this excellent group of people who represent thousands from the industry who add so much to our lives and leisure time.

WARM AND FUZZY FEELINGS AROUND RETURN TO SERVICE

"The second break was a bit more stressful, I would say," says Blackmore of the lengthy June-starting lockdown that everyone had hoped would be avoided.

"You knew what was coming," he explains, "and didn't feel as fun and weird as the first. There was something kind of strange about the first one but this second one it was just a bit of a ball-drainer."

Ball-drainers aside, all three guests waxed passionate about the reopening of the city and getting their businesses back on track and having actual humans dining and drinking in.

"It's been nice to get people back in," says Blackmore. "And it's just nice to go out! And have dinner and not eat your own food and not drink beers out of your fridge" — a sentiment shared by so many of us, burnt out by home cooking and fridge beers for so many months.

The connection to customers was a joy that Kobi Morris almost forgot about due to the pressures of reopening. "I remember being really stressed about coming back into service for about a week leading up to this most recent reopening. Especially because we were supposed to be checking vaccines... I haven't had anyone yell at me yet, and that's great!"

Morris continues, "Everyone's been really happy to be out. I was expecting it to be really stressful — and it has been stressful — but it's also been enjoyable. I forgot how nice it was to have customers in the cafe."

In this clip, Kobi Morris talks about the most difficult part of lockdown for her and many others in the industry, which was the need to stand down staff.

We've all lived through a shared experience that's been varying degrees of traumatising, and the result of this in the broader community as well as in the hospitality scene specifically has been an outpouring of mutual support and connectedness.

"The community's been really strong," Blackmore said. "And you can see it at places that had a really good team and fostered a really good family connection between everybody, that's kind of expanded to take in other places around it as well."

The flip side of the more intense connection to local communities that formed during life in 5-kilometre bubbles is a greater sense of segregation between parts of Sydney, as Issac Martin — who lives in western Sydney — points out. Watch him elaborate below.

LOCKDOWN CAUSED GREATER DIVISION BETWEEN SYDNEY'S WEST AND EAST

There was a rumbling of tension throughout lockdown that pulled into focus the social and geographic division between west and east Sydney. While Bronte Beach and others continued to be crowded with mask-free faces (something this editor observed on numerous occasions), western Sydney was subject to harsher restrictions and more intensive policing.

But, naturally, there are more complexities, as well as positives to come out of this.

As Martin explains in the clip above, "the west and the east was very divided on more than just one front. And I think, on a micro level, it probably reinstated [existing perceptions of division]."

It is something that expands beyond west versus east; lockdown also resulted in a hyperlocal culture that drills down to a single-suburb level.

"All of a sudden now, for four months you've been in this 'support local' mindset that, no longer, are you like: I might go across the bridge and I don't have to go to Bondi to go out", Martin says. "And there's still reasons to go other places, but it's almost [as though] every community now is self-sufficient."

So the question is: is that a good thing?

"Not in terms of that segregation because now it's almost a further divide [between the two sides of Sydney] than what was already there," Martin suggests. "I think it will break down in time... But, short-term, if you're freshly 18, [you've missed out on] that rite of passage is to go out in the city or to a well-known night club. Now you might have spent that first six months [as an 18 year old] at your local pub! And that becomes habit, and habit becomes behaviour."

"EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLDS ARE NICE AND WE ARE THE DICKHEADS"

The conversation turned to those members of society who reached legal drinking age during lockdown and can now be released into the wild.

In a panel populated with millennials, the question was whether the new generation of young people will be better behaved. Jeremy Blackmore postulates that they're just a nicer generation. And if wholesome TikTok groundswells, the mass movement away from the toxic empathy-graveyard that is Twitter, Greta Thunberg and benevolent BTS fandom are anything to go by, the answer is: probably?!?

Or it could simply be that everyone's got a camera-phone and social media, ready to propel you into viral memedom or the shame files of Brown Cardigan's pages at any moment.

As Martin points out, back in the day "you could be a dickhead and it wasn't going to be on the internet in ten seconds."

WHAT COMES NEXT

The industry is back, baby! So, where to next?

Issac Martin, a true burger aficionado, is ready to sample the goods at Sydney's first Wahlburgers (yes, that's the fast food chain masterminded by showbiz bros Mark and Donnie Wahlberg who potentially created the business solely based off the strength of the wordplay). It's bound to open its first Australian residence in Circular Quay any day now.

And, at the time of recording the live stream, Jeremy Blackmore was excited about imminent dining experiences at newly minted restaurants Paski and Ursula's.

Now really is the best time of year in Sydney to go out, eat, drink and party. So make reservations, be spontaneous and get exploring — both in your local area and beyond.

You can watch the full episode of Hot Takes & Takeaways here or catch the first episode captured in the midst of lockdown (and starring Julian Cincotta of Butter and Cuong Nguyen of Hello Auntie) here. If you'd like to learn more about what restaurants are doing to survive — and thrive — in the next phase of this unprecedented moment in time, check out Uber Eats' Enterprise Hub.