I think the first cookbook, BLD, was around in 2000, but that book was all about simple home cooking; I wanted everyone to be able to cook that sort of food. It was accessible to everyone, because there are a lot of restaurant books that are difficult. And I think, especially nowadays with the other books, people are time poor, so you want to make it accessible and easy for them, and that sort of was my goal for cookbooks.
Products are a big part of the business. We’ve got olive oil and spices and vinegars and wine and things like that and they’re not products where we go out and say, “Hey we like your olive oil, put our label on it”. We go to the people who have their olive oil and we say, “We love your oil, your olives”, we work with them, and then I blend all my own products. I blend all my own spice mixes and wine. It’s good fun.
I think that restaurants are pretty hard to make money, especially in this climate, and I think from the day I had my first restaurant, Salt, my book came out, and then I was doing different little products and things like that. So having all those spin-offs are great things for the brand; it helps fill the brand, it helps create revenue, you know, it’s an important part of my business. But some restaurants or chefs don’t see it that way, but to me, it’s utter common sense.
Well, we don’t open restaurants just for the sake of opening restaurants. I’ll only open a restaurant if we have the right staff: so if I have a chef ready for it, and a waiter or a manager to run the front of house. So if you go into one of my restaurants, all of the head chefs have been with me for a minimum of eight years. So they’ll come to a stage where they’ll knock off and do their own thing, or work with someone else. So I make them a part of my structure and make sure that they’ve got a little bit of ownership, not just in the food but in the business as well, in having part of the business as well.
Oh, it depends on the person and how long they’ve been with us and things like that, so it varies. But I like to give them opportunities where they can grow, so if you start off with 1%, in 10 years they might have 10%, hypothetically.
No, it wasn’t. You know I sold 50% of the Salt brand because of my Sydney restaurant in 2005, my current partner in Asia, a Japanese guy. We started Salt in Tokyo in about 2006, thankfully that’s going really well. Our plan is to expand through Asia, and now we’ve got two in Singapore and hope to do – well, we’re doing Salt Grill in Jakarta this year, we may do a little Salt tapas there next year, we’re doing a Salt Grill in Bali. Look, the overheads in Asia are a lot less than they are in Australia.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
