Ray Reilly snaps up the West Village Hotel
The Goodtime Hospitality Group has sold the West Village Hotel, located in Sydney’s Petersham and formerly known as the White Cockatoo, to inner west publican Ray Reilly for $6.5 million.
The Goodtime Hospitality crew Locky Paech and James Bodel acquired the White Cockatoo in 2014 and rebranded it as the West Village Hotel in late 2015.
But they put the pub on the market with their changing circumstances, not least of all Paech and his wife expecting a child.
The acquisition is all part of Reilly’s strategy.
He consolidated his Henson Hotel in 2016, acquired Newtown’s Sydney Park hotel opposite St Peters train station and divested his Trinity Bar.
As he put it, the acquisition of the West Village Hotel completes his “golden triangle”.
“It’s a bit daunting, but my team is ready for it,” Mr Reilly told PubTIC. “It all stacks up – having three of them in proximity helps running them.
“We know the area, we’re comfortable with the area. We have some fairly strong ideas for the venue, but we won’t know a huge amount until we get in there.
“A lot of the hard work was done, we’ll just tweak it to our style, nothing major. Seem to me the pub internally is going to stay the same. Our idea is to do some add-ons – that means going out the back somehow, so we’ll just sus it out.”
He says he isn’t wild about the name but he’s not giving too much away about what changes he has planned apart from talking about “add-ons”.
“I think we’ll revert back. White Cockatoo is a great name and everyone knows that name, especially the clientele of the inner west,” he told PubTIC.
“We love the pub and looked at it before they bought it, but the time wasn’t right and I still had the Trinity. Now the Sydney Park is well on its way and the Henson is very much established.
“I can’t be too specific, but there’s gaps in the market, put it that way. It will be family-orientated, but you don’t have to have screaming babies and kids running around like lunatics at the Henson. It won’t be a circus.”
by Leon Gettler, June 20th 2017
