‘King of Talk’ remembered: Otto opens John Laws’ beloved Table 53
If you ever needed to track down legendary broadcaster John Laws, there was a pretty reliable plan: head to Otto at Woolloomooloo. “If he was in town, he would be at Otto for lunch,” Graham Ackling, group general manager of Fink, the hospitality group behind Otto Ristorante at Woolloomooloo, Quay and Bennelong told Good Food. “He would come to Otto for lunch and dinner pretty much every day, the entire time the restaurant was open,” he said. His last visit was just weeks ago.
Laws, who died yesterday at his Woolloomooloo home aged 90, was so loyal he basically had assigned seating. “He had an indoor and an outdoor table,” Ackling told Good Food. “He generally always sat on one particular table, but he did have one inside that was his, if it was bad weather.”
Living upstairs at the northern end of the Finger Wharf certainly helped, but proximity wasn’t the whole story. “He loved Otto,” Ackling said. He loved it so much he briefly owned it—taking a majority stake alongside close friend and developer Lang Walker from 2002 to 2006. As the story goes, when he learned founder Maurice Terzini was moving on, he told Walker: “Wouldn’t it be good fun to get involved, seeing as we spend so much time there?”
After a rocky four-year spell—staff departures, customer churn—the pair sold the restaurant to current owner Leon Fink. During that era, Otto cemented its status as a social hub for Sydney, with Laws at the centre of it. He most often dined with his third wife, Caroline, who passed away in 2020, but he was just as likely to host media mates and visiting stars.
“Quite often he would dine with entertainment figures like Neil Diamond or John Williamson,” Ackling says. He wasn’t shy about sharing his allegiance either, spruiking Otto as his favourite on air.
Menu-wise, the King of Talk didn’t really do “regular order.” “He would often have oysters, he would often have barramundi, but he would work his way through the menu,” Ackling said.
There were the occasional fireworks. In 2007, Laws famously left his Otto table to confront rivals Derryn Hinch and Bob Rogers next door at Salon Blanc. As Rogers recounted: “He laid his hands on the table and said, ‘You are the two most despicable c---s I’ve ever met in this business,’” Rogers said at the time.
Mostly though, Laws was a gentleman of the room. “He was very generous with his time,” Ackling says. “If there were listeners, they’d often talk to him and get an autograph and a photo, he was always very happy to talk to people.” He was a strong tipper and, as Ackling puts it, “was very generous to the staff,” Ackling said.
And for those keen to sit where he did: for the first time in 25 years, Otto has now opened up bookings for table 53.
Jonathan Jackson, 10h November 2025
