It took just 43 seconds to prove Attica in Melbourne is Australia's hottest restaurant
Ten years on, chef Ben Shewry still remembers, all too well, his first week at Attica, in the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea.
“A customer sat down, read the menu and told my staff ‘whoever wrote this fucking menu must be on speed’, then promptly stood up and stormed out”, he recalls.
A decade later, he’s struck by how far he’s come, having bought Attica two months ago from David Maccora the man who gave Shewry the break and also create freedom that’s placed Attica on the world’s 50 best restaurants list at 32.
From two people in the kitchen and two waiters, he now has around 30 staff.
Dinner at Attica is a $220 tasting menu, but it seems there’s no shortage of takers. Yesterday Shewry opened reservations for December at 9am.
It took just 43 seconds for every table of two in the lead up to Christmas to be booked out.
That’s not lost on Shewry.
“It’s a long way from 2005-2008 when often we couldn’t beg people to come eat at Attica,” he says. “Yes it’s long way from those days but we never forget, the reminder keeps us hungry and determined to never go back there. It’s our roots and I’m proud of our humble desperate beginnings”.
The turnaround began in 2009 when Attica was named Victoria’s best restaurant and since then it’s regularly named in the top three among the restaurant awards littering this time of the year.
Shewry says the reminder of those early days isn’t a burden, but he does have physical scars – “from scrubbing hundreds of pots and pans to order!”
If you can find a couple more friends to share a bigger table at Attica in December, there are a couple of tables left. Check online here.
Source: Business Insider Australia, Simon Thomsen, 3rd September 2015
Originally published as: It took just 43 seconds to prove Attica in Melbourne is Australia's hottest restaurant
