This year is big for me because on December 23 we will do our last service at Merediths after 10 years in business. I've pretty much made my reputation here on Dominion Rd, and closing wasn't an easy decision to make, but it was one that I had to make. I decided about two years ago that it was time to leave the industry, at least in the format of the fine-dining restaurant. It's good ending on my own terms.
Restaurants are not easy. In front, it all seems glamorous: you're in magazines and papers and on the radio talking about beautiful ingredients and there's the performance of cooking.
But there's also the hard side: the hours, the sacrifices, the stress and no sleep and the compromises. When you believe in something so much and work so hard and put everything into it, you spend all your time living with big expectations, so the fear of failure is always in the back of your mind.
Names are very important. "Merediths" had a good vibration to it, but people always said about the name: "You can never step away from it now."
When we kicked off, there were only a handful of restaurants at our end of the market. We were quickly booked out a lot. After a year or two we moved into degustation and we were the only restaurant doing that. That was a good concept for a small space: you have a set-spend and there's hardly any waste.