‘The challenging times weren’t going to go away’: String of restaurant closures in Victoria

Amid fuel-price uncertainty, three interest rate rises this year and unpredictable shifts in consumer behaviour, restaurants and bars in Melbourne are bracing for a tough winter, with some operators deciding to close their doors before the end of this financial year.

At least six restaurants will shut before June 30 or have already closed.

Some, like Brunswick’s Noisy Ritual, are casual spots whose customers have been hit the hardest by the cost-of-living squeeze. Others are areas with lots of foot traffic, such as the long-standing Lucky Coq on Chapel Street, or attached to well-known precincts such as Crown.

“We realised the challenging times weren’t going to go away for a while,” says Cam Nicol, one half of the duo who founded Noisy Ritual as a working winery and bar in Brunswick East. It will close next month.

In the CBD, the Windsor Hotel Group runs a string of successful venues including two-hatted open-fire restaurant Aru and artisan gluten-free bakery Kudo. But its all-day venue Antara – a three-in-one restaurant, bar and bakery on Exhibition Street – hasn’t found its groove since opening in October 2023. It will close on May 30.

“ I think Antara is the most complex venue within the group,” says owner Adi Halim. “It is trading three meal periods – breakfast, lunch and dinner. There’s a restaurant and there’s a bakery that coexist in the same space.

“I think there are definitely opportunities for both sides of those businesses in the CBD, but for them to continue to coexist is something we’re reviewing.”

Halim points to the ongoing unpredictability of CBD foot traffic, specifically who is returning to the city and how they’re choosing to spend. In that climate, he says, more-specialised venues, such as others in the group’s portfolio, have resonated more clearly with customers.

In hindsight, scale also played a role. “If you’ve been to Antara, it’s gigantic. It’s been great; it’s just not the most suitable for [a building] that size,” he says.

While Halim isn’t yet sharing what’s next, he confirms the concept will be split. One arm of the business will remain in the space, while the other will relocate.

“ It’s exciting to be able to do both really well without having to compromise,” he says.

Brunswick winery-plus-bar Noisy Ritual will close in June, nearly 10 years to the day it opened with a novel idea: to show people in the city how to make their own wine. Watching their bills mount up and their customers tightening their budgets, owners Cam Nicol and Alex Byrne have thought about closing for 18 months.

“Something I’ve observed is that it’s just harder to get people through the door, and they spend less when they do,” says Nicol.

It’s an industry-wide problem, but Noisy Ritual’s situation was aggravated by debt accumulated just prior to COVID to expand into wholesale production.

The plan was to sell the brand’s minimal intervention wines to bars and restaurants, but two years of pandemic restrictions destroyed that. “All the sales fell off a cliff,” Nicol says. “Clawing [the debt] back post-COVID was pretty challenging for us.”

The business became well-known for winemaking workshops, where people would do everything from grape-stomping to barrel tastings at a brick warehouse in the heart of Brunswick East, producing their own wine. More than 1000 people in total participated, Nicol estimates.

“It’s easy to forget in the last few years – but it’s starting to come home now after posting the closure message – there’s heaps for us to be proud of,” he says.

The venue is offering 50 per cent off wine until its last day on Saturday, June 13.

Southbank seafood destination and celebrity fave The Atlantic will serve its last plate of oysters Kilpatrick on May 27. The vast Yarra River-facing restaurant has traded at Crown for 15 years, after getting its start in St Kilda in 1994 on the corner of Fitzroy Street and Canterbury Road.

Crown is undergoing a $200 million redevelopment, shaking up its hospitality offerings with 15 new bars and restaurants planned. It’s understood Atlantic owner Hatem Saleh was offered another lease at Crown and is exploring other concepts, while also planning to reopen The Atlantic at a new site.

Saleh closed the original St Kilda restaurant in 2006, before taking it to Crown five years later with celebrated chef Donovan Cooke on the pans.

For its final weeks, the restaurant is running specials ranging from $3.50 oysters to weigh-and-pay seafood platters.

In central Victoria, a restaurant on Kyneton’s major eat street will close on June 28. Marchesa, formerly known as Spaghetti Bar, is going to morph yet again. Current partners Daniel Whelan and Daniel Saligari are parting ways so Whelan can pursue other interests. After some renovations, Saligari says, he’ll open something entirely new in the space by end of July, with a new chef and a shift away from Italian.

Two music venues – The Lucky Coq in Windsor and Stay Gold in Brunswick – are also shutting down. Lucky Coq’s owners, Morris Hospitality, are working on a new venue to replace the 20-year-old Chapel Street magnet for partygoers, known for its $5 pizzas as much as its DJ line-ups. Pointing to the area’s changing demographics, marketing manager Grace Dorman says it is time to change the venue to suit.

“The target audience – the students, the share houses and all that kind of stuff that really formed the basis of the Lucky Coq audience – have moved out of the area,” Dorman says.