Chin Chin s Chris Lucas fought Melbourne lockdowns Now he s planning six new restaurants afr.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from afr.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The long launch: the trials and tribulations of opening a restaurant mid-pandemic
It was a brilliant if unlikely pairing – Melbourne’s hip eatery king Chris Lucas teaming up with Sydney’s top degustation duo Martin Benn and Vicki Wild to create a new restaurant they hoped would change the face of dining. Then came COVID-19.
June 4, 2021
The man behind Society, Chris Lucas; chef Martin Benn and his wife, Vicki Wild at the new Melbourne dining precinct.
Credit:Kristoffer Paulsen
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It’s September 2020 and Melbourne is barely two months into a 112-day lockdown. Martin Benn and Vicki Wild are holed up in Toorak, in a modern two-storey townhouse they’re renting in the city’s affluent south-east. The one-time darlings of Sydney’s restaurant scene, who together ran the three-hatted Sepia for a decade – Benn the consummate chef with a bent for Japanese, Wild the infectiously warm front-of-house host – are sitting out the cit
Hire Society: restaurateur Chris Lucas is recruiting 450 staff for two new Melbourne restaurants
Paul Best
Photo: Julian Lallo
Chris Lucas wants you. Or, more precisely, he wants 450 of you – chefs, sommeliers, waiters and bartenders – to staff his latest Melbourne CBD restaurants, the highly anticipated upscale diner Society headlined by leading chef Martin Benn, and Australian-Japanese grill Yakimono, earmarked to open at the 80 Collins development in mid and late 2021 respectively.
The high-profile restaurateur last week formally launched a recruitment drive, both nationally and internationally, in what is seen, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a much-needed boon to employment, with the end of JobKeeper.