At 66, Neil Perry thought he’d be retired. Instead, he’s transforming Double Bay

Neil Perry bends down to pick up a used straw from the side of the pavement. It’s the fourth or fifth time this morning that a stray piece of detritus has caught the chef’s attention, and it won’t be the last. His eyes are a radar for imperfections; little things that just shouldn’t be there, things you and I might not notice, or simply choose to ignore. But for Perry, a spotless footpath is essential. This is his corner, after all. Hell, it’s pretty much his suburb.

Since the venerable Australian chef swung open the doors in late 2021, Margaret, a restaurant he named after his late mother, has become the beating heart of Sydney’s Double Bay. Occupying the prominent corner where Bay Street meets Guilfoyle Avenue, it has spawned a more casual eatery, Next Door, as well as the Sydney outpost of Melbourne’s cult-hit bakery Baker Bleu, a partnership with founders Mike and Mia Russell. Together, the three adjacent venues form what Perry calls “the Margaret precinct”. And later this year, he will open two more establishments on the next block: a modern Chinese diner, Song Bird, and a jazzy bar below, Bobbie’s. At 66, Perry is speeding up, not slowing down – and he’s bringing Double Bay with him for the ride.

He runs through the rest of Bay Street’s inventory: Charlie Kelly and Faheem Noor’s new bar and diner Bartiga, the Royal Oak Hotel, cool Japanese joint Tanuki, Italian trattoria Matteo, and wine bar Bibo up the end. “It’s thriving. It’s just insane,” Perry says. “Sitting along there in the evening and watching people walk past, it’s like sitting in Paris or somewhere in Europe, watching the world go by.”

Most people are rapt. But of course, not everyone wants Double Bay to be Paris. Just as Margaret is the neighbourhood restaurant that’s become a Sydney destination, debate springs eternal about whether Double Bay should be a bustling hub for all Sydneysiders or a village for locals. Its revival has been in train for a few years now; Lebanese restaurant Bedouin and Mexican joint Sinaloa, both now closed, attracted the Instagram set during and after COVID-19. But most observers credit Perry and Margaret with really galvanising Double Bay’s comeback. Cranes line Bay Street, which food writer Scott Bolles has dubbed “the Rodeo Drive of Sydney restaurants”. But you can bet some people don’t want it to be Los Angeles, either.

‘My style hasn’t changed a lot for a long time, really. I’ve just cooked food that I like cooking.’

Neil Perry

But can food really change a suburb? The Sydney Morning Herald’s chief restaurant critic Terry Durack believes so. “We saw it happening in Bondi in the 1990s when Sean Moran opened Sean’s Panaroma, and then Maurice Terzini opened Icebergs Dining Room in 2002, and put Bondi Beach on an international dining destination map.” Fratelli Paradiso had Potts Point to itself for 10 years – now it’s joined by a throng of top eateries. And it’s happening again in Melbourne’s St Kilda, with Saint George x Karen Martini, and Stokehouse, bringing some chutzpah back to the suburb.

Like Double Bay, Neil Perry is no stranger to reinvention. Over the years, he has endured failures and disappointments to match the ecstatic highs and accolades. Shortly before the pandemic, he was in a difficult relationship with his masters at Urban Purveyor Group (UPG), the private equity-backed conglomerate to which he had sold his restaurant stable in 2016. Just as COVID began to worm its way around the world, the entity announced Perry would depart, taking Rockpool Bar & Grill, Spice Temple and Rosetta back with him.

In the chaotic months that followed, with the future of hospitality unclear, the financing for that deal collapsed. Perry ultimately walked away from his role as UPG’s culinary director, leaving behind the eateries he’d spent 30 years building up, and busied himself with his charity project, Hope Hospitality Foundation, delivering meals to those in need. But he wasted no time planning Margaret with his own money. It was about to open in late June 2021 when the Delta variant swept through Sydney, forcing the cancellation of 10,000 reservations. In October that year, it finally welcomed its first customers – socially distanced, of course – who practically tore down the doors. “The first six months were insane,” Perry recalls. “They were so in love with you for being open.”

Of course, Perry will tell you he’s just doing what he has always done. Sourcing the best possible Australian produce. Applying an eye for detail that borders on obsessive. Mixing fine dining with casual neighbourhood vibes and injecting a healthy dose of pan-Asian flavour. “My style hasn’t changed a lot for a long time, really,” he says. “I’ve just cooked food that I like cooking.”

It worked. Margaret was named Restaurant of the Year at the 2024 The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide awards, praised for its “uncompromising focus on wild-caught seafood”. Durack says it’s line-ball with Josh and Julie Niland’s Saint Peter, in nearby Paddington, for best seafood restaurant in the country. “One old-school, the other new-school,” he says. “One treats fish like fish, the other treats fish like meat.”

Neil Perry starts his day at Baker Bleu before 8am. He’s in his uniform: tailored white shirt, blue-wash slim jeans and white Common Projects sneakers, his greying hair tied back in his trademark ponytail. Later, he’ll whack on the terracotta-coloured Margaret apron. Perry casts his eye over a wall of sourdough boules, rye and caraway loaves, crusty baguettes and sesame seed ficelles baked earlier that morning. When Good Weekend visits three weeks before Easter, there are also the requisite hot cross buns.

The goods on the shelf this Thursday morning began their journey in the Baker Bleu kitchen two days prior, when the base dough was made and fermented overnight, before being shaped the next day and put into provers, which first cool the dough, then slowly warm it up in the early hours, ready for the first bake at 3am inside the cavernous oven. I’m curious about its dimensions. “It’s just f---in’ big,” Perry says. “Five tonnes or something, it weighs.”

It has to be capacious. Today’s manifest, for a busy Friday tomorrow, calls for 144 country loaves, 108 boules, 288 bagels and 126 ficelles. That’s before we get to sandwiches and pizza slices, which fly off the shelves at $12 to $18 a pop, the price tags clearly no deterrent. Baker Bleu will ring up at least a thousand sales a day; nearly 2000 on weekends. More so than even Margaret itself, the bakery has become a Double Bay ritual, where people grab a coffee, meet, walk the dog and chat. “It’s a cheaper buy,” as Perry says, so people come more often – some daily.

Perry’s world has shrunk considerably. The old Neil was spread thin, with a lot of time spent ricocheting around the country, tending to Melbourne’s Spice Temple or Perth’s Rockpool, or servicing his long-standing role as Qantas’ food and beverage director. Or starting projects he never found the time to finish. The new Neil is more grounded – literally. “I’m in Sydney a lot,” he says. “It’s nice being at home.”

Specifically, he’s in the eastern suburbs a lot. Perry and his wife Sam, who celebrated their 21st wedding anniversary in March, live five minutes up the road in Vaucluse. He spends his day gliding between the restaurants and his office, a block away beside the Song Bird construction site. And this operation is a family affair. Sam calls the pass at Margaret most nights, ensuring waitstaff take dishes to the right tables at the right time, while his eldest, Josephine, 29, is on the front desk. Younger daughters Macy and Indy also schedule shifts around university and school commitments (Indy is in year 12).

Josephine, who received her own crash course in the perils of the restaurant industry when she opened short-lived Potts Point brasserie Missy French at the age of 21, is married to Michael Clift, from the team behind Sydney hotspots Bistrot 916, Pellegrino 2000 and Clam Bar. She’s pregnant with their first child; her father, despite his enthusiasm for staying young, professes himself “super excited” about becoming a grandfather.

Perry’s morning includes an inspection of the latest delivery at Margaret; 17 boxes from line fisherman Ben Collison up at Bowen in the Whitsundays, one of the restaurant’s four main fish suppliers. Margaret doesn’t order fish per se, and eschews fish markets; it takes whatever the fishermen are catching. Today, that’s mostly coral trout, along with some scarlet sea perch and Moses snapper. “Look at these guys,” Perry exclaims, pointing out the Moses’ signature black spot. “This is really f---ing exciting.”

Seafood guru John Susman has worked with Perry since the heady days of Paddington restaurant Perry’s in 1983, and later the pioneering Blue Water Grill in Bondi. Susman managed the joint; in the decades since, he’s supplied seafood to Perry’s empire and travelled the world with him, scouring fish markets from Hong Kong to Paris and New York. Also, on one occasion in the UK’s Brixham, enjoying a seafood dinner followed by Perry’s best Liam Gallagher impersonation (Perry remembers the evening, but can’t recall the song).

“A lot of chefs talk about being supplier-friendly,” says Susman. “Neil’s quite a rare bird in the sense that he genuinely supports his suppliers. He’s fiercely loyal, he’s incredibly encouraging, and brutally honest when it comes to quality. I’d actually argue there’s nobody more supportive of producers in Australia, in the real sense. He’s not the sort of bloke that needs to come to the Sydney Fish Market with a camera crew in tow – he’s doing it all day every day.”

Durack says every senior chef or sommelier at Margaret could open their own venue tomorrow, but they don’t. “Neil pulls it all together and makes it work for everyone. They believe in him. That’s how he can power through and do all the other things he does, which all come back to reward Margaret, the mothership.”

The mothership was an expensive beast, costing about $5 million to open, of which Perry says he borrowed $1.8 million. That’s nothing compared to the bill for Song Bird and Bobbie’s, which he expects to reach $12 million, including design fees. The site is under construction and at present, when Perry’s not on the pans at Margaret, he’s preparing for the forecasted August opening. On the day Good Weekend visits, he’s finalising table numbers and telling the designers they have some wriggle-room on expenditure between stone and furniture.

“The project was getting a little out of hand with budget,” Perry admits. “It started out with just trying to get the bar, then ended up with some harebrained scheme about ground floor and level one. Then I realised to get all the infrastructure I needed in, we were really going to have to try to get the next floor. So, anyway, it kind of got out of control. It just organically grew, right?”

It being a family business, it’s also family money. The house is on the line again. Two-thirds of the $12 million is coming from Perry, in a roughly 50-50 split between a bank loan and funding from Margaret. The final third comes from landlord Pallas Group and its development arm, Fortis.

Song Bird will have 230 seats; on the plate, think upmarket Cantonese-style dishes such as roast pork belly, white cut chicken, or coral trout with ginger and shallot. Perry is trying in vain to narrow the draft menu from 110 items to 70. “I’d like to lock [in] all of it,” he says. “But I just can’t.”

The bar is no afterthought; it’s a collaboration with Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson, a husband-and-wife duo from Sydney who moved to New York and bought the iconic, century-old Caffe Dante in Greenwich Village in 2015. A few years later, in 2019, and renamed Dante, the venue was crowned the best bar in the world.

Call it organic growth or call it excess, the mounting expenses may elicit concerns about Perry overextending himself, which has caused problems in the past. Especially at a time when the hospitality industry is struggling under the pressure of higher interest rates, lower consumer spending and rising costs. An article in the The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age earlier this year was headlined: “Is Australia’s restaurant industry on the brink?”

Perry scoffs at that suggestion, noting restaurants are always a fickle business, and regularly come and go. They keep opening in Sydney, with Michael Clift’s team preparing to add Neptune’s Grotto to its portfolio in May, Justin Hemmes planning Good Luck Restaurant Lounge in the CBD, and Alejandro Saravia due to open Morena in the Martin Place GPO building. Likewise, Chris Lucas is promising “nothing Melbourne has seen before” with his four-level, French blockbuster Batard in the city later this year, plus another restaurant in Windsor.

‘I wouldn’t be as cocky as to say, “Nothing can ever go wrong.” ’

Neil Perry

“It’s always in a cycle,” Perry says. “There will be tight times and then the economy will flourish again. Look, compared to things like the ’89 recession that we had, and 10 per cent unemployment and 18 per cent interest [rates], I mean, Australians have got no idea what hard times are. No idea whatsoever. And I hope more than anything that they never find out.”

Terry Durack says while Margaret’s success has given Perry a solid base to build on, “my heart is always in my mouth when Neil Perry leaps into the future without a safety net.” On the other hand: “I’m picking up that there’s less hubris involved, which gives me hope. He’s genuinely grateful for having his family around him, for being alive, for being busy. I’d never call him humble, but there’s less bravado now, which is a good sign.”

Perry is philosophical. He acknowledges past errors, including the “massive, massive mistake” of opening Star Bar & Grill, later replaced by Wockpool, in Darling Harbour in the mid-1990s. “The whole idea of somebody saying, ‘location, location, location’ are the three most important things in restaurants is absolutely right,” he says. “We went and did a couple of things we possibly shouldn’t have, and thought that great food and service and wine and fit-out would be enough – and they weren’t.” By the end of the year 2000, the site was shuttered, with Perry losing $2 million in the process.

Teaming up with private equity in 2016 wasn’t necessarily an error, but it didn’t work. At the time of Perry’s exit in 2020-21, reports mentioned bad blood between him and managers at Urban Purveyor Group. He says it wasn’t like that. “We just had differences in style, essentially. And it was better for them to take that and run it the way they wanted to run it. I most likely should never have ever worked for somebody else. I’m not really good at that.”

But Perry is certain he has the right set-up in Double Bay, even if it’s expensive. “I wouldn’t be as cocky as to say, ‘Nothing can ever go wrong,’ ” he says. “I never thought I’d build something as substantial as [Margaret] or Next Door again, or spend that kind of money on a restaurant.

“I don’t know whether it’s ego or just the desire for the right detail and functionality. The kitchens have to be amazing, I really want people to love working in them, so we try to think of everything that we possibly can, and it’s working so far. Fingers crossed. Who knows, though? Every time you roll the dice, you never know where it’s going to land.”

If Neil Perry loves Double Bay, it loves him back. Mostly. The halls of Woollahra Council (which takes in Double Bay), and the merchants of the suburb once mocked as “Double Pay”, are teeming with people lining up to thank Perry for helping rescue the village from the doldrums.

The former mayor, Susan Wynne, who was in power when Perry set up Margaret, tells me the precinct has transformed. “It was dead, that whole space,” she says. “The energy is different, the atmosphere is different. People are wandering around smiling and happy. That’s what he’s created, which I think we haven’t had for a long time in the east.”

Richard Shields, Wynne’s successor, gives special credit to Baker Bleu. “That bakery has brought new people into the area just for the bakery. It’s all well and good to have something that encourages people to go from other parts of the eastern suburbs to Double Bay, but you’re really just moving people around the area. [Baker Bleu] has become such an institution that people are coming from outside the area.”

Simon Cohen, of television’s Luxe Listings fame, began his career with Ray White Double Bay and bases his buyers’ agency, Cohen Handler, in the village. He watched the suburb wither when Bondi Junction Westfield opened and Village Twin cinema closed 20 years ago. “I think he’s absolutely changed Double Bay,” Cohen says of Perry. “It’s now a hub where even if you don’t make a reservation, you can come to Double Bay and just walk around and get in somewhere.” The renaissance has been a boon for property values, too. “The first thing I look for when buying property is a village atmosphere,” Cohen says. “The more that Double Bay has that, the more valuable it becomes.”

As such, Bay Street is a construction site. Next to Perry’s forthcoming Song Bird, excavators have cleared the way for Ruby House, a six-storey premium office complex boasting harbour views from the terrace. Across the street, global luxury brand and celebrity favourite RH Gallery (formerly Restoration Hardware) is building its first Australian outpost. The five-level gallery will showcase luxe furnishings, lights and decor, with a rooftop restaurant above. On nearby Cross Street, Chinese-backed developer SJD Properties is building 15 exclusive units in a project called Encore 1788, sister to its recently completed apartments on New South Head Road. Just a few doors down, another luxury six-storey development, Ode, is also underway. And the InterContinental Hotel – with its storied history as the Ritz-Carlton, where INXS’s Michael Hutchence was found dead in 1997 – was recently sold to a syndicate including developers Allen Linz and Eduard Litver, for a reported $215 million.

But not everyone is crash-hot about the building boom. The Double Bay Residents’ Association, led by semi-retired financial communications consultant Anthony Tregoning, is “uncomfortable” with the level of commercial development. Tregoning worries office workers who leave the suburb and go home at the end of the day “won’t have the same commitment to Double Bay” as locals. “The challenge brought by popular businesses like Margaret is that it attracts more traffic and brings in people from outside the area who may not have the same sort of love that we have,” he says. “[We’re] very happy if that sense of community attracts other people, but we don’t want people to swamp us. For every Margaret that’s opened, we’d like to have a few smaller restaurants catering for perhaps lower budgets and catering for people who live around here.”

Tregoning laments the demise of little neighbourhood shops: the delicatessens, greengrocers and hardware stores – a phenomenon common to many Australian suburbs. He and his wife prefer to go to Queen Street in Woollahra to dine out. “I don’t think we eat anywhere now in Double Bay,” he says. “None of this is a commentary on Margaret, which I haven’t experienced. I think it looks very nice from the outside.”

Barbara Mortimer, also a Double Bay Residents’ Association (DBRA) member, enjoys Margaret – as do her children, who are in their 40s. “Neil Perry has been a godsend for Double Bay,” she enthuses. Yet even she has reservations about what’s happening in the Margaret precinct. “Those parklets [for outdoor dining] are actually stealing pedestrian space. But look, the local people love it.” Nor is Mortimer a fan of the smell of fish cooking, which apparently wafts through nearby homes depending on the wind and “really pongs”. The DBRA also objected to the building that contains Margaret, saying it was too big and too tall. “Liking Margaret is not liking the development,” says Mortimer. “I only like the tenant, I don’t like the building. If you mix commercial with residential, you’re going to have some problems.”

It’s 11.30am on the dot and a dozen Margaret staff are gathered around the front desk for the pre-lunch briefing. Perry tells them what’s off for today – the ceviche of flathead and coral trout wings – and what’s on: the pav and Heidi swordfish, with a new garnish. The menu is big, and regularly name-checks Perry’s favourite producers – Colin’s chermoula-crusted lamb cutlets, Brent’s Wollemi duck breast, Bruce’s rock flathead. “We kind of set waiters up to fail if they don’t pay attention,” Perry says. “They have to know who these people are and why they’re special to us; otherwise it’s really disingenuous to put something together like that.”

Lunchers can have a quick cocktail and piece of fish at the bar, or spend thousands on lobsters and wine. One of Perry’s signature dishes is the King George whiting, grilled, with little adornment ($59). “You have to have the courage just to pour extra virgin olive oil on it and have people think that it’s the best thing they’ve ever eaten – because it probably is,” Perry says.

‘If your job is easy, you are not doing your job properly.’

Margaret assistant manager Callan Smith

With about 120 staff on the books, it’s a large operation, though a fraction of them are rostered on for today’s unusually quiet lunch. The per-capita recession coming to bear, perhaps? But when Good Weekend returns on Saturday night, it’s a different story. With 242 covers booked over two sittings, plus walk-ins, it’s an almost-full house. After a 5pm staff meal (Perry calls it “family meal”) of bibimbap, the dinner briefing starts at 5.40pm. They run through which friends are dining that night, among them Skye Gyngell, daughter of the late television executive Bruce Gyngell, and one of Britain’s top chefs and restaurateurs. Perry will visit her table later to say hello, as he does other friends and associates.

Assistant manager Callan Smith implores the team to “bring the energy” and speaks of a recent diner’s complaint that “no one smiled at them the whole night”. And he lays down the law. “If you would do it in a cafe, we do not do it here. We are not a cafe ... If your job is easy, you are not doing your job properly.”

Sam is calling the pass and Josephine, having vanquished a cough from a few days ago, is back on hosting duties. But at 5.56pm, there’s a sudden cry. Josephine realises they’ve forgotten beverage director Richard Healy’s birthday. He receives a tiny, solitary cupcake, and staff file into the rear kitchen for a speedy rendition of the customary song. It is the shortest birthday party of all time.

Early birds wait outside for the doors to swing open. Inside, someone yells “one minute”. Perry is in the front kitchen, mixing sauces and rattling pans in full view. His main task tonight is running the grill section, making sure meat and fish come out as needed. I wonder if his composure might give way to the manic, angry-chef cliché we have come to expect from TV chefs like Gordon Ramsay. Alas, Josephine says, her dad has “gone soft in his old age”.

It’s true that Perry’s calm exterior doesn’t shatter. But he’s experienced enough to know what he wants, and what he doesn’t like. That’s as true of politics as it is of food. We run through a few of his gripes: poor behaviour in Canberra (Barnaby Joyce’s pavement escapades are still fresh), the backlash to Labor’s tax-cut changes (“Peter Dutton was never going to win that argument without looking like an absolute douchebag”), and most of all, his hatred of government waste. “If we stopped wasting money, we could all pay less tax. So let’s put that on the agenda at some stage, please.”

Through his long relationship with Qantas, Perry is close to former chief executive Alan Joyce. He believes Joyce was treated too harshly by a public that feels a sense of ownership over the national carrier and holds it to higher standards than other corporations. “The Commonwealth Bank is still allowed to make $10 billion without being the worst people in the world,” he says. “It seems quite crazy. ‘We want you to have all the infrastructure and be on time, but we don’t want you to make money.’ Without profit, it’s pretty hard to invest in all the things you want to invest in.”

And from bitter experience, Perry is also frustrated with local government. The lights in the park outside Margaret have been broken for ages. Woollahra Council took eight months to approve the development application for Song Bird, something Perry finds especially galling since he’s a known entity. “I’d hate to be a normal person trying to get into the suburb,” he says. “Some of it is mind-numbingly horrendous. But I have to try and let go of that, otherwise it would drive me insane.”

Woollahra mayor Richard Shields accepts the criticism. “Our DA processing time is not good enough, and it needs to be improved. It’s an area that lends itself to a greater amount of planning scrutiny, but ... that’s no excuse. We do need to pull up our socks.”

Meanwhile, at least the council has Perry looking after his little precinct. On Monday or Tuesday, which is supposed to be his weekend, he’s often found watering “my babies” in the planter boxes outside Margaret. He has a gardener, the aptly named Greg Bush, to do the pruning.

One of his regular customers is an old restaurateur buddy, Wolfie Pizem, who gave Sydney the Russian Coachman, Wolfie’s, The Waterfront and Italian Village. He won the Good Food Guide’s Vittoria Coffee “Legend” award in 2004, the year after Perry took home the inaugural prize. Now 96, Pizem dines at Margaret “all the time”, telling Perry about his next overseas holiday or property development. “I think it’s magic, what he has done,” Pizem says. To succeed in restaurants, he tells me, you need to be a great chef, a good PR man and a shrewd businessman – and Perry is all three. For Perry, there is no greater praise.

“I’d love to be 96 and as lively and mentally switched on as he is,” Perry says. “When I was 25, I thought at 66 I’d be near dead: certainly retired, and at the very end of my life. Whereas I actually think I’m at the beginning. And I actually hope my body lasts for another 30 years because I’ve got so much more to do and give.”

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