Melbourne Classics: Donovans

On an evening in 1989, Gail Burgess and Kevin Donovan were sitting on the deck at St Kilda restaurant Jean Jacques by the Sea. Let’s imagine they’re looking out over Port Phillip as the sun sinks somewhere behind Werribee, clinking two glasses of Dom Perignon.

It’d been a landmark year for the pair: Kevin left the Hyatt, where he’d been working since ’86, and opened his first restaurant, La Chinois. In May, after keeping their feelings stowed away for years (they worked together at the Hyatt), he and Gail finally hooked up. And that evening, over champagne and oysters, they decided to move in together.

Almost 30 years later, Gail and Kevin are still sitting on that deck. But these days it belongs to the restaurant they started together, Donovans. “It sounds like you're writing some sort of cornball story here,” suggests Gail. “But it's the truth.”

Celebrating a restaurant’s 21st birthday indicates you’re doing something – actually, a lot of things – right. You can’t just cook well. You’ve got to be firing on all cylinders, offering diners exceptional service and wine they like and can afford. And you’ve got to do it all in a space people want to return to.

Gail and Kevin have not only done that, they’re getting better at it.

“It’s not a business. It’s a life’s work,” says Gail. “The business has grown every year, continues to grow. And we're on this amazing journey of just seeing how great we can make it.”

When the pair took over the Jean Jacques lease, they transformed the old bathing house, built in 1928, into The Pavilion. At first they stuck with former owner Jean Jacques Lale-Demoz’s fish-heavy menu.

“We felt that the location suggested seafood, and Jean Jacques was almost completely a seafood restaurant,” Kevin says.

It wasn’t long before the problem with this approach became clear. While ocean-focused cuisine does well in warmer months, it’s a tougher sell in winter. The Donovans needed customers all year round to survive.

“It had been a business that was packed and overworked in the summer and completely empty in the winter,” says Gail. “Just because you have a restaurant near the sea doesn't mean you should only serve seafood.”

So, in 1997 the Donovans began to make the changes they envisioned. They made the menu more broadly Italianate, keeping the seafood but making it more approachable.

“The sea needed to be a bonus. We wanted to cook the food that people love to eat. We wanted to make it look like somebody's house,” says Gail. “Therefore, it would be hospitable. And that we should call it Donovans because it's about our house.”

They installed fireplaces and opened up the windows, and began instituting a provincial if ambitious design scheme that changed the entire interior every six months.

Over 21 years, the approach has remained relatively unchanged. In fact, 10 of the dishes first created by original head chef Robert Castellani remain: house-smoked salmon blini; Queensland leader prawns with oregano and chilli; grass-fed eye fillet with cafe de Paris butter; whole roast duck with pommes dauphine; beer-battered fish and house-cut chips; cos with parmesan and lemon vinaigrette; linguine with fresh Moreton Bay bug; the enormous and impossibly festive Bombe Alaska; and, of course, the old-fashioned chicken pie.

Diners have become unreasonably attached to these dishes. When Kevin and Gail (briefly) decided to remove the chicken pie, blood ran hot. “Sometimes you say to yourself, ‘God, if I have to serve another chicken pie … or if we have to make another roll of puff pastry in the kitchen … I’ll scream’,” says Gail. “But remember when we took the chicken pie off?”

“It was revolt,” says Kevin.

“I tell you, it was chaos. They weren't just little emails and phone calls we got. ‘We're never coming back,’ they said,” recalls Gail. “And 30, 40 [calls] on Monday morning.”

Ultimately, this is not a bad problem to have. Part of the restaurant’s appeal to generations of diners is its homey reliability. The Donovans are philosophical about their menu.

“The most important thing is that we write our menus [based on] what sells,” says Gail. “And those 10 things still outsell everything else that we do.”

That Castellani’s original dishes are still in demand is a testament to his skill as a chef. Before Donovan’s, he worked for Stephanie Alexander for seven years. His tenure in St Kilda lasted 15. In 2011 he handed over to Emma D’Alessandro, who started as a second-year apprentice. As current head chef, she’s already been there for 17 years. “It was just a natural progression that Emma would take over the reins of the kitchen,” says Kevin.

What’s extraordinary about that progression is that – in an industry with a legendarily quick turnover, and with a much-discussed chef shortage – anyone would stay in one place for the better part of two decades. D’Alessandro and Castellani aren’t the only ones. Looking at their 70-plus staff, Donovans is clearly a great place to work.

“There's been a lot of chatter in the press recently about abuse of staff and wages. We've never been a part of that,” says Kevin. “We employ our staff according to all the standards of the awards, and we don't abuse them. I mean, how can somebody work five splits in a week and exist as a human being? They can’t.”

Kevin and Gail are the prototypical owner-operators. You’ll find one or both of them in the restaurant on any given night. It’s a point of pride for Kevin that he waits tables. “Someone said to me a few weeks ago, ‘The garden is only as good as the dirt that comes off the gardener's shoes’,” he says. “We can't be here 24 hours a day, but I was on the floor today for lunch taking orders, clearing tables. I'll be doing the same thing tonight.”

That quality of experience is almost universally acknowledged by us fickle commentators in the press. Still, there’s one criticism that pops up regularly – the price. For Kevin, such criticism hurts.

“A complaint to me, it's like being cut to the quick,” he says. “Because you work so, so hard for everyone to have a great experience. It’s very, very difficult for us to do what we do, to keep this building looking sharp, to keep the interior evolving, to keep the amount of staff that we have on board in order to do the job that we do. We can't serve John Dory at an inexpensive price because it's a premium fish. It cannot be a cheap or inexpensive restaurant. So I wear the expensive tag, but I want to be sure that we deliver.”

On August 27, 2014, the Donovans were devastated when embers from a charcoal grill floated up into the ceiling and set fire to the kitchen. Oddly, though, they were sanguine. After the wedding party and other diners were evacuated, Gail joked to an ABC reporter that they’d be having a sausage sizzle on the beach the following Friday. The reality meant closing Donovans for almost eight months.

Instead of a tragedy, Gail and Kevin saw the fire as an opportunity – a chance to renovate a restaurant that had only seen some minor improvements in its long tenure. “We were reborn,” says Kevin.

“We had great insurance,” Gail adds. “We had enough insurance to fully pay our staff for the eight months that we were closed. I’m not saying that having a fire is a great experience. But what I'm really proud of is this business, this building, which we love so much. [It’s now] in great stead for the next 50 years.”

For those 50 years (at least), the Donovans plan to continue what they’ve been doing for the past 21. Because however you look at it, what they’re doing is working.

“As long as you look after people, provide a daily consistency, a daily delivery of quality and expectation and experience, you'll then survive,” says Kevin. “Then the business becomes easy.”