It’s Tuesday, and an hour before meeting up with restaurateur Chris Lucas for lunch at one of his nine venues, Lillian Brasserie, I send a text reminding him thatinsists on picking up the tab. “No issue,” he fires back, “we need the income lol [laughing crying emoji].”
Lucas takes interruptions like these in his stride. The restaurant floor may not be his office, but clearly it’s his stage. He’s had a hand in pretty much every design detail surrounding us, from the delicate, Austrian hand-blown glassware to the handmade-in-Melbourne timber table we’re about to eat lunch from.
With 500 staff at 80 Collins Street and nearly 1500 more at his other venues , Lucas says over the past two pandemic years he often felt like the captain of struggling ship. He organised daily free meals for staff who needed them, employed two psychologists and paid the equivalent of JobKeeper to 120 foreign workers who didn’t qualify for government support.Kristoffer Paulsen
Lucas caught the hospitality bug growing up in a hotel run by his Greek immigrant father Con in Geelong. But his dad’s death when Lucas was only 15 set him on a different path. Honouring his late father’s wishes he went to Monash University, graduating with a science degree and majoring in pharmacology.
It wasn’t until his mid-40s, in 1995, that he returned to hospitality, opening up Number One Fitzroy Street in St Kilda. The Botanical in South Yarra was next, which he sold in 2007 for a reported $16 million. Many restaurants have followed, and another Melbourne venue is in the planning stages even as you read this.“When you’re a creative person, there’s no off switch,” he says. “You know, I don’t even understand the concept of retirement. My father died on the job.
Never heard of him.
He’s the reason why I don’t go to restaurants
The same Chris Lucas as the one in this story?
The LNP goto whinge machine. Can’t pay his staff correctly but I bet he knows how to pay his horse trainers
This is the Grub who has been caught a number of times Under paying staff