Local Hospitality Business Had To Close One Venue To Unlock A New Level Of Success

Hospitality is in Sam Worrall-Thompson’s blood. His father is a celebrity chef in the UK, and it was natural that he’d find himself heading up a kitchen one day. What was less predictable was the manner in which he turned Magill Road cafe Fine & Fettle into the hub of a hospitality empire.

Though his official title is Director of EMBR Hospitality, he laughs that “most days I'm a kitchenhand or a maintenance man... I just drive around and get things fixed.” And while opening highly-rated venues including Bar Lune, Spread and Dolly has given him plenty to celebrate, the chef says the smartest move he ever made was closing one of his best-loved establishments.

“We were three years into the business, and Fine & Fettle was finally becoming profitable,” he explains. In addition to operating a cafe on the site, Worrall-Thompson had chefs coming in at night to use the kitchen for a seasonal catering business. That was so successful that it expanded into the neighbouring building and began hosting onsite functions, “but the cafe was a seven-day business and I was about to have a kid… I could try to have Sundays off but if someone called in sick, you know who was going in.”

After considering all the options, he made the difficult decision to close the cafe and transform the entire property into an event space operating under the Fettle brand. “Even though the catering business had a pretty full calendar up till March, I was a bit worried about getting through the winter with such a seasonal business,” he recalls. As expected, turnover was way down once the cafe shut. Fortunately, so were the costs. The result? “We made more profit in the first six months of being an event space than in three years as a cafe.”

As EMBR expanded, Worrall-Thompson was also able to give his catering chefs extra hours at other restaurants across the portfolio. Now boasting seven venues, the business is becoming increasingly integrated in other ways. “The main staff work across all the sites, so instead of having a venue manager in every spot, some are run by restaurant managers and bartenders,” he explains. “That helps us reduce overheads by sharing those costs, and if one place is quieter, we also have the ability to push more events there.”

Despite being located across Adelaide, the seven establishments operate as part of a single network, “with Fettle as the centre of that ecosystem”. The original Magill Road site still fuels the catering business and hosts everything from baby showers to engagement parties. With weekends full, the next step is filling the gaps in the calendar, “so we host first birthdays on Sundays, and I want to focus more on corporate events during the week when the space is underutilised,” says Worrall-Thompson, who recently added a dedicated wedding venue in Ashton to the EMBR collection. “We’ve got big plans moving forward,” he says, “and it’s all possible because I closed Fine & Fettle. That was the best thing I’ve ever done for the business.”

Reach out:

A: Unit 4, 57 Magill Rd, Stepney
W: https://www.fettleadl.com.au/