Closing Time

The structural and economic issues that beset the hospitality industry are no secret. The business is hard; the success rate is low. What we often don’t hear about is the unvarnished side of the end. What happens when the last check has been called, and what comes in the days and months afterward? What happens when you let go? I spoke to several owner/operators about the experience of being in business and closing the doors –  what it took from them, what it gave back, and what do you do with all those napkins?

Who said that restaurants have to be forever?

When Jo Barrett opened Little Picket in Lorne back in August 2022, she “didn’t know what it was going to be.” The casual diner/bowlo became a destination and a media draw, earning a chef’s hat from The Age and Barrett scooping Chef of the Year from that same masthead. It could have run for a decade, says Barrett, but when she closed it with partner David Osgood in April 2024, it was on their own terms.

“I remember Josh Niland was closing [Charcoal Fish] and we spoke about the idea of: why does a restaurant have to be forever?” says Barrett. “It doesn’t.” Longevity has traditionally been tied to pride, but she realised that the short tenure wasn’t a failure of the idea – anything but. Busy to the end, no single reason prompted closure, more a confluence of factors. A do-everything model and a lack of energy late on to implement systems or changes was one. Another: reaching an inflection point. Needing to scale-up, but asking, is this what we want? Barrett was also drawn to purpose-led projects impacting food systems, like Wildpie, the maker of wild game pies and sausage rolls, which she co-founded in 2024. Approaching the end of their lease, Barrett and Osgood felt it was “a nice time to finish up,” allowing those projects to come to life. But closing the doors on Little Picket was a new lesson for them both.

Last (or first) hurrahs made running stock down difficult. Equipment carried over to Wildpie or went into storage (an ongoing cost) with booze, and the objects that become a restaurants identity. “I have so many napkins, like tubs of them that my mum made,” laughs Barrett. “We're literally moving house now and still I’m moving a restaurant.” Plates have passed to one of her new interests, Surf Hotel in Torquay (where she is now working), to friends, family, and into storage for pop-ups and the (slim) chance that Little Picket returns. 

Alongside the immediate pack down and clean, there’s working with your accountant, and paying everyone (Little Picket “never had any outstanding debt,” says Barrett.) Finally, you think you’re done, but there’s the ever-present ATO, websites, social accounts, and booking enquiries that continue to come. 

Barrett recalls a lightbulb moment while looking through photos of dishes eighteen months after closing and remembering picking produce, cooking from scratch, and looking after their waste. “I was like holy shit; Little Picket was quite cool.” A fact that perhaps everyone knew except the person at the creative heart of the kitchen. “You don't realise it at the time” she says.  

Little Picket wasn’t Barrett’s first culinary project, but it was one she says that has shaped her. There’s lots of small things she’d do differently, like put in a booking system (rather than a leather-bound reservation book) and outsourcing laundry. But there are elements that are still non-negotiable, around how she sources produce and pursues an agenda around waste. She’s older and wiser, and when approaching a new project, she’s now interrogating her reasoning, the viability, and the holistic picture.

On a personal note, Barrett didn’t expect the community that sprang up around the restaurant. Saying goodbye to her team was tough. But the local crew are all still friends, some having babies together. “Restaurants are a moment in time, but they live on in different ways,” she says.

Separate emotion and ego from business decisions.

Marque, the Surry Hills fine diner Mark Best helmed from 1999 to 2016, secured its place in the pantheon of Australian culinary endeavor, placing on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and attaining and mostly retaining three hats. Over the last decade Best has become known as a writer, consulted to the likes of The Calile Hotel in Brisbane, brought products like Margra Lamb to market, and currently acts as Culinary Director for Infinity at Sydney Tower by Mark Best. A mouthful of a name perhaps, but he’s managed to give some sparkle to a revolving restaurant 81-floors above the Emerald City. Rock-solid resume aside, Best has had to make peace with closing what could be considered his magnum opus. 

“I’m getting to the point where I am, in current parlance, telling my truth,” says Best when I ask if it’s a difficult subject for him. “There was a point where I didn't like to talk about it. Now, I think the embarrassment of failure has diminished and I can talk about it, and I think it is in fact helpful.” He terms himself a creative person with some sense of business but admits he’s made some “very poor decisions in the past.” All lessons to carry forward. 

“We became irrelevant through the loss of the third hat,” says Best matter-of-factly. “We had traded on the infamy of having three hats for so long, and when we finally lost it, we were no longer viable.” On that day, 25% of bookings cancelled, and it was only his contract with Dream Cruises keeping the lights on. His advice is to have a strategy behind closure, whether that’s a bookings bump from earned media or attempting to negotiate your way out of a lease (“bloody tricky”).

Emotion and ego need to be separated from business decisions. “An accountant would tell you to close immediately, others would perhaps take some more money from you to make changes, get in PR, marketing, change the décor,” he says. “All of these things cost you more money.” It can be better, he says, to shut the doors if there's “an exogenous event, like losing your third hat.” In hindsight, his strategy would have been to shut the door on that day, instead of bearing operational costs, and re-signing a lease “with the vague hope of winning it back,” which he says, was an impossibility.

Marque closed two years after losing the third hat, and Best understood “at a fundamental level” that the only thing he had was his personal brand. The business was built on goodwill towards his name, and there were few assets that were saleable. “For us to go out solvent was my overriding aim” he says. There was the “difficult” move to sell the family home, but it was a necessity to allow the business to pay out “absolutely everything.” To cheat people isn’t something you recover from, says Best. Solvency isn’t solely financial, it’s also about being “morally and emotionally solvent.”

Hospitality puts on a brave face

“Susan and I were extremely exhausted,” says Melissa Palinkas of the lead up to closing Young George, the East Fremantle bar and restaurant that she owned with partner Susan Whelan for a decade. It was, to be frank, one of those oh fuck moments in the west when they announced their closure in April 2026, the same week they gained a hat through Good Food and months after attaining two stars from The West Australian Good Food Guide. 

Palinkas says that maintaining a level of quality with the staff available to them was a constant challenge. They were putting hours into development, which ultimately led to a degree of burn out. “Everybody in hospitality puts on a really brave face, a front.” says Whelan. “Over ten years at Young George, it wasn't the first time we had struggled. It was difficult at the beginning and then we started kicking some goals and you have this sort of high, then it takes a bit of a dive.” Since closing the doors, Whelan says that the amount of people that have sent personal messages admitting “I'm doing it tough, tough, tough,” has surprised her. 

More talk, less front within the industry is what’s needed, says Palinkas, even if the conversations are bound to be raw. Palinkas tells me that when the possibility of talking to A+ came up, the feeling was one of apprehension. “I said, ‘I don't want to talk about Young George, because it still hurts,’” says Whelan. Yet they did, perhaps because they are of that hospitality mould, wanting to give back to an industry they clearly love.  

After years of surviving, and of putting the business first (even ahead of health, says Palinkas), it was a split second “rip the Band-Aid off” moment that sparked the rapid closure. “We couldn't move forward with our landlord,” says Palinkas. The George Street location was just getting tougher, compounded by the nearby year-long closure of the Fremantle Traffic Bridge, and rent going “up and up.” Talks with their landlord were drawn out over months but they “would not budge.” A rent deferral was offered, but “there was no miracle about to happen in six months,” Whelan says, that would make the situation economically viable. 

Speaking not even six months on, the closure is still obviously a raw topic; it likely will be for many years. Whelan says, “there’s never a right time to go, and that was a problem. We were going to be trapped doing the same thing. This [situation with the landlord] happened and we just went, right, that's it.” Palinkas reflects on creating “a great business” but says that you have to weigh how much your business is taking from you. Is it worth it? “I wasn't embarrassed at all,” she says of the closure. “I was fucking furious to be honest.”

In mid-2025 the couple closed Ethos Deli + Dining Room, also on George Street. They say that the two don’t compare. “We had another venue that we could take our staff to, it didn't upset the apple cart,” says Whelan. “This one was heartbreaking, to have to say to people who worked full-time, ‘you've got no job.’” It was a case of working the phone, says Palinkas, determined to place her chefs. One front of house team member, full time and there from the beginning, was snapped up by (newly opened) Pearla & Co. There’s a palpable sense of relief that the team was able to move on so easily. 

But there’s sadness for “our beautiful customers, our locals,” says Palinkas, concerned for where they’ll drink on a Sunday, eat pizza on a Wednesday, and celebrate life’s moments. “All those that had weddings at Young George, now don't have that spot to return to.” This is the cost of closure for so many owner-operators who see beyond a balance sheet. 

Palinkas and Whelan mirror what a lot of operators say publicly or privately: Hospitality is tough going, the market is brittle, and most do it for a love of food and community. Palinkas says that despite the many feelings around the closure, there was “an actual joy” in making the decision and getting out. 

That joy is perhaps manifested in what comes next. For some, it’s new industries, a breather, or all-out retirement. For others it’s adjacent paths. Whelan has been working with Prepare Produce Provide, a West Australian not-for-profit which connects First Nations youth with mentorship, through cultural and culinary training. For some, it’s a chance to revisit what brought them to hospitality in the first place. 

Palinkas feels lucky, she says, that at 52 years old she still has a passion for cooking. A recent residency at a Margaret River winery stoked ideas of a pop-up exploring her fascination with Mexican cuisine, and separately plans to dust off the Ethos charcuterie brand. She starts to list the equipment and inventory held in several storage units. It seems you never escape a landlord of one sort or another, or for that matter, the instinct to feed people.