Restaurants & Resilience with Chef & Entrepreneur Tony Kelly

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

Nobody’s ever ripped the piss out of you who’s better than you. One of the truest things that’s ever been said and it changes, it changed my whole outlook on that. Cause just because somebody tells you that you’re not good enough, it doesn’t mean that you’re not. My unwavering belief in myself now is probably my strongest tool. And I’ve got a great ability to surround myself with extremely talented people. Business is funny, but it changes people. It changes people’s mindset. Everyone’s different and I’m not appeased by money, which makes me extremely difficult to deal with.

Before we get started, the team here at the Coast and Commerce podcast want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where this podcast is created, the Kaby Kaby and Jinaburra people. We honor their rich culture of storytelling as we share the inspiring stories of business leaders across the Sunshine Coast. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Let’s get on with the show.

Welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. This is the show where we bring inspiring stories from Sunshine Coast business leaders to help you in business, whatever you do here on the Sunshine Coast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media. And one of those inspiring business leaders we’ve got here today is Tony Kelly from Tony Kelly Restaurant Group. But you might also know him from some of the amazing restaurants around the coast like Rice Boi, Giddy Geisha, Piggyback, Market Bistro. There are some other ones as well, I’m sure we’ll get into.

Tony, welcome to the show. Thanks Ben. Great intro. You make me blush.

Well, I would love to hear a little bit about your story. So I know many people on the Sunshine Coast have probably either been to your restaurants or know of them, but they might not know of you too much. Can you tell us a little bit about your story? What got you into what you do today? So I was a budding golfer when I was at school. I wanted to be a golf pro as a young fella, but I got all the way up to, I think I was playing off two or three at the time. And my old man gave me a gap year straight after school but I think I got six months into that gap year and realised it was never gonna happen. And I loved cooking and I was really passionate. My mom and my grandmother were very passionate cooks at home. So I thought, you know, if you love what you do, why don’t you follow down that sort of career path. So I started my apprenticeship as a 18 year old and the Hyatt Coolum, when it was a proper five -star hotel was, you know, sort of was a birthplace of my culinary journey.

Spent about five or six years there and sort of really got a strong craving and passion to see the world and to cook for a living. So fast forward now, you know, that was, finished my apprenticeship in 98, travelled a bit, did a bit of work in the US, worked for Disney, spent some time up on Hayman Island. The wine bar was kind of where my wife and I cemented ourselves back on the Sunshine Coast. we had that in DuPort Avenue in Merichador for seven or eight years, I think. And it’s probably the wine bar comes up in conversation with me weekly, times, maybe five or six times a week. People either, you know, met there, got married there, did business there, had a funeral there. You know, it was, it was so heavily involved in so many Sunshine Coast locals lives that when it came time for me to, to come back into business again for myself.

was always going to be the Sunshine Coast. wanted to raise my family here and this is home and now we’ve got several good restaurants on the Sunshine Coast and they’re trading well and the locals really look after us. So we’re, we’re fortunate. Yeah. I dare say that early days of the wine bar, the culinary scene on the Sunshine Coast probably is very different to what it is today. I would say that was probably one of the only restaurants of its type, you know, in in the region at that time. Certainly south of the bridge. I mean, we always took the.. in the hospitality game, there’s north of the bridge, which is Noosa and then there’s south of the bridge, which is sort of Mooloolaba. Maroochydore certainly didn’t have anything. There was Ed Bistro, Daniel Jarrett, who is now cooking up at this Spice Tamarind property. He’s a good friend and a very talented chef. He was the head chef at a restaurant called Ed, which is sort of was tucked behind the Duport Tavern there. That was really, really good. Then there was the Spirit House and us and that was kind of it, Harry’s on Buderim. And then if you wanted another decent feed, you needed to go to Noosa. So back in the day, we felt like we were a bit before the time. I reckon you could drop that restaurant right now into the fray and it would go well. I feel there’s a part of me that thinks that Marco Bistro is probably a little nod to that restaurant. There’s a lot of similarities there and a lot of diehard wine bar fanatics certainly go into the restaurant.

and to Mark O ‘Bistro and enjoy themselves now. Share a story or two. Yeah. So I know you kind of talked about, know, that was quite a lot of history that you spanned over a short amount of time there. And, you know, it hasn’t all been ups and it hasn’t all been ups and successes along the way. know there’s been failures as well. you know, I do want to kind of go into a little bit of the ups and downs throughout today’s episode. And so that’s a little teaser to keep people sticking around.

You know, you have been described, you know, I’ve read anyway, they’ve been described as the king of cuisine or the restaurant baron of the sunshine case. How do those kinds of titles or those ideas kind of sit with you? No, not, not real well. mean, I guess, I mean, every it’s not, it’s nice in a way, but when people gloss over the hard work, and I know they don’t mean to do that because it’s nice when somebody calls you a restaurant baron or you know, you’ve got the Midas touch or something like that. But there’s a part of me that goes, well, it’s not as easy as that. You know, there’s been a lot of, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. There’s been a lot of fails and you know, a lot goes into it. You just don’t click your fingers. And suddenly you’ve got, you know, we’ve got 500 staff, depending on what time of year it is, all with a set of problems and all, you’ve got to, you wear that, that the burden of knowing that today I’m paying their salaries that will feed their families and pay their rent and that pressures on me to make sure the restaurants are busy enough this week to be able to do it again next week and that doesn’t come overnight, know, their success and our knowledge has been built off the back of their fails. yeah. Yeah. I want to make sure in this episode that what we share or what you share is relevant to anyone in any sort of business on the Sunshine Coast or beyond. I think one of the key things that I see from where I sit of what you’re kind of putting together with the various restaurants is something that intrigues me, I guess, is as a leader or maybe a visionary for where you’re taking the group of restaurants, how much of that success that you’ve had currently is like idea or concept versus execution?

I think it’s both. Our growth is determined by our people. So we won’t grow, we won’t execute on an idea unless we’ve got the people waiting in the wings. we find the restaurant group is an incubator for young talent who either don’t have the means or don’t have the knowledge to go out and do it themselves. And if we can in some way assist and educate and also provide an opportunity to those people then…

That’s the future of our growth. We’re not actively out there trying to grow and be the biggest and the best. We’re very focused on what we already have. And if there’s some young people coming through our ranks and we see that there’s an opportunity or an idea that seems to fit the mould and fit the times, then we’ll jump at it. yeah, I’m not sure if that answers your question, but we don’t sort of go.

Look, I want to do a Mexican restaurant and then we go out and find a space and then we try and find the people. It’s exactly the opposite to that. We find the people and go, look, we think that the industry right now might, there’s a gap on the Sunshine Coast for this concept. And then we have a look at our current pool of talent and go, I wonder if this guy is keen or this girl is keen and then we’ll have a yarn to them and we’ll try and get a bit of a business plan together and start the roots of the conceptual idea. And if if all those dots join them, we’ll go looking for a site. So it’s certainly not an overnight, make a decision, sign a lease, roll into it because there’s too much at stake. In the restaurant game, I can only speak about the restaurant games because I know it very well. It can take the house of cards. One bad mistake can cost you hundreds and thousands of dollars. And if you sign a wrong lease, it can cost you millions of dollars and take everything from you.

So you’ve got to be super careful and there’s a lot of thought process and there’s a lot of research that needs to happen for that to go. And I think in any industries, like I think the hospitality game is one of the most volatile potentially, you know, to various things. And there’s a lot on the line as well, right? So launching a restaurant, don’t necessarily know if it’s going to be a success and you’ve already invested a lot. It’s very fickle. Yeah. And everyone, the general public are vicious with it. They’re always looking for that next best thing, the new flash shiny restaurant.

So that in itself is hard. It’s hard to be cemented as a favourite for somebody. But the restaurant industry is so unregulated. Anybody can open a restaurant. you know, general rule of thumb is if you go out more than twice a week, you’re a restaurant critic and a professional restaurateur. and then a lot of mom and dads, you know, end up investing or opening their own cafe or restaurant or wine bar, thinking it’s kissing cheeks and shaking hands. And I think that’s where.

a lot of the catastrophe happens because as I said, it’s very easy to lose a shitload of money really, really quickly. Yeah. So you think about, you know, one of your, guess, probably most popular restaurant, maybe not most popular, but well-known restaurants, Rice Boi on the coast here. know, that was, I think, was one of your earlier current iterations of venues. it seems like there’s a bit of a bit of a mould that that one’s kind of created there, that you’ve then…

kind of rolled out into your other restaurants and Piggyback, Giddy Geisha and so on. Is that the way you look at it? Like it’s kind of like, not that you’ve got the Midas touch, but not that it’s a guaranteed success. Because what a lot of people fail to appreciate or to mention was we opened Riceboy in 2017 and the general consensus when I said I signed a lease at the Wharf was everyone called me an idiot. Prior to the development of the Wharf.

Yeah, the Wharf, unlike Ocean Street, when I had restaurants in Ocean Street, Ocean Street was buggered. There was homeless people everywhere, was hardly any shops opened, there was nothing there. The wharf felt like it was a ghost town. A lot of people thought it was falling down, was derelict, there was no leases in place. It was done. The developers who currently brought it, Evans Longley, had the foresight to jump in.

invested a lot of money. And one of the things that the Dirk Long sort of said to me, which cemented my decision to go in there in my head was the fact that he wanted the wharf to be his family’s legacy. And Matt Evans is his business partner. He is a Sunshine Coast boy. My father did a lot of work with his dad back in the day. And I realised that the Sunshine Coast legacy for their families was very important to them. So I thought failure is not going to be an option for these guys. So I had a lot of very fond memories of the wharf as a kid being the place where you wanted to go. And if you, if your mom and dad happened to say, we’re going to the wharf today, you thought all your Christmas has come at once. So I knew that it had been there before. So we opened Rice Boi and it was a slow burn at the start. It was really hard. We had probably a quarter of the size of space that we had now.

And it was full maybe on a Saturday night, we started off, you know, it was good. We started off with a bit of a bang, it wasn’t, you know, the revenue that we’re doing today, we would do, the revenue we would do, we’ll probably end up doing today on a Monday was about the same revenue as what we’re doing for seven days of trade when we first opened. A lot of people just reckon we went bang and a rise. But over a six or eight month period, it grew and we…

We soon realised that we really struck a chord with the coast locals. And one of the driving factors of that, we opened in November 2017. Our first winter when it’s rainy and it’s cold and it’s Monday night and you’ve got a full restaurant, that is the definitive moment where you go, well, we’ve got a proper business here. Because I challenge you to find another one on the coast no matter where you go. That’s the same. So we just off the back of knowing that,

we took on a bit more space and a bit more space and a bit more space. We started off with 170 square metres of space at the wharf and that was the Riceboy footprint. And I think Riceboy is about, it’s a tad over 450 square metres now. It’s a massive venue. It takes a lot of work just to keep it maintained and clean and you know, it’s a beast. So if you look at what it is now and you try and think about it being that small little joint back in the water at the wharf there where nobody knew where it was, it’s hard to fathom. But that was the start, that was it. And you’re right, when we knew that we were onto something there, people love the food, so we used the DNA, which is Rice Boi, and we developed Giddy Geisha, and then Giddy Geisha, we wanted a bit of a land play, so we brought the freehold out at Palmwoods, and we knew that that…

Hinterland sort of area is is really undercooked on the Sunshine Coast and that’s my patch. I live out there and so we jumped in and used that same DNA that we knew was successful at Rice Boi and Those two restaurants were born off the back of it. We’ll never do another Rice Boi. But I used to say I’ll do one in Newshorn. I’ll do one in Clounder and I shouldn’t say never say never but

We don’t want to cut and paste. I think the success of Gittie Geisha and Piggyback are the fact that it’s not Rice Boi. It’s, I believe people ask me all the time about what’s my favourite restaurant. I can say that my favourite Asian restaurant, the food I think is the best at Gittie Geisha. probably piggybacks food more because it’s close to my home and it’s bloody good. But I also, I do enjoy Rice Boi as well, but there’s something about the Gittie Geisha food.

I don’t know, it’s really good. just these very small little tweaks that we do with the menu. But we’re not going to be this cookie cutter where we just, we have a success story and we just cut and paste. It just becomes plastic. And I think that the, you walk into some of these venues that have got multi -sites and they just, there’s, I think there’s a bit of a lack of soul in it. You know what I mean? So we want every restaurant to have its own personality. It wants to talk to itself, you know, about itself when you walk in there. And I think, that has been successful, we’ve managed to do that. Yeah, it’s an interesting mindset to have as a business owner because my gut feel is that the easy option would be to copy and paste, right? 

To be like, well, Rice Bois successful, let’s have Rice Bois in every suburb or around Australia or whatever that kind of expansion plan is. the way that you’ve gone by taking that DNA as you described it and replicating that is I think it as a business owner, kind of inspires other ideas for me in other industries. That’s a similar sort of playbook that I think other people could potentially consider is, you know, how do you expand by taking the DNA of what you do well here into not a whole other industry, like you’re still in restaurants, right? But you’re not in, you’re not competing restaurants now. Instead, people will go to Rice Boi and then next weekend they’ll go to Giddy Geisha and then next weekend they’ll go to Piggyback.

Cause it’s not like, well, we’ve already been Rice Boi. If you, you, if you take the crux of our conversation we’re having right now and go, you’ve got a very successful podcast here. You could do a podcast that’s based around lifestyle or four wheel driving or fishing or all you gotta do is change the topic, research, educate yourself. You’ve got the crux to it. You know how to, you know what mics to use. You know how to film you. You’ve got the foundation, right? All you gotta do is educate yourself in and around a different, a different space. And I think you can do that. restaurants are funny. Like it’s.

Yeah, it’s I think if I was to tell you some of the some of the opportunity that’s been presented to us to franchise licence agreement, roll out Rice Bois, you’d probably think I was mad not to do it. But there’s a part of me that as stupid as it may be, I want to protect Rice Boi because I feel like the Sunshine Coast owns it as much if not more than what I do because my success would be nothing without the Sunshine Coast and the Sunshine Coast diehard locals have supported me in what I’ve done so well. So I don’t want to take the piss by opening at Southbank or opening at the Gold Coast or Tweed Heads or I just don’t want to do that. And I’ve done that. 

We did that with with junk when I was there and it was fun and it was successful. It’s a beast and it’s still going really well now. But I realised we’re not a shopping centre model. We’re not a franchise brand. We want the design process, the birth of a new baby. We want that. That’s what excites us and that’s what I think excites the locals. And when people go, what’s the next one? I think when we do it, it will be again, it will be completely different and it’ll be fun and people will jump all over it, I reckon. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So as you mentioned though, it hasn’t all been success in an instant kind of, you know, hits out of the park. I can see the bags under my eyes. Well, know, the grey hair. Yeah. So I’m interested to explore with you and, know, however much you’re happy to share around, you know, those, those failures as well and how you’ve moved on from those all.

Maybe tell us about those. It’s a deep pool. mean, we, I’ve had a lot of fails. I mean, even if you look back at the Wine Bar, I mean, we all, I joke about, with Ken Reed from re property group. was one of my business partners. Him and his dad, Harry were instrumental in my life. And, and I would consider them to be, close friends, family friends. And, he always jokes around about the fact that we didn’t make any money at the wine bar. you know, we’ve got successful businesses now and he, sits back in the wine bar, sorry, sits back at Marco Bistro now and he goes, why wasn’t I like this when we had the wine bar? But I suppose that’s 20 years of education now. Because when I was, when I was at the helm of the wine bar, all I cared about was making people happy. The financial success of the restaurant, as much as I cared about it, it was secondary. So the GFC come along and, and flogged us to death. We, we managed to get out of the wine bar, basically sold the lease for nothing. We still had a bunch of bills that we needed paying. we had the wine bar, we had a deli called the Kitchen Pantry. also had Ilsa Conde, which was an Italian restaurant. All got flogged because just the, if you’re on the Sunshine Coast during the GFC, it was catastrophic. We went from doing, I don’t know, six or 700 people a week at Wine Bar to 50. It was, it was bad. So after we got belted there and I moved away with a tail between our legs and tried to regroup and, and try and get a bit of a bank balance back up. I mean, we, we sold, we sold our car to pay our last bill, my share of the bill. So that was hard, but off the back of that fail, we, I got offered a great opportunity to go and open the Stokehouse, which probably in my careers,

real cornerstone it was it’s probably laid the foundation of the success that I’ve had now but you know there’s there’s a raft of things that we that have failed we are even most recently a fish and chip shop called saltwater which we we signed a lease at the wharf with them we lost a bunch of money we just weren’t good enough and I soon realised that you know you need to be really really laser focused on what you want to do and and really tap into that market and know what the locals and what people want. Now, as much as when I go out for fish and chips, I want to have fresh local line court snapper, and I’m happy to pay, but the reality of it is that families that go out for fish and chips can’t afford to pay that amount of money. 

And the market who is happy to pay that is very shallow. So the guys who do it really, really well, all the the fish and chip shops that are attached to the Mooloolaba slipway down Mooloolaba fisheries and so forth down that end of the spit. Jeez, they do it well. And trying to compete with those guys, you’re better off just leaving it to them because they’ve got the best fish. They can sell it cheap and you just get the best value for money. So we tried and got belted. So that was hard. 

You know, even down to when we first opened Spiro, we opened with a bang and probably took our eye off the prize a little bit. We never got to the stage where the restaurant was losing money, but it took a lot of work to really sink our teeth back into it. And now it’s a fantastic business. I’ve had my relationship with the best friend fail due to junk and probably our expansion. And we took on more business partners and all that went to custard.

Very valuable lessons that I probably wouldn’t change any of it because that’s put me in the mindset that I have now and it’s educated me in a way that I would never have had the knowledge without that beating. So it was hard. And I suppose I look at how I pulled myself up off the couch from that because that was a big business. was the last foray before Rice Boi opened was a business called Worldwide Hospitality Group, which I ended up selling my share of that business out. But that was off the back of a conversation with my business partners where they sat down and said, your services are no longer required. We don’t want you here anymore. Right. That’s not easy to take. That’s a kick in the nuts, especially when I was the only hospitality guy in our partnership. And, you know, to sit down and have that said to you, it’s, you know, it’s really, really hard. Business is funny, but it changes people. It changes people’s mindset.

Everyone’s different and I’m not appeased by money which makes me extremely difficult to deal with. I’ve got a very happy marriage, I’ve got great children and they’re the most important things to me. I could be dead broke in the gutter but if I’ve got my wife and kids next to me, I’m the richest man in the world. So when you start talking or trying to negotiate or strong on me around money, it’s completely fruitless because I don’t care. I protect it and I value it because we’ve got business partners but you know, that’s secondary to me. And if it wasn’t the undying belief my wife has in me and my ability to run a business and cook, that was the only reason I got off the couch. I was in a dark place. was, it was challenging times, but yeah, was, Rice Boi wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for Melissa Kelly, that’s for sure.

There you go, a lot to be said for having that support network around you of those that lift you up and drive you forward. It’s hard to start again when you’re north of 40, you know, it’s hard because you, I suppose your motivation and everything changes as you get older. So, geez, I don’t know what I would have done if it wasn’t for her. I don’t know what I would have done for a career to feed my family, but the day she kicked me off the couch and told me to to grow up and basically believe in myself again. We didn’t have enough money in the bank account to pay for our school, kids school fees. So it was a, it was a trying time. Yeah. There’s, when we’re, when we’re prepping for this interview, you shared a little bit about that and it made me think of the book Fail Forward by John Maxwell. There’s a quote in that where he says that 90% of businesses who fail don’t actually, they’re not actually defeated that they just quit. And what I hear from you is, is you didn’t quit.

Right. You could have quit. I imagine you could have quit. wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. And have done something else. Yeah. Sure. You would have found something, right? But you didn’t, you picked up, you moved forward and you learned from those, I guess, failures to use that in inverted commas, right? Yeah. And somebody once told me that nobody’s ever ripped the piss out of you who’s better than you. Yeah. That’s a good one. And I felt like I’d failed and I wasn’t good enough. 

And then when they told me that and yeah, you’re laying in bed in a really quiet time in your own head. And if you say that to yourself, it’s one of the truest things that’s ever been said. And it changes, it changed my whole outlook on that. Cause just because somebody tells you that you’re not good enough, doesn’t mean that you’re not. It’s just, you know, how you bounce back from that. And I think my wavering belief in myself now is probably my strongest tool because I just believe that I can do it.

And I’ve got a great ability to surround myself with extremely talented people. And yes, I can cook, but I’m good at HR. I think if you look at our team of people, Harriet, my, Bokker, Luke Stringer, Mitch Smith, Eliza Malloy, list goes on and on. Justin at Market Bistro, Zasha, my personal assistant, who she’s got no right to be a personal assistant. She’ll be a CEO of a company.

You look at those repertoire, that repertoire of talent that I’ve got there, I can’t teach those guys anything. They’re teaching me something every single day. I just give them a great stage to play on and, and orchestrate their, their willingness to, to cook and to look after people and to run businesses. And we give them that stage and let them go, give them the tools that they need. And you know, that’s the success of those restaurants are very much dependent on that. Those guys. Yeah.

If there’s any recipe for success, think that’s it. It’s people, you know, because I can’t be there. I’m here talking to you. The restaurants are busy today. So I can’t, I couldn’t do it without them. And my father taught me once, he said it once and I remember thinking really, really hard about what he meant by it. And as a young kid, I didn’t understand, but he said, if you open a business and you can’t walk away from it, you don’t have a business, you’ve got a job.

And I had baffled me about it. And it wasn’t until I really sunk my teeth into business, I really realised that it’s so true. Even if you look at this, there’s a thousand different careers out there like doctors who earn great living, but if they go on holidays, they don’t earn, their business stops. But if you can create a great business that one, you’ve got something to sell, but two, you can walk away, take a few days off and your business is still ticking over. You can put these systems in place where it can still manage without you for a period of time. That’s, I believe is a very big definition of business. Yeah, 100%. Thank you for sharing that. Just as we start to wrap up here, I want to talk about the Sunshine Coast. So this is the Coast and Commerce podcast. We focus on success stories from the Sunshine Coast, but for you,

You know, you were born and grew up here on the Sunshine Coast. You went away for a while. You came back to the coast. Why the coast for you as a place to do business? It’s tough to do business here. The diehard Sunshine Coast locals are fiercely protective of the place. But I guess where you, it’s funny where you call home. Like my wife is from Brisbane. We lived in Brisbane for a while and it wasn’t until we had our second baby, Connor.

And she was like, it feels like we need to go back to the Sunshine Coast. goes, we lived there for 10 years, it feels like home. And it’s something about, I don’t know whether it’s just where your roots are. Like I drive around Maroochydore and around Maroochy Waters and stuff. And that was all bush. My father was in business on the Sunshine Coast for 40 years. I think it’s got a lot to do with that because he…

Even, I can remember his business cards. He had a large Crane hire business called Kelly Green Crane hire. And every business card said the local lads. And he always used to say to me, if you look after the Sunshine Coast locals, they’ll look after you. And it’s not until you look at Riceboy and its statistics where, yes, we peak up because during school holiday times, the population will all about triples, but we get another spike straight after the school holidays because all the locals come back out. So the locals go, we’re not going during school holidays because it’s, shit to park there at the best of times. So as soon as the school holidays are over, all the locals come back out. it’s like, they really support, they support you. If you’ve got a great product and you look after them, they will fiercely look after you. And I’m, I’m assuming I can only speak about the Sunshine Coast, but when we had our business in Toowoomba, was exactly the same.

target the locals, you know, if you’ve got specials or whatever, or even down to your marketing, if you can make sure your marketing is pointed at the locals, then they’ll look after you. And we try and do a lot for charity and a lot that we sort of don’t spook about. Like every Christmas we give each of the, we give the restaurant manager and the head chef a thousand bucks and say, go to your local Coles or Woolies, just look for, you know, somebody that might be down and out who are clearly buying their Christmas lunch gear and give them 300 bucks and buy their groceries for them for Christmas. We don’t sruike about that through media, but that’s, we look forward to that. We’re talking about it now, Ready for Christmas now, and we’re all excited about it, because it’s a really fun thing to do. it’s going back and I think sometimes it’s…

It’s a bit of a throwaway line. You get back to the community. But if you really do, and it doesn’t have to be that, people, a lot of people can’t afford a thousand bucks, but you don’t have to do that. I drove past a little girl just near the back streets, the plaza there, and she was selling lemonade on a lemonade stand. And I thought, big fan of Gary Vee, and he will always stop. And we, I stopped and there was a litre of lemonade and I gave the, I gave you 20 bucks for, to buy it all, but I didn’t take any of it.

because I thought young kid out having a crack and the mum couldn’t believe it and I said, know, that’s Rice Boi buying all your lemonade for you. And I said, if you ever put it in a bottle, make sure you come and see us and we’ll sell it in the restaurant. And this little kid’s eyes was lit up, but that’s fun. And that’s my way. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but that’s, I think is in essence what being a local is all about, you know.

And it doesn’t even have to be that. can be picking up a bit of rubbish and putting it in the bin. But if you look after your community, it will look after you. think that’s what it means to be a Sunshine Coast local. It gets lost in the cities, you know, because there’s so many people and it’s always so busy and it’s like, everyone’s trying to scratch together one more minute of the day where the Sunshine Coast is where we live and it’s our home. Yeah, I love it. That’s awesome. So what’s next, Tony? What’s next for you? Can you share the next Tony Kelly restaurant group opening plans?

Look, to be honest with you, we don’t have one. We went into 2024 saying it’s not going to be a gap year, we’re, you know, at beginning of the year, there was a, it was a strange sort of time around our economy. A lot of people feeling a lot of pain. So we thought rather than jump into a project, let’s just hold tight for 24. If something comes across the desk, we’ll have a look at it. And there’s a there is a lot of opportunity on the Sunshine Coast at the moment. But we’re in, we’re right now planning for 2025 and there’s a couple of things we’re looking at, but nothing secured. But we’re super keen to do another Italian concept, maybe just focus around pizza, because it’s been so successful at Boca. We’ve got a very cool Mexican concept we want to roll out and

I would love to do a proper, really well done steakhouse, like a Peter Lugers from New York City, that style of steakhouse. I don’t have sites. We’ve spoken to a lot of people. We’re in no rush. But this year has been a bit of consolidation and making sure we’ve got all the systems in place. And this year will be the first year since 2017 that we have an open venue. And to be honest with you, been kind of.

Kind of Had a couple of early marks and just like yours, we’ve launched a podcast, which has been really fun with a real good friend of mine, Peter Marchant and Corey. He looks after all of our audio visual stuff and seeing those guys get an opportunity to own their own thing. And all I do is chat on it. So I’m no brains of that operation, but we’ve got to speak to some really interesting people, a lot of industry people, a lot of friends, which is kind of cool. But yeah.

2025 might be a bit of an action packed year, we’ll see. I won’t bite off more than what I can chew, but we’ve got the people, we’ve got the concept. So probably after this we’ll have 10 ,000 developers ring me up going, you got a Mexican concept? Anyway, we’ll see what happens. yeah, we’ll see the rest of this year out with what we’ve got. All the restaurants are really busy, which is fantastic. looking forward to Christmas and a bit of a break, which is great. Yeah. You mentioned before the…

Evans and Long developers at the wharf, one of those guys mentioned that it was his legacy here on the coasts. What’s your legacy? That’s an easy one. My legacy is firstly my children, but when we first opened Rice Boi, I sat down with Mitch and Eliza and as I was saying before we started filming that we always say that we want to, it’s our people, we want to make sure that we

be famous for something. And we said very, very clearly one of our biggest ethos is we want to be the best employer on the Sunshine Coast. And I would like to see when our people move on, they might be with us for a couple of years and they move to Melbourne, that when, you know, maybe the Stoke house in Melbourne grabs their CV and they see Marco Bistro, Riceboy, Bocca, they go, got to get this person in.

That type of legacy for me is really important to us. I wanna really stand for something in our industry. And it’s been an industry of rape and pillage for years and years, in particular with staff. And I see it feels like the land of broken dreams and promises. Cause a lot of restaurant owners over promise and under deliver where we’ve tried to be the opposite of that. We try to under promise and over deliver. And if we can…

push through some really, really good, talented young people through the system and create future business owners or just even people want to go overseas and cook and pour wine and develop a career out of this industry. That’s success for me. It really is. So hopefully I’ve answered that question well enough for you. But I suppose primarily we want to be the best employers on the Sunshine Coast. But if we can provide an avenue and a platform for

developing future leaders, that would be cool. Yeah. Well, that’s the definition of legacy is something that then perpetuates through those people, right? Yep. So I love that. Yeah. Tony, for people who are interested in maybe listening to your podcast or following more of what you’ve got going on, where’s the best place for people to follow you? LinkedIn or where’s your podcast? LinkedIn or behind podcast is the link. you know, I say that I’m the least tech savvy guy. So even when I listen to it, I go straight onto the behind podcast.

Instagram page and follow the links and you can either watch it on YouTube or Spotify Or jump on the Tony Kelly restaurant group dot com dot au and it’s got links everywhere for it So and you can check out the restaurants make bookings and do everything from there and all those platforms We’re live where we’re really active on all of them So we shouldn’t be too hard to find if somebody’s interested in having a listen and or sending me a message by all means It’s fun. Awesome. Hey, Tony. Thanks for joining me on the coast and commerce podcast today

Pleasure, mate. It’s cool and I’m chuffed that you reached out and it’s great. You’ve got a great podcast here and I enjoy listening to it, so well done. Awesome. Thank you. And for you guys watching or listening, make sure you hit subscribe or whatever podcast player on YouTube so that you don’t miss another episode. We’ll have links to the places that Tony shared there in the show notes page for this podcast. And we’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks, guys. Bye bye.