By RNZ
Thirteen years after walking away from restaurant life, chef and entrepreneur Simon Gault is “fizzing” to be opening a new hospitality business in Auckland in 2027.
Gault, who opened his first restaurant at 22, says his new venture will be “a really cool space”.
“There’ll be a walk into a big deli where you can buy products, but then you can go and sit down and a family style, authentic Italian pizzeria, pasta, fresh salads and fish and things like that. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s got me fizzing,” he told Jim Mora on RNZ’s Sunday Morning.
Gault says the business is as yet unnamed and an opening date is at least six months away.
“I’m totally in the hands of the council, it might be six months or more to get a resource consent.”
Gault’s career has included working in restaurants overseas and in Aotearoa, cooking for billionaire Larry Ellison on his superyacht and judging five seasons of MasterChef New Zealand. He says he left the restaurant business because it wasn’t conducive to family life.
“I had a 1-year-old and I was like, this is just, you know, I want to be remembered as a dad, not the guy that was always in the restaurant.
“I used to have a nanny and I would get my daughter up in the morning, get her off to school, then I’d go to work, cook lunch, drive home. I live way out south and I’d get her dinner, early into bed, leave the nanny to it, go to work.
“And I’d finish work at 12 o’clock at night … One day I just said, enough’s enough. This is just ridiculous.
“So I hung my boots up and that was 13 years ago. And now I’ve got a daughter who’s saying, oh, I’d love to be a waitress in a restaurant, Dad.”
- RNZ