Episode 2 ft Kepos Street Kitchen

Since opening their now-institutional venue Kepos Street Kitchen in 2012, Michael Rantissi and Kristy Frawley have gone on to open a 2nd location, establish a catering company and release 2 top-selling cookbooks.

That’s not to say it was all plain sailing:

“Do you know what’s a funny thing? We’ve actually, between the two restaurants, been broken into four times.

“So the first time that we got broken into, our bread supplier, or someone, called Michael and said, ‘you know, you’ve been broken into?’ So we literally got out of bed and drove down there.

“By the last break-in, which was in between the two COVIDs, you just go, ‘oh yeah, we’ll call the police. Off you go.’”

And it’s not just problems with break-ins they had to deal with. Sometimes, success itself can cause issues:

“When Kepos Street Kitchen got to a stage where people had to book three, four months in advance to be able to go in, we started losing our customer base because of that. People started to get annoyed (that), as a local, they can’t really go in because outsiders used to be a little bit more organized than a local, and they would book so much in advance, while a local would just go, ‘oh, I don’t feel like cooking tonight, let’s go to our local,’ and they were not able to do that.

“And that’s where I thought, let’s open something close by to it that is designed for a destination, while this one stays as its own identity without dragging it to become something that it’s actually not.”

Find out more about the Lightspeed x POH Series RAW here:

https://www.lightspeedhq.com.au/raw-hospitality-podcast-series/ (https://www.lightspeedhq.com.au/raw-hospitality-podcast-series/)

Kepos Street Kitchen Website: https://www.keposstreetkitchen.com.au/ (https://www.keposstreetkitchen.com.au/)

Lightspeed Website: https://www.lightspeedhq.com.au/ ( https://www.lightspeedhq.com.au/)

POH Website: https://principleofhospitality.com/ ( https://principleofhospitality.com/)

A little more about RAW

RAW will be a podcast series about the highs and lows of hospitality.

Each episode our host over at POH, Shaun De Vries, will conduct off-the-cuff, unscripted and uncensored interviews with the best in the industry.

They’ll be talking about their experiences, what they’ve had to sacrifice or overcome to achieve their success, and what keeps them pushing forwards in an industry that has a tendency to both wear down and excite in equal measure.

The guests will leave everything in the open, showing that even though they may enjoy a success that seems out of reach to most, they too had to work hard to get there and we all start from the same place.