When Bei Bar & Bistro served its last steak with house-made fig custard last weekend, the modern Mediterranean restaurant’s closure felt like another nail in the coffin for a corner of Darlinghurst already on its knees. Bei’s owner, the seasoned Sydney restaurateur Leigh Cholakos, had been holding out for an uptick in the precinct where the sprawling Oxford & Foley development on the northern side of Oxford Street – which promises to eventually inject new food operators and commercial tenants – is under construction. In May, Big Poppa’s restaurant closed on Oxford Street and Cholakos warned she might also be looking to close in Darlinghurst.
“This site needs young energy,” Cholakos says of Bei’s home, a modernist building on the corner of Bourke and Foley Streets. Now it has found it with Stefano Marano, the former head chef at The Apollo, and his business partner, Jack Reid. Next month, they’ll relaunch the site as Avia, a 60-seat European restaurant.
Cholakos believes the duos’ timing is promising. Oxford & Foley is slated to finally open next year, with restaurateur Ibby Moubadder ( Nour, Ito ) to launch a Japanese-Peruvian restaurant there, and a revised development application for a Sydney branch of private club Soho House behind Oxford & Foley, approved in June. “The area feels like when we opened Apollo, and everything grew around us,” Marano says of the choice of location for Avia.
The pair, who met in 2014 working at Apollo, certainly have the.
