The Bulletin: Oliver’s twist

The Melbourne restaurant supporting Jamie Oliver’s charity foundation is largely owned by a businessman who is banking on profits which may not be there. BY ED CHARLES
JAMIE OLIVER’S GONE HOME. The cameras are switched off. The TV show will soon end. Now the local franchise of the celebrity chef’s charitable cause, the Fifteen Foundation Australia, and the commercial restaurant venture, Fifteen Melbourne, have to make it on their own.
Fifteen, the restaurant, is the public face of the project. It is the media vehicle that
– hopefully with the Jamie Oliver cachet – will make the charity work. The idea is that each year 20 disadvantaged youth – former drug users, alcohol abusers and the homeless – train through Box Hill TAFE and get their first year’s work experience at the restaurant.
In London, the original Fifteen venture attracted Prime Minister Tony Blair, former
US president Bill Clinton and a bunch of Hollywood celebrities as diners. John Howard’s yet to make an appearance at Fifteen Melbourne, which is booked out four months in advance for evening meals due to the profile created by Jamie’s Kitchen, the television reality series documenting the project. Only time will tell whether the restaurant can survive without that level of free publicity.
Melbourne-born chef Toby Puttock is at the helm. He worked at Fifteen in London and built his local profile through his involvement with Channel Ten’s show Ready Steady Cook.
But he hardly has the force of personality or profile of Oliver; as The Australian recently put it, “he couldn’t discipline a goldfish”.
With Lauren Oliver, director of the Fifteen Foundation and no relation to Jamie,
Puttock has been in the spotlight during the documentary. Melbourne moneyman Adam Garrisson, who put the deal together, keeps a low profile.
Questions started to be asked about the transparency of the charity and its association
with the restaurant when Herald Sun restaurant critic Stephen Downes was kicked out
– apparently on the orders of the owners.
So who is Adam Garrisson, who has seemingly come from nowhere, and what is his
relationship with the charity? Where did his money come from? He prefers to call himself an “investor” rather than a property developer although he is connected with
high-profile property developments.
Garrisson insists the motives behind his involvement in Fifteen are purely charitable.
“We are not doing it to make money,” he tells The Bulletin. He met Puttock when the chef was working in a Melbourne crepery and has put together about $1m of funding for the restaurant and the foundation’s start- up costs. He has pledged one-third of the restaurant’s profits, at least $100,000, to the foundation for the first two years of opera
tion. Garrisson, Lauren Oliver and Puttock are founding directors of the foundation,
for which a board is about to be appointed.
Company documents show he owns 85% of the restaurant through a shell company; the remainder is owned by Puttock.
So are we talking business or a charity vehicle? In England, all the restaurant profits
go to Oliver’s foundation. In Australia, it will be a third of the profits.
Garrisson’s current business focus is refurbishing the Windsor Hotel, the Melbourne
landmark, which he bought jointly with the Halim Group for $39m. In June, he sold 171 Collins Street, a property that he says he only owned a minority stake in, to the Macquarie Office Trust for $27.6m. Bought in 1999 for $15m, the plan for a $174m office, residential and retail development was abandoned after the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal refused planning permission.
In 2005, Garrisson and partner Morry Schwartz sold the 99-year lease to the GPO
Melbourne retail complex, bought for an undisclosed sum in 2001, to the Industry
Superannuation Property Trust for $81m.
This is all that can be found on public record about Garrisson’s business interests
apart from ASIC documents that refer to directorships of seven shell companies. He
isn’t keen on filling in the details. “I’m just a very private person,” he says.
Garrisson’s grandfather was a builder in Sydney around the time of the Great
Depression. His father, Peter, ran a real estate business in Toorak, where Garrisson
worked while studying law at university. He says: “That’s where I learned the basics of property, from my father.”
In 1993, he founded Wetherby Capital, in his first office in Block Arcade off Collins
Street. Wetherby was to be like a small merchant bank, its speciality packaging up
debt and equity for property deals.
While structuring deals, he was also marketing apartments in Asia. He says: “Every
Friday I’d leave here for over there, market units, and come back here on Monday. I do that every second weekend. Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Jakarta … What I was doing was trying to keep the cash flow of my business going by doing that.”
Over these years, Garrisson built his labyrinth of shell companies, which own his
investments. In July 2000, Garrisson’s luck turned with the 171 Collins Street investment, followed by GPO Melbourne.
Now, along with the Windsor, his focus is the Fifteen charityand the restaurant business. It needs to find from sponsors and donors $1.2m a year to support 20 trainees. To date, nearly $600,000 has been raised for the first year’s costs. That includes the $100,000 that is guaranteed from the restaurant and $174,000 from the Victorian government.
It looks like the National Australia Bank is reaping the real benefits. For a sponsorship of just a few hundred thousand dollars, it’s been able to use Fifteen as a centrepiece of its advertising and staff communications.
Garrisson claims it is one of the bank’s most popular sponsorships with staff, eclipsing the Commonwealth Games sponsorship.
Lauren Oliver is aware of public perceptions that the kids are being paid for by Jamie
Oliver. She says: “I think what is interesting in all this information … is there isn’t
a public understanding of the fact that the UK and Jamie doesn’t foot the bills for the
foundation over here, and that the money has to be raised.”
In reality, Jamie Oliver won’t be back in Australia until 2008. His only association
with the local foundation is the name, for which a licence fee on a sliding scale of 1%
to 3% of turnover is paid.
Lauren Oliver says: “There are thousands of charities out there doing great work and
keeping their profile up and we have to do the same. And that’s our challenge for the
next however long.”
Garrisson says: “That is a concern for us. We’ve been talking with our existing
partners and our PR company on how we keep the profile out there.”
The key to making the foundation a success is to ensure that the training ground
for the trainees, the restaurant, succeeds.
But the restaurant business is tough and the food Fifteen serves is of a similar price and quality to hundreds of other dining rooms.
These restaurants, although not charities, are also not staffed by former drug users.
Most restaurants make less than a 4% profit on turnover. According to the industry
group Restaurant & Catering Australia, a 90-seat restaurant would typically employ
one person for every 7.5 seats. At the top end, Melbourne’s Flower Drum employs
one staff member for every three seats.
Fifteen employs 32 – one staff for every 2.8 seats – in the 92-seat restaurant, plus the
20 trainees.
Fifteen is a $4m to $5m turnover business. It does 100 covers a night for the only meal on offer: a $90 tasting menu. Lunchtimes are about half full. For the restaurant to maintain its donation of $100,000 a year, profits would have to reach $300,000, a
profit of 6% to 7.5% of turnover.
Garrisson admits that Fifteen’s costs are higher than for other restaurants because
of the number of staff it employs. Ten staff both answer the 100 telephone lines and
wait tables.
So far, the TV program has been its marketing weapon. John Hart, CEO of Restaurant
& Catering Australia, says the day after the cameras stopped filming the reality
show My Restaurant Rules, the queues of willing diners dried up. The winner of the
first series, Room 19 in Western Australia, closed 18 months later.
Hart says: “My gut feeling is that they [Fifteen] won’t be significantly more prof-
itable but will have significantly more turnover.”