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It’s 11.54am on a Friday, and a woman in a bedazzled shirt is swinging eagerly on golden handles, trying to pull open the double doors of one of Melbourne’s most palatial restaurants.
After a few seconds, she concedes defeat, slumping into one of the black metal chairs laid out for diners who routinely arrive early for the midday lunch service at Maison Bâtard.
Finally, the tall glass doors click open with a whoosh, sounding like a collective sigh. The diners hurry inside.
The creative director
Stepping into one of Chris Lucas’ restaurants is like stepping into a theme park. Beyond inhaling the food, he wants you to feel the weight of the 110-page wine list at Bâtard; marvel at its “icy throne” of an oyster bar, flanked by marble and smoked mirrors; and gawk at boisterous dining institution Chin Chin’s famous, and sometimes unsettling, projections.
His head chefs’ names elude most. Lucas is the face of the operation – the creative director, the visionary, Walt Disney.
It’s a role that sees him rub shoulders with the rich and famous – arm in arm with Margot Robbie, his restaurants visited by Drake and John Cena – and in the ear of Australia’s most influential people.
He is one of former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews’ most vocal, and arguably influential, opponents – even when the restaurateur’s team feared it was to his detriment.
As it stands, he has 12 restaurants operating nationally (including Grill Americano in Sydney, which opened in November), or almost double that if you count the micro bistros and bars inside his larger venues.
He has amassed a sprawling commercial empire. Between 2021 and 2024, he bought $70.1 million worth of property in Melbourne’s CBD alone.
Bâtard, a four-level Parisian giant, is his most ambitious project yet, thought to have cost $45 million. And still, he’s plotting world domination.
He designs his venues alongside wife Sarah Lucas, with whom he shares a 22-room mansion in Toorak bought in 2014 for $18.55 million, according to commercial records.
Lucas has “fingers in every pie”, and control of every menu in his restaurants, down to the commas. “He’s hands-on with everything,” his former publicist Monica Brown tells me, laughing.
“I mean, you’ve got to love working with somebody like that, or you’d want to kill him.”
Where delays have hampered billionaire Justin Hemmes’ plans to infiltrate Melbourne’s hospitality sector on a grand scale, Lucas is on an unprecedented run of restaurant openings.
His restaurants are a refuge for the wealthy, a hangout for those too rich to care (hello, stealth-wealthers sporting trackpants), a go-to for people who want to impress (clients, dates) and the frequent site of once-a-year – or once-in-a-lifetime – celebrations.
Overwhelmingly, though, they are ambitious and aspirational – like his life story, the way he tells it.
The salesman and strategist
When I meet Lucas, it’s at Grill Americano in Melbourne – a typically stylish affair frequented by businessmen and barristers.
He’s more relaxed than I imagined. Chattier. He asks the maître d’: “Did you tell her who had lunch here yesterday?”
They did.
“Ricky Martin,” he says, grinning.
A friend tells me before our interview that, at the opening of his restaurant Carlotta in Canberra, Lucas knew everyone in the room.
He closed the restaurant just 14 months later, in December, impatient with the lack of progress in its CBD precinct, which he said was unconducive to his “multi-venue model” and plans for expansion in the national capital.
“It isn’t consistent with our strategy to operate just one restaurant in a market,” Lucas told Good Food.
So profound is his crowd-pulling power, developers and project heads approach him to move into their buildings (he’s got another four venues in the works, including two at a $400 million Toorak development, and all-electric restaurants at a swanky $1 billion Bourke Street office tower).
He haggles on rent and pushes developers to chip in for restaurant fit-outs, according to sources not authorised to speak on the subject.
He is strategic. A master networker. He is involved in the details – he will handpick bronze sconces from French antique stores. So it surprises me a little he still sees himself as a “kid from Geelong with no money”, whose success came off the back of an opportunity to go to university in Melbourne – something he wouldn’t have done if it wasn’t free.
Before our interview, he asks me whether I’m from country New South Wales. I tell him not quite, but a regional area. He nods, as if to say “me too”.
We talk a lot about his ultimate goal as a restaurateur: elevating Australia to international culinary acclaim.
The country’s distance from the northern hemisphere holds it back, he says, but it’ll only take the success of one or two local restaurants overseas to “open the floodgates”.
He reveals his team is looking at opening venues in the Middle East, Britain and the United States.
“We’re having a bit of a go at all of those areas,” he tells me.
A while later, I put to him one of the main criticisms of the Lucas Collective that I’ve seen in hospitality circles: effectively, that they don’t care about the “little guy”. Lucas appears confused, hurt.
“Well, I don’t understand that because I grew up as a little Greek immigrant boy in Geelong, in a pub working with my dad, with nothing. And then my dad died when I was quite young, and my mother brought me up on a widow’s pension,” says Lucas, whose surname is an anglicisation of the Greek Loukas.
One former bartender at Chin Chin – the Aussie-Thai juggernaut that made Lucas a household name, and divided diners with its no-bookings policy – tells me colleagues laughed at her request for a pay rise because they were so rare.
Some complain Lucas restaurants “will work you ’til you break”.
But a former marketing assistant recalls Lucas was horrified to find her working more than six hours’ overtime, at about 11pm, printing menus in a back room at one of the venues. Lucas finished the job himself, staying until at least midnight.
Lucas says: “The foundation stone of what I’ve achieved today is because I have regard for – I won’t use the ‘little’ bit, because I don’t really understand that – but the people who work for me, work with me.
“You know, our business supports thousands and thousands of small farmers, winemakers, who rely on us.”
Lucas got his first inklings about restaurants at age 10, stepping inside the kitchen of Melbourne’s first modern hotel, where his uncle was the executive chef.
His father, Kon, warned him against a life in the restaurant business, leading him to study pharmacology at university in the years after Kon’s death.
He graduated, but dramatically changed course because of advice from his faculty head: Lucas was one of the worst chemists he’d ever seen, and he should become a salesman instead.
Lucas took it to heart, and signed up to sell computers with global technology company IBM – which was recruiting on campus – in 1981.
It was a move that saw him work in Tokyo, London, Silicon Valley and New York; exploring restaurants and izakayas, courtesy of the company’s generous expense account; and partying at the likes of Studio 54.
Years later, Lucas would tell the Australian Financial Review the job took him from “simple country boy to global executive”. He was highly regarded among IBM colleagues, according to people who knew him at the time.
Then the niggling allure of the restaurant business proved too much.
After a decade at IBM, Lucas sold his stake in telecommunications start-up Primus Telecom, funding his debut restaurant venture, St Kilda brasserie One Fitzroy Street, in 1995. There was “no Mark Zuckerberg story” – no tech millions, Lucas maintains – only a gamble that paid off.
Property journalist Nicole Lindsay tells me One spearheaded a “cleaner” image for the area.
“That really changed the nature of that whole strip, and St Kilda in general,” says Lindsay, who tracks Lucas’ commercial portfolio.
But it was with South Yarra’s Botanical, which Lucas bought and renovated for $7 million, that his status as culinary visionary was carved out.
He mortgaged his home and borrowed from the bank and family connections to afford it, before upending the pub’s layout and erecting a pick-it-yourself wine wall.
With top British chef Paul Wilson, he instituted a popular early iteration of the now-ubiquitous gourmet burger (a menu item Lucas’ wife refuses to eat but a mainstay at Bâtard). He sold the leasehold for Botanical in 2007 for a reported $16 million.
When the Bot was named the Good Food Guide’s 2004 restaurant of the year, reviewer John Lethlean wrote that the place groaned “with energy and innovation”.
“As with most things Lucas has done, he did this properly,” Lethlean wrote. “Acres of cash have been splashed.”
When I interview the now 64-year-old Lucas, he’s just announced his Collective Foundation, a huge part of which he says is about elevating hospitality as a sought-after career path in Australia.
He’s working with La Trobe University to design an “elite” program of specialised hospitality diplomas and degrees, and fund scholarships for underprivileged kids.
“It’s great that someone like me, coming out of Geelong – [which] was just a small country town at the time – [can] achieve some success,” he says.
“I want to be able to see if we can do that for other young kids.”
The Society man and the premier
Lucas does not always come off as the country boy made good.
He has the polish and pugnacity of a business titan accustomed to getting his way, and will slam his restaurant door in the face of a premier.
It all started with a phone call to Melbourne talkback radio. Long before the Andrews government announced its road map out of lockdown, its relationship with business – especially the restaurant business – was starting to fracture.
Lucas’ tipping point came in August 2020, during Melbourne’s second lockdown, when then-premier Andrews announced he would push for a 12-month extension to state-of-emergency powers – a move that would give authorities the power to enforce lockdowns for another year.
It was, he told 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, the equivalent of “dropping a bomb” on Victorians.
“The premier is disconnected,” Lucas lamented. “I think he has a lack of understanding of what’s actually going on in the community at the grassroots level.”
The interview started a media campaign among restaurateurs fearing for their livelihoods. Within half an hour of hanging up the phone, Lucas received thousands of messages of support.
Later, one media outlet described the phone call as a “tear-here” moment for Melbourne, when demands for an end to lockdowns became unrelenting.
“The mental state of Victorians is at such distressing levels,” Lucas told Mitchell. “The suicide rates, the family bust-ups, the torment, the financial pressures amongst the people of Victoria is extraordinary.”
Lucas became the uncompromising spokesman for the hospitality industry’s revolt against COVID-19 restrictions. Again and again, he derided the Andrews government, arguing it was needlessly decimating businesses and destroying Victorians’ mental health.
His public scolding of Andrews was so frequent that his then-publicist Brown says she was concerned about alienating diners.
“There are times when I told him to take the foot off the pedal,” Brown tells me over the phone from Britain.
When his contempt led him to break one of hospitality’s unspoken rules, Brown was particularly worried.
Andrews’ wife, Catherine, tried to make a lunch booking at his South-East Asian venue Hawker Hall, and Lucas told her there was nothing available.
The restaurateur later defended this rejection, pointing out that the Italian restaurant Di Stasio also knocked back Andrews for a birthday booking.
The premier had his “own cross to bear”, but they were allowed to disagree, Lucas told a media outlet. After all, he said, “we live in a democracy”.
“[Lucas] was never a Dan Andrews fan during COVID,” Brown says. “There were a lot of people who were, and when you own a restaurant, your door’s open to everybody, whatever the politics are … you welcome everybody.”
To this day, some former senior Andrews staffers refuse to eat at Lucas’ restaurants, instead favouring those belonging to restaurateurs like Andrew McConnell, who were less outspoken about the state government’s COVID-19 containment measures.
Brown and Lucas maintain the restaurateur’s issue wasn’t with the premier himself but his policy decisions. “[They] were driving [Lucas] crazy because he was on the receiving end of them,” Brown says.
During our interview, Lucas tells me that two of his young staff took their lives during the pandemic.
“Two?” I ask, taken aback. His eyes well up with a mixture of anger and sadness: “Two too many.”
Lucas had a line to Victoria’s then-treasurer Tim Pallas during the pandemic, as well as then-tourism minister Martin Pakula and prolific Andrews critic, former Liberal MP Tim Smith.
He often spoke to City of Melbourne’s then-lord mayor Sally Capp, and was also in touch with former Labor leader Bill Shorten and then-federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg, with whom he shared his despair.
But his frustration was not being able to get through to Andrews himself, according to insiders. “I did meet with lots of other politicians, and to be honest, [Andrews] didn’t really make himself available. He didn’t want to talk to anyone,” Lucas tells me.
The professional stakes were immense for Lucas during COVID-19. He was on the verge of unveiling his much-anticipated Society restaurant, billed as an avant-garde training kitchen to rival Europe’s best.
The project was years in the making, after Lucas in 2018 recruited chef Martin Benn and maître d’ Vicki Wild – the couple behind the vaunted Sydney fine-diner Sepia – to co-lead it in a coup for Melbourne.
But lockdowns stalled the restaurant’s official opening three times. Wild left the business weeks before it finally opened in July 2021 (a year late), and Benn followed in September.
Publicly, Benn blamed the pandemic for their decision. But insiders tell me that by the time Wild left Society, she refused to speak to Lucas – even when they were in the same room.
Wild declined to comment for this story.
Lucas doesn’t want to say much about Benn and Wild’s departure.
But he lauds them for sticking it out in Melbourne during COVID, particularly when they didn’t have family living locally. Society’s kitchen – which he describes as the “most amazing” in Australia – wouldn’t exist without Benn, he says.
Benn and Wild recently announced they are opening a $35 million four-level private members’ club three minutes’ walk from Bâtard.
“Thousands of people come through these businesses, play their role and then move on,” Lucas says. “They played a key role, and they’ll always be part of that history moving forward.”
Some industry insiders believe Society didn’t live up to its vision. Its enormous kitchen, bespoke chandeliers and soaring ceilings still impress, and it is a “very good restaurant” that pulls a crowd. But hot, innovative? Not so much.
Society dropped from two hats to one in the 2026 Good Food Guide, and the neighbouring Lillian Brasserie was de-toqued. Flinders Lane’s Grill Americano regained its hat, and Kisume returned to the Guide for the first time in four years, after several years of the restaurant’s 12-seat Chef’s Table being reviewed.
Lucas’ seven remaining large Victorian venues – including Bâtard – are without hats, although these run the gamut from casual pizzeria Baby to the perennially busy Chin Chin.
Emma Breheny, editor of The Age’s Good Food Guide, says restaurant groups often have ups and downs as they expand nationally.
“It’s a lot of balls to keep in the air. Grill Americano, for example, was awarded two hats in its first year, then dropped to one, then none, and is now back to one hat,” she says.
“Within big groups, the focus and energy gets stretched in a way that’s different to owner-operator venues, where the boss is in there every day noticing every little thing.”
Bâtard and Society are Lucas’ crown jewels. The latter is an internationally recognised restaurant, but more importantly lives up to its mission of giving young Australian chefs a world-class alternative to training overseas, Lucas says. “That’s a unique thing.”
The two faces of a culinary king
In Lucas’ great dominions, it’s a bit of a novelty for staff when he visits for a meal.
Sorcha Harrop, a bartender at Chin Chin between October 2016 and July 2017, says he came in for lunch during one of her shifts and she tried acknowledging him a few times – but was ignored. Lucas denied the exchange.
Harrop launched legal action against the Lucas Group in November 2017, alleging she was underpaid, but withdrew it after the company agreed to back-pay her $9500.
In 2019, this masthead revealed a broader audit found more of Lucas’ workers were paid less than the minimum rates of the award – an error for which Lucas says his company was “absolutely exonerated”.
The Fair Work Ombudsman formally cautioned the Lucas Group in July 2020 following an investigation. The ombudsman confirmed the company paid back affected employees and had overhauled its payroll systems.
When the underpayment audit was revealed, Harrop claimed the company, which has since grown to almost 2000 employees, “exploited eager, passionate people and worked them to the bone”.
But other people describe working at Lucas’ restaurants as creative, exciting, fun; the ultimate resume addition in a youthful and naturally transient industry. And Lucas is one of its most recognisable champions.
Pakula, a key player in Andrews’ cabinet over two terms, recalls receiving a rush of texts from Melbourne restaurateurs throughout the pandemic – each of whom suddenly had his personal mobile number.
The messages detailed the pressure the industry was under and what the government should do to ease it, he says.
It wasn’t until two years later, while chatting with Caterina’s Cucina e Bar owner Caterina Borsato over lunch, that Pakula found out it was Lucas handing out his number, and mobilising restaurateurs to hassle him. He ran into him a couple of nights later at an event and told him jokingly, “you’re sprung, mate”.
“The thing with Chris is, you can have a pretty robust conversation with him and a pretty robust disagreement, and he’s not sensitive … he doesn’t bear a grudge, and I like to think I don’t either,” Pakula says.
“That’s a good, healthy relationship. I actually value it quite a bit.”
In 2024, Lucas launched the Australian Restaurant and Cafe Association. Its sole focus is having a seat at the government’s table when it comes to policy issues including tax, wages and skilled worker migration – an industry first, Lucas says.
Merivale – a Sydney-based restaurant group run by Justin Hemmes, which is seeking to expand into Melbourne – had a seat on the association’s board, but stepped down following allegations of sexual harassment, exploitation and drug use at the company’s Sydney venues. The allegations were reported by this masthead and 60 Minutes and are denied by Merivale.
I ask Lucas whether, as the association’s deputy chair, he had any say in Merivale’s stepping down.
“I can’t really disclose what goes on and what doesn’t go on,” he says.
“We’ve worked really hard over the last 30 years to create amazing restaurants [and] safe workplaces, where women can feel safe, young people can feel safe.
“I feel a bit of a parental obligation as well. I’ve always felt that way, which is why, during COVID, I went to great lengths to protect my kids and my people, because I felt they’re like family.”
According to hospitality insiders, Lucas thought it was embarrassing when City Of Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece recently posed for a photo with Merivale’s billionaire boss Hemmes.
Lucas quietly campaigned for Reece’s deputy, Roshena Campbell, before she joined Reece on Melbourne’s mayoral ticket in mid-2024. When I interview Lucas, he says he supports them both.
The restaurateur would have more venues around Australia by now if it weren’t for COVID-19, as his ambition has always been for a national and international business, he says.
He’s just unveiled a characteristically bold second foray into Sydney: Grill Americano in the centre of the city’s “prime-cut zone”.
Lucas’ business acumen and ambition demand respect from his peers – and in his hometown, Geelong, he is a hero.
The restaurateur is a long-time supporter of the Cats, and in 2024 the AFL club approached him to open Club Chin Chin at GMHBA Stadium.
The regional outpost “speaks volumes” about what the restaurateur is trying to achieve, Cats chief executive Steve Hocking says.
“He’s very thoughtful about where he places [his restaurants], and the access people have to them,” Hocking tells me.
Local hospitality matriarch Lyndsay Sharp, who is also on the Cats’ board, describes Lucas as a risk-taker who is “always raising the bar”, while Brown says the restaurateur has more energy than men half his age.
But there’s a lesser-known side to Lucas: he’s a romantic, his former publicist says. “I don’t think many people you speak to will describe him like that.”
It’s a side of Lucas likely born in his uncle’s restaurant, where – as a starry-eyed kid – he fell under the allure of towering cakes, croquembouches and ice sculptures, in what felt like “a fancy show” he couldn’t afford.
Back at Bâtard, it comes through in the light cast by the hanging lanterns outside, which beckon diners to escape from the chaos of Melbourne’s CBD.
It draws their gaze to the sparkling Parisian chandelier centrepiece of the restaurant’s first floor, and blares through speakers on its ceiling, where Nat King Cole sings “Love was made for me and you …”
Lucas has become the curator of his own fantasy – and he’ll step on anyone who tries to take it from him.
Crisis support is available 24/7 from Lifeline (13 11 14).
The author dined at Maison Bâtard as a guest of the Lucas Collective.
Read the full article here
