THE recipe called for fine dining from a rooftop restaurant, events for the fashionable luminaries of Brisbane (especially for those attracted to the three-pointed star) and more besides including a boardwalk cafe on the Breakfast Creek waterfront of the five storey Mercedes-Benz of Brisbane dealership.

And while the best-laid plans have been partially usurped by the rules of engagement introduced under the Covid-19 pandemic, enough has already been achieved on the culinary side of the partnership between renowned chef Shannon Kellam and LSH Auto Australia to show the great potential of what is now possible as life in Brisbane steadily returns to normal.

The concept of cafes in car dealerships goes back to the 1990s. Auto impresario Ian Pagent even turned his MG showroom in Sydney’s Surry Hills into a fully fledged restaurant back then. But the scale of what is being put in place adjacent to the Brisbane River elevates the concept to a whole new level.

To recap: The Breakfast Creek dealership Mercedes-Benz of Brisbane, built by the local arm of the Hong Kong-based multinational LSH Group, is designed to blend a premium automotive sales and service experience with a lifestyle precinct; each merging in with the other.

The plans fit in with LSH’s intention to build a competitive edge for Mercedes-Benz Brisbane by creating a destination that is visited by its customers far more frequently than the normal car purchase and vehicle service cycle. The plan is to build sales from the extra traffic generated by the lifestyle activities within the building.

Mr Kellam was assessing the provisions made for two food business locations within the building when he saw an opportunity to completely transform his catering and restaurant operations in Brisbane by leasing a big chunk of the lifestyle area of the dealership for a central commercial kitchen.

Shannon Kellam’s plans encompassed:

• A rooftop Premium bar lounge and private event spaces with fine dining for up to 200 people and an additional rooftop bar lounge and events terrace for another 150-200 people.
• Boardwalk bar, boulangerie and patisserie and more casual dining with coffee, sandwiches and hot savoury food along Breakfast Creek for about 400 people.
• A food preparation kitchen and bakery on the third-level lifestyle floor occupying 5500 square metres with viewing windows for the public to watch the chefs, pastry cooks and bakers at work. This operation supplies prepared food to events spaces within the dealership showrooms, to the Kellam family’s dining areas throughout the building, to their Lumiere catering business and wholesale clients.
• A cooking school for 20 people for savoury dishes (meat, vegetables etc) and another school for 20 people for baking, desserts and pastries on level three.
• Private dining room attached to the cooking school.
• Delivery vans have access to level-three kitchens via the two car lifts used by the Mercedes-Benz Brisbane dealership. These are used to deliver produce into the kitchens as well as deliver prepared food to his restaurant, Montrachet, a separate boulangerie in Bowen Hills (The King Street Bakery) and deliveries to outside catered events operated under his Lumiere brand.

At this stage the Mica cafe on the boardwalk is operating within social distancing rules and is exceeding the high hopes held for it by both Mr Kellam in terms of his enterprise and the high hopes of the management of LSH Auto who see it as a daily drawcard of prospective owners into the Mercedes-Benz brand umbrella.

Mr Kellam reports 5000 people a week are visiting his Mica cafe; an impressive level by the standards of the hospitality industry and one that brings smiles to the faces of those in LSH Auto who backed the concept during the planning stages.

Mr Kellam told GoAutoNews Premium: “It’s a great location. It’s the absolute ultimate location with Newstead, Teneriffe, Ascot, Hamilton around here. This spot is a central hub to a lot of urban Brisbane living along the waterfront. It’s one of the main arteries in the CBD and it’s also surrounded by an industrial estate. So as far as all the dynamics of having a great flow of people, I don’t think you can find a better spot.”

The rooftop Premium bar lounge and private event space has been put on the back burner and various catered events using the Mercedes showroom and the cooking school were postponed when Covid-19 set in. However Mr Kellam is taking bookings for showroom events and the cooking school, and activity from October is looking promising.

The commercial kitchen is fully operational with an astonishing 30 chefs (in a dealership no less) and others further down the kitchen hierarchy preparing food for Montrachet, Mica, The King Street Bakery, Lumiere catering operations and wholesale supply of prepared ingredients for a range of other clients.

Vans come at 5am for first dispatch. The vehicle lift brings a van to the third-floor kitchen with produce for the creations of the day and leaves with 10,000 hand-made pastries and breads for Mr Kellam’s in-house catering and other clients; these delights have been prepared by pastry cooks through the small hours of the morning.

When restaurant dining rooms were closed by the pandemic, on day one Mr Kellam launched a Montrachet home meal service on the first night of the shutdown.

Mr Kellam said: “We were doing 1000 sales a day. Without the central production kitchen, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the demand.”

So what happens in the central kitchen?

“The long arduous jobs have been removed from our kitchens. For example in Montrachet,  which is a classical French restaurant, we’ve taken away all the stocks, all the soups, all the butchery, all the slow cooked items and the braised items and all those jobs that take eight to 10 hours to cook.

“This includes those that are very arduous and the lifting of all the heavy weight of all the bones and the pots and the trays and so on. So that is taken out of those smaller kitchens now. It’s all about removing the type of work that is labour intensive and time consuming.”

John Good, managing director of LSH Auto Australia told GoAutoNews Premium: “Mica is really very strong. At seven in the morning it’s busy and people are really travelling from quite some distance to go there. He’s got a very good lunch following; he can serve wine as well.

“So I’m told that people are coming in to even just have a glass of wine on the boardwalk as well. So from Shannon’s retail aspect that is really very good. Our customers are also using it.

“We’re inviting customers to come in for service and they get a complimentary coffee with Shannon on the boardwalk. So it’s really keeping the customer within the business and we are really building upon this destination concept and destination idea,” Mr Good said.

By John Mellor