I founded Great Aunty Three in 2011.

I established Great Aunty Three in 2011. Approvals, drawings and the build took the next year. Great Aunty Three opened in Enmore in August 2012, with my grandma's recipes and my mum's twenty thousand dollars. The shop carries my grandma's name. The recipes came down from her grandmother to her, and from her to me.

Mum passed away a month later, in September 2012. She never saw it. I promised her I'd see it through. I kept that promise until 2022.

Sydney turned up. So did the press. SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, Broadsheet, Time Out Sydney, The AU Review and Urban List. We were an UberEats launch partner in Sydney. We landed in the city's top ten for pho and banh mi.

In 2014 we opened a second shop, a corner in Surry Hills. I put every dollar I had saved into it. The response was overwhelming. Some mornings the line wrapped around the corner. From the outside it looked like the best year we'd had.

It was the year my health started to go. The busier we got without systems, the harder I worked. My team wanted to take the load off and they couldn't, because I had never built a way to hand anything over. I had hired hands, but I hadn't built a business.

Looking back, it's the most useful lesson I own. Systems first, then people, then growth. I wrote the whole story here: a full room is not a working business.

And I was the bottleneck in every one of those eleven years.

Every decision came through me. Every problem, every service. Team paid, suppliers paid, rent paid, me last. Longer hours each year for less. I hadn't built a business. I'd bought myself a job.

Why I handed over the keys

By 2022 the shop was eleven years old and still full. The shop was fine. I was not. My health had been sliding since the second shop opened in 2014, and I spent the years after it telling myself the next quiet month would sort me out. There is no quiet month. There is only the next service.

Here is the honest version. I had built something that could not run without me standing in the middle of it, and then I resented it for never letting me leave. That is not bad luck. That is a design fault, and I drew it.

So it came down to two options. Keep going until my body made the choice for me. Or hand the shop to the people who had been carrying it beside me, and go and rebuild the bloke who started it.

I handed the keys to the team. They had been holding that room up through years I was too tired to notice properly, and they knew it as well as I did.

Letting go of your grandmother's name on a shopfront is not a clean feeling. I made my mum a promise in 2012 and I kept it until 2022, and walking out still felt like breaking something. It took me a long time to work out that keeping the promise and keeping the keys were never the same thing.

Then I did the work I had been putting off for eleven years. Not on a business. On me. I built the prison, then I built the key. That is what The Return is.

Four years later, I could see they needed help

I want to be precise about this, because it matters.

Great Aunty Three has been the team's since 2022. I founded it, I ran it for eleven years, and then I handed them the keys. They have carried it ever since, and it is theirs.

In 2026 they moved the venue from Enmore to Pyrmont. A new room, a new neighbourhood, and everything built since 2011 to carry across. A move like that is a lot to carry on your own, so I came back to help them through it.

So I am helping them through the move, behind the scenes. The website, the socials, being found online. A hand while they settle in, not their owner.

This is not forever, and it was never meant to be. Once they are settled in Pyrmont, they run it without me. That is the whole point.

If you came here looking for the restaurant and not for me, good. That is the right way round.

I founded Great Aunty Three and I ran it for eleven years. The team who took it on carry it now, and they have kept it going through a move across the city. I am giving them a hand while they land in the new room, because my grandmother's name is on that shop and her face is on the brand, and I want it to outlast all of us.

They are in Pyrmont. Go and eat there. It would mean more to them than anything you could ever do for me: greatauntythree.com

Why that's the only reference I need

Anyone can say they understand hospitality. What I can point at is this: four years after I walked away, with no reason left to be paying attention, I still knew that room and what a brand that age needs to stay current. So when the venue moved, I offered to help them land it. My grandmother’s name is on that shop, and her face is on the brand. It has not been mine since 2022. I still want to see it do well.

I know that venue's services, its numbers, its suppliers and its margins in a way no agency could, because I lived in it for eleven years. And I know exactly which decisions eat an owner alive, because they ate me.

I ran all of Great Aunty Three's marketing myself for eleven years. The socials, the websites, the lot. We never hired anyone.

I'm not a marketer who read about hospitality. I'm the operator who was the bottleneck, and I build the thing I wish I'd had.

What I am helping with, for now

Great Aunty Three has been trading since 2012. That is a long time in Sydney hospitality, and it brings a problem nobody warns you about. The room is an institution, the food has not slipped, and there is a new venue opening every month with a bigger budget and a louder feed. Staying known is a different job to getting known.

• Getting the new address right everywhere people look for them
• Website moved across and kept working through the change
• Socials, so regulars know where the room went
• Local search, so a new neighbourhood can find them
• Telling people the story, because the story is the one thing a new place cannot copy
• Systems, so the venue runs without me in the middle of it

Every one of those is built to be handed back. When they are settled, I step out.