Bondi Local | Peter Zaidan
Bondi Local | Peter Zaidan
We first met Peter when he was the manager for a previous higher end incarnation of what is now a more everyman Macelleria (Italian for butcher) on Campbell Parade. Melanie came to trust him with our meat requirements, and he was always good for a chat as he freshly ground the pork mince, or wrapped the fennel sausages. So, when the new shop opened, we were there from Day One. In fact I’m pretty sure that we were his very first customers.
Macelleria sells great burgers and a big range of steaks, either take away or (and here’s the novel bit) cooked to order and served in situ, just like a fish shop does with fish. As a business it’s going off, and is always packed with both locals and tourists. The media have started to take notice. An early piece in the SMH Good Food section HERE.
Melanie chatted with Peter at Macelleria.
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Peter, what’s your back story? What got you here?
Illogical story - started at 8 yrs of age when my family of 11 moved from Granville to Coogee to run a fruit shop. My father and mother had a history of fruit shops in Leichardt and Canley Vale. With a family of 9 children, that was really the only way to feed them. If you’re in that sort of business food’s readily available.
My father worked very hard. He bought the shop in 1980 from an Italian man, Mr Panozzo, whose kids weren’t interested in the business. My eldest brother, who was in his second year of accountancy at university, was made to leave to come and work in the shop, to help with the markets and running the business. We lived above the shop (by then there were 10 of us as a sister had gotten married). There was a girls’ room and a boys’ room, although my eldest brother got a room of his own, which had a view over Coogee oval. I used to sneak in there to watch the Wicks play on a Saturday morning when I should have been downstairs helping in the shop. We lived on top of the shop so there was no escaping the work. Before school, after school. We all pretty much had to work in the shop, do our bit packing apples, onions, oranges coz all these things were pre-netted. We were forever doing something. Weekends we were working in the shop and at night we would be compressing cardboard boxes: wax boxes, foam boxes, wooden boxes. They all got sent back to the market and you were paid for them. It was actually an income stream so you would tape everything up and clean them – on a windy day that was impossible but rain, hail or shine it had to be done.
From there I swore that I’d never get into food so I hit the books and decided that I would do anything except get into the food industry coz it was way too much effort and work from the age of 8. And then the going to the markets at 3 o’clock in the morning, even on school holidays you’d be woken up …
I went to Marcellin College [in Randwick] and that was really hard moving from Granville to the Eastern Suburbs. We were always the wogs, plus we didn’t go surfing on the weekend because we worked and there were no extra-curricular activities so we were a little bit disengaged from the locals and back then it was very much Aussie wog. I got through that. I think it was character building, and decided to do electronic engineering. I was always very good with my hands and very much into computers and tinkering with electronic things. I actually spent my time pulling TVs and video players apart. I was Mr Fixit.
I ended up working for a very big American cable company in the 1990s but in 1996 my then wife and I bought a fruit shop in Bronte from my sister. It was called Fruitgasm and it was on Macpherson Street. I did that for 6 years and then I took up an opportunity in Newtown. It was initially going to be seafood, I had an idea to call it Fishalicious but it very soon became Burgalicious! At the time there was only Burgerman but I thought I could do a better job than these guys. I thought they were well over-priced and that you didn’t get much bang for your buck. I sold the fruit shop then and focussed on the new business. My then partner and I ended up with 4 shops and we had various suppliers of meat but it came to a point where I started doing our own butchery. I went out to an abattoir to learn everything I needed to know. Interestingly, well before all that, when I was 7, I used to go to my aunt’s farm where they butchered their own animals. So that was my first exposure to butchery, at a very early age, having to go into the shed to clean up all the goodies after the whole slaughtering process. After all that I didn’t eat red meat for years. I’d remember the smell and swore I’d never get into that sort of business. Every time my cousin, who did work in that business, came in he always had blood and things on him and he’d come up and kiss you… with this horrible smell! So we were exposed to that from early on and then it became something that I spent much of my life involved with.
I then got involved in many different businesses outside of my own, including Arthur’s Pizza in Paddington and Oporto. So, I deviated away from Burgalicious and eventually left it all together for a while. I took a complete detour and managed an Allens Music store – I was a guitar player too and became a guitar specialist there – for 2 ½ years and built that store up into their strongest retail store. I then worked for an organic business putting produce into Coles and Woollies. Then I went to work in radio (naturally!) where I learnt marketing and advertising. I had a brief stint back at Burgalicious when I set up an outlet for them in Kings Cross.
While I was still at the radio station I had been approached by someone at a recruitment agency who was scouting for La Macelleria. That was 2012. The Icebergs opened the shop up but there was trouble at the top and Robert and Maurice split. Robert maintained the business and Maurice went on to do his own things. I ended up going in to a fairly dire situation. I met up with the Andrews Meats boys coz they had pretty much gone in there and bailed the business out and so they asked me to go in and see what I could do. They gave me an incentive to go in and turn it around. I got it into a much better position but after 18 months they decided not to renew the lease. They had just been bought out by JBS, the world’s biggest meat processor, and so they had bigger fish to fry, and they needed to focus on the business with their new partners. I built up a very solid clientele there so when the thought of leaving it all came up I very quickly decided to look for another property. And that’s when I found this place. I walked in, looked around for 5 minutes. There was someone else looking at the same time, so I said “I’ll take it! Let’s get a heads of agreement together”.
Did you know back then that you wanted this kind of hybrid business?
Yeah. That’s what I want to do at the other place. Then one thing I noticed at La Macelleria was that I was always explaining to customers how to cook meat and a lot of them didn’t have time to do it. Those people now just let us do it for them and it’s at a price point that makes it a very easy question – Do I cook it at home or do I let someone else do it?
My philosophy is that meat should be affordable. At the moment it’s very tough. Meat prices have just gone through the roof so I’ve created a bit of a problem for myself but we rely on turnover. We get the same people coming in 2, 3 times a day! So a big part of our clientele are locals so we want to be fair and reasonable. And not have people say, “Wow, I paid 60 bucks for a steak when I could have just taken some meat home and cooked it for myself and I’m never going back in there”.
Do people still buy fresh meat?
Of course they do. I sell a lot of fresh meat. We will continue to do that because it’s still a butchery with another side to it. I don’t see the peculiarness to it. It’s just what you would do.
Whatever you’re doing it’s obviously working. If I come in at 6pm it’s usually too late.
We very rarely carry meat over to the next day.
I mean the queue!
Oh yeah the queue.
Now that you’ve landed in Bondi …
I’ve always been in Bondi really. I stayed in the eastern suburbs and I’ve always dined in Bondi so I’ve seen it change over the years. It was very apparent to me how to be successful on this debilitative strip; shops disappear, closing left right and centre, geared up for big weekends and summer days but when winter hits they’ve got kids running shops and they’re under managed and they wonder why the businesses are not successful.
It’s usually the strip that locals avoid but you’ve given them a reason to come.
I always want to lead by example and say well this is how you do it. This is the standard we need and if we all do that all the restaurants and shops will do well and people will not make a joke of Campbell Parade. There are a lot of great stories of people around Bondi; people who were successful but maybe they’ve become complacent and then they scratch their heads and wonder why they no longer have a business. It’s not going to be a sunny day every day. There’s not going to be big crowds every day. You can’t just have management running your shop, you need to be engaged with your customers. I know that when I’m not in the shop it’s going to be different then when I am there. So I try as much as I can to be hands on. It’s a culture thing, it rubs off on them (the people working behind the counter). Monkey see, monkey do! And I’m chief monkey!
We know that if we continue to have a great quality product, great service and we’re consistent, good bang for your buck then the business will continue to prosper.
Happily you are also on the tourist path.
That’s all bonus. The tourists are not why I opened the shop, it was for the locals. To be honest I prefer the shop to be full of locals.
Where would you eat and drink aside from your own place?
I eat out a bit and I gotta say I’m constantly seeing what else is good out there and I struggle. There’s not a lot of places in Bondi that I go to, I’ll be honest. If the football’s on I’ll go to Ravesi’s to get a drink. I’ll go to Bondi Hardware sometimes to get a cocktail. Or A Tavalo [restaurant] every now and again. I think you need to be respectful of people’s pockets and there are reasons that restaurants need to charge some of the prices that they do, I get that, but we pride ourselves on not being greedy. In fact I should be greedier according to my accountant, but I’m not in this for the money. I need to make a living, but it’s about cooking great meat.
Do you have a motto?
My motto for life – I don’t believe in trying, I don’t believe in praying, I don’t believe in wishing, I just think you’ve got to do stuff. All the other stuff is like lotteries, sky fairies and all that. I have faith in myself and if you believe in yourself you don’t need to believe in anything else. And if you do believe in yourself and you’ve got a great idea and a bit of fire in your belly, don’t be scared to back yourself. Just do it and then you’ll have no regrets in life.
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Full interview on SoundCloud below or HERE
