‘Sometimes I lose it': Famously direct restaurateur sells up after more than 50 years
As the June 24 auction date looms at one of Sydney's oldest restaurants, Stuyvesant's House owner Rudi Dietz talks about retirement but is determined to go out swinging for the hospitality industry.
The famously direct restaurateur is down a chef for lunch service, and clearly under the pump at his Crows Nest restaurant. He excuses himself to answer a call on another line: 'Please don't ask me how I am, what do you want?'
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It isn't a show, you only have to read some of the restaurant's online reviews. But it's the industry Dietz loves the most he wants to talk about. How governments and trade associations have in his eyes neglected hospitality, and not worked hard enough to bring skilled workers to the country. They also lost opportunities for boosting tourism, he believes.
'Australia is a beautiful place,' he says. The same beautiful place the German-born Dietz eyed on promotional posters in Europe in the late 1960s. He arrived in Australia in 1970, and three years later took over Stuyvesant's House, which had originally opened in 1961 as a Dutch restaurant. Dietz put his own imprint on the menu and personality in the place, while his brother Max joined him on the floor.
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