Little eateries find room to move as optimism grows

IT'S the little things that are getting Michelle Fong excited about moving her Japanese restaurant, Ocha, to a bigger venue. An indoor toilet, for example, after 15 years of having to ask diners to use a backyard loo. Not to mention the much larger kitchen, and some space for customers to stretch their legs.

"The move is a bit of a thanks to our customers," says Fong. "We'd like to offer them the same old Ocha with a bit more comfort, a bit more legroom."

Fong and chef Yasu Yoshida's new Ocha ought to have opened a while back, but the pair have been held up by liquor licensing and building delays. The restaurant will share Hawthorn's old Beehive site with Barkers, the new gastro-pub from Taxi's Michael Lambie.

It will seat 80 (about 50 diners more than Ocha's old East Kew home), and, if all goes well, open in a few weeks.

Fong hopes the extra seating will shorten the waiting list, which is made up of loyal customers who are prepared to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a table.

The expansion of this little eatery represents a wider trend in the city's evolving restaurant scene ? owners are growing confident about the economy, so often places are getting bigger to keep up with overheads and expand slim profit margins.

Places like MoVida have already moved in this direction. The newest venture in the Spanish empire, MoVida Aqui has 140 seats inside and 40 more outside ? more than four times the amount of seats in the original restaurant which opened six years ago.

"We have got a whole bunch of really big openings this year and there does seem to be this mantra that bigger is better," says The Age's chief restaurant critic, Larissa Dubecki. "It's interesting that we are coming off the back of the global financial crisis, and suddenly we have this explosion of big restaurants."

While Dubecki says that many of the new ventures would have been planned before, or even during, darker economic times, she notes a growing confidence in the industry. "I think that these openings, and the people doing the openings, show that there is a bit of a feeling of optimism and that we seem to have dodged a bullet from the GFC, and concurrently Australians are more interested in food and wine than they ever have been."