Trimboli’s strong team the recipe for success

Restaurateur Nic Trimboli has created well-known eateries E’Cucina, Balthazar and Duende, and he’s done it all without needing to man the kitchen.

Mr Trimboli sheepishly admits his formal training is actually accounting, a profession that had him working for seven years with Arthur Young, which later merged with Ernst & Whinney to become Ernst & Young.

His corporate experience extended to Wesfarmers where he worked in the conglomerate’s retail division and was part of a group that led the buyout of supermarket group Charlie Carters in the late 1980s.

The days of crunching numbers from stuffy offices are now well and truly behind Mr Trimboli. Yet his background goes some way to explaining why the restaurateur values the team around him so highly - he needs and relies on experienced people to create the vision he has for the restaurant.

Mr Trimboli points out that his staff were part of the reason for establishing Balthazar, which has been voted by the industry as WA’s second best restaurant in a WA Business News survey.

Mr Trimboli said that by doing something more intimate yet relaxed provided a place for his experienced E’Cucina team to evolve into and grow their careers.

Daniel Goodsell, for instance, has worked for Mr Trimboli for more than a decade, first at E’Cucina before managing Balthazar and Duende. Now he is leading Mr Trimboli’s redevelopment of Cottesloe’s La Tropicana Café.

Mr Goodsell was part of a team that hatched ideas for the development of Balthazar, which Mr Trimboli established in October 1998 after stumbling upon the former Luis’ Restaurant site that was being offered for lease as office space.

Luis’ had been an opulent fine dining noshery where many deals had been struck in the booming 80s. But the business was sold after the recession began to bite, and its new owners stepped away from the grandeur and eventually threw in the towel and opted to convert the ground floor of the historic Lawson building into offices.

Mr Trimboli negotiated to buy the strata rather than take on a lease.

“I always liked this building and I thought that if it didn’t work I would turn it into an apartment,” he remembers. “The city pad was the backup plan.”

Opening Balthazar allowed Mr Trimboli to grow the upper end of the market that had become a part of the mix at E’Cucina, which he sold in 2001 as he became more involved in developing boutique brewer Little Creatures.

Establishing and building up Balthazar into the credible food institution hasn’t been without its challenges.

Shortly after taking ownership, scaffolding swallowed the building after it was discovered that exterior cleaning work arranged years earlier by controversial Laurie Connell, a then tenant of an upstairs apartment, had led to cracks in the façade, which eventually started to breakaway.

Mr Trimboli jokes that he was foolish to get into restaurants after getting a taste for hospitality working the numbers for Phil Sexton’s Matilda Bay Brewing Company.

Mr Trimboli attributes a lot of his success to his team of people, which he has empowered to make their own decisions from the outset.

“I establish the parameters, I don’t do the writing,” he said.

Balthazar’s current manager, Dan Morris, has worked for Mr Trimboli for four years and said Mr Trimboli made his staff think for themselves and make decisions.

But, he said, having someone watching over the business from afar was beneficial because he and his staff were caught in the hectic day-to-day operations, and often couldn’t see some simple changes that could be made to make the business work better.