How do you keep a dream alive? Conviction, commitment and a lot of determination.

These are things Justin James knows a lot about. It’s been two years since he stepped down as executive chef at Adelaide fine diner Restaurant Botanic. Shortly after, he announced his own restaurant, Aptos, would open in a historic Adelaide Hills church.

“After 24 years of being a chef and travelling the world, now was the time,” James says. “I had the right confidence, I had the right vision. I came to Australia 12 years ago to work at Vue de Monde. The plan was to only stay for a year, but I ended up staying for five and a half years. Then I came to Adelaide, and the rest is history.” 

Things moved quickly at first. Construction got underway in October 2024. Head chef Pierre Verret was appointed in February 2025. In June 2025, James announced he was adding two new bars, christened Mary and Cruz, to the project.

But converting a church into a restaurant isn’t easy. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” James says with a laugh. “The original walls are 158 years old. When we moved in, it was all gyprock, so we removed it. It took weeks – eight weeks – to remove it all, re-mortar and repoint it. There were six people in here doing that for eight weeks.”

Now, after 17 months of keeping the faith, the 158-year-old Ashton Memorial Church is ready to emerge as Restaurant Aptos on May 8, when it welcomes the first guests. Reservations are open. 

“The church was never part of the plan we had. I had an idea of moving 14 people between two spaces, and had something lined up in a suburb outside the CBD,” James says. “But I heard about this church for sale and I had to drive up. I saw it and instantly I go, ‘That's the spot.’ I just felt it saying, ‘Turn me into a restaurant.’”

I made two visits to the construction site, almost a year apart. The progress is unreal. Even though the space was a gallery before, the Aptos team, alongside architects Williams Burton Leopardi, essentially rebuilt the whole interior. Beyond adding plumbing, insulation, stoves, dry-agers and a commercial kitchen, great pains were taken to preserve the heritage features, as in the example of removing the old plaster from the original walls.

Spending 17 months fitting out a space allows you to focus on the details. There are 30 Australian artworks in the building, and James has a story about each piece and artist. His favourites include an abstract Justine Varga piece which hangs above a 16th-century Ming Dynasty table purchased from the Aptos Cruz Gallery, which previously occupied the space. He also loves a sculptural Julia Robertson piece, a pitchfork dressed up in smocked drapery. Downstairs there’s a font, dripping quietly, harking back to the building’s first life, while the nearby bowl of branded condoms reminds you that things have changed. There are shelves and shelves of ceramics – mostly made by Andre Davidoff, an artisan from the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales.

While the collections of art and ceramics and furniture are impressive, Aptos’s true power rests in the kitchen. James – whose CV includes four years at Eleven Madison Park plus stints as executive chef at Melbourne’s Vue de Monde and Adelaide’s Restaurant Botanic – has assembled an Avengers-esque team of seven top chefs from international kitchens.

Head chef Verret, a French-Canadian who was James’s sous-chef at Vue de Monde, has been attached to the project for over a year. He moved to Australia from Japan, where he’d been working at the Michelin-starred Lurra.

“I saw on Instagram that [James] was coming to Japan and I said, ‘Chef, can you come to the restaurant where I work? I would really love to have you’,” Verret says. “A couple of days later he texted me and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you. Do you want to be the head chef of my restaurant?’ It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity … It felt like Aptos [would] be the best new restaurant in Australia – if not the world. So, I called my wife and said, ‘I think we’re moving to Australia.’”

Although the staff is made up of professionals from across the globe, “this is an Australian restaurant,” James says. His passion for native ingredients matches or outpaces most Aussie-born chefs. At home, he’s got a chest freezer packed with 194 emu eggs and in the kitchen, Aptos’s chefs are plating up proteins like emu, crocodile and kangaroo, along with introduced species like camel and water buffalo, and making use of lemon myrtle, cinnamon myrtle, finger and dessert limes, muntries and lilly pilly.

When Aptos opens in May, the chefs will prepare 16 courses for just 14 diners at a time, who’ll move through several spaces throughout the meal. Guests are encouraged to arrive 30 minutes before their booking for a drink in the lounge, complete with plush couches in ’70s orange and brown tones. Then, it’s up to the library for tone-setting cold and room-temperature snacks. James – whose Restaurant Botanic menu included a dish called Lick The Rock – has warned he’s eschewing cutlery at various points.

Next it’s down to the kitchen, where speakers from Bondi-based Atlas Harmonic pump rock’n’roll and the chefs plate up in full view of the diners, as if they on stage. “In traditional 14-seat restaurants, tables are in an L-shape or U-shape, so there's a division between the kitchen and the dining room. Here, our passes run parallel. I want the guests to see the chefs’ legs. It’s hard to pick my favourite room, but this is one that really gets me energetic,” James says. 

The final stage of the multi-hour experience takes you “up top”, where the “not overly sweet” treats from chefs like Mariana Salazar Solis (ex-Gaggan, Bangkok) will be served. “I’ve followed Chef Justin’s career for a long time,” she says. “We both worked at Eleven Madison Park in New York. I saw the position and then I moved all the way from Peru to Australia to take the job. It’s my first time here in this country.”

A church-turned-gallery-turned-restaurant where chefs come by way of Detroit, Quebec, Copenhagen, New York, Peru, Bangkok, Kyoto, and Melbourne to turn Australian ingredients into meals and memories for a small group of people a few times a week. It’s special. And, in a world where diners are increasingly cynical about degustation and experiential dining, it’s giving us all something to believe in.

Reservations for Restaurant Aptos are open now. The first service will be on May 8. Bar Mary and Bar Cruz will open later this year.

restaurantaptos.com
@restaurant.aptos
@chefjustinjames