There was an era of Sydney when, if you spent any time in the eastern suburbs, you’d end up at Three Blue Ducks eventually. I’ll never forget my first visit. A colleague at the time (this was around 2013) invited me on a walk from Bondi to Bronte, followed by the obligatory stop at “the Ducks” for coffee. I agreed, though fresh from living in Sydney’s west, I had no idea what I was in for.

Status anxiety soaring, I laced up my grubby Vans and took to the coastal path on an overcast morning, weaving between tourists, tanned locals and designer dogs, until we jumped off the path at Bronte.

There, on Macpherson Street, I saw the rainbow: a mural arching over an alleyway with two bustling dining areas either side. Crowding the tables were plates of eggs with blood sausage, dill cucumber yoghurt and redcurrant jelly; various things grown in the garden out back; and sourdough from a little bakery up the road called Iggy’s.

Eggs and attractive customers aside, this wasn’t a Bill Granger place. It was Three Blue Ducks – long before the name became a banner for a group of restaurants along the east coast. Sydney was rocked when the cafe closed in 2021, but even back then, the place felt special – like a scene you had to be in. But the real magic was always under the hood.

When Three Blue Ducks opened in 2010, two of its co-founders – Chris Sorrell and Sam Reid-Boquist – were just a couple of local surfers with barely a lick of hospo experience between them. The third, Mark LaBrooy (who left the business in 2023), was a gun chef with Tetsuya’s cred. That combination of beginner’s spirit and fine-dining flair applied to cafe food proved to be a winning one.

“The idea was to bridge that gap between cafe and restaurant, because that’s kind of who we were,” Sorrell tells Broadsheet. “We weren’t the kind of guys who went to white tablecloth places. But we wanted to bring that quality to the average person.”

When neighbouring pizza shop owner Jeff Bennett and British expat Darren Robertson (another Tetsuya’s alum) joined the business in 2011, the paddock-to-plate and sustainability movements were only just gaining traction. But the Ducks would stick their beaks in all of it.

“To be honest, a lot of stuff we tried, failed,” says Robertson. “But it was like our customers and even a lot of chefs were coming along for the ride with us.”

One notable convert was Masterchef winner Andy Allen, who joined Bronte as a line cook after the show in 2012 and went on to lead the Ducks’ Rosebery restaurant as a fully fledged owner in 2016.

Five venues, three cookbooks and a TV series later, the Ducks are only just getting started. As they prepare to open their sixth venue in Burradoo in the NSW Southern Highlands next year, the team reflects on the last 15 years and the cafe that hatched a hospitality empire.

Learning to fly (2010)

Three surfers decide to open a cafe in the sleepy suburb of Bronte without ever having made a coffee for a paying customer before. What could possibly go wrong?

Chris Sorrell: Bronte has always had this nice little community of surfers of all different ages. Sam and I met in the surf sometime around 1998 and became friends.

Sam Reid-Boquist: It was a pretty incredible place back then – like a small fishing town, but without the fishing. It was a really small, tight-knit community. You’d walk down the street and end up seeing every single person you knew.

Sorrell: I went travelling in Europe after I finished my uni degree and ended up running surf camps in Morocco, which is where I met Mark [LaBrooy]. Around 2007, Sam came over and the three of us ended up travelling through Europe for a couple of months. We started spitballing [business] ideas, as you do over a couple of beers.

Sam had a fruit box business back in Sydney; Mark and I always talked about doing a farm and a restaurant combined somehow. When we were all back to Sydney around 2009, Sam told us about this old chicken shop in Bronte on Macpherson Street. It was super run-down and dodgy – but it was available. He was like, “Why don’t we open a cafe?”

Reid-Boquist: For me, the idea was more about being my own boss and not working for someone else. I didn’t really eat out much, or even know much about hospitality in general. But the adventure and fun of opening something with my close friends seemed like a pretty good idea.

Sorrell: We thought we’d be out the back playing guitar and going for a surf on our lunch breaks. But on the first day, we were run off our feet. I’d been going down to Single O to learn how to make coffee, but the day we opened, I’d never actually made one for a customer. It was a really sharp learning curve. Sam’s auntie came in for breakfast and ended up staying to do the dishes because it was just me, Sam and Mark running the place. The next day we hired someone, then hired someone else the day after that.

Reid-Boquist: There was no point of sale. Everything was written on dockets.

Sorrell: We didn’t realise, but it was actually what the locals had been wanting. Bronte had a couple of touristy cafes near the beach in front of the park. Macpherson Street had this sleepy little set of shops with another cafe on the corner and a pie shop. We opened a couple of weeks after Iggy’s and that was really the beginning of breathing life into that strip.

Three becomes five (2011)

Jeff Bennett, owner of the pizza joint next door, took a shining to the trio. So much that he closed shop and turned it into an extension of the cafe, doubling its footprint and effectively making room for Darren Robertson – another Tetsuya’s alum – to join the fold.

Darren Robertson: I met Mark working at Tetsuya’s and we’d become quite good mates. I stayed in Sydney and did the fine-dining thing while Mark travelled the world with these two and lived the life of Riley. I still remember going to see them while they were building the place themselves, Youtubing “How to render walls”. It was amazing. I was quite envious!

Once I’d left Tets, I’d started doing pop-ups at farmers markets and things like that. Mark invited me to this dego dinner at the Ducks, where we cranked up the music and did a bit of a piss-take of the snobbery of Sydney hospitality at the time. It was so enjoyable; there was so much freedom and something really clicked. By then, Jeff, who had the pizza shop next door, had become the fourth Duck. But that was my initiation as the fifth Duck.

We set up this little kitchen garden out the back, got some chickens, a beehive and started growing bits and pieces. It was a tiny garden, it was really inspiring. Growing stuff and using the whole ingredient was very fringe before then, but it sort of became our identity. The minimal-intervention wine thing was just kicking off. Jeff was really getting into the craft beer scene that was bubbling away. It was a really exciting time. We were part of this new wave of Sydney hospitality.

Andy Allen backs himself (2012)

The Ducks go interstate for the first time with a seasonal pop-up at Falls Creek in the Victorian High Plains from 2012 to 2014. As well as an excuse to snowboard, the pop-up becomes a pressure test for a sixth Duck – a former sparky called who’d just won Australia’s biggest reality TV cooking show.

Andy Allen: I really started getting into cooking during my apprenticeship. I knew I didn’t want to be an electrician for the rest of my life, so when one of my mates dared me $500 to apply for Masterchef, I took his $500 and somehow made it onto the show.

All these big-name chefs were coming on as guests and one day a young-ish Mark and Daz walked through the doors. The Bronte cafe was kicking goals and the boys were getting a few write-ups for these cool dinners they were doing.

But they just had this really different demeanour. When Matt [Preston], Gary [Mehigan] and George [Calombaris] said “Your time starts now”, [LaBrooy and Robertson] were the only chefs who casually walked to the pantry. They had confidence, but there wasn’t anything egotistical about it. And obviously their food was epic. I was just kinda drawn to them for those reasons.

Robertson: Back then, there was still a huge divide between “restaurant chefs” and cafe culture. It was a bit of like – if you worked in a cafe, you were no-one.

Allen: Mark and Daz came back for the Masterchef finale and Mark said, “Mate, when you’re done with all the shit, come and see us.” Sure enough, I got pushed into a bunch of media gigs and there was a new winner eight months later. I remembered what Mark said, so I asked if there was any room for me to jump in. He said come down to Falls Creek, it’ll be heaps of fun. I went down there for three weeks and got sucked in hard. They offered me a job in the kitchen in Bronte after that.

Robertson: The great thing about those pop-ups was that they gave our team the chance to break off and semi-replicate the Ducks’ offering in other interesting spaces. It was super fun but it gave us a lot of skills to grow. But it eventually got to the point where we were either going to do another season down at Falls, or take up this opportunity to open something permanent in Byron Bay.

The Farm (2015)

The Ducks partner with Byron Bay locals Emma and Tom Lane to open a paddock-to-plate restaurant on a working farm outside town. A supersized version of the Bronte cafe, it becomes a hit and wins *Gourmet Traveller ’s Regional Restaurant of the Year in 2016.*

Sorrell: I think back to those conversations with Mark back in Europe about growing food on-site and having a restaurant off the side. When the Byron opportunity came to us, we just looked at each other and thought “How is the universe giving this to us?” You couldn’t script it. It was pretty crazy how it all worked out.

Robertson: I remember seeing it for the first time when it was a garden shed, a concrete slab and that was it. But it had this massive car park and we were like – holy shit, imagine in a few years’ time if we could fill that thing. Fast forward to opening day and the car park was full.

Sorrell: It was on a scale that was way bigger than we’ve ever done. Bronte started as a 20-seat cafe, but the farm was three or four times that capacity.

Robertson: We were just in the weeds straightaway. Double docket rails, 15 staff short. It was the never-ending day. But The Farm was the right place at the right time for the style of food we were doing. The Northern Rivers was moving into a new phase, plus we were on a bit of a charge. We were gaining attention.

Rosebery rising (2016)

Following the success of Byron Bay, the Ducks return to Sydney to open a full-service restaurant at The Cannery in Rosebery. Allen graduates from the line at Bronte to lead the massive 230-seat site, complete with an open kitchen and a 500-kilogram grill.

Allen: The boys gave me 12 months in Bronte before they gave me the reins to this absolute monster of a restaurant. I still think it was a massive gamble. As much as I’d worked in Bronte, that was a 50-seat cafe versus a 230-seat warehouse. But I was like, I’m going to put everything into this and do justice to the opportunity. It was the first major thing I’d done since winning Masterchef so I knew there’d be a bit of a spotlight on it.

Sorrell: It was this beautiful warehouse in the old Campbell’s canned soup factory. Kitchen by Mike was an institution there; we knew Mike [McEnearney] and loved his food. We used to go there all the time. Even though Rosebery was a bit of a slower burn to get started, it really found its speed in the end.

Allen: It was so fucking hard in the beginning. It went backwards considerably for the first 12 months. But to see it turn around and reach its potential, I’m really proud of that. It was a super team effort. We don’t do this to get [Good Food Guide] Hats, but to get that recognition [at Rosebery] and to be the first Masterchef contestant to get a Hat – there were so many good things that came out of that hard work.

Ducks leave the nest (2018–2021)

A partnership with W Hotels saw the Ducks fly higher, with international pop-ups and a five-year stint at W Brisbane starting in 2018. While the pandemic era brought new ventures (a restaurant in the NSW Snowy Mountains and the Ducks’ first Victorian outpost at URBNSURF Melbourne), they ended with closure of the original Bronte cafe in 2021.

Sorrell: It was a pretty big shock when Covid hit. Bronte ended up going through a few different iterations, but eventually we started doing a lot of home meals to keep revenue coming through the door.

Allen: Covid was ridiculously hard. The things we came up with to try and get paychecks to our staff and do the right thing by the community, that’s probably one thing I’d hang our hat on and say, fuck, we really tried our best during that period. If we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be having this chat.

Robertson: Bronte just kind of became this production facility. A lot of the staff had moved or transitioned to Rosebery.

Sorrell: But then we never really reopened Bronte. It was really hard to let go of. We were deliberating for a long time.

Robertson: People were pretty sad we weren’t going back in there. Even now I bump into people and they say how they used to go to Bronte back in the day. It was dormant for bloody ages until Iggy’s took it on, but we really wanted it to fall into decent hands and continue that legacy, because it was an important space. It’s still really sad.

Allen: The early Bronte days were some of the sickest times I’ve had in a venue. It was a really big part of my time in Sydney.

Sorrell: It’s worth acknowledging that there were so many people who helped us in the beginning. Dion from Single O, the Iggy’s family. There were multiple suppliers who became friends and helped us to do what we’re passionate about, staff, customers. The Ducks wouldn’t have been a success without so many of those other people involved along the way.

Flying forward, looking back (2025–)

The Ducks’ new Burradoo site will be the first new venue since Bellingen opened in 2023, featuring a bakery, produce store and a refined 50-seat restaurant. While it’s set to be the team’s most ambitious venue to date, their ethos hasn’t really changed. And somehow, they’re all still mates.

Sorrell: We’ve stayed true to what we did in those early days in Bronte. What we believe and stand for personally really flowed into that cafe and I think we’ve stayed strong all the way through. It’s taken us to some interesting places.

Allen: We’ve tried really hard to keep that same culture and the same principle of doing our best by the planet. Sustainability is such a buzzword, but we live and breathe it. Whether we’re at home or at the restaurants, we act the same way. To continue that across six sites that aren’t even remotely the same, I think we can hang our hats on the fact that we always tried our best.

Robertson: Even now, there are all these decisions we care about, and we still debate ethical choices. It’s such a cliche, but this is a true collaboration. It’s never been about one person. It’s a team of people constantly trying to improve their practice. We had some biffos over the years, but genuinely, we still enjoy going out for a beer together. You don’t always hear that with businesses and friendships.

Allen: It’s really rare because shit can get hard, but I think that’s when we’re at our best. There have been a lot of openings, a few closures as well. Even with Marky leaving the business, we’re all still really good mates.

Reid-Boquist: I’m most proud of the culture in our group. We’ve worked hard on that, and tried to always make that at the forefront of what we do. We’ve had some incredible people work for us who’ve gone on to do bigger, crazier things than we have. But it’s nice to be part of the community we’ve built.

Robertson: We’ve had so many amazing chefs come through our kitchens that now have their own restaurants. We’ve done fundraising events with people like David Thompson and Peter Gilmore. Even now, I’ve still got this imposter syndrome constantly. I’m just so proud to be a part of the Australian hospitality industry.

Allen: We’ve got the best team around us at the moment to keep moving forward and keep kicking goals in the industry. As long as we look after the house and what we’ve got at the moment, I do believe we can continue to grow, whether that’s domestically or overseas, because of the hard work we’ve done over the last 15 years. The sky’s the limit.