Hot List Update: One Year of Scotch Eggs and Sunday Roasts at Reed House

Reed House is on The Hot List , the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences, updated weekly.

This week’s Hot List activity

• Added this week: Zareh
• Most popular restaurant: Times New Roman
• Most popular bar: Above Board
• Most popular cafe: Masses Bagels

Why Reed House feels like it's been "open for five seconds and five years"

Reed House is turning one in just over a week’s time. This beguiling, British-leaning restaurant in the CBD operates out of a beautiful bluestone building and charms everyone who visits. In less than a year, it’s amassed an enviable legion of fans, one ramen scotch egg and rarebit crumpet at a time.

We caught up with owners Mark Hannell and Rebecca Baker to talk birthday plans, first-year mishaps and what we can expect next.

How's planning going for the birthday party?

Hannell
We do fried chicken Friday for our staff every week, and we always get loads of messages about it, so we decided to do a fried chicken night for our first birthday and open it up to the public. So we created an event page and it’s already sold out. It’s been crazy.

For some reason, it feels like Reed House has been open for much longer than just a year.

Baker
Yeah, I often say to people, it feels like we’ve been open for five seconds and five years at the same time. I’m guessing that the building itself probably helps with that established feeling. But for us, it definitely feels like we’ve been here for ages. And we’ve had the same team since we started, so that feels really familiar.

Hannell
And everything in there is literally from our house, because we had no money, so that helps it feel lived in, too. Reed is an extension of our life; it feels like people are coming into our home.

Do you already have a solid line-up of regulars?

Baker
We have a little group of regulars, and some people who’ve already come in seven or eight times over the last year. Some people who actually had their sort of wedding reception dinner with us are actually coming down for the birthday party, which is really sweet. A lot of people have been reaching out to tell us they can’t wait to celebrate Reed House’s first birthday, so it’s been really nice.

Hannell
Our first ever customers came back the other day and brought us a really lovely poster, actually. And they live in Perth. It’s quite funny; I accidentally set the fire alarm off before they came in, so they had to evacuate the building before they ate. It was within the first 10 minutes of being open on our first day. That was a hell of a start.

What are some other mishaps from the first few months?

Hannell
One of the first Saturday nights I took off, one of the chefs accidentally left the oil tap on upstairs from the oil drum, and it leaked through the floorboards into the fridge and started spraying oil around the fridge at like 9pm on a Saturday night.

Baker
It was the busiest Saturday night we’ve ever worked, and Mark was not there, and the poor sous-chef didn’t have the heart to tell me until the very end of the shift. I just opened the walk-in and started to laugh.

Hannell
And then when we first opened, the power tripped the kitchen – so for the whole opening week, we’d just have to sprint up and down the stairs every five minutes to force the breaker on and off.

Baker
It’s probably some of the hardest we’ve laughed. There’s nothing you can really do in those moments except just have a giggle about it. Get over it. Have a beer at the end of the night.

And what’s been the highlight of the last year?

Baker
Having the opening team still with us at the one-year mark is so lovely and a real feather in our cap.

Hannell
We just love the team. They’re our favourite people.

Baker
And also all the little collabs we’ve done – like Sunday roasts with guest chefs or winemakers and brewers.

Hannell
We’ve done some really fun events like our Kyle Squared with Kyle Nicol and Kyle Goodwin, or the ramen we did for Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. But they’ve all been really special – we basically beg people we like to come work with us.

At what point did you start to think, “Okay, we could be onto something with this place”?

Baker
It happens gradually, by surprise. Like, when we put roasts on à la carte, every weekend, I didn’t think it would be popular straightaway, but we got absolutely rolled. So all of these little things that just kick off have made us think, “This is working.” We’re extremely lucky that people are keen to take this journey with us.

Hannell
We thought we were going to be quiet from the get-go. Because we were nobodies, not a big company, with no money.

Baker
I genuinely still feel like Reed House is a toy that we get to play with. It doesn’t feel like mine yet.

What’s the plan for year two?

Hannell
We’re growing the wine list and working on the food – like, we always want to deep dive into some weird English recipes and modernise them.

Baker
A customer once said our food was very exotic, which made me laugh so hard. Because I’ve been to Mark’s hometown, I don’t think British food has ever been described that way.

Hannell
My new tagline is that we’re a modern Australian restaurant with a British accent, which works pretty good for us. But I think we’re quite confident in the product we do, we don’t really want to mess with it too much.

Baker
We’re just thankful that everyone comes in, enjoys the space, and that people get what we’re trying to do. So I think we probably just want to hone what we have now. The first year, everything was an unknown. So we just didn’t know what would work, what people were after, what people would attach to. Now we have an idea of what people want and we can keep trying to fine tune it. And keep being as exotically British as we can be.

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