How we began
An old drapery, a long table and the people who keep both
Wollemi Hall began as an empty shop on Parke Street. This page tells how it became a dining room with a casino room upstairs, and who you will meet there.
Our beginnings
The drapery on the corner of the street
Before it was Wollemi Hall the building was a drapery, with a cutting table on the ground floor and a storeroom above where bolts of cloth waited out the winters. Todd Gibson, who opened the hall, walked past its dark windows for years on his way to the station. He once told me that he could see a long dinner table in them.
Todd had spent the earlier part of his working life running a catering van that followed the school holidays up and down the mountains. He liked feeding people and he liked cards, and he saw no reason a town where visitors arrive by the coach-load and leave by dark should not have a place that did both properly, for adults who wanted a calm evening.
Behind the house stands a company that looks after the paperwork. The venue is operated by WAFFLE ADVERTISING LTD, 85 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7LT, United Kingdom. Everything you see on the floor, from the menu to the manners at the tables, belongs to the people named further down this page.
I joined in the second month, after a decade at the front of a guesthouse in Leura. The kitchen was already sound, but the room upstairs was still a store of folded tablecloths. Todd and I spent three weeks, with Noel Novak as an eager adviser, deciding that six tables was the right number: enough for company, few enough for quiet.
What has not changed since is the order of the evening. Dinner leads, the tables follow, and nobody is hurried up the stairs. The street still sets our hours: the last shift workers pass at about eleven, and by half past we are turning down the lamps.
I came for the pumpkin soup and stayed for the roulette wheel, which I still do not understand. Noel explains it every week, patiently, and nobody has ever hurried me.
On the floor
Three people you will meet first
Noel Novak
Croupier
Noel Novak learned to deal at a dealers' school and spent his first years on cruise ships, where, he says, he learned patience and how to carry a tray in a swell. He joined the hall a fortnight before opening. He deals roulette and blackjack, trains every new dealer, and keeps a notebook of guests' favourite seats which he reads aloud to nobody.
Darren Barnes
Floor manager
I look after the floor, the rota and the front door. Before Wollemi Hall I spent eleven years in guesthouses, most of them at the mountain end of the highway, and I still check the heaters before I check the tables. If a guest has an unhappy evening, I would like to hear it from them directly.
Clayton Richards
Head chef
Clayton Richards cooks in the manner of a country baker: the pastry first, then everything else. He trained in guesthouse kitchens and then spent two years cooking for a bushwalking lodge, where he learned to feed forty people from one oven. He tastes every pot at four o'clock and writes the evening's menu by hand on the board.
Small questions
Questions about the house and its people
Who runs Wollemi Hall from day to day?
The floor is run by the staff named on this page. The operator of the venue is named earlier on this page and in the footer of every page. Todd Gibson, who opened the hall, still comes in on Saturdays.
Is the building still a drapery?
Only in its bones. The pressed-metal ceiling, the tall front windows and the long cutting table survive. The table now stands in the dining room, and guests eat at it in groups of eight.
How many people work at the hall?
On a normal Friday there are about fourteen: two in the kitchen, five serving, three at the tables, a host, a dishwasher and a cleaner who arrives before dawn. The number is smaller on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Can I speak to Todd Gibson?
Yes. He enjoys it, and he is usually found in the dining room around seven on Saturdays. Ask the host, Chloe Gardner, at the door and she will tell you which table he is visiting.
Are the brass lamps original to the building?
They are not. A local metalworker made them for the opening, to a pattern Todd drew on the back of a menu. The green shades came later, after the first winter, when the glare on the baize became tiresome.
The hall in daylight
