A final hurrah for the Peanut Eatery - Mal and Gina make the tough call

Bought out of the desire to keep the well designed restaurant in local hands, the Barnes family said they wanted to make sure families could dine out in a restaurant that wasn't a local pub, club or take-away venue.

Mal, Gina and their kids therefore decided to take on the business, from former owners and creators of the space, having re-opened in May 2022.

Now in the Peanut's final week of business, the Peanut is inviting the local community to come out for its final night on Friday, December 15.

"We're just putting it out there to anybody that wants to come along, the menu will be a bit varied and it will be first in best dressed as we go through the last of our stock," Mal said with a chuckle.

"But there'll be plenty of cheap cocktails, live music played by one of our local bands Loose Change and it should be a fun night with a good atmosphere."

Mal said the closure of the Peanut was a real loss for Bega, as it meant there weren't many places left for people to dine out in the town.

"There's plenty of places on the coast to go out to for dinner, but we just felt that there was a need for a restaurant in Bega that was not part of a pub or club," he said.

"Just a family type of place and it has become evident as we've gone along that it's been a good place for people to meet up, have coffees, lunches, dinners and catch up."

Mal said while the Peanut's space and services were well suited to the town, they'd struggled with fewer people dining out, and that along with the rising costs of wages, foods, electricity prices just "didn't make it profitable".

"With the economic downturn we found that people just don't go out as much as at night," he said.

Mal said another struggle they had run into had been the difficulty in hiring enough chefs, with there often being only one chef in the kitchen that would end up burning out.

"Our intentions were to have two or three chefs split the hours so we wouldn't burn them out and unfortunately we couldn't, we got one," he said.

With the business then changing its opening hours to cater for chef shortages and then the closures over periods where they didn't have chefs, the decrease in customers put even more of a strain on the business.

"It created a situation where we didn't have that consistency of food or consistency of opening hours and all of those sorts of things just snowballed until we couldn't keep it afloat any longer," Mal said.

Gina added that although they had their struggles, it didn't stop them from trying to expand their offerings over the last year. Coming up with fun, new and engaging ways for people to engage with the business.

"We tried lots of different things, we had a beer and burger night, bush dance, happy hour and cocktails on a Friday, paint and sip events, and we even opened up to host functions," she said.

Mal added that they also tried offering services that had been requested by customers, just to be met with little engagement.

"We had people say 'oh we need a wine bar in Bega', well we were doing Friday afternoons with cheap wines and cocktails and no one came," he said.

Looking back on the 19 months, Mal and Gina said they were grateful for their regular customers, community and especially their "fantastic staff".

"We really appreciate the effort that our chefs and all the staff have put in and everything they've done for us," they said.

Mal said he hoped when the business went up for sale it would catch the eye of someone that could see its potential and also be able to work within the kitchens.

"This business can work if a husband and wife team come along where one or both of them are chefs and they don't have to worry about closing the business when a chef leaves," he said.

"We're not able to put the time in ourselves because we were running two businesses, this business needs someone who is in it every day."

Mal said if the turnover of customers was high enough they could have afforded to hire a full team, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

Mal said he would miss the social side of the business, chatting to people as they came in.

"I'll be spending more time in Mal's Pizza, so I'll be back chatting to people over there," he said with a big smile.

"It's going to be sad not to be able to run the Peanut anymore, we loved the atmosphere and our customers, but at our age we just need to wind down, not wind up," Gina said.