LICENSEE Ash Lyons is preparing to quadruple the staff on the upper floor of the Oxford Hotel as he gets close to unveiling a new dining option for the city.
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Mr Lyons says he has spent months refining “B Town” – which will offer Texas barbecue and southern dining – before it replaces Bistro Piper at the William Street hotel.
The restaurant will be fully gutted, refitted and refurbished when Bistro Piper closes at the end of the week before B Town opens in early September.
“It will be American retro,” Mr Lyons said of the restaurant’s new look. “It's funky, it's fun and it's stripping the building back to its 153-year-old brickwork.”
The businessman said he got the idea for the new restaurant when he came across a brewery offering smoked meat when he was in Vanuatu.
“It set off a little light in my head,” he said. “I thought this sort of application done in Bathurst would go down really well.”
Mr Lyons and Central Tablelands chef Tom Grasso – who opened Venue Cafe in Orange together – will head up the kitchen and have put plenty of painstaking work into developing the B Town offering.
That work has included flying to Adelaide to visit the Low and Slow American BBQ restaurant.
“We are both passionate foodies. We have loved every moment of developing this product for our customers and just can't wait to get it on the plate,” Mr Lyons said.
He said it had been a “great decade” of trading for Bistro Piper, but it was time to move on to “bigger and better things”.
“I would not even contemplate shutting down Bistro Piper if I honestly did not believe we had a better, reinvigorated product to put on the table,” he said.
My Lyons said he and Mr Grasso had sourced the best of Australian meats, had imported a Yoder Smoker from Kansas in the US (advertised as being the product of choice for barbecue competitions) and had made the decision to use 100 per cent American hickory as they finalised their work on B Town.
“We have tried to keep the base product as authentic as possible, so that we believe that the product we're putting on the plate would have the same flavour profiles and quality that you would get in some of the best Texas smokehouses,” he said.
Of the takings from the final week of trading for Bistro Piper, Mr Lyons said he will give a $500 donation to the Kelso Breakfast Club as a way to mark the end of the era at the hotel.
The Kelso Breakfast Club provides breakfast on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to children who would not otherwise have it.
Mr Lyons said the creation of B Town is the first stage of a number of changes planned for the Oxford.
