The year that was
CAM FAIRBAIRN
“We went through some tough times, but I wouldn’t change the experiences. It’s made me who I am.”
When the time came, the conversation was simple. At the start of the year, Cam Fairbairn and Mitch Orr stopped, and asked each other, “Do we want to keep doing this?”
“This” was Acme, the Asian-inflected, not-Italian pasta restaurant in Rushcutters Bay that helped usher in a new blueprint for Sydney dining. A place that made haute bar snacks of devon sandwiches and star turns of Jatz and pig’s-head macaroni and backed it up with a service style that was fresh and refreshing all at once.
In closing, Orr (food) and Fairbairn (floor) were recognising that the lows had come to outweigh the highs. Come July, they were ready to turn out the lights. When they did, it was after a flood of bookings that saw them do it with a bang. When Fairbairn looks back now, it’s with pride on where Acme sits in the city’s eating and drinking history.
“You lose some perspective when you’re in the day to day, so at the end it was nice to realise what an impact Acme had,” he says. “When we opened in 2014 no one was really doing pasta at a starred-restaurant level. It was always three stars, or Bar Reggio. And no one was really doing the kind of laid-back, friendly, casual-but-professional service
