H – “ Johnny and I met in Melbourne in 2014 working in Southbank in a busy, fancy spot. I was bartending and Johnny was chef.
J – “I lived in Glasgow where I did most of my training before coming to Australia. That’s where my chefing started, in the hills of Scotland. I came to Australia for a 2 year break and ended up meeting this beautiful girl and staying so it’s four and a half years now. We never found anywhere that we wanted to stay really. We always found jobs and places to live but it never felt like home. We decided to give Byron a shot and that’s when we discovered the Northern Rivers. We thought if we didn’t like Byron we would go further, Coolangatta, Cairns, it didnt matter. We had all our belongings in the back of a ute and off we went.”
H – “We married in February. We’ve moved all over the place. We lived in Portugal for 6 months helping Johnny’s parents run their restaurant and then back to Melbourne, up to Sydney, back to Melbourne, just trying to find our feet as a sparrow does, keep flying.
We were working in Byron but then this place here in Rosebank came up. We found our house just up the road and we drove past the store every day and saw it closed a lot. We thought of approaching the owners and doing a pop up night or something. The whole community sort of got behind us after we did one night. It’s the only place here for everyone to meet up, so we have taken it on and we are open weekends only. We thought it would take a few months to pick up but it’s all happening very quickly. We were totally booked out Friday night 2 days before. We want to entice people from Lismore and Mullum to come out over the weekends too.”
H – “Our mantra is ‘think global, eat local’. If this is going to be a business for us we want other peoples businesses to prosper in the area so we are trying to use the macadamias people are growing here and giving us, limes and finger limes today were given by a neighbour.We create our menu from fresh local ingredients. The ginger came from Ellen down the road. Our coffee is roasted and grown less than a kilometre away. I’m a Barista by trade and worked for 8 years in Melbourne so went from using 20kgs of coffee in a 4 hour shift to 1 kilo of coffee in a weekend so I really want to keep my skills up.”
J – “We only open for the 3 days and Friday night is our big dinner night. On the weekends we do baked goods, sandwiches, etc. to take to the falls or picnics. We source our meat from Clunes and sometimes Lismore, our fruit and Veg from the Byron farmers market. All our fish comes from the local boys at the Byron seafood market. We do everything from scratch, bake all our own cakes. We make our own Granola”.
H – “The reason we are ‘Bookings only’ is we don’t want 60 people crowded in this space not having a good experience. I’d rather have 30 people having an absolute blast that are being looked after 100%. The community has been extremely supportive and same with my parents and grandfather. They’ve all helped us.”
J – “My mum always called me Gypsy, leaving home early and not coming home at night and Hope was the little sparrow because she ate so little. My mum would make quail eggs because she wouldnt eat a full egg that’s how we came up with the name, The Gypsy Sparrow.”
thegypsysparrow@gmail.com
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