The Story Behind Australia’s Most Exclusive Restaurant

Quirky freelance writer Guan Un met Mary, a fellow art student, twelve years ago. Fast forward to present day, Guan and Mary are married and juggling life with two small children in New South Wales, Australia. Limited by what he calls her “Party Aversion Disorder”, Guan wanted to do something special for his wife’s 32ndbirthday. The solution? A one night only, pop up restaurant in the comforts of their own home, The Owl & Sealion. Here’s the story in Guan’s own words.

It all started with my wife’s birthday.

My wife, Mary, has told me in no uncertain terms that she doesn’t like parties. She hasn’t had a birthday party since she was thirteen – not even to mark milestones like her 21st or 30th birthday. It’s not for lack of trying on my part, I might add. Part of her Party Aversion Disorder is that she doesn’t want to have to organize things.

So for this last birthday, I organized a surprise dinner party for us and just six of Mary’s closest friends. Just for the occasion, I transformed our little apartment into the inner-west Sydney’s newest restaurant, “The Owl & Sealion”.

On a side note, the name came about because Mary loves owls: to the point of having an owl tattoo. The latter part of the name came from a remark that Mary once made to me during a holiday trip to New Zealand. “If you had a spirit animal, it would be the seal.” (I took some creative liberties substituting ‘seal’ with ‘sealion’ because I thought that “The Owl & Sealion” had a better ring.)

Now back to the story. To pique our guests’ curiosity even before they stepped through our doorway, I decided to go all the way in- starting with creating a menu and iconography for my pop up restaurant and sending it out to the guests (and Mary) as a teaser.

However, about thirty minutes into fiddling with desktop publishing to format the menu for my fictitious hipster restaurant, I stopped. Surely, I thought, there must be a less time consuming way to create something that looks nice and is easily shareable.

Enter Strikingly.

I’d heard of Strikingly before, but hadn’t yet used it for myself yet. I’m a freelance writer by trade, and so I thought I could just kill two birds with one stone — I’d get to create my restaurant’s website and see if it was worth recommending to future clients at the same time.

And … fifteen minutes later, the website was basically done. I put together the menu, added pictures, and wrote up a quick ‘biography’. The menu on the site was what was actually served on the night of the dinner.

The part that took the longest was the logo until I remembered that if there’s something ironic on the internet, somebody’s created an internet generator for it. Sure enough: a Google search took me here. After ten minutes of fiddling with the Hipster Logo Generator to create the Owl & Sealion’s new logo, the site was ready.

I sent the link around to my friends so that they could see the website on their phones and showed it to Mary that night. One friend messaged, “It took me ages to realize that it wasn’t a restaurant that we were ordering in from.”

The night itself went beautifully. At about six o’clock, a friend whisked Mary away for a pre-dinner cocktail. While they were out, I pulled our dining table into the center of the room, lit candles all around, and most importantly, hid away the baby paraphernalia. (Hipster restaurants do not leave the nappies out where customers can see.)

The guests arrived promptly at seven, and Mary got back at seven-fifteen for the grand opening of The Owl & Sealion.

Throughout the night, I got compliments about the food, but even more about the site: “I can’t believe you made a whole website just for one night!” I like that the site is still there as a living testament to the evening, the ‘opening and closing night’ of The Owl & Sealion.

But most important of all, Mary had an absolute blast, enjoying the conversation and company of a few beautiful friends. The party may have even eclipsed the one she had when she was thirteen.

Like this story? Check out other fun Strikingly Stories on our blog or check out Guan’s portfolio.

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Originally published at blog.strikingly.com