Shayne and Natalie - Little Oink / To All My Friends

Never satisfied just doing one thing, Shayne and Natalie have spent the better part of the last decade building Little Oink and To All My Friends Bar into the suburban institutions they are today.

Both grew up in small country towns - Natalie in Warialda and Shayne in Kyogle - eventually meeting at university in Lismore. In 2004 the couple moved to Canberra to find jobs in IT, with the vision to stay for a couple of years before moving back to the country life they were both so fond of. Naturally, life had others plans…

Opening a cafe was never the plan for Shayne and Natalie, but rather something that happened naturally due to circumstance. It was 2014, and Nat - now an IT project manager - was on maternity leave after the birth of their son Beau. As we talk, Shayne reminisces on this time, recalling nights driving around the suburb of Cook trying to get Beau to fall asleep, stopping in to the Cook Grocer to pick up a four-pack of beer. This was right at the time when the craft beer craze was really starting to take off in Australia.

Nat joined a mothers group at the local community hub, and it was during this time that she identified the need for a local coffee place - a spot for fellow new mums and other locals to get their caffeine fix. Her eyes eventually fell to a long vacant shopfront between the Chinese restaurant and the hairdresser. Never one to miss an opportunity, Nat decided to use her time on maternity leave to start Little Oink.

‘It was a lean start-up’ Nat remembers. ‘We did it for very little money, not knowing if it would work, not knowing what we were doing. It was very DIY - we didn’t have a kitchen, we did all the renovations ourselves…’

For the next 18 months the couple worked themselves silly to make everything come together, constantly overseeing the evolution of their little cafe. In between working as an IT contractor and helping Nat sling coffee and toasties, Shayne worked tirelessly on the fit-out to bring it to where it is today. The two eventually realised there was a demand for ‘proper food’, which meant a ‘proper kitchen’ - and so, Little Oink grew.

Inspired primarily by A Bite to Eat in Chifley, as well as the vaguely industrial cafes she loves in Newcastle, the recycled, eclectic, vintage style has been present since the start. ‘Everything Little Oink is very me…’ Nat explains. ‘The pink and blue, the mish-mash decor, the quirky style… the first coffee machine was called Dolly because I’m a massive Dolly Parton fan!’

As we sit, breakfast arrives at the table - Nat notes that pork belly (her favourite) has been the only consistent ingredient on the menu since they had a kitchen. When the two started offering kitchen-cooked dishes someone pointed out that every dish had meat of some kind - simply because they wanted to serve the kind of food they wanted to eat. It was always a matter of trusting their own taste.

Eventually the time came for Nat to return to the IT game (today, Nat owns A23) - and so day-to-day operations were picked up by the friendly faces you’ll find there today. However, this wouldn’t be the end of the hospitality game for the two, as there’d long since been an idea cooking in the background for a second venture.

With the lessons learned from building Little Oink, Shayne and Natalie took the space next door previously occupied by Golden Seas Chinese Restaurant, and began to build a different venue.

Replacing a Chinese restaurant so loved by the locals, Shayne and Natalie wanted to keep the food offering to something in the same approachable, casual dining vein. ‘We were very conscious from a business perspective that for a suburban local to work, it had to be a place that people felt they could eat once, twice a week’ Nat recalls.

However as someone who took pride in his elaborate, lovingly prepared dishes and often got lost in the details of how to elevate the quality of simple foods, Shayne felt it was important to use artisanal, quality ingredients, noting ‘If we were gonna have a single food offering, it had to be good.’ Shayne has always believed in bringing the same enthusiasm he feels when spending hours on an American style barbecue for his friends to the business.

The two’s personalities and their roles in the IT world seem to directly correlate with how they approach their hospitality ventures. Natalie, the Project Manager, was always focused on the things that made the business run smoothly and effectively, and took the lead on the aesthetic and branding choices. Meanwhile, Shayne the Network Engineer, was busy working on developing the pizza base recipe.

‘He would want to talk to me about how the flours worked, and I was like please - I don’t care - I don’t even like pizza!’ Nat laughs.

‘Lost in the weeds,’ as Shayne puts it - there was a lot of time spent listening to craft beer podcasts, paying close attention to American trends, importing beers, experimenting with different foods and planning for well over a year before opening. The two note, ‘there was a real small bar craze happening, you look around today and there’s small bars everywhere, but it wasn’t so much like that at the time - it was a new thing then.’

And so in January of 2018, To All My Friends opened to the public.

Asking about the vision for the bar, Nat reminisces on her feelings about pubs in country towns, ‘in a small country town, the pub is everything to everyone… it’s the institution. It’s where you can walk in off the street in your work clothes for a drink, it’s where you have your birthdays, where you celebrate your anniversary, where the fishing club meets, they sponsor the football club, you go there for raffles…’

As well as the passion for the food, it’s this focus on people and a sense of community that has seen the two businesses become so successful and loved by locals. Even the name of the bar - ‘To All My Friends’ - is inspired by a salutation made by a character in the cult movie Barfly, which Shayne and his housemates used to watch together religiously.

Those country town community values really shone through in how Shayne and Natalie faced the challenges 2020 brought about. It was always the top priority to stay open and keep the business going, to keep all employees employed. ‘We had staff offering to step down because they lived with their parents, so that others could keep their job,’ Nat remembers. Government assistance meant it never came to that, and with a quick pivot to takeaway they found that pizza orders actually picked up. ‘We had stacks of pizza boxes lined up all along the wall’ Shayne laughs, while noting that it made him thankful they settled on pizza as the bar’s food offering. While the kitchen closed at Little Oink for some time (as there was simply no demand), locals felt much more comfortable visiting the cafe for their takeaway coffees than venturing into the bigger city centres.

When asked why the two have leaned so hard into hospitality, Nat replies that she’s always had an attraction to owning her own thing. ‘What I like about business is there’s no boundaries to admission other than your own capacity,’ she comments, Shayne nodding in agreement.

Owning her own IT company, Natalie sees no future where IT isn’t her primary focus. For Shayne though, there is a grand future dream - to open a brewpub. Bar Manager Paul, a qualified Cicerone, shares Shayne’s passion for brewing, and the two have big ideas for what this could look like - taking notes from successful breweries such as Bentspoke, mixed with the atmosphere of Wig and Pen. The extensive range of craft beers available at To All My Friends speaks to the enthusiasm Shayne has for brewing, and as Shayne’s eyes light up while explaining his thoughts, Nat comments, ‘once we decide to do something, it’s pretty much gonna happen.’

Shayne mentions towards the end of our conversation that there’s a German word that’s always stuck with him, loosely translating to ‘drinking beer in the shadow of brewery.’ A fond description of when drinking beer is at its best, and a vision we can all look forward to.