This wasn’t the plan, Ben Murphy is explaining, as he looks around his restaurant, the literally-monikered 74 Charlotte Street by Ben Murphy. When, at the end of 2024, he left Kensington’s Launceston Place after seven years, “I was going to sort my personal life out, and find a balance, a more normal life with more free time,” he explains. “I was going to take six months off, maybe a year.”
If he managed a little of the former — less than a month after he left Launceston behind, Murphy was engaged — the year off never happened. “In May, I was approached by Alex [Alessandro Fasoli, managing director of WSH Restaurants] who said there was a potential opening,” Murphy says. “He asks am I interested, am I looking? And I wasn’t… but…”
