9 hours Ago By Tomas Telegramma
After seven years on Punch Lane in Melbourne’s CBD, contemporary South-East Asian restaurant Sunda is closing on Saturday, January 25. However, head chef Nabil Ansari – who helped the diner regain a hat in The Age Good Food Guide 2025 – won’t be there for the final service. Ansari departed Sunda on December 31, and on January 6 started a new role as senior sous chef at Supernormal, Andrew McConnell’s modern Asian restaurant on Flinders Lane.
“I really enjoyed working at Sunda,” says Ansari. “My team – both front and back [of house] – were amazing. And I learned a lot.
But I think for my own career growth it wasn’t working.” Adi Halim – whose Halim Group is behind restaurants Sunda, Aru and Antara 128, bakery Kudo and The Hotel Windsor – says Ansari’s departure wasn’t the reason for Sunda’s closure. “There are a lot of factors that came into play,” says Halim.
These include “very unpredictable” weekday trade in the city, and the fact, he says, that Sunda had outgrown its current space. “If we were to build it again, we’d do it completely differently.” Long-term, that’s the plan.
He says he wants to move Sunda to a site “that won’t be in the city”, with a new chef. The venue’s original home on Punch Lane is set to reopen with a whole new dining concept “in a matter of months”, helmed by an existing Halim Group chef. “Up to 2022, we were quite active in testing new ideas,” says Halim.
“As a result, we had [the now-closed wine bar] Parcs . Kudo came out of it ..
. We just felt like Sunda was a good size for us to use to test something, to do something different.” An industry source has told Good Food that the Sunda site could be transformed into an Italian concept, but Halim said he was not ready to confirm or deny any plans.
Sunda opened in 2018 , with Ansari serving under founding chef Khanh Nguyen, who made the restaurant a hit with his Vegemite curry roti, before his sudden departure in 2023 . He now leads two-hatted King Clarence in Sydney . Ansari also left Sunda in 2023, to lead the kitchen at Vietnamese-inspired Prahran restaurant Firebird .
However, he returned later the same year to take on the head chef role, subtly adding his Indian heritage to a menu mostly influenced by South-East Asia. “My food was well-accepted in the community, but we never quite got that traction,” he says. Ansari insists the move to Supernormal was driven by self-development.
“I did help my team grow [at Sunda], but when it came to growth for myself, there wasn’t really much.”.
