Temporada says adios, final service is May 18

"I don't want any tears, I want to close the doors with nothing but good memories," he says.

"There's a lot of nostalgia when long-time restaurants close and we think 10 years is an incredible milestone to go out on."

Ben Willis opened Temporada in 2014, taking a punt on the site on the western fringe of the city in Moore Street. Young joined the team and in 2018 bought into the restaurant with Willis, before buying him out in late 2019.

"It wasn't exactly great timing," he says. "It was right in the middle of the bushfires, we'd be here at 6pm and every night this wall of smoke would just roll down the street ... we're in here wondering if it was Armageddon or something."

Armageddon would come soon after when the Covid pandemic hit, but the restaurant made it through two lockdowns doing home-delivered meals, selling bread and cultured butter.

"It was a pretty uncertain time but we got through it," says Young.

Young says running a small restaurant is hard at the best of times, but despite a little bounce back post Covid, he says the cost of living crisis has hit the industry harder than most people realise.

"It's pretty tough in hospitality at the moment, anyone you ask, who would answer you honestly, would tell you it's not great," he says.

But he doesn't want to dwell.

"There's a whole lot of factors in the decision but I just think 10 years is a pretty good run."

He has no plans for the future. There's not another venue looming. "But if anyone is looking to bankroll a restaurant, let me know."

Over the next three months there'll be several events to celebrate Temporada's run.

"We've always prided ourselves on serving really good simple food and providing great service," he says.

"I think the restaurant has grown up, matured over the 10 years, and while we don't have to be on the top of everyone's list, we just do things well."

Young, who did his apprenticeship with Neil Perry at Rockpool and worked overseas for Marco Pierre White in London, had never owned a restaurant before taking over the reins at Temporada.

He says he's learned running a restaurant is all about resilience and reinvention.

"You don't really know how resilient you can be until you're faced with some of the things we've dealt with over the past few years," he says.

"You can't go backwards so you have to look for ways to change things up.

READ OUR REVIEWS FROM OVER THE YEARS:

"At the start we were doing breakfast, lunch and dinner, five days a week, and dinner on Saturday ... things changed over the years, we had to make some tough decisions."

The restaurant branched into catering, private and corporate events, it's doing weddings at Petrichor Farm in Gundaroo, selling the housemade cultured butter at the Capital Region Farmers Markets via The Butter Project.

Over the next few months Young will bring some menu favourites back.

I tell him Jack's Mistake has to be on his list. It's a chocolatey dessert with the best back story. It was one of my favourite dishes of 2023.

Jack was a young apprentice back in 2020, before everything went to hell, thanks Covid. Young says he was one of the best kids to come through the kitchen but this night he made two mistakes. There were two desserts on the menu at the time, one a chocolate sponge, the other a vanilla panna cotta. Jack got them both wrong. He undercooked the sponge and he underset the panna cotta, and they couldn't use either. At the end of the shift the staff just mixed it all in a bowl and grabbed some spoons. And it was delicious.

"It was right before lockdown and this dish was so comforting. In a way it was a reminder that it doesn't matter what goes wrong with the world, if you look for the good, you'll find it."

Temporada encourages people to follow its social media accounts to know when the final events will take place.

@temporadacanberra