It’s a Friday night at Chin Chin, the Thai no-bookings restaurant in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane. A queue winds its way from the heavy green door down the footpath outside. It’s 7pm and the restaurant is full. Greeters politely take phone numbers and estimate for anxious diners how long it will be before a table becomes available. It should be crunch time, but something is different. The 120 seat venue’s relatively small kitchen is humming. Wait staff smile. Orders fly out.

Almost since the moment it opened five years ago, Chin Chin has been one of Melbourne’s busiest restaurants. Brash, loud and fun, it's slick without being expensive and has built a huge following among a population not phased by wait times of up to four hours. More impressively, the hype around the restaurant has not faded. Chin Chin is always buzzing, drawing people for the experience as much as the food. How do they do it?

The no bookings policy helps, making demand more constant and even. There’s good systems and workplace culture, and of course there’s Chris Lucas himself. But there’s something else that sets this restaurant apart from most other mid-sized eateries in Melbourne: a huge production kitchen. But you won’t find it in Chin Chin — it’s 20 kilometres away, in Moorabbin. There, in an industrial estate in the city’s south, sits a facility known as Factory One. It operates non stop, 24 hours a day.

Staffed by 45 rotating chefs and 15 kitchen hands, admin staff and storemen, Factory One is the pulsating production heart of the Lucas Group, the four-restaurant (and counting) empire that includes Italian eatery Baby, Korean and Japanese barbeque joint Kong and Hawker Hall. Beyond the world of catering and fast food, there’s nothing quite like it in Australia’s restaurant scene. 01

In an average week, Factory One will process, make or dispatch 12,000 litres of stock, two tonnes of slow braised meats, 400 litres of milk, 400 kilograms of mozzarella, two tonnes of washed vegetables, 800 kilograms of flour and 15,000 litres of beer, wine and spirits. If this amount of food sounds outsized — it is. To put the numbers in context, Chin Chin, Baby and Kong alone feed the equivalent of a small regional city the size of Bairnsdale or Horsham (12,000 to 15,000 people), every single week. 02

“It’s not a mom and pop operation,” quips one of the staff, dryly.

Although they keep details of their annual turnover close to their chest, CFO Emile Quinn later writes in an email that they are one of the fastest growing restaurant groups in Australia, with sales and growth targets above industry averages. “We have plans in the next five years to become one of the largest restaurant groups in the country,” he tells us, “with a diverse portfolio of brands which will have both national and international expansion.” Indeed, Lucas has already secured a venue in Sydney and is scouting locations in Brisbane for a possible Chin Chin restaurant. Hawker Hall is about to open on Chapel Street, Windsor, and he hopes to open in New York, too. Lucas is nothing if not ambitious.

By 5pm, a new shift has started at Moorabbin and delivery drivers have returned with their empty trucks. At Chin Chin, a dozen floor staff stand near the kitchen around sommelier (“wine chick”) Ella Wositzky. Wine glasses in hands, they sip and listen to her explain the fruit characteristics of a Mountadam pinot gris (“lots of limes, crunchy apple”), which she encourages them to push tonight.

Floor manager Kosta Taktikos takes over and tells the group that on the same night last year, the restaurant did 521 covers. “This year we’re going to 550. Have a great night, guys.” There’s laughter.06

“Meet it or beat it” is a Lucas Group mantra that has become part of the floor staff DNA. Indeed, Lucas believes the energy of his staff rubs off on customers (known as ‘guests’ according to official Lucas Group training protocols). “Energy plays on energy,” he says later. “The place is intense. If you’re slacking, there’s nowhere to hide. That rubs off on our guests. The energy flows through to them, I think.”

Energy needs to be up in the relatively small confines of the kitchen, too. While the work done at Factory One allows Chin Chin to keep so many customers happy with such a small kitchen, the actual business of cooking and constructing the dish still has to happen here. As the night heats up and chef Dave Rogers begins barking orders, executive chef Benjamin Cooper steals a moment to explain his personal approach. “This is my life,” he says. “If you get a little quiet period as the tables are changing, I’ll have the guys doing star-jumps or bouncing on the spot. Anything to keep the brain connected and active.”

Over the course of an evening at Chin Chin there are few opportunities for pause. Door greeters Sophie Adams and Bardie Barclay-Sutton meet the flood of hungry, anxious guests head on, entering contact details into a computer, checking on tables, answering phone calls and estimating wait-times. At 7pm this is anywhere from 1.5 to two hours. Over the course of the night, tables will turn over multiple times until the last party is seated at 11.30pm. Some guests wander off to find a city bar but many end up in Go Go, Chin Chin’s dedicated watering hole downstairs. It’s possible to eat here too, but most patrons are happy to share a drink (or several) while they wait for a table upstairs. 07

When the kitchen does finally start to wind down after last orders have been taken and dispatched, it’s almost midnight. Staff finally get to eat their own dinners — a vegetarian stir fry for some and whatever ‘wastage’ orders (dishes ordered by mistake) are floating around (a few ducks, a soft shell crab). Wine chick Ella Wositzky is happy. Staff have sold five bottles of that $46 pinot gris.

Meanwhile, floor staff engage in more light-hearted banter as they sense the night coming to a close. Past midnight there’s still the cutlery to be polished and the clean crockery to be dried (a splash of vinegar is a final measure to remove any grease). And then, at 12.37, after the restaurant’s final guests leave, the front door is shut and locked. “Give us light,” says one of the waitresses, audibly relieved when the house lights are flicked on. Soon it’s time for the six remaining wait-staff to clock-off and go home.

At 1.30am, staff at Factory One are waiting on the next day’s orders while ensuring that Baby, the only Lucas Group restaurant that serves breakfast, will start Saturday fully stocked. At Chin Chin, three barstaff are prepping for tomorrow while several kitchenhands soap down the stainless steel surfaces. Cleaner Martin Vasanthn has started on the bathrooms and will work here until about 6am. After that he’ll go home, sleep and spend the afternoon cleaning private houses.

Tonight, the restaurant managed 510 covers - short of the result from this time last year, but still above average. 08 By now, chefs from all three restaurants have emailed their orders to David Finlayson at Factory One in Moorabbin. As a day at the Lucas Group draws to a close, another has already begun.