Keeping it in the Family : Rotorua’s newest hospitality icons following in father’s founding footsteps
Words Jill Nicholas
Pictures/video Stephen Parker
An icon, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is traditionally a devotional painting of a holy figure.
A more recent meaning is ‘a person or thing regarded as a representational symbol or worthy of veneration’.
With the best will in the world Richard and Julie Sewell can’t be described as holy figures but they are venerated by their peers.
Confirmation of that came when they were named icons of Rotorua’s hospitality industry at the city’s ‘hospo’ awards this past August.
Nor are they the first members of the Sewell family to be similarily honoured.
Richard’s father, the late Herb Sewell, was awarded the icon title 11 years ago.
He was a founding father of Rotorua’s restaurant-bar scene in which he spent close to 50 years.
Richard and Julie were in the industry since they were school kids. It would be a brave – no, make that naive, person who told Richard how to mix a cocktail. He’s been shaking and stirring them since he was 15.
“I realise now it’s almost 50 years since we learned the hospitality trade – wow,” says a genuinely stunned Richard.
“Time goes fast when you’re having fun,” is Julie’s contribution to that revelation.
For the past 16 years the couple owned and operated Urbano Bistro. That was until a couple of weeks ago when they sold it to their long-time head chef Mark Solon and his wife Jane.



