Fashionably late, Salvation Jane was
officially launched 6 weeks after opening. Less fashionable or forgivable is
the lateness of my thankyous. Well after
midnight I stood on a chair and said something heartfelt along the lines of a speech I’d prepared and had intended to give much earlier in the evening when
there were more people in the room and less cocktails in me. In case I actually did just slur “Iloveyousall”
to the handful of family, friends and members of the band committed to drinking
the bar dry, here is what I meant to say….
Tonight is my way of saying thank you
because in the 3 and a half years I’ve been running a cafe, I’ve rarely taken
the time to stop and enjoy a drink with the people who make the business what
it is - staff, suppliers, customers and industry people.
It doesn’t feel that long ago that I was
living a very different life as a policy advisor in Melbourne. A couple of
months before I was due to fly to London on my one way ticket, I took a day off
work to attend an industry seminar at the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. It
was called something like Tips for
Success in Running a Restaurant and had a panel of industry stalwarts
including two of my heroes: Sam Clarke from Morro in London and Alla Wolf
Tasker from the Lakehouse in Daylesford, just outside Melbourne. I went along
expecting to feel inspired and reassured about the huge career change I was
about to make from public servant to restaurateur. Instead, the talk turned
into a therapy session for the room full of chefs and restaurant owners, all
talking over the top of each other about the hardships they’d faced in running
their businesses – difficulties of location, finding and retaining good staff,
the power of reviewers to make or break your restaurant, trying to maintain
passion when you are so physically exhausted from the long hours...and on and on.
I sat there feeling the panic rise. At the
end of the session I went up to the table of speakers and asked them: "Knowing all that you now know would you
still choose the career you have?" Alla Wolf Tasker didn’t hesitate. She looked
me in the eye and said “Absolutely. There’s nothing like the excitement and
theatre of hospitality. Each day is a new performance; the table is set, the
audience arrives and you put on a show.”
It’s true. Despite all the challenges that
are continuously thrown at the team at Salvation Jane and Lantana, they are greatly
outweighed by the rewards (I hope). When we’ve had a successful service where everything
runs smoothly and customers tell you how much they enjoyed themselves, you
understand the unquantifiable pay off for working in this industry. One of the biggest and
unexpected rewards I’ve received is meeting so many wonderful and talented
people from all walks of life who share the same passions as me - from the
staff at Lantana and Salvation Jane, people working at other London restaurants and
cafés, to our suppliers and customers. It is an incredibly creative,
enthusiastic and supportive community which I feel so privileged to now be a
part of.
They are an absolute joy and pleasure to work with. I know I can be a pain in the arse sometimes but the reason we do work well together is because we are all obsessive perfectionists who will wake up in the middle of the night because we’ve realised there’s a typo in the new menu and can be put into a bad mood for an entire day by a careless mistake like over blanching the green beans. They are both serious and talented chefs who continue to make me incredibly proud,
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| This is not one of our real dishes |
and smile.
