We were going to open a backpacker’s and bar in Thailand, but our dad had a heart attack and had to have a pacemaker put in, so he couldn’t fly on an aeroplane. Jerome didn’t really want to work anymore, he just wanted to sit around, drink beer all day, and eat noodles. When all of that happened he turned his concept to the city. And when we first opened that’s what he did. He sat eating spaghetti and drinking beer all day and people would come and just talk to him. He was really happy, then one thing led to another and he got busier and busier.
It used to be a little old swiss café. Jerome and I had a real estate agency on Hardware Lane, so we used to go there. The owner was about 70 and he would decide whether he’d want to serve you or not; chicken schnitzels and percolated coffee. All he had in there was a round table where he’d play cards with his mates and postcards covering the walls from all his friends around the world. One day he said to Jerome, ‘you come in here all the time, do you want to buy it?’ This was when the GST was coming in, and it was a little too much for him to handle. Jerome asked him how much he wanted, ‘two thousand dollars’, he said. We went back a few days later, and told him, ‘Eddy, fantastic deal, we’re going to buy it.’ Then he said, ‘no, I’ve decided I want $100,000!’ He hadn’t even made that the whole time he’d been there. But he was adamant. We went past two weeks later and he’d vacated. It was all shut up.
One of the first Saturdays, before it got busy, I was down the laneway with my girlfriends playing cards and having a few drinks thinking no one was going to come. We cranked the music up, and the next minute about two hundred people came in. It was all the people that had left the Lounge because they heard we were open. That was how Saturday night started.
My girlfriend used to clean the place on Sundays because it wasn’t that busy. I’d go down to meet her and have a few coffees and beers. Whilst we were cleaning, people would knock on the door asking us to let them in. We knew a few of the people, so we’d let them in and have a few drinks. So Sunday became party clean day, and they’d help clean as well.
When it really took off we didn’t have a dishwashing machine or any power. People were waiting for their coffees, and Jerome was yelling at me while I was trying to run them out here, there and everywhere. We didn’t have a lot of staff, so the customers used to come behind the bar after they’d eaten their toasties and wash their own plates in the sink. It sort of became their home. When we had the deck, kids would bring umbrellas to sit under or put a raincoat on, just so they could drink coffee and eat their toasties at St Jerome’s.
One night there was a Rip Curl party, and Jerome said, ‘there’s 100 people coming, how are we going to fit them in? They can’t drink out in the laneway.’ So he got a friend, ‘H’, to come and knock out the wall. We couldn’t afford to put a sliding door in to shut it, so Bruney would come every night and shut it up with wood panels, then come in the morning and pull all the nails out.
We built the counter, which is why it was so small. I got really angry, because Jerome couldn’t always fit behind the bar. He’d serve a few drinks and then go and talk. My hands were absolutely freezing because we didn’t have fridges, just bins with ice. I had to reach in with my bare hands trying to dig the beers out. I told Jerome, ‘I can’t do this anymore, we’ve got to do something.’ The next night, he turned up and said, ‘Andrea, I’ve solved the problem.’ And he gave me a pair of rubber gloves.