I ran the bar for just over three years. It had been open maybe two months before I got there. I’d left another bar job and called a mate of mine asking if he knew if any work was going. He told me to go see this guy who’d just opened a tiny little laneway bar in the city that could be cool, so I made my way down to Caledonian Lane. This was when they’d only just knocked the hole through the back wall. It was just the concrete fire escape out the back. I walked into the bar and ask for Jerome. This little guy came out from behind the bar and he said, ‘come round here, I want to show you all this stuff.’
So my first meeting with Jerome was through the hole in the wall sitting on two milk crates and he was trying to sell me the vision he had for this amazing laneway bar he was going to create. How he wanted to put DJ’s out the back, bring in couches and all he wanted to do was sell longnecks of beer and cans of Melbourne… He always gives me shit because I just sat there looking at him thinking, ‘this isn’t going to work; it’s going to be crap, but good luck with it.’
The thought that was going through my head was that this would be cool for a couple of weeks till I find a proper job! And then the next thing I know I’m standing behind that bar for three and a half years serving longnecks and cans of Melbourne. It was ridiculous.
He wanted someone who could come in and take over the responsibility of counting off the money at the end of the night and making sure the doors are locked so he could sit back and enjoy getting drunk rather than having to do that himself.
At the end of every night all the money from the bar went into a little takeaway food container and it got ‘hidden’ on top of the microwave for Jerome to come and collect the next morning to take to the bank. Sometimes it would be collected in the morning, sometimes I would go to put the next night’s takings in and there it would be, sitting in the same spot. When he remembered, he’d come in and take it down to the bank. But if he didn’t remember he’d come in and grab a handful of cash and go out for lunch. It was ridiculous.
For at least the first two years there was no till system. People would buy a drink and you’d turn to this little old style jewellery box that was our cash container sitting on the back bar. We had a loose stocktaking system based on how much money we’d made compared to how much stock we thought we had gone through. It made for fast service, which is the key when you’re working in a bar a metre and a half long but with 300 people wanting booze.
Then the back bar came along and that was a revelation. Jerome hunted down a three-wide mobile fridge and that became the back bar, which we wheeled out into the laneway every afternoon and chucked a couple of kids behind it with another jewellery box. That eased the load.
Before we had a fridge in the main bar, it was just a counter. So you’d be serving behind the bar and at your feet were five or six garbage bag-lined milk crates with beers shoved in and a bag of ice broken over the top. Getting more ice meant running with a shopping trolley to the IGA or Dan Murphy’s. At night I would send one of the bar staff in a taxi to a service station and convince the taxi driver to allow them to fill the boot with ice. It was absolutely ridiculous.
The three biggest investments were the back bar, the glass washer so we didn’t have to wash by hand anymore, and actually getting fridges behind the bar, which saved us an absolute fortune on ice.
We didn’t have to spend a cent on power until every six or nine months we’d blow a fuse, or someone in Myer would flick a switch and we’d lose power for a day or so, but then someone would find their way into Myer and get the system back up.