THE WORLD CLASS AUSTRALIA FINALS TOP FIVE, WITH DIAGO’S KATE MCGRAW. PICTURE: TOM YAU
R ohan Massie can only laugh when he looks back on his journey from a hospitality newbie to one of the premier bartenders in the country. “I was horrible when I first started - and I always remember it,” the Rude Boy Hobart and Punch and Ladle owner says with a grin. “Every time I have a new staff member on, and particularly young staff and they mess up, they do something and you’re like, ‘what are you doing?’ But you have got to think back to when you started because I did that same sort of stuff. Just because I’ve had 20 years’ experience doesn’t excuse the fact that when I only had six months experience, I was making the same sort of mistakes. “I started out in Melbourne at the Rosstown Hotel which was just a suburban pub basically. I struggled making a lemon lime bitters, didn’t even know what a cocktail was. I think I had asked for the recipe for a strawberry daiquiri like six times and my manager started to get frustrated with me. That was the first job. I moved around, did some function-type stuff for some bigger groups in Melbourne before moving down to Tassie.
when, and God love him, JJ [Zucco] fired me because I kept making mistakes. I was the world’s worst waiter. I had the personality, and I could talk to tables, but I took a paella to the wrong table, a dish that takes 45 minutes to cook. Just all these little things kept adding up. The best part about that, and I think this is the best part about good managers, is that he said, ‘look mate, go away, get some experience, go learn and come back to me and I’ll give you a job’. “So that’s what I did. I went to the Maypole Hotel and then I went to Burnie, and got some experience then came back to Hobart. Joe was opening Observatory with Dave Hales, and he saw my name in the pile of resumes and he went ‘I’ll give you a job’. That’s really where the bartending part of it started. That opening crew had some really good people on it, back when Observatory was a fancy tapas bar, and so that’s really where the bartending journey started, and particularly the cocktails. Then I started reading the Australian Bartender Magazine and seeing what everybody else was doing around the country and that’s really where the inspiration sort of started to flow.”
That early inspiration has taken Massie to the top echelon of bartenders in Australia. Whittled down
“First, I was working at Sisco’s on the Pier way back
9 Tasmanian Hospitality Review August/September Edition
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