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Bernie’s Bar is a venue with a purpose. Newcastle doesn’t have a lot of venues for the LGBTQI+ crowd, so the events that Bernie’s put on all go off. But there’s another side to the business that isn’t thriving. It seems that people who come to Bernie’s to drink and dance aren’t really there to eat, and people looking to eat don’t consider coming to Bernie’s. Co-owner Patrick wants to see the kitchen side of the operation grow.
In this episode we bring in Tarts Anon‘s Gareth Whitton, winner of Dessert Masters S1 to hear Patrick out and provide a few tips on how he could shake things up.
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Episode Transcript
Melissa Leong:
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Intro:
Yeah, I remember talking to the team that night, I cried. I cried in front of him.
What I would not do and write this down, put it in highlight, don’t do it.
We made so many mistakes that we’re always going to make. Don’t let Lorenzo measure the store.
A lot of them were terrified that the business would fail within six months. They said that in those words. They were like, “You will not survive six months.”
And you have to try it. You have to just roll the dice. I think you have to take those risks.
Melissa Leong:
This is Coolroom Confessional, a podcast by Square. In this series we’re offering hospo business owners a place to confess their problems. With some expert help we’re going to try and solve them. I’m Melissa Leong. I’ve been a writer, culinary critic and TV judge. Today we’re headed to meet Patrick Fisher from Bernie’s Bar, a special place with a unique story.
Newcastle is a coastal city an hour north of Sydney, with a thriving scene for queer youth. The problem is there are a few venues that cater specifically to the LGBTQI+ crowd where they feel seen, celebrated and safe.
Cue Bernie’s Bar.
Bernie’s video:
When coming to Bernie’s this Friday we’ve got another edition of Love Box. If you’re looking to meet people around Newcastle but hate the apps…
Melissa Leong:
It’s a queer-friendly venue that welcomes all. At the end of this rainbow are three founders. They live and breathe the ethos of Bernie’s as polyamorous partners in life and business. One of them is Chef Patrick Fisher.
Patrick Fisher:
We’ve been in business together now for almost 18 months. We have all the regular quarrels that business owners have with each other, and all the regular quarrels that partners have with each other, and all the regular quarrels that friends have with each other. But, I guess, that compartmentalization is one of the core skills of polyamory and alternate lifestyles. You’ve got to be able to explain yourself and to listen to other people explaining themselves, and in business that’s been a pretty invaluable skill.
Melissa Leong:
They knew that if they opened a new queer venue Newcastle would welcome them with open arms, and it has.
Patrick Fisher:
We got very lucky. We were able to secure a venue which is historic for the queer community, first of all. It’s this beautiful 100-year old hotel, which has been a gay bar at several points in its previous hip-streak. It got real big real quick, and we’ve just been riding that rocket ever since.
Melissa Leong:
But the rocket has not maintained its financial trajectory.
Patrick Fisher:
Most of the early stuff was there was a rainbow on every plate, more or less. My strong desire when we launched this was to avoid standard pub fare, but it was not a menu you’d book in to go out to dinner to.
Melissa Leong:
The Friday and Saturday nightclub crowd is massive, but they’re not there for the food. And the other nights aren’t much better.
Patrick Fisher:
If I was to prioritize anything, it wouldn’t be explicitly the nightclub at the cost of everything else. The mission that we’ve got for the venue is too broad to fit inside a nightclub. Plus, I didn’t buy a nightclub. I bought a bar and I don’t want to just work in a nightclub.
Melissa Leong:
Patrick has done a lot to maintain momentum.
Patrick Fisher:
The growth and interaction we have on all our social media channels is just phenomenal.
Bernie’s video:
My biggest ick would have to be arrogance, and chewing with your mouth open.
My biggest ick is just bad vibes. It’s all about the vibes.
Melissa Leong:
And uphold the business’s goal of providing affordable food in a cost of living crisis.
Patrick Fisher:
We’re doing $5 meals all evening.
Melissa Leong:
Bernie’s owners believe it is important their doors stay open for years to come.
Patrick Fisher:
This week we had a message from some patrons. They had actually named a child after the venue. There is now a Bernie in the world because of what we’ve started here. Been through some turbulent few months, but one year I get, I’m relieved, and I think we can do it.
Melissa Leong:
But that means building beyond a club, and doing it sustainably.
We have Bernie’s Bar co-owner and co-founder Patrick Fisher joining us now.
There’s a Bernie’s baby. That’s awesome, Patrick.
Patrick Fisher:
Yeah, it’s pretty phenomenal for us as well.
Melissa Leong:
Patrick, congratulations on a year. That’s no small feat for a hospitality venue these days. You’ve had a really successful opening, and there’s been subsequently a bit of a decline in your dining offering. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s been happening?
Patrick Fisher:
Yeah, of course. So when we launched we had this idea to be the everything bar, as I’m sure every hospitality business does. We will, of course, be everything to all people. It became pretty clear pretty quick that the most popular offering was absolutely our nightclub offering, which meant that Friday and Saturday nights have been super consistent ever since. But we have really struggled to keep the pub stuff going through the week, and by that I mean our regular bistro trade. When we first opened we did six days lunch and dinner. It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that there wasn’t really much lunch trade to be had, where in the CBD there’s not a lot of workers here anymore. The lunch trade fell off almost immediately. Within about three months we’d called lunches entirely. After that we went through some staffing changes. We’re closed one day, so we’re now open five nights.
The dinner offering, it’s been there, but it’s never been a significant part of the business. It’s always been a bit of an afterthought, I think for the patrons, which is awkward because I don’t spend much time thinking about anything other than the kitchen offering at the moment. I am the sole member of the kitchen. We started with a staff of five, but as lunches became non-viable, as we went from six days to five days, the trade just never materialised. It meant that, yeah, I run the entire kitchen operation myself. It’s got a lot of potential to expand, but it’s a tricky one to grow.
Melissa Leong:
From an emotional standpoint, how does that impact you?
Patrick Fisher:
Obviously, this is a fairly vulnerable question. You don’t ever like to admit that you’re struggling in business, but we have always had difficulty making people turn up when we haven’t put on a big flashy event. It’s a very awkward size to be, where we’re getting enough to cover just my costs in the kitchen, but without a very clear and stable growth trajectory. So any growth that we do have, especially in terms of support for me, it’s going to come pretty slowly. It’s going to be an awkward transition from one stage of business to another. It’s probably not long-term sustainable where it is in terms of its costs to myself and the flow of the week. Its small businesses hard, and then I’m running it feels like at least two.
Melissa Leong:
So many hospo venue owners will be nodding their heads as Patrick is talking right now. Hospitality is tough, but people like Patrick are tougher. This is why I wanted to be part of this show, to support places like Bernie’s, which has played with different models to boost its food sales.
Can you talk about what has worked for you?
Patrick Fisher:
Sure. So we ran a little while a dark kitchen on Uber Eats and Menulog. The idea there was that the queer bar may be scaring off some patrons. There may be patrons who don’t necessarily think too much about the rainbow, who just wanted a feed. So we rebranded a dark kitchen completely separate from the Bernie’s branding, and ran that under the Bernie’s umbrella to try and sell food to audiences that weren’t necessarily part of our organic marketing reach. Although the restaurant was quite well reviewed it is a very competitive marketplace, and we found that we couldn’t make money with the Uber Eats and Menulog business model, where they take such a significant cut of the sale price. That kitchen ran for about six months and wrapped up in about April.
We’ve moved back to more, I’d say, commonplace pub fare, schnitzels, burgers, those sorts of things. We’ve tried to find ways that we can put our personality, the Bernie’s style, on different categories. Schnitzel toppers specifically look like a pretty easy win for us. There is a bit of glitter, not as much on the schnitzels as you might think. Glitter is a very… It drinks great, but it can be a little intimidating to see on a piece of food. People assume that there’s been a spill in the kitchen.
They’ll come down for all sorts of things. Trivia is one of them. Dancing is another. We’ve run big clothes swaps. We’ve run market days. All the sorts of stuff we run brings people down and when they’re here they might eat, they might not, but there’s not many people who are coming here to eat, which is the difference.
Melissa Leong:
So it’s really about bringing that particular offering, of the many offerings that Bernie’s has, to top of mind for your customers in the area.
Patrick Fisher:
Especially during the mid-week and especially on weekends before the nightclubs kick off, because we’re open a lot of hours before 9:00 PM. Who knew?
Melissa Leong:
Hold on tight, Patrick. We’ve got someone who might be able to help.
This podcast is thanks to Square. Hospitality has enough on their plate. Square builds business tools that help hospo businesses like yours run smoothly. It’s more than just payments. From table layouts to a digital ticket system for your kitchen, it’s all integrated and it all talks to each other, because service still matters. Find out more at square.com/my/service.
Now we’re inviting Gareth Whitton of Tarts Anon on to pull up a chair. Gareth has worked with some industry heavyweights, and it’s safe to say now he’s become one himself. After working as head pastry chef under Heston Blumenthal he did the ultimate pandemic pivot. After losing his restaurant gig, Gareth started baking pastries at home, and eventually expanded his offerings into a retail space. So now alongside partner in business and in life, Catherine Way, Tarts Anon is thriving.
Welcome, Gareth.
Gareth Whitton:
Thanks, Mel. Thanks for having us.
Melissa Leong:
Now, Gareth, Patrick has been trying on some things in the past 18 months with his menu, The Space. Gareth, what do you think?
Gareth Whitton:
Well, yeah, listening to some of the issues that Bernie’s is facing I’m reflecting a little bit and trying to contextualise it for myself, because obviously it’s best to use my own experiences to really compartmentalise the issues here. And being reactionary is very detrimental because I think not only is the market overly saturated, but that saturated market is struggling individually. When listening to some of the concerns that Patrick has about Bernie’s food offering, I know it’s hard to really strip back everything. It probably would take a little bit of re-addressing and really just going back to bare bones to work out where you want to go, instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Melissa Leong:
And it can be quite a humbling thing after you’ve experienced quite a huge success initially, to strip things back and look at what’s working and what’s not working.
Now, Patrick, you want to upspend per customer and get them eating when they’re in, and also have more customers coming in outside of Friday and Saturday nights.
Patrick Fisher:
It would be to look at the calendar in three weeks time to see that there’s guaranteed of 25 people coming down to spend 20 bucks each, that’s what would keep the lights on. We can make the venue work how we’ve got it now, but it’s right on the bone. If we’re spending 100 bucks to make 101, that’s the margins currently.
Melissa Leong:
Increasing the spend per customer can be tackled in different ways. When we asked award-winning chef and restaurateur Joe Vargetto, he said, “Every minute counts.”
Joe Vargetto:
If that drink or coffee doesn’t come on the table within, let’s say, three or four minutes and it takes longer than that, you’re probably doing yourself out of a secondary drink or a secondary coffee. So then it’s not what you’re taking, it’s what you’re not taking. So it’s one of those discretionary things where you go, okay, if delivery’s not quick enough, what aren’t you taking?
Melissa Leong:
And Patrick, I’m really interested to hear your thoughts going through your menu. The single-handed food, the party food that is drink in one hand, dish in the other. Talk to me about that part of your menu.
Patrick Fisher:
Since day one when the kitchen proper has closed for dinner service, we’ve run what we’ve called the snack menu. The snack menu goes until close, and it includes toasted sandwiches, it includes nuggets and fries. It’s hot dogs, it’s fairy bread, it’s a heap of party treats, but it’s also stuff that is not chef-constructed. The idea behind the snack menu was that wait staff and front of house staff would be able to put this food together. This meant that we didn’t have to have a dedicated chef on until 1:00 AM. It meant that we could continue to sell far more food than simply chips and nuts behind the bar. So that snack menu has sold consistently, but it’s certainly not enough in terms of revenue to prop up a restaurant.
It almost feels like we run two bars, and one of them happens to start at about 8:30 on Friday and wrap up on Sunday morning, and then the other one runs the rest of the time. I think we’ve got a fairly good handle on the sorts of things that work through our nightclub periods, and selling more food there isn’t necessarily the top priority. The full service of food through the week, especially with the concept of entree, main or main, dessert, that sort of food service is the one that is particularly complicated to market it seems because all the messages that we’re sending out have been very thoroughly nightclub coded.
Melissa Leong:
This is where good marketing can save the day, and without a big ad spend businesses like Bernie’s are going online. Bernie’s is already exceptionally good at cultivating and feeding a large targeted and engaged social media audience. The next job will be for the team to build a new identity for its restaurant that is Bernie’s coded, but puts the food front and centre.
Bernie’s video:
I’ve got Spag bowl, Aussie classic. I’ve got a beautiful Ratatouille with some potatoes. It’s all vegan, that one.
Gareth Whitton:
Can I just ask, Patrick, with your menu, is there a one key goal that you are wishing to achieve through that, or are you hoping to fulfill a couple of different criteria in terms of how you construct your menus?
Patrick Fisher:
I’ve based the menu concept on a party of six, I would suppose. As a solo operator any more than a table of six, I’m not really able to… People start to have some more diverse needs after that size. With that, I’ve got about a third of the menu dedicated to schnitzels and schnitzel toppers. We run four different kinds of schnitzels, chicken, beef plant-based and a plain one, which is a grilled chicken breast, which is for gluten-free folk. We have about four main meals, which are specialty mains. I’ve thought of them as more wintery foods. I’ve got a lasagna, I’ve got a lamb shank, stuff like that. And then in the middle of menu we’ve got a couple of burgers, and the rest is just a handful of shares and sides. I think to do much more than that would require some pretty significant revisions of how the space gets used, and also it’d require a fair bit more of the staff.
Gareth Whitton:
To be quite frank, it’s a lot of work for a one-man show.
Patrick Fisher:
Of the few kitchens, or the few menus that we’ve debuted in this place, it’s certainly the one that offers the most to the customer with the easiest prep burden on kitchen. For instance, the figures we’re doing now are roughly analogous to the figures we were doing when we first opened, except that I do it solo instead of with four staff. When the revenue is only three grand a week that’s my wage, that’s food cost, and that’s a handful of the overheads, but the kitchen still is probably on the wrong side of breaking even.
Gareth Whitton:
Do we need to talk about the elephant in the room are the wages and staffing that is just absolutely crippling the industry at the moment? The industry’s on its knees and we’re not really seem to be getting up anytime soon so owners and founders are picking up the slack, and you find yourself just committing overly to make sure that what you’re doing is ticking those boxes, and burning out as a result. So do you need to perhaps look at your offering and think, well, yeah, do we want to stick to the pub classics? And it seems to me as though, and we’re not looking at reinventing the wheel here, but it sounds as though the schnitzel menu you’re offering holds up.
Patrick Fisher:
In terms of stripping it back I don’t have a lot of places left to go with it, short of relaunching under a new brand as a way of capturing a bit of the schnitzel hub feel. I don’t know how much more I can cut off it without it just becoming a single-item kitchen.
Melissa Leong:
Patrick doesn’t seem convinced that a single item kitchen is where Bernie’s should go, but when I spoke with Nick Connellan, Broadsheet Australia’s Editor, not enough venues are doing exactly that.
Gareth Whitton:
I’d also love to see more venues that are just focusing on doing one thing really, really well rather than trying to be an all day full service thing, which is understandably really important for making money, is to appeal to a lot of consumers and be open all day and whatever. But I love these hyper-specialized restaurants where there’s three things on the menu, something like that where it’s we only do this and this is what we want to be known for. I think anyone who’s travelled in Japan knows those ramen shops where they literally only have two bowls of ramen on the menu or something. I’d love to see more of that in Australia, whereas we tend to do these big-
Melissa Leong:
Trying to please a lot of people.
Gareth Whitton:
Yeah, big full service places.
Could you start to work creatively and then turn Bernie’s into a schnitzel place? Because then you then find yourself with opportunities to turn that into a late night beer in hand, snack in the other. That doesn’t necessarily require a full kitchen team, or the attention from yourself as the sole member of that kitchen team. You have schnitzel sliders or something that are pre-made and can just be flashed in an air fryer by a front of house member. It’s a two-second job and then it gets onto the tray and out to the customer that much quicker. Just having that focus on something, it’s a lot easier for people to remember.
Melissa Leong:
It feels like there’s quite a bit of juxtaposition between the restaurant offering and the nightclub offering, and I wonder if we know that the nightclub offering is the thing that’s what’s really working for you. Do you reverse engineer a food menu that is bringing the party into your every day, and that can seamlessly play with that drinks menu?
Patrick Fisher:
We’ve done a handful of menus over the last year that have really tried to bring different parts of what we are about at Bernie’s to the Kitchen. That includes, I think, we’ve put out the most colourful plates of arancini you’ll ever see. It’s a little harder on something perhaps as ubiquitous as a schnitzel. It’s certainly there. The menu is very clearly ours. It’s colourful, it’s quirky. It’s got all the little Bernie’s bits and humour that people would appreciate.
Gareth Whitton:
Maybe it might take a bit of a big swallow and accept that some things just aren’t working and just get rid of it, and really just focus again on putting that energy into your top line sellers. And then from there, maybe this is coming from a different angle, but I would just look at the ones that you think reflect the identity of Bernie’s, and think how can I use this in marketing? What’s your elevator pitch? You need to have that short, snappy three line mantra that people can just roll off the tongue and say, “This is what Bernie’s is and this is what they’re offering me.”
Melissa Leong:
The all important elevator pitch. You need to be able to sell your business or idea in the time that it takes to ride the lift up a few floors. It’s easy to get bogged down in detail, but don’t forget to zoom out and remember what you’re offering, and why. If you can’t tell someone else what you do and why it’s brilliant in a sentence or two, how are you going to convince a customer?
Huge thanks to Gareth Whitton, head and hands behind Tarts Anon, and his co-founder Cat Way.
Gareth Whitton:
Thanks, Patrick. Great to meet you. Thanks guys.
Patrick Fisher:
Thanks a lot, mate.
Melissa Leong:
By the way, Patrick, I really feel the frustration. And thank you for being so vulnerable with it because these are the granular pieces of information and concerns that so many businesses share. Thank you so much for that.
Patrick Fisher:
Sure, sure. Look, I really believe that if we can all, as business owners and as people in hospitality, can talk a bit more about the challenges that we’ve got and the ways we’ve overcome them or the ways that we’ve fallen short, I think that there’s a lot more to be learned from it. And as someone who consumes all of this content it is my honour to help bring something back to it a little. It’s been a thrill to be a part of the project.
Melissa Leong:
We’ve heard about the challenges of a first-time venue owner running a regional bar in its first year, but you are about to hear what happened when one of the best bartenders in the world opened a stunning venue in Melbourne, and a dream turned to disaster.
Luke Whearty has been named amongst the world’s best bartenders, with a laundry list of awards and accolades that have made him a hospitality superstar. He and his business and life partner, Aki Nishikura, head up Byrdi Melbourne, which has been listed among the top bars in the world. But success looks very different from the inside, and it’s been a wild ride.
Luke Whearty:
Byrdi for me was, in my head, it was meant to be the easy one. I was coming home, all of a sudden in my head going, I’m going back home. This is easy. I know this like the back of my hand. And I’ve worked for bars in South Africa, Singapore, and done it for so many years. And I’m Luke Whearty, I’m the top four international bartender of the year and all this sort of stuff. So I had this idea in my head of what opening Byrdi was going to be like, and it was anything but. Our builder got about halfway through the build and then just vanished, and then we realized that he’d taken all the money that we’d given him for our builds and using it to pay off his other debts on about 10 other builds. Everything that we’ve worked for 20 years to build our dream bar had just gone, and it was looking like we weren’t going to open.
We had money that we had set aside for a rainy day. Oh, yeah, and we had to kiss goodbye the soft openings that we wanted to have friends and family and everyone involved. All of a sudden the thing that I said that we wouldn’t do, and that was open on a weekend, we did. We opened on a Friday night at 5:30. It was still a construction site. There was saws and sawdust and everything. And yeah, I remember talking to the team that night, I cried. I cried in front of them saying, “I am so sorry. This is not what I wanted it to be like for anyone.”
Patrick Fisher:
I have no idea what pressure Luke must’ve been under to do that because I would not have made that call. I would’ve waited. I would’ve said it is not ready and we cannot launch like this. So braver man than me. Opening a new venue is not just turning a key. We had to orient 20 staff to a place that had no orientation manual. I cannot imagine the stress of that. We moved into a site that required a fit out, not a renovation. There were no builders involved. There were tradespeople, but we could wrangle those. That sounds like a horror story.
Melissa Leong:
That’s the humbling thing about hospitality. Awards don’t pay the bills, and despite appearances, most owners are facing the same financial pressures as any other business.
Luke Whearty:
Yeah. It’s definitely not the case that if you won a certain award that you’re not going to have financial troubles within your business. It helps definitely, I’m not going to lie, but it’s still the same. I can’t rest on my laurels, and I can’t just take it easy because of what I’ve done in the past. I think, if I’m finding it hard, I don’t know how people are just starting out in this industry that don’t have a name for themselves yet. Yeah. I think people just assume that, oh yeah, I’ve got that investor to lean on, in hard times or whatever.
Patrick Fisher:
If we’ve been able to transform an inefficient business at the start to something that has survived what appears to be a bit of a crisis, wait till the times are good. These are cycles. They’re big cycles, 6, 7, 8, 10 years, but it gets better. It’s not like all of economics has suddenly changed and there’ll never be a boom again. And when we get to that, which we are determined to do, we’re in a very good position to really pay ourselves back.
Luke Whearty:
You have these experiences and it’s how you grow from them, I guess. So I think it’s maybe a better person, for sure. It’s made me understand people a little bit more, I guess, and the stresses people go under when they open a business. It’s definitely made me better at what I do.
Melissa Leong:
We caught up with Bernie’s Bar co-owner, Patrick Fisher, a couple of weeks after our chat to find out what he’s been doing.
Patrick, how are you?
Patrick Fisher:
As many small business owners will probably appreciate, my mood is almost directly tied to revenue. And in the last week it was a little slower, and so there was a correlating stress increase. So I recognize though that the trajectories were on are all healthy.
Melissa Leong:
Patrick, Gareth floated the idea of becoming a specialty schnitzel bar, try saying that three times, and making that a single menu item with a variety of toppers, which would involve another kitchen rebrand. You didn’t seem too keen at the time, but with a bit of time to digest that idea how do you feel about it now?
Patrick Fisher:
So to do a rebrand, we start, well, I start with the data. It’s very straightforward to pull sales data out of the system that we use. We use Square, and in the sales records that we were able to get through that show me not only the most common items, but the most common modifiers on those items. And far and away the kitchen was supported by its schnitzel. That’s every kitchen you go to. In fact, it’s become a shorthand for the business. When we think about launching a new idea or a new product or a new service we ask ourselves, what’s the schnitzel? What is the item in the blend of revenue that is that really dominant 25, 35% of revenue? What’s the schnitzel in a new idea?
In this case, the schnitzel was actually a schnitzel. The pivot towards something closer to a schnitzel restaurant we made with this most recent menu. The whole kitchen brand was carved off under the new banner Schnit Happens, which we had a bit of fun playing around with. So there’s already been some steps to make that a bit of a focus in the marketing, and we’ve also continued to develop the kitchen brand as a separate but related identity. We still want to trade on all the things that make Bernie’s Bar unique, but we’ve taken a few steps to put food closer to the centre of that mission. I’m very optimistic, but it is a long-term optimism.
Melissa Leong:
The takeaways from today, no matter who you are and what you’ve done before, falling over and getting back up is part of the ride. Identify your customers and what they want. Focus on what you do best, and don’t waste time trying to be all things to all people.
Patrick Fisher:
I get up, I work on this. I come home and I work on this. We believe in it.
Melissa Leong:
Coming up next on Coolroom Confessional.
Isaac Varano:
How did you choose what you wanted to prep in your prep store?
Lorenzo Fantarella:
The main thing, obviously the logistics for two stores isn’t there yet, but with us it’s mainly about quality control. It’s a roller coaster. It’s a wild journey. Strap in.
Melissa Leong:
This podcast is thanks to Square. Hospitality has enough on their plate. Square builds business tools that help hospo businesses like yours run smoothly. It’s more than just payments. From table layouts to a digital ticketing system for your kitchen, it’s all integrated and it all talks to each other because service still matters. Find out more at square.com/my/coolroom.
We are proudly supported by American Express. Did you know that Square sellers automatically accept American Express for the same low rate as all other cards? Let American Express card members know that you support their payment method of choice with Square. Get your complimentary signage and supplies at amexpop.com/square to help you attract more customers.
