“I mean Employees Only is a sure thing,” said Dushan Zarić. “Consistently, you always know it’s going to be a good time. Right? And no matter where in the world you are.”
On this occasion Zarić, the brand’s co-founder is sitting in the private dining room in Employees Only Sydney. Always the consummate host, he is about to welcome hundreds into the venue for a party to celebrate the one year anniversary of the opening.
Now while opening a bar anywhere can be a calculated risk. Opening a bar halfway across the globe from your original New York location, in a city hampered by lock-out laws was seen by many as nothing short of madness.
“I would get questions from people around the world when they heard that I’m opening in Sydney, they would ask me, ‘can you still drink there?’
And while Sydney has never been a dry city, it would be fair to say that a lot of the life and atmosphere that had originally attracted Zaric to our shores had, over the five years of the lock-out, been diminished.
“We were fortunate to find the location, and due to our concept being a supper club and not just a bar or restaurant, we managed to get a three o’clock license even during lockout laws.
“I’m also old enough to know that history repeats itself,” Zaric answered, “and every attempt to regulate personal behaviour is doomed to fail. You just cannot do that. People will just find ways to circumvent any attempt by the authorities to regulate behaviour.”
With many of the lockout law restriction due to be lifted in less than a month and the bar proving to be one of the most popular venues in Sydney’s CBD, it could be said that the gamble has paid off.
“We definitely have managed to hit different clienteles and different target groups throughout the night,” Zaric explained. “So we start with the after-work market, people who finish work at five o’clock and come here. After that we transitioning to the dining crowd, then the after-dinner crowd and then after midnight we have the hospo people who are hungry.”
As the name implies, Employees Only was always designed to cater to hospitality professionals and be that refuge was they could come once their shift was done. But when you cater to an industry that is all about service, you can not survive unless your own service is impeccable.
And when Zarić talks about ‘teaching the long game’ this is what he means. “It’s all about how you treat your guests. And that’s every guest by themselves, and you have to really always be on top of that.
“That is something that for Sydney specifically, has been challenging. It’s not because of the guests, but because Australians do not necessarily choose a profession in hospitality. Behind the bar or in the kitchen is different story these days, but the only servers that are available to us are the young students who come here on a work-and-study visa who can legally work for six months and only 20 hours a week.”
Anyone who has worked in hospitality will know that creating a well-oiled team when no-one is there longer than six months is difficult. Especially, as Zarić points out when most do not have basic professional knowledge.
“We’re fortunate enough to have a really, really good staff and we work with them daily basis. I don’t hire people; I create teams.”
While service may seem like an odd thing to concentrate on when talking about a bar, to Zarić, it’s what it is all about. We are lucky enough to now live in an age where you can get beautifully constructed cocktails from bars in almost any city in the world. And almost everybody can hire a good chef who will come with an organic ingredient list. The differentiator is, as Zarić stresses, how you treat your guests.
“The experience requires the server to be able to forget about themselves and focus their attention on the guest. I can only speak about this because I’ve had challenges too and it was only through the help of others and the guidance from the mentors in my life, both professionally and personally, that I was able to overcome.
“I understand how long it takes to create a professional like that,” he said. “And I have all the patience in the world. My philosophy for creating teams is to allow you the space to make mistakes, and for you to trust me that you are safe to make mistakes is super important. If we don’t have that trust, then we can’t really work.
I don’t hire people, I create teams.
“If you come to work and you put your energy, your life force, your time into my business, then I have to at least able to respond with an energy and an environment where you feel safe to be whoever you need to be.”
With training as one of his central points and a ‘trust is not earned, it’s lost’ philosophy, Zarić believes that the future offers, not only Employees Only but the industry as a whole, an opportunity to take a breath, catch up and subsequently grow up.
“The demand for craft bartenders was so high in the last ten years that we produced people who weren’t really properly trained,” he explained. “So reteaching bartenders is the next challenge in the next 10 to 15 years. The aim is to create a generation of bartenders that look at their creativity, just like the fine dining chefs look at their food.”
Yet Zarić is careful to point out that creating cocktails that are multi-dimensional, as well as gastronomically sound is not just about making the recipes more convoluted. “In my experience, you don’t become a great bartender, like you don’t become a great chef, just because you make something complex because that’s easy. It’s easy to make complex things.
“It’s harder to make things that are sound,” he explains. “Did they finish it? Did they enjoy it? Do they want another one? I don’t care if it’s made with vodka or it’s made with quince or Eau de Vie; I don’t care. It has to be palatable, and it has to have a three-dimensionality to it so that as it warms up, as you drink it down.”
Zarić gives the example of a Negroni, where people who weren’t properly trained were making the drink with powerful gins, heavy and bitter vermouths and covering it all with Campari. The result of which he likens to a sea urchin in your mouth; way too much and not very enjoyable.
“To the untrained palate it may indeed taste like something, but that’s only because it’s extremely complex. There are tiny little things that you taste that completely wake you up because they’re so amazing, but that requires years of training.
And that training very much comes to the fore when you are dealing with a spirit like vodka. “It’s easy to make drinks with gin, whiskey and tequila. It’s harder with vodka. It’s very difficult to make well-composed, sound cocktails using spirits that don’t give you anything else but an alcoholic foundation in a body.”
For Zarić the future of bartending will basically come down to retraining the palates of bartenders and subsequently, consumers. “When you taste a gin straight, it’s going to be compounded. It’s going to be very compressed. You add a few drops of water, and you see how the botanicals release oils.
“You’ll see those little filaments of oil beginning to release into the gin and all of a sudden that whole thing changes. With a little bit of water, you can see how that gin will work in a cocktail and whether it has the botanical foundation and strength to carry the drink, or it’s just a consumer marketing product.
Zarić believes that bartenders are challenged by the spirits that are widely available through the big brands. “All these big multinationals, they create consumer marketing products, which don’t necessarily work for us as professionals for mixing. They’re designed for the consumer palate. To be mixed with maybe a soda or tonic water or whatever.
“For us, we need to be exploring creative possibilities and pushing boundaries, and that means using the liquid tools that are produced and created for professionals. Sadly, there are not many brands that are like that anymore.”
Profit margins and shareholder profits are, of course, the main reason that Zarić believes that a lot of the bigger brands not necessarily maintaining quality. “Look at what’s happening in the world of tequila. Diageo buys George Clooney’s brand for $1 billion. It wasn’t the great tequila, to begin with, but now it’s atrocious.
“How are they going to make $1 billion back?” he asks. “By cutting costs; adding flavouring, adding sugar, lobbying Mexico to change legislation to allow them to use diffusers and all that other stuff. So, of course, the quality is going to be lower than it was before.”
If the larger brands are making alcohol to be consumed by the masses and concentrating on their bottom line, Zarić believes at the other end of the scale, the issue with small producers is the uniformity of the products they produce. “For cocktails, the spirit needs to be at least 40% or higher. I don’t think cocktails need more than five or six ingredients, including water, so I need a good foundation to build on.
“So with the small producers, there’s again that same challenge like with young bartenders, they tend to be overly complex, which then doesn’t allow me much room to play. For smaller brands, consistency’s something that is a challenge, but that is something that in time they will overcome.”
Time is an important concept to Zaric. He believes that not matter whether you are talking about brands, bartenders, legislation or bars, if enough time is allowed, everything will eventually click. And he uses Employees Only New York as the perfect example of that. He points out that it took 7 or 8 years for the bar to attract the attention and acclaim that it has today. And he hopes that the Sydney venue will over time follow suit.
“It took a while for us to establish ourselves and do things consistently and lead by example, lead our staff by example,” he explained. “So I’m not expecting that in just a year will be as successful and be hitting all those milestones yet. I want us just to keep treating people the way we have so far and hopefully; Employees Only will truly become a landmark here as well.”
