A Ball Tearer

“Fuck me, I’ve just had what the Australians refer to as a ball tearer.”

DISCARD asked Paul Mant, Group Beverage Manager for Sydney mega-operator Merivale, and sometime founder to talk to us about the sometime unseen, often unsung part of the bar industry – those working behind the scenes, operating bars ‘at scale’; maintaining standards, guest experience, and quality control across multiple outlets and enormous volumes. After his initial explanation about the ball-tearer (it means to have a bad day apparently), he sets the scene for the conversation - he can give “radio friendly” answers, or he can “let go and then red pen it”; just chat away untethered, and then can have the final edit on the spicier elements of the conversation. We choose the latter.

“I started working in bars in I think 1997. I wasn’t allowed to go to sixth form [after leaving secondary school aged sixteen] because I was a very naughty boy, so I went to the local golf club, lied about my age and got a job collecting glasses. I spent some time watching the guys behind the bar, and worked out pretty quickly that all you had to do was give the people the thing they asked for, and be nice, and you’re all of a sudden seen as really good at it? I thought, I’m up for this, no problem.” The golf club was in Ascot, explains Paul - an affluent leafy London satellite, full of footballers and new money financiers, and as such the club attracted a fairly wealthy and famous clientele. “The whole France ’98 squad came in for a golf day once.” We enquire whether they were well behaved. “I was told Gazza was enjoying himself careering about on a golf cart with a hipflask of brandy”. 

A regular at the bar owned a nightclub in Windsor and offered Paul the job as assistant manager. After a happy year working two nights a week, the owner wanted to raise service standards, telling him to find somewhere in London to train. “I was sort of self-taught, and while I’d managed to get myself to a decent standard and got relatively fast the drinks were all sour mix and spindle mixers. I used Yahoo - yeah it was those days - and found this one bar where both ‘Theme’ and ‘Flava’ bartenders of the year [Dre Masso and Jamie Terrell] were working. My boss paid a grand for me to go for a two-week course at LAB.” The daytime courses were useful, but it was the end of the day Paul enjoyed more when the staff took him out to visit other bars. “My eyes were opened, and I was completely intoxicated by it”. Back in Windsor a sudden change of ownership: “a load of gangsters, basically” at the nightclub meant a change, and following a short stint in Antigua, Paul returned to the UK to work at a bar in Hertfort, while also doing event work with Soulshakers. “I was meeting and working next to all these people off the front of CLASS and Flava. I was shitting myself.” 

Fast forward to 2007 and while on a holiday, Paul received a call from Soulshakers’ Giles Looker, asking him if he was interested in working at a new rum bar opening in Mayfair, which would turn out to be the now infamous Mahiki. Summarising himself at the time as “just acting like Billy Big Balls, I did not have the chops” he interviewed for head bartender. The interview was successful but could have been very different, “after we shook hands on the job, I saw Rich Hunt walking down the stairs. Sliding Doors moment - If I’d have been twenty minutes later, I’m pretty sure they’d have hired him instead”.

Mahiki upon its opening was wildly popular - “an absolute juggernaut” - helped in no small part by an opening night visit of Royal princes William and Harry, who were pictured in the national tabloids drinking their signature sharing cocktail; a champagne-soaked punch served in a huge treasure chest. “Next day it was on the front of the papers and everything went mad. We just couldn’t keep up. Imagine the bar version of Fawlty Towers. But with sillier walks.” Paul remained at Mahiki as head bartender for eighteen months, which Paul described as “a long year and a half but looking back some of the best times in my life. It’s where I made my bones; in terms of profile, for sure.” 

It was whilst working at Mahiki Paul co-founded the anarchic, winner-takes-all cocktail competition It’s A Rematch, Beeyatch, with the simple aim of ending the grumbling about unseen conspiracies, and strategic pouring deal based faux-victories. For Rematch you paid your due, everyone made the same drinks, and the fastest took home the pot. At its peak Rematch was a polarising phenomenon; it had a huge following, was contested in twelve cities across the world, and offered the winners serious money and cult status, but it was still lambasted by certain corners of the industry. Paul is philosophical when looking back on his Rematch legacy, stating that its innate popularity turned it into something unrecognisable, “it was great, and there’s no denying it helped me get lots of free holidays, but it became a bit of a disaster by the end. It was time to kill it.”

2009, and Paul turned down a role with Mahiki sister venue Whisky Mist in favour of joining new Soho member’s club Quo Vadis. “Whisky Mist told me they wanted to make a classic cocktail bar, but said they wanted classics ‘y’know, like the Lychee Martini’. The same day I went to Soho to talk to the Quo Vadis owners and they happened to be looking at glassware. One of them picked up this delicate glass and remarked about how it would be good for a Sazerac. I thought, this is it. These people care about the right stuff.” Paul thinks for a second, then continues - “quite funny really, since nowadays Lychee Martinis pay a significant part of my wages”. Paul started as bar manager and soon took on responsibility for the club as well, and had some big names around him; Charles Vexenat, Marcis Dzelzainis, Gianfranco Spada, and Ali Burgess all worked behind the bar; “the team was a belter, and we had – even though I hate to say this term – what I think was the UK’s first proper ice program”. 

Quo Vadis was critically successful, winning Best New Bar from CLASS, and being nominated for a Spirited Award, attracting a more eclectic, but no less famous clientele than those sipping drinks out of pineapples at Mahiki, “I remember one time I was in the bar, and Lucien Freud, Damien Hirst, and Banksy were sitting at the bar, having a cup of tea. Three generations of British art just sitting there chatting about the football”. Despite the success of Quo Vadis, after three and half years Paul was eventually was made redundant, which in retrospect he admits was wasn’t totally surprising. “I’d successfully managed myself out of a job. My final eighteen months I probably wasn’t really giving it my best – we still had a good team and the bar was running well – but I was basically coming in three or four days a week and drinking with guests. I fucking loved it, but Quo was full of lunatics. You can get yourself into bad habits in the West End of London with company like that. Looking back, I don’t know how I operated mentally for as long as I did. Guests were having a great time for sure, but I probably could have been a better leader, a better manager, a better boss”. 

Managing to leave on good terms, and using his redundancy package to purchase events equipment, Paul started Heads, Hearts & Tails alongside Joe Stokoe, running events, working with liquor brands, and consulting on projects such as the table tennis chain Bounce. Although a successful company now, building the business from scratch proved tough. “It was fucking hard, really hard, we worked as hard as we could to get the work we could, you know? We did well eventually, but there were ups and downs and we were broke most of the time. Actually, Joe is better with money than I am, I was broke most of the time”. 

A trip to give a talk at the Sydney Bar Show during Mahiki’s opening year had led to an extended month long stay in Australia, and since that time Paul had returned several times and made and maintained friendships there. One of these friends was leaving his job in the hospitality group Merivale and asked Paul if he’d be interested in taking over in his place. Eight weeks later he was starting his job as group bars manager on the other side of the world. The learning curve was very steep, and Paul admits he struggled to adapt: “I had no idea what I was doing, then my old man passed away which was really challenging, and I didn’t take it well. Fortunately, the people that work there believed in me and gave me the ‘eight-week chat’ which is basically an ultimatum; here are the problems, here is where you can get better, you have eight weeks to get it right. Fucking terrifying, but one of my strengths is certainly fortitude, so I decided to get my head down and sort it out. One of the good things about this company is if there are ever things you need to do differently; they address it very clearly. Not in a mean way, in a constructive and fair way that just makes you think, OK I’ll get on that”.

Merivale is a gigantic operation, currently operating ninety outlets across twenty-five venues, with a diverse portfolio ranging from simple pubs, through all sizes of restaurants, various bar concepts, wine bars, nightclubs, and even hotels. Paul has to think for a second when asked about how many venues he’s opened in his seven years with the company, “I think about twenty, but each has completely different challenges. Justin [Merivale owner] states that the point of the diversity of the portfolio is that’s there’s something for everyone, so some pubs we might just take over, they need a quick rebrand and then we open, some might have a $20m refurbishment program”. Paul is realistic about the hard work expected: “We’ve had people who are - quite frankly, superstars - from the UK, Aussies, whatever, come along with very, very good reputations and they haven’t made it. It’s not for everyone, it’s all about how you respond to the demands of the job I guess. It’s not like Google where they give you snacks and let you take naps. We work fucking hard, we’re incredibly successful, we’re the market leader. Get on the bus”.

The scale of the operation is frightening. Fully staffed the company has three thousand employees, including a thousand-strong bar team, who collectively in the twelve months pre-COVID poured out three million litres of beer across the company’s bars, and close to the same number of serves of Absolut. The numbers sometimes even surprise him: “we are certainly the biggest consumer of Don Julio 1942 in the Southern Hemisphere, maybe the world, but that’s without pushing it. It’s just what people order”. The challenge of operating at this sort of scale of course is to maintain that consistency and quality control of a single bar across all the different concepts; finding a way for a simple drink to be served in a way that is consistent with the company standards, put together fast enough to match the – sometimes overwhelming - demand, and of course profitable, no matter which venue you order it in. This is not to say that money is the primary goal however. “The fact is, we talk about money and volumes and all the rest of it, but every decision is made with the guest in mind. Every decision”. Consistency is the keyword in the approach to staff training as well. A strong leadership structure, ideally promoted from within, helps to maintain the company standards across venues. New recruits are sent to a bartender ‘bootcamp’ to learn the basics of bartending, service, and a recently added module on batching cocktails. “The idea is to take away the scary shit for these kids, and make sure they know how to make everything the way we want them to make it no matter the venue. Spirit, ice, mixer, there’s definitely a ‘Merivale way’ to make that now. I really think our consistency and quality has never been better than it is now”.

“I think that sometimes - and I’m mentioning zero names - you visit certain bars with someone that is in the industry, in ‘that world’, and your customer experience can be very different than if you go in on your own. It’s not really fair to treat some guests differently, basically because they know less about distilled liquor than you. Getting a bar in the top fifty I imagine is very difficult - I’ve never purposefully set out to do it, but I’ll admit for a time it was all I wanted - however, I would argue that putting together a batching operation churning out seven thousand litres of Negroni a week, or even getting a thousand eighteen year olds to serve a vodka soda the same way is just as challenging, if not more so. I do think we have a few bars that are right up there in terms of standards for sure, and we definitely have the right talent amongst the guys delivering the actual product, those putting the actual drinks on the bars”. 

On Sydney nightlife, Paul talks up the service standards of Australian hospitality staff, “everyone talks about the guest-centric approach in Australia, but I think it is something that exists. You just see less dickhead bartenders.” He also extols the virtues of bars such as Baxter Inn (”pretty fucking good time, every time”), and Old Mate’s Place (“just a great place to sit and crush liquor”), but is quick to proudly single out some of his places. “Charlie Parker’s and Will’s do not get the credit they deserve in my opinion. The work that goes in there, and the effort the goes into what’s in the glass, as well as the guest experience, it’s…well, it’s fucking sick. I would stand behind the consistency in those places, I think their drinks are as good as anywhere”.

We touch on the pandemic and how it’s affected Sydney’s hospitality trade. “We’re short about four hundred staff at the moment, we usually have a lot of casual staff who now aren’t available because there’s no one travelling, there’s no transient workforce”. Batched cocktails have become a big focus for the company, “We’ve become a tenant of what used to be Qantas’ meal fulfilment venue, so now that’s where we batch now”. Recently a change in the restrictions allowed outdoor vertical drinking again, which affected one of Merivale’s larger venues rather dramatically. “We have a venue called The Newport with the biggest beer garden in the Southern hemisphere. The change was announced on a Friday, and overnight the capacity went from four hundred to three thousand. So yeah, we have some work to do”.

It’s fair to say that Paul’s professional motivations have changed since his switch Down Under. He states that one of the more rewarding parts of his job nowadays is developing a positive and rewarding place to work for the younger staff, “I’m definitely in it for different things now. I’m in it to make sure these kids get developed the right way; they have a working environment where they’re not feeling pressured by modern life, that they have that balance. That’s what I’m interested in now”.

Seven years into the job, what advice would he give for those looking to go into a similar field? “Looking back at what I think of as the golden years of the London bar scene - all of us drinking in LAB and the Player and places like that, I think with all the great people working at the time, with the training and standards - the book was written then for sure. Back then Soho House was looked at as somewhere that wasn’t cool at all, probably because someone influential said it was shit or something. But look what they’re doing now. Would you want to be on that bus? Fuck yeah you would! Tom Kerr’s got to have the best job around! My advice would be to not blindly follow the opinions of people you see in the magazines, and do your own thing, you might find something you’re really good at. Learning a different skill is fucking hard, you might have to do something that the coolest people might not think is cool to develop yourself beyond what you might have thought was possible”.