How I got here: Antico’s Steph Jacobs on why service comes before drinks

Welcome to Sidecar No Sugar, a weekly Boothby newsletter about Brisbane bars and the people, work and creativity that grounds it. (You can sign up to get it in your inbox each week, right here.) This week, I chatted to Steph Jacobs, Antico venue manager, princess of the people and experienced hospitality soldier. Her no-BS observations of young (and old) bartenders alike is particularly relevant as the industry reckons with its flaws.  

If you have info the Brisbane bar community should know, please email me contact@beccawang.com.au or send me a message via Instagram (@supper.partying).

I’ve known Steph Jacobs since 2020 at my first job out of the pandemic – running food at Hellenika at The Calile. She was a weapon waiter at Hellenika, floating around the enormous venue in her signature flowy skirt, making guests at her tables chat and laugh with her like it was the easiest thing in the world. It’s no secret Steph champions service above all else – if you’ve worked with her, this much is true. 

Since then, she’s overseen all things service at the Boom Boom Room and Gerard’s Bar. Now, she’s the venue manager at Antico, where she develops cocktail menus, shuns the term mixology, and helps train a new generation of bartenders with passionate service and genuine care. 

BECCA WANG: We’ve known each other through working in restaurants together. You were always a weapon in the restaurant. How did you get here and why did you change to bars?

STEPH JACOBS: Originally I wanted to do theatre, which is probably where a lot of my personality comes from when I’m on the floor. I was pretty much a showman from a really young age. I guess I was just a bit of an attention whore, I loved having eyes on me from getting into theater and drama.

I started working at Mad Mex, and even the service I provided there was very personable and I was always getting compliments on it. Do you know how William Shakespeare says,  “All the world’s a stage”? I thought I can literally make a living out of making the restaurant my stage, and found a way into waitressing on the Sunshine Coast. That wasn’t great, honestly. For the first few years I was doing pretty bad adjusting to the workload of it. Once I adapted, it became very clear to me that you could teach talent and knowledge and the general steps of service but you can’t teach passion. When I graduated into training positions at Hellenika and the Boom Boom Room, it became very clear to me that the people I was hiring didn’t have a lot of experience and knowledge per se, but they had a ton of drive and passion. I developed their talent from that which became my way of training people. 

I got into bars because Antico was a venue that offered the knowledge and training on top of what I already had [service-wise]. [My bartender partner] Damien helped me connect with people to get me on board. It was like trying to find a marriage of my half-finished theatre degree and my love of the hospitality industry. 

BECCA: What are the key differences between working in bars and restaurants?

STEPH: Restaurants and bars have a really wide berth between the floor staff and the bar staff, which is what I found to be the most jarring thing of all. Working in a bar, everyone’s one team and one family but restaurants are different in that the bar team and the floor team are very much segregated. They don’t really have that kind of crossover unless you are already friends with each other. If you’re in the bar, you’ve got to stay in your section and that was something that I couldn’t really get behind. When I was at Boom Boom Room, I was trying to jump in and see if I could make a drink here and there but I got an energy from one or two of the bartenders that was like, we don’t want you in our space. 

In restaurants, people pay more attention to the food than the drinks which really bothered me because the drinks we had slapped. Often people are only paying attention to what the chefs put out. It’s a kick in the face to the bartending team who put so much effort into all of these creations. Don't get me wrong, chefs do a really good job but they're very widely recognised because there are so many restaurants that focus solely on food. I wanted to lean more into the talent that bartenders have which is why I found myself chasing bar jobs after I left restaurants. 

BECCA: How much do you use your restaurant experience in your drinkmaking?

STEPH: So much. There are ingredients that I know from chefs who have told me about them, and not just told me about them but gone into really intense detail of what is in it, how it’s processed, how it’s harvested, how the kitchen prepares it. I made a drink for Dr Gimlette’s menu called the Mushroom Man. It was inspired by a dish from Boom Boom Room and it had koji chives and enoki mushrooms. I wanted to mess around and see if I could make a Martini with it. I took the flavour profile straight out of Zac Sykes’s dish. A good 80 percent of my drink ideas come from my time in restaurants, from dishes I've seen or flavours on a menu. I feel like everyone needs to work in a restaurant before they work in a bar so they can get a clarified version of where they want to go with bartending.

BECCA: Working in restaurants is very humbling. You can always tell when someone has never been yelled at by a chef. 

STEPH: 100 percent. Sure, you can get yelled at by a bartender but at the end of the day, a bartender is only going to yell at you so much. Chefs have thrown things at me for getting things wrong and that has put the fear of God into me. When bartenders do it, it’s like, ‘Whatever, come at me’.

BECCA: Speaking of which, if you could have the power to change three things about working in bars or bars in general, what would they be?

STEPH: A really big thing is the gatekeeping of bars. It’s getting way better, mind you with this younger generation coming into bars but still, I’m coming across a lot of bartenders who look down on people who are starting out and being like, ‘Oh, you haven’t done this, haven’t done that.’ We all have to start somewhere and it’s really important to give these new kids a chance and foster them without the old school bartending ways. 

So many bartenders still go off of the rhetoric of, ‘I was treated like this when I first started bartending so you’re gonna have to go through the same kind of treatment’. This generation doesn’t tolerate that kind of treatment, getting glasses thrown at them and getting yelled at for making minute mistakes with their drinks. At the end of the day, we’re pouring liquid into cups, right? So it’s really not that serious. Too many bartenders have had the joy of hospitality trained out of them and now all they care about is perfection. The new generation of bartenders aren’t going to take mistreatment. I really want some of the older bartenders to take that on board and realise that times are changing and you can’t treat people like that anymore. 

Lastly, the term mixologist needs to die. If I meet someone in an interview who genuinely, unironically calls themselves a mixologist, I’m just not going to hire you because you’ve lost the point of what hospitality is. Hospitality is creating a good experience for the people that come into your venue. Yeah, sure, the customer’s always right but they’re the ones giving you money for the craft, so you’ve got to treat them with some kind of respect. And service is always at the forefront of our game and it’s what makes us love what we do. If all you care about is being a mixologist and making good drinks and making bitters and syrups and shit but you don’t want to talk to the people coming in and paying money for you to do what you do, it just doesn’t sit right with me. The term needs to be retired because it’s not about the craft, it’s about the service. If you can’t give good service then you shouldn’t be able to make amazing drinks if you’re not planning on sharing them in the right way.

The Last Word

• Isabella Polley from Bar Hugo wins the Archie Rose Greenhorn competition at The Gresham. 
• Savile Row is now hiring for a venue manager.
• And entries into the Drink of the Year Awards are open now — enter at boothby.com.au/drinkoftheyear.