I’m a bartender at heart, and behind the bar is where I love to be most.
A lot of people come into this kind of work seeing it as a job they do on the side whilst they’re working towards something else. Before I actually started doing it, I felt the same about my first bar job when I was 18, and had just become a student at Glasgow School of Art.
I started off collecting glasses in nightclubs and immediately took a shine to working in that kind of environment. I was studying a degree in Fine Art, specifically sculpture - laterally I was working with neon, designing lights, and I did really enjoy it. I’ve always been creative and it’s definitely a passion, but personally I just didn’t see a career in what I was studying.
But I could see the potential to move up the ladder quickly working in bars. I was just lucky that one of the first pubs I worked in was really good in training and encouraging me.
I worked hard and they gave me my first assistant manager’s role when I was just 19. Getting that promotion when I was so young really gave me the confidence and ignited me to go even further in my career and I’ve got to where I am now very quickly. People always assume that I’m older than I am because I’m already the general manager of a bar at 25.
For me, this was never going to be just a bar job. What I saw very early on, was the opportunity to have an interesting and viable career that I could do really well in, and also, being a creative person coming from art school, I just found a different route that still enabled me to express my creativity, because this is a job where I continually do that.
I love working with food and drink and creating new menus and flavours to use in drinks. I love to challenge myself and take classic cocktails and give them a bit of a twist. I think that’s how I see life generally. I’m always trying to do something just a little bit differently to keep things interesting. I’m not trying to re-invent the wheel - perhaps just embellish the wheel a little bit.
People might not expect to hear that the manager of a busy bar has a really good work life balance, but I absolutely do have that, especially working here.
Of course, my weekends were something that I sacrificed a long time ago, but to be honest going out to socialise on a Saturday night doesn’t really interest me anymore. I prefer to go out midweek, and there’s always something going on in Glasgow, whatever night it is.
I think I’ll always want to work in this brilliant industry. I don’t have plans to do anything else. I can see myself someday putting the key in the door and locking up the bar after my final shift, but, as far as I’m concerned, it won't be last-orders for me for a long time yet.
