Page 20 - foodservice Magazine July 2019

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INDUSTRY
Above: Inside the Winter Feast.
“[Dark Mofo] just creates this extreme environment of things that are really interesting and quite different to anything else that you’ve ever seen in Hobart. It encourages
a community of people who are keen to stay up late.”
Bar manager and sommelier Alister Robertson moved from Adelaide to Hobart for the job, arriving less than two weeks before it opened. He says the outstanding produce and tight-knit food community drew him south.
Robertson is one of many hospitality professionals who have made the move. Franklin’s Butler and Cooksley are both originally from Tasmania, but after a decade-long hospitality career in Melbourne, the partners in life decided to move back.
“We wanted ... a better work-life balance and to live somewhere that afforded us more time to indulge in the social and physical environment around us,” says Butler. “Also we are working towards opening our own space and we wanted to do that in a community that we really felt we could connect with, learn from, and hopefully add a little something to.”
But with so many new venues and jobs being created, filling them with the right staff is an increasing issue.
“We have a big, big, big problem,” says Andrisani. “We need a lot more people and we struggle,” she says, acknowledging that they and their team work long hours, which is “not really healthy”. “The biggest problem for me and my partner is always staff, or good staff anyway.”
Dyson says Hobart’s housing crisis is partly to blame.
Last year, the lack of affordable private rentals peaked when Hobart’s median house rental price surged to $420 per week, just $10 less than Melbourne. At the time, Hobart’s annual growth was at 15.1 per cent – the only capital city in Australia to be in the double digits – which put immense pressure on the housing market.
“Every year Dark Mofo [breaks] records,” says Dyson. Tourism Research Australia showed international tourism in the 2017/18 financial year was up 21 per cent on the previous year, with a record 307,000 international visitors touching down and staying an average of 17 nights on the island.
“Young people come down here and really struggle to find affordable accommodation,” says Dyson. “If that wasn’t a problem, I think we’d be inundated with bright young things.”
But although Dark Mofo is partly responsible for this growth, it’s working to add skills to the local hospitality industry too.
The Winter Feast provides internships for around 60 students from six local high schools and colleges each year, which Cook calmly describes as “a catering job for 100,000 people”.
Students are asked to elect the top three stalls for which they’d like to work and why, before each is placed at one or multiple stalls, to accommodate their interests.
“When we do our stallholder briefing, we talk to them about the importance of taking on students because we really need them in our industry,” says Cook. “We’re just desperate for more people in hospitality.”
On the final weekend of the Winter Feast, the crowds swell as expected. As stallholders hand out the last of their skewers, s’mores, and smoked fish congee, there’s Cook, dancing at the front of the live-music stage, surrounded by the recently nourished revellers of her grand Winter Feast.