Josh Smith, Tammy & Rob Charter

Conversation with a chef: It’s lovely to be here with you, Tammy and Rob and Josh at the Queenscliff Hotel. It is such a beautiful building and a lovely drive from Melbourne, quite easy, actually. Looking out the window, you can see the sea and the beautiful park with those amazing trees. The restoration has taken three years, and I know you’ve had lots of obstacles, but tell me about opening and how things are going so far. 

Rob: We opened in mid-March. It’s been really hectic, I think is the right word for it. We’ve been really busy and we’ve been settling in too. For Tammy and I, this is a new venture for us to run a hotel. Luckily, we’ve got Tim our general manager and Josh, our executive chef. They’re experienced hands, and they’ve been fantastic helping us through that process. For us, it has been new: new systems, new facilities in some ways because we restored everything in a new kitchen and so forth. It’s actually an interesting building because it’s like four businesses in one: we’ve got a cafe, two restaurants, two bars, and accommodation. It’s a lot of businesses starting all at once. We did some staggered staging, but it’s it all came on pretty quickly. I feel now we’ve finally settled down into more, not so much a routine, but a little bit more established, our staff are more experienced, and so we’re feeling much more relaxed at the moment than we were probably in the beginning of March. 

Josh: There’s a few more procedures in place. 

This room’s beautiful. It’s all a beautiful green colour. Did you did you have to do everything here? 

Tammy: We didn’t. We had our architect, who’s also a designer: Molecule Studios. Anjashe headed up all the designs, all the interiors. This is a silk green wallpaper, and then she’s paired it with mustard-coloured curtains. 

Rob: Tammy’s being very generous. Anjadid an enormous amount of work, but Tammy had a huge hand in finalising details.

Tammy: We all did. But what we really wanted to do was to celebrate local. Most of the art was done locally. Even in the bedrooms, we have quilts on the beds that are from Creswick Mills, the alpaca, and quite a few of the Doona covers are Carlotta and Guy, which is another Australian firm. Then we have all the rugs from a Melbourne company. The mattresses are from Melbourne. All the lighting, all the bespoke lighting in the restaurant, upstairs in the bedrooms, in the hallways, in the bar, all done by a fantastic lighting company out of Melbourne. Actually, they are brothers from New Zealand. And actually, there’s more New Zealand influence because those big lights in the conservatory are also from New Zealand. There were definitely a lot of conversations about everything. 

Rob: One of the things we were worried about when we started was the difference between the restoration of the building and furnishing in antiques versus what I’d call luxury, more modern furniture. This is where actually Tammy came into her own. Everyone loves antiques and we had a lot of requests locally about what antiques and so forth. All the furniture was sold before we bought the property. We bought some of it, but not much. We knew people staying here would like luxury furniture to sit in. There are a lot of traditionalists about the building as well, so we have an eclectic mixture of some antiques and a lot of modern as well. We’ve been really pleased with the reaction about that, which really came from Tammy. No one wants to sit in an antique piece, but they like the look of it, so we’ve done a mixture of both and we’re really happy with the outcome. 

This has taken three years to do, but was there some time before that? How long has this whole project been? 

Tammy: We bought it only because all the approvals had been done. The previous owner had been living in Hong Kong. He was local, but he lives in Hong Kong, and he had got all the architectural plans and designs all drawn up, and all the approvals with heritage. He was a year fighting to get the lift approved. All of these things happened before we came. We only really got interested because we saw all that had been done and we could hit the ground running. 

Rob: There were 30 consultants before we started and all and we said, we don’t need any of them, and we literally brought them all back on board. They started in 2017 with the approvals and we didn’t start the work until the beginning of 2023. By that time, legislation had changed, our building surveyor wanted us to work to a different year code and all sorts of things. We actually had to re-engage all those people. But the basis was done. Our architects were engaged since 2016. 

Tammy: Anja was pregnant when she first took it on and know her child is ten. 

So this is also like her baby. A very old baby. When was it built?

Tammy: It was started in 1887 and finished in 1888. 

Rob: So they took one year to build it. We took three years to restore it. I don’t know what that says. 

What we really wanted to do was to celebrate local. Most of the art was done locally. Even in the bedrooms, we have quilts on the beds that are from Creswick Mills, the alpaca, and quite a few of the Doona covers are Carlotta and Guy, which is another Australian firm. Then we have all the rugs from a Melbourne company. The mattresses are from Melbourne. All the lighting, all the bespoke lighting in the restaurant, upstairs in the bedrooms, in the hallways, in the bar, all done by a fantastic lighting company out of Melbourne. Actually, they are brothers from New Zealand. And actually, there’s more New Zealand influence because those big lights in the conservatory are also from New Zealand. There were definitely a lot of conversations about everything. 

Tammy Charter, The Queenscliff Hotel

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when this all came about. Who saw the ad or who was aware this was up for sale? Were you on your avocado farm? 

Tammy: We were. We ended up selling to purchase this, but we were farming and we both did our hips. We thought, this is really hard work and it was really hard to make it pay for itself. That’s all we wanted to do was try and make it pay for itself. We made it organic. We did all these things, and it still wasn’t viable. Then we needed to come back here because we wanted to be closer to family. We made that decision. We were looking at what was available on the Bellarine that would keep us interested. Rob had retired from corporate and I was retired from teaching. 

Rob: Just to clarify. We did farming for five years. I did corporate for 30 and Tammy was a teacher through a fair bit of that. Farming didn’t generate the money for this place. Because everyone goes, boy, that farming must be good. 

Smashed avocados!

Tammy: I wish we’d got those prices. 

Rob: It was actually just realestate.com. We literally saw it and said, oh, that’s an interesting place. Let’s go and have a look at that. That’s how it started in October 2022. I’d been past it, in my childhood, because I grew up in Geelong. But I had never been in. 

And it was a bit of a full circle moment as well because did you both meet in hospitality? 

Rob: Yeah, we did. 

Tammy: Working in the pub as students. 

Rob: Tammy grew up in Macedon and I grew up in Geelong and then went to uni in Ballarat. My parents had since moved to Mount Macedon. I went home on weekends working at the Mount Macedon Hotel, which was Gowing’s at the time. We met there. We did a few years working there together. That was our hospitality experience, to be honest. That was the start of it. We actually looked at that hotel a few times over the years. 

Tammy: We knew its limitations because we’ve worked there. We didn’t know the limitations of this one. 

Rob: This is a far prettier one. 

Josh, when did you come in on the project? 

Josh: I came in a bit later. I started about three and a half weeks after. We had been in talks before when my previous business was closing down. The timing wasn’t right, then. 

Rob: We were very keen to have Josh, but he was right in the middle of closing.

Josh: They were talking about opening at the end of January. My business after nine years was closing at the end of January. We all agreed it probably wasn’t for the best and then other things fell through and they gave me a call on Easter Saturday. I started on the Wednesday. 

Rob: It was great. We were thrilled 

How did you know about Josh? 

Tammy: We’d eaten at Merne a long time ago, before all of it. 

Rob: We knew it was hard to get in. We rang on a cold call one day, on the day and said, can we book a table? And they said, they’d had a cancellation this morning and there was a table for two available for lunch. So, we just walked in. We got to speak to Josh’s partner who was front of house, and we were just talking about where we’re from and what we were doing and we talked about the hotel. We loved it. The food was great. We went back in November and we’re chatting again, and Josh’s partners asked if we were looking for a chef and we said, oh, we absolutely are. And that’s how we got introduced. 

Nine years is a good stint. 

Josh: It was a crazy stint. And honestly, we really could have kept going, but my business partner was just getting ready to retire and after nine years, it was time to do something fresh. 

Nine years is a long time to be anywhere, and so when you step into a new kitchen, where do you start? Was it already up and running? 

Rob: When we first met and talked Josh through the proposal, we didn’t have a kitchen. 

Josh: I think I got the architect’s render: this is where the islands are going to be and so on. 

Flow is very important in a kitchen, isn’t it?

Josh: Especially with the conservatory, the higher numbers, definitely important. 

How’s the kitchen now? 

Josh: It’s getting there. Walking into a new kitchen’s always hard and there’s always different styles and Rob and Tammy are extremely accommodating, trying to find solutions to all my problems. We’re getting there. I’ve been here five or six weeks, maybe two months. It’s very early days, everything’s still just fresh. My menu’s been on for two or three weeks. I think it’s going well. Everyone’s starting to find their place.

Tell me about the menu because did I read that it’s European with touches of Australian influence? 

Josh: How would I describe my menu? It’s best to probably talk about the two restaurants as separate entities. The menu at Mietta’s is very much European with Australian touches, and by Australian, I mean multi-cultural, because to me, food is just such a cultural thing. I love the bringing together of cultures, people, and the sharing of ideas and all that, that’s what really excites me about food. This menu at the moment is a bit more simplified. We are going to be a bit more adventurous on the next one. We’re finding our feet and we want it to be true to the building.

Are you using a lot of regional produce as well? Seafood? 

Josh: Yes, seafood: we have a fisherman on the pier who works from Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday, and he actually sends out his own boats. We do a market fish, and we’ve been really lucky to get quite a lot of Barwon Head snapper at the moment that’s been gorgeous. Obviously, Portarlington mussels. I’m always trying to keep the mussels on because I think if you think of the Bellarine seafood, you think of those mussels and snapper. 

Is a seven-course degustation in Mietta’s?

Josh: Yes, and single plate traditional, trying to be true to the building while being innovative and a bit more modern because when you go in that room, there are the beautiful chandeliers and the beautiful hardwood roofing and you just look at it and you really want to respect that. We try and blend a bit of the room and keep it modern and interesting and innovate on that. 

There’s such a fine balance with a degustation. You want to show off all those beautiful flavours, but people have to be able to get through the meal. Where do you start in planning that? 

Josh: I always believe in being generous with the food as well. That’s always been a bit of a problem. I have a serious gripe about going to a restaurant and leaving hungry. For sure. That makes me very upset. I’m always very conscious about that. When I design the menus and think about how things are going to evolve, I’m not so much thinking about how filling it’s going to be. I’m thinking about how the textures and the flavours are going to build up slowly. The journey of how you’re eating. Sometimes you have a meal and you have something super strong and then it’s followed by like a more mild dish and it loses itself. I’m very conscious of how the meal structure goes together. 

Then there’s the conservatory. What sort of meals are in there? 

Josh: We’re aiming for a high end bistro in the conservatory. We’re really trying to get to the stage where people want to order an entrée and a main and possibly a dessert. I think my Middle Eastern influences are showing a lot more in that side. But once again, I tend towards a vegetable and fruit driven kind of menu. I don’t like relying on proteins to fill a meal. I like having a good amount of vegetables to highlight the meats, to make it exciting. We all know what beautiful braised lamb tastes like, but you add a bit of parsley, vichyssoise, or something like that, and it’s a completely different dish. I focus not just on the proteins, but all the beautiful organic produce that we can get around this region. 

When are Mietta’s and The Conservatory open? 

Josh: The Conservatory is open seven days a week: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mietta’s is Friday, Saturday, Sunday lunch and Friday and Saturday dinner. 

The name of a restaurant can really set the tone and obviously Mietta O’Donnell was a huge figure in Melbourne’s culinary history. How did you settle on that? 

Tammy: When we came to the hotel, we very quickly learned no one knew the name Queenscliff Hotel. They’d all argue about which hotel it was, even for deliveries. They didn’t know where to bring anything. Anyone that came past the hotel would tell us their story about Mietta’s. We did some research and we found out there were two existing family members: the husband of Robyn O’Donnell, the youngest O’Donnell sister, who had worked here as well and had been a co-owner and they have a daughter who’s on the sunny coast. We contacted them and said, look, is there any chance you would be offended if we used the name Mietta’s? We’ll do a tribute to her, we want to celebrate the idea anyway of the sisters, and there’s so much history tied to their period at the hotel because it was in its heyday when they owned it. It’s always been a hotel, but that’s the time period that everyone remembers. They agreed. We went and bought the trademark and then went with it, but we didn’t want to call the whole hotel, Mietta’s. We just thought it was better to do it in the restaurant, and it was helpful because it gave us a bit of a framework and path forward. So that was good. 

Josh, are you from this area as well? 

Josh: I grew up in Torquay. I’ve moved around a bit with work, up in Dunkeld, Melbourne, but I’ve always stayed around this region, family, all that. I’m in Leopold now. 

Did you always know you wanted to be a chef? 

Josh: Everyone will tell you I did, but no. My career was an interesting one. I did VET during school and at the end, I was actually planning to be a mechanical engineer, I applied to Swinburne, got in, and then I ended up deferring on that one because my boss had suggest I just finish off my apprenticeship. I only had a year, I did that and then Gordon Ramsay opened a restaurant in Melbourne and I thought, well, that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’ll go work for him for a bit, just to be able to say I did it. I did that for a while, and then did some work experience at a few places, and then Royal Mail offered me a job, right, when they were getting Restaurants of the Year. So I thought, well that’s another good experience. So that was another 3 years and then by the time I knew it, I was 29, and then I just kept going. 

What do you love about it? 

Josh: I love the meeting of science and art. I love the framework of: everything has a reason why something happens, but you can still play with it and you can still be creative in that process. I like how both of those mix up. And then, the culture and history of food: how it brings people together, how some techniques evolved, like fermentation, all those kinds of things get me really interested. 

Overseeing those different entities within one as executive chef, have you had that kind of role before? 

Josh: No, this was very much my first time. My favourite part about cooking has always been the creative process: doing new menus. So this has definitely been a change of pace. I’m looking forward to being able to step back and get a bit more into that role soon. 

Are you big with spreadsheets? 

Josh: I do like a spreadsheet. I like these figures. But I’ve got to be perfectly honest. I’m not quite at the stage where I’ve been able to do too much of that. At the moment I am training staff and you’ve got to get people used to the way you work and your expectations, because every chef has such varied approaches.

Absolutely. How do you do that? 

Josh: Just being there personally, leading by example and just really setting expectations and not lowering them is the main thing. 

Rob: I think the other thing is we’re quite a tight team between our General manager, Tim Harris, and Josh and Tammy and I, we spend a lot of time together. Our general manager, Tim started his career here at O’Donnell’s. He’s been to New York and run bars and restaurants and been all over the place and back here. He has a vision for this place. We have a vision; Josh has a vision for his part of the business. So between the four of us, we really sit down together and build that together. We’re not finished, but we’re progressing that journey. 

I love that. I think hospitality should be about… well, it should be about being hospitable…but if it comes from a team that get on well together, that’s already such a beautiful place to start. I like to hear those stories. 

Tammy: We’re also fortunate because Lyndon Betts, who also works in their kitchen, he started his apprenticeship here. He was taught by the nonna, who trained all the kitchen staff on pasta making and bread making at Mietta’s. That’s his thing. He is brilliant at making sourdough and brilliant at making the focaccias, and the gnocchi and the pastas. He’s passing all that knowledge on to our staff. 

Rob: He’s our sous chef. 

Tammy: It’s really important for Josh because he’s been working with him for a long time. 

Josh: He was my previous sous chef at Merne. That was a real win when he decided to come on. It was funny when the Nonna came in. 

Tammy: Oh, she came in and both Tim and Lyndon were like, oh my goodness, she hasn’t changed. And they thought she was ancient before. It was very funny. 

Did she eat the bread and pasta? Did it pass the test?

Josh: Yes. I don’t think Lyndon would have lived it down otherwise. 

How has the reception been from locals? Because they would have been watching and waiting, were they? What’s the vibe? 

Rob: They are incredibly supportive. They were from day one. We did a talk ages ago now, 2024, at the Point Lonsdale Primary School and we apparently had the biggest turnout that they’ve had. 

Tammy: They have these monthly talks and they invited us and we were just expecting a small gathering of 30, 40 people. They didn’t have enough seats. 

Rob: There were 300 or something there. 

Tammy: They see it as, we’re just custodians. This building’s here for everyone and the town’s incredibly proud of it. A lot of people came to Queenscliff to live because of their connection with this building. 

Rob: Now, that doesn’t stop them having opinions. And they’re very generous and they always are very complimentary of the restoration and what we’re trying to do. And it’s always to help. They genuinely mean it, and they are. We get a lot of support and they are encouraging and when we have messed up, when we started up, they said, you know, we want it to succeed, and this is what we think. They keep coming back and they keep coming back and they keep supporting us. It’s been great. 

You’ve really centred it in the space as well with the names of the rooms. I really love the names of the rooms. I really love like Norfolk Pine, and Sheoak. How did you come up with that idea? 

Tammy: We knew we had to do something other than just numbers. And I was stressing about what we would use: names from our past, and I was just looking at the window and I went, I’m just going to do what we see out the window. So what you see out the window is the name of the room. 

Then did that tree flavour the way you decorated? 

Tammy: I don’t know. Anja was the one that did all the colours and stuff, but she knew the names of the rooms at that stage. I don’t know. I never asked her. But every room has different feel because they’re all unique anyway. But then the colours are also unique to each room. 

One of my favourite stays overseas in Paris, and the rooms are always so tiny in Paris, but it was somewhere the near the Sorbonne anyway, and all the rooms had a different kind of a washed paint kind of colouring, and this is 20 years ago when I was in that hotel. But, I’ve always remembered that. I just love having different colours. 

Rob: Being a heritage building, we were very restricted in…not restricted, I shouldn’t use that word. 

Tammy: Contained.

Rob: All colours were approved by them and they had to be in the fabric of history. There was about 16 layers of colours and wallpaper. So as we said, what about this, they would flick through all the history and say, no, that doesn’t work. 

Tammy: That’s how we got the colours for the outside. If those colours hadn’t been in the colour palette in the past, we wouldn’t be allowed to have them. 

Rob: All the walls and everything were all determined or approved by Heritage Victoria. Furnishings are fine. When we had differences in rooms, we could do what we wanted with the furnishings, but we couldn’t do it in the palates of the walls and so forth. 

That’s fascinating. That must have taken a lot of to-ing and fro-ing as well, did it? 

Tammy: We had very good heritage architects in Melbourne, consultants: RBA.

Rob: Philippa, who was our lead person, was fantastic. She liaises with Heritage Victoria. 

Tammy: She gave us the heads up before we even went down the path. It’s quite a long process. Once it goes to heritage, it sits with them for quite a few weeks before they come back with a decision. She would say: Forget that, think of something else. You have no hope of getting that, so don’t even bother. Rob: Then we’d argue with her for a while, but in the end, we’d get to a point where she would say, I can represent that. 

There’d be a lot of lessons learned over that process, but what are some hospitality lessons you’ve learned since opening? 

Tammy: I don’t know. We knew most of it. We knew that people want to feel comfortable and welcoming. And I think we’ve tried, and we continue to strive to be welcoming, as a venue, and not austere. We’ve encouraged our staff to smile and engage and for the younger staff, that took them out of their comfort zone, to have to talk to people with a smile and do more than just hand over a menu. So we’re still working on that. But because they’ve been with us for a while and they feel like a team, I think it really helps. Once they feel a sense of place, they feel a sense of pride and they also relax a bit more. 

Rob: That’s like any business. I’ve been involved in a lot of businesses and I think it’s all about having a happy and comfortable staff and everyone’s on board with the vision of what we’re trying to achieve and they enjoy coming to work and all that. And of course, you have a mixture of that with any organisation. But I think making that environment right so that comes across to the customers. I think the thing we’re really happy about is in our reviews, we’re getting, whether they’re direct to us or public, we are seeing that that intent and attitude is coming across through our staff. 

Tammy: Because that makes the customer comfortable and they’re happy and then that helps everyone. We want to be a premier destination in Victoria, or even in Australia for people to come and experience Queenscliff, because it’s a forgotten gem. We really want people to say, oh, my God, look at I can walk on this beach and there’s no one around and how pretty. There’s lighthouses, there’s history everywhere. It’s gorgeous. Then you’ve got the marina and the fishing boats going in and out. The pilot boats going in and out, the train. There’s more than one train: there’s the children’s train, the Blues train, and then there’s the dining train. 

Josh: And the historical buildings around here, sometimes I just walk through the centre street and it’s beautiful to look at because they’ve really done such a great job in keeping the historical value of the town. 

It’s a very cute town. There’s also the army fort. It’s pretty incredible. 

Tammy: We’re pretty fortunate. I think we are one of a few places in all of Victoria that hasn’t consolidated with a huge council. We’re this little council and they look after their area. They are really supportive too of us. 

What are you all looking forward to over the next few months? 

Rob: Everyone’s got a different view. We’re looking forward just to continuing to establish ourselves and continuing to work on our product and whether that be accommodation or our service or whether it’s our menu. I think that’s all exciting. I’m looking forward to summer when we really get put under the hammer. We’re just really excited about all the things we can do here and the first bit’s about just starting and getting settled and making the product right and doing all those things. I think all of us are excited about getting that under our belt and then really working on how we can improve our offering. 

Tammy: It has been a gradual unwinding. We started off without any bar snacks. We limited where people could eat because we were always trying to manage the expectations. Slowly we’ve been able to continue, move out. So now there’s bar snacks, the café’s open till three. It keeps growing. In summer, that’ll spill out into the courtyard and all the benefits of that. 

Josh: Just continuing to upgrade the menus. I’ve been focussing quite a lot on training staff, simplifying everything and just building up over the next six months to a year. Each menu gets a bit more advanced and fun.

Tammy: We want to have partnerships with local farms and things. We want to use local produce. This area is known for its farming, and it’s got a lot of wineries too, so we’re pretty blessed. We want to keep capitalising on all that. 

Rob: We’ve got more ideas and enthusiasm than we have time at the moment. 

Josh: We’ve all got a lot of ideas. They’re all on a list somewhere, slowly getting ticked off. 

Congratulations. You undertook a great task and you’ve done it. I’m really excited to stay here. 

The Queenscliff Hotel, 16 Gellibrand Street, Queenscliff