Earlier this month, one of our favourite cocktail bars — Terrarium Perth — cleaned up at the Australian Hotels Association WA awards night. On the night, the bar was awarded the Best Cocktail Bar award and owner David Stucken took home the Best Cocktail Bartender Award. This was the second consecutive year Terrarium and Stucken have won these awards so we thought we’d drop by the bar to talk about the awards and what makes the bar special.
Terrarium is also featured in our Top Ten Guide: The Best Cocktail Bars In Perth.
Cocktail bar awards
Stucken believes that a big part of what makes them special and has helped them win these back-to-back awards is what they do for the industry outside Terrarium.
“My belief, or my understanding as to why we’ve won, is just how much we do for the industry outside of our own venue and the standards we try to continue to push here. We do tonnes of trade events and run our regular cocktail competitions for young bartenders to help them grow and develop. I’ve been running them since 2017 and have seen so many of those young bartenders go on and do great things.”
“Our main goal is to keep doing things that we see other operators doing in other parts of the world who have more opportunity, more budget, more resources, bigger cities, and more density. The one thing I keep hearing from other operators right now is how hard it is and how everyone’s close to the edge, no matter what industry you’re in. Even though we’re having our share of troubles like everyone else, we’re still just remaining focused on keeping our standards high, keeping the service high, keeping the products that we’re putting out good value, and trying to push the envelope and help put Perth on the map.”
“Instead of looking at what the person next door or down the street is doing, we’re looking at what they’re doing on the other side of the planet. How can we learn from that? How can we do our own take on that in a way that’s not just blatantly ripping it off? We take inspiration from what’s working in other areas. What happens in places like Edinburgh, London, New York, and Amsterdam won’t necessarily work in Perth. It’s financially not viable because we don’t have the population density they have. That’s why we take inspiration from it and adapt it in the Perth way.”
What’s Terrarium’s best cocktail?
“That’s a theoretically impossible question to answer because it’s not about what I think is the best drink.”
“It’s about ascertaining what their tastes and preferences are; and psychologically, where they’re currently sitting. So one of my favourite questions to ask — which I stole from a bartender in Melbourne — is ‘metaphorically speaking, are you drinking by a pool or a pool table?’ Are you going to be drinking a cask-strength whiskey Manhattan by a pool? Probably not. Are you going to be crushing mai tais by a pool? Definitely.”
“I can’t lean towards one size fits all, because if one place has to rely on one signature drink or be a one-trick pony, and can’t be malleable to adapt to your guest’s needs, then you’re not giving great service. If you can’t think on the fly and be like, I can tweak this slightly to make this drink exactly what this person needs right now, then someone else can and will do it better.”
Where do you like to go when you go out?
“One of my favourites is Alfred’s. I mean, you kind of love a place you worked for a long time. You walk in there, order a pizza, order a shot of a Mario or a beer, and occasionally maybe a daiquiri or something that the boys are cooking up and it’s non-pretentious and it’s fun. If I’m going out out, maybe somewhere like Alibi in Northbridge, and if I want to go dining, Balthazar is always amazing — it’s a classic and you can never go wrong with it.”
