First Person: 'I am Glenn Watson and I’m a butcher at Rockpool Bar & Grill'

I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d be working in a restaurant as a butcher.

It is pretty unusual. There’s three of us full-time in Australia and we’re all within the Rockpool Dining Group. Because this is a steak restaurant, the best way to do that is have your own butcher – do everything in-house. Basically I deal directly with the producers and then we dry age all our own meat, so it’s minimum 50 to 60 days drying. With dry ageing, the flavour’s so much better.

I’ve been here at the Melbourne restaurant for almost 11 years; before that I was in butcher shops.

I started off as a clean-up kid when I was 13, after school and on Saturday mornings. Mum sent me up to the local butcher shop to get some mince and I saw the ad on the window. I loved it from day one. You could muck around and earn good money, and it was fun. It still is.

I ended up finding an apprenticeship when I was 15 and left school. I started off in a butcher’s shop and halfway through my apprenticeship I changed to a family-run Italian small goods company.

I enjoyed making salami and prosciutto, all that sort of stuff. We’re talking in the early ’80s. For an Anglo-Saxon kid to be sitting down at lunch eating prosciutto at 15 and 16, it wasn’t the norm.

I’ve worked in kosher butchers; I’ve worked at David Jones. I’ve picked the jobs I wanted because I wanted to learn as much as I could in my trade, and this is the pinnacle of a butcher’s job.

To start my week off, I’ll make sausages and start preparing. I’ll look to see what functions are on, to make sure we’ve got enough stock. The spring racing carnival’s coming up and because we dry age we’ve got to plan in advance.

This job isn’t for everyone. It’s physical. You’re lifting and cutting. Some people think you get everything out of a box, but you don’t, we have to process it. We get over a tonne of wagyu each month, and that’s just the wagyu. We have anywhere from $90,000 to $120,000 of beef ageing at any one time, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for that.

rockpoolbarandgrill.com.au

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