Knockoffs with… Mathieu Smeysters
CityMag heads to Station Road to chat with the co-owner and general manager about consumer habits, Adelaide’s gin trend and how the Belgium-based sommelier found himself in Adelaide.
WHERE: Station Road, obviously
DRINK OF CHOICE: Guinness Draught 0.0
Mathieu Smeysters is the co-owner and general manager of Station Road.
Journalist, Claudia Dichiera, visits him at the premises on a Monday when the restaurant is closed. They take a seat on a high table near the glass walls.
CD: Well, cheers firstly!
MS: Cheers! Your first Guinness non-alcoholic.
CD: There’s not even a G that we can split or anything.
MS: No, I won’t force you to do that one. I don’t think it’s relevant on the non-alcoholic one.
CD and MS sip their beer
CD: That’s quite tasty.
MS: It’s not bad, is it?
CD: That’s quite nice. I don’t remember enjoying a Guinness this much, to be honest. Why have you gone a non-alcoholic Guinness over something else?
MS: I think it’s just trying to stay off the alcohol a little bit from Monday to Friday. And because, especially non-alcoholic Guinness, I think it’s become such a big segment of the market. The alcoholic market and the non-alcoholic drinks. Two years ago, it wasn’t even on our spectrum, and with different bottle shops, we weren’t even thinking about ever getting any non-alcoholic drinks. And it’s really evolved significantly over the last 12 months especially, and there is a real market for it.
I think some of us are still in denial and think this is a temporary thing. It’s a trend. But I don’t think it’s a trend. I think it’s a shift in the market. I think it’s here to stay. And I think especially the younger generation is much more health-conscious and trying to limit their intake while still having fun when it goes somewhere. I’ve been to a pub where I was drinking Guinness zero, and you’re still feeling like you’re in the atmosphere, it’s not impacting your night and you wake up clear headed, no hangover, perfect. You know, good to go.
CD: What other consumer habits have you seen change?
MS: I think that RTD’s and all the little seltzers and such definitely became more popular as well in the last 18 months. I’m not a big believer of them. I think that’s a trend because during, I think it was 2024, for a couple of months, it was pretty much the only thing you could see left and right.
It’s the same thing with the trend of gin. Gin was such a big thing…[I’m from] Belgium, so I moved here in 2017, but when I was in Belgium, that gin trend was already on the way out. It had been huge for about five to seven years in Belgium. You had heaps of gin bars all around the cities in Europe. Pretty much every man and his dog were producing a gin. The restaurant I used to manage in Belgium, we had a list of 100 gins, different ones. And every gin had its own botanicals. It was getting out of control.
And then I moved here, and everyone was talking about this new rage: amazing gins. I’m like you’re behind 10 years, mate!
Everyone in the in the drinks industry is trying to identify what the next big thing is going to be. People are talking other is going to be tequila or Mezcal becoming bigger and bigger, and the other one is vermouth. So as an aperitivo style, you know how the Aperol Spritz has taken over the world for the last, already, decade, if not longer. But vermouth, I don’t know if it’s a resurgence or whether it’s something new that is coming up, but I’m getting more and more demand for vermouth, and there are some good ones getting produced.
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CD: Do you think Adelaide has passed its gin moment? Because I feel like people are still in their gin era.
MS: I think it’s still there. I don’t think it’s on the way out entirely yet, but people used to be much more interested and engaged when they looked at your bar and they think ‘oh, what an amazing selection of gins. Tell me more about the local ones that you can get your hands on’. And it’s just not really a thing anymore. People don’t inquire about it anymore to the same extent than they used to.
CD: Funny you mentioned tequila – I don’t know if this has anything to do with consumer trends and habits, but there’s so many celebrity tequila brands, I’m thinking mainly from America, I’d imagine there’s some in Europe as well – do you think that has any impact?
MS: It’s probably the result of the fact that it’s become more popular. I don’t think it’s become more popular because of celebrities creating tequilas. I think it’s the opposite. But it shows you that the trend is actually working and they see a market and the opportunity to actually monetise.
CD: Yeah, 100 per cent. That’s very true.
MS: But yeah, it’s true. That’s right. I couldn’t pinpoint who it is exactly. There’s quite a few of them that are…
CD: Kendall Jenner. That’s the one that comes to mind for me, at least.
MS: I think even Lewis Hamilton is producing one as well from memory. Ryan Reynolds, I think he’s producing one as well. I’m pretty much just saying names now.
CD laughs…louder than usual
MS: But I’m sure he produces one as well.
CD: So you said you moved to Australia from Belgium. Is that correct?
MS nods
CD: What brought you here? Did you move straight to Adelaide?
MS: No, I lived in Melbourne for quite a few years. I was there until 2020.
CD: What brought you from Belgium to Australia in the first place?
MS: Like most stories, it’s always about a woman. It’s always a love story.
CD and MS laugh
MS: So, I lived in Australia for a year in 2013 and at the time, I came here on a working holiday visa, and I had just spent nine months traveling the world…and got to Australia said ‘okay, I’ll stay here for a year, work, and towards the end of that first year, I knew that working three months in construction or farm work would enable me to get a second year visa, which at the time, I had no intention of coming back, but I said, ‘okay, I’ll get it anyway, and then let’s see what happens’.
I went back to Belgium. Was very successful over there and working full time and whatnot.
CD: Did you work in hospitality during your time in Australia?
MS: Yeah, I was one of the soms [sommelier] at NOMAD in Sydney
CD: Oh, wow. Oh, my goodness.
MS: And I worked at The Restaurant Pendolino, which is the one Chef’s Hat restaurant on George Street in Sydney as well which was cool at the time. And NOMAD is still an amazing restaurant.
Went back home and met my then girlfriend…I said ‘look I want to go and travel for a while. Where are we going to?’ And I was considering different options, and said, ‘okay, if I’m going to leave my job in Belgium’, which was quite a good job, I said ‘at least, let’s do it in an environment where it’s going to enable me to continue on developing my career and improve my English at the same time’. So I said ‘I still have a year available for another visa in Australia’, and I was turning 31 and that was the threshold of you being able to move to Australia on that working holiday visa. And I think two days before we moved out, we broke up, and at that time, I had already gotten rid of my apartment, I had no job in Belgium anymore. So I said, ‘you know, whatever. I’ll go for a year and see what happens’. I had applied for a job before moving here, and they offered me a job at Vue de monde in Melbourne as a som.
The guys at Vue de monde really took me in, and I climbed the ranks quite rapidly and they offered me a sponsorship, and I became a manager at Vue de monde and then GM working across some of the other venues within the group.
And then again, same story. A couple of years later, 2019, I was very close to going back to Belgium. They offered me a job back in Belgium, which was an amazing gig, and I worked a charity event in Melbourne…I was there representing Vue de monde, and I met my partner, who was working for Penfolds, and we exchanged our business cards.
CD and MS laugh
CD: A very corporate way to start a relationship.
MS: Well, that was me flirting. But she didn’t pick up on it all the way.
CD and MS laugh
MS: It still worked in the end. And, yeah, so we started emailing, and we had a long-distance relationship for a year because she was living here [in Adelaide] and I was living in Melbourne, and the initial idea was for her to move over there.
CD: So, you declined that job in Belgium?
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MS: I declined the job on the basis that, yes, in part, Shannon Bennett [of Vue de monde] was still there and had offered me a great role. But also because there’s this very early, not premature, but early on relationship. I want to see where this is going.
After a year, COVID happened. And instead of Zoe moving over to Melbourne, which was the idea. Penfolds being a big company, they said ‘okay, we have to put all of this on ice, because we don’t know where COVID is going to take the company’, especially being a such a retail brand, where everything was shutting down.
So I called the CEO of Vue Group, and I said ‘I’ll take my computer to her place in Adelaide. I’ll work from her place for a couple of weeks’. At the time, the idea was that the state was going to go into a lockdown for three weeks in Victoria. That was the second lockdown. And he said ‘okay, no problems’. And I literally made the decision in a split second… They had just announced we’re going to go into a lockdown at midnight. I was at the gym at 6pm and I looked it up and there was one last flight at 9pm I booked it instantly, and I found myself on the last plane out of Melbourne, and that’s when Melbourne ended up going into a three-month or four-month lockdown.
CD: That was a good decision.
MS: I got very lucky…It was crazy because we had gone from a long-distance relationship… which is [mostly] online or talking to each other on the phone and we did see each other every two weeks, but we had never lived together. It went from that to you’re in isolation in her small, one-bedroom, little house.
CD: That’s one way to see if it works.
MS: Correct. So we got to know each other very well, very fast.
CD and MS laugh
MS: Funnily enough, I didn’t go back to Melbourne for another year…so I was working for Vue Group three days a week on my computer, and I said ‘I’m getting bored. There’s nothing for me to do here’. I’m very much into wine, and love wine. I said, I’ll go and work in a retail shop just for fun as a casual employee a couple of nights a week, which would be a nice point of difference to what I was doing on a daily basis. And Zoe introduced me to Michael Andrewartha.
CD: Of East End Cellars?
MS: Yeah…and Michael said ‘I’m actually, I’m looking for a head wine buyer’. And I had taken a very different direction in my career because I hadn’t touched wine for, at that point in time, three, four years. I’d gone into general manager roles. And I said ‘you know, fuck it. I’ll do it for a while and see what happens’.
CD: So you had been a som for…
MS: So I had been a som in the past in Belgium for quite a long time…so I’ve always worked hospitality or wine, and I’ve got a heap of accreditations from lots of different wine institutions in Europe and so it was kind of a full circle in a sense, because I got back into wine working for arguably one of the best independently owned retailers in the country and I was doing a lot of importing and I was looking after Michael’s distribution portfolio which is also a very interesting job. And I think we got to know each other very well in a short period of time and got along well enough to realise that my role could evolve into something different. And then from there, became the GM for them. And we then started talking about expanding the group. So, Mother Vine became available for purchase…So we bought Mother Vine, and we’re then talking about expanding the group further, and then East End Cellars Norwood became an idea because that site became available, which has now been open for about 24 months.
And then Station Road became a thing almost two years ago as well. So two years ago, Michael was approached with a possibility or with an idea to tender for this tenancy here and we knew that being part of the Festival Plaza, being part of what a lot of people believe is going to become an equivalent to what the riverfront is in Melbourne or Sydney over the next couple of years was a great opportunity for us.
Readers are then directed to further reporting on Station Road’s new offering, Bistro.
CD: Now I’ve got a few rapid-fire questions for this ‘Knockoffs’ column. What’s your favourite, either alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink at the moment?
MS: Non-alcoholic drink, I’ll go with a Guinness 0.0.
CD: Delicious, I can confirm.
MS: Alcoholic, I’d probably say I’m still loving an old fashioned. And I tend to have it with rye whiskey. And Saskia here our, our bar manager that used to work at Mother Vine does the best old fashioned that I’ve ever had. So I keep on ordering one every now and then whenever I decide to have a little cocktail.
CD: What’s your favourite Station Road Bistro menu item at the moment?
MS: The whole deboned whiting.
Random patron walking past opens the door
Random patron walking past: Hello, it’s cold out there.
MS: We’re closed actually today, I’m so sorry.
RPWP: No that’s okay. I was just swinging by because we’ve got a lunch booking on Saturday…and I just wanted to check if there was a table allocated.
MS: I can go and have a quick look for it.
MS leaves the table and exits behind the kitchen
RPWP: Guinness is a good option.
CD: It is too.
RPWP: I just tasted the double and to be honest, out of all the non-alcoholic drinks, I actually think the Guinness is pretty good.
CD: We were actually just saying that as well. It’s really tasty.
RPWP: I actually just bought a lot of it. Monday and Tuesday night are becoming alcohol free, so I’ve been having one of those.
CD: I’m not much of a Guinness drinker myself, but I’m actually finding this is, I mean, obviously, it’s not as heavy as a regular Guinness, but yeah, it’s delicious. It’s going down really well.
Station Road is located at Festival Tower, Station Road, Adelaide and is open on Wednesday from 6pm until late, then Thursday to Saturday from 12pm until late, then Sunday from 12pm until 6pm.
Bistro by Station Road is only available throughout July and August.
Connect with the business on Instagram for more.
