00:00 My name is Michael O'Donoghue, the name of our business is The Reserve Cocktail Bar and
00:04 we have transformed a wrecked old horse box into this beautiful 1920s kind of art deco
00:12 style horse box.
00:13 So the business launched first week of June, we had like a couple of months prior to that
00:17 designing it and I'm lucky I got a lot of friends who were in woodwork and carpentry
00:22 and stuff like that so I got a lot of free labour out of them which I was very lucky
00:25 for yeah.
00:26 My background is hospitality, it all started when I was 14, I started working in a little
00:30 cafe, scrubbing plates and kind of being the errand boy in the kitchen.
00:35 Proper first job in hospitality pulling pints and serving alcohol was in Grosvenor's Casino
00:38 in Leeds.
00:39 I went from there to work in the theatre and then I got my first cocktail style job in
00:44 Harvey Nichols in Leeds.
00:45 I was luckily offered the opportunity to work in their flagship restaurant in London in
00:50 the Oxo Tower and that's where my real passion for it started.
00:54 Moved from there to Soho House where I was there for a couple of years in Greek Street,
00:58 the original one, did some really interesting things there, did like the Golden Globes and
01:02 things like that.
01:03 And then from there I got a job in Savoy so I worked in the American Bar and the Barfoot
01:06 Bar for a couple of years and that was when really things started to kind of move for
01:10 me a little bit.
01:11 Luckily one of the directs of Mixology left to open his own bar, I went with him and then
01:17 from there I moved home with the boss, with my girlfriend, opened the Ivy Asia in Leeds
01:21 and then went on to open the Reserve.
01:23 The big dream is to open a bar and this is just kind of like our build up and us kind
01:27 of gaining a bit of a following.
01:29 My big passion is hospitality, everyone can make great drinks, there's many places you
01:32 can go to have great drinks but we really believe in the essence of what a bar is which
01:36 is the service.
01:38 So we believe in offering more of an experience rather than a service, it's all about what
01:43 the memories that you make with us if you know what I mean.
01:45 So we offer like a really high end style so we have many years of experience in making
01:49 great drinks but we really share the love of hospitality with people, we're really big
01:53 into being people pleasers.
