New Hire: Selling Pinotta and Working at Ophelia Helped Heidi Modra Find a Sense of Calm

Heidi Modra ran her restaurant Pinotta for 14 years before deciding to close at the end of April.

Part of the reason for closing was, she tells Broadsheet, “to have a life that wasn’t all-encompassing about where I worked. I made a commitment to have a personal life.”

She’s now joined Yolk Group (Terror Twilight, Hi Fi) as venue manager at its Westgarth cafe and bar Ophelia. Just two weeks into the role, Modra has helped launch dinner service on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday nights.

Joining Ophelia was slightly serendipitous. “The day I had settled with the new owners [of Pinotta], I came [into Ophelia] with my best friend to have a coffee, and I said to her, ‘I really love this space, if I could do Pinotta all over again, I want something that’s as beautiful and thoughtful as this’.”

In a bit of kismet, Modra then stumbled upon a job listing for Ophelia. “I think the universe owes me a little bit. So I take this one as a little gift,” she says. We caught up with Modra to learn more about her move.

What’s the transition been like, going from owner to employee?

I think I was more scared of it than I needed to be – mostly because I’ve never worked hospitality anywhere but Pinotta. I was very nervous that this skill set I had, while very broad, was only appropriate to one place. I was scared of being too set in the Pinotta way of doing things, but I really wanted to succumb to others and learn from what other people do. I’ve allowed myself to step back and be directed and be framed by what the owners want to achieve. To come from running a million miles an hour to just coming in and responding to what I’m being asked to do – that’s been a lovely, calming thing for me.

The first couple of weeks after I closed, I was a bit shell-shocked and scared to see people. But now people come up to me in the street and I get stuck all the time with people wanting to tell me how wonderful Pinotta was and how much they miss it – which is a delight. But then they go on and say how much happier I’m looking, and how much calmer I’m looking, and how there seems to be an openness in my general demeanour. I think the pressure of running your own business takes a toll on you, so it’s a real relief to be in a place that has a management structure I can fit into – I report up and I report down – and we just all generally look after one another. It’s a really lovely, kind thing that I’ve done for myself.

Tell us about Ophelia’s new night-time offering.
We have Pasta Tuesdays, where we do $20 pastas. They sit alongside the cinema next door, doing cheap movie tickets. It’s a real opportunity for the neighbourhood to have a place to come before and after a movie. We’re doing Friday and Saturday nights as well. Because we play vinyl here all day, every day, there are DJs coming in on those nights to play records while we run around and serve really amazing cocktails. I’ve put together a very short wine list to start, which will expand as we work out what our neighbourhood wants.

How has working cafe service been?
It’s quick – so much quicker than restaurants. My first weekend here was the long weekend, and I have never sat so many people. We had a waitlist as long as my arm. You have to be very agile in your thinking, and the service itself is different. The time you spend at a table and the time a table spends with you is shorter, and you get lots of people with small kids. You’ve got families that have a timeframe that’s quite different to a couple who are going to have a couple of cocktails and think about wine. So service touchpoints are quite different.

I have all these little things that I like to make sure happen at tables and in cafe service, some of those things – like running through specials – are superfluous. They’re just not necessary because people are coming into a space they have a lot of familiarity with. The community here comes in regularly, so they have an ownership of the space already. They’re coming into what they consider an extension of their lounge room.