Twenty-year career from bars, clubs to owning hotel

ZOE Cooper has experienced great highs and extraordinary lows in more than two decades in the Tayside hospitality industry.

Zoe, now 46, grew up in the Angus village of Inverkeilor and after some youthful dabbling with drink, drugs and partying, she worked at De Vito’s nightclub and the Santana Italian restaurant (now Azzurro), both in Arbroath.

She later moved to Dundee, where she worked for The Globe (now Molly Malones), suffered “hell” serving food while in charge of shortlived Dundee pub Pivo, had to confiscate photos of naked women at lapdancing bar Liberty and learned to “cook out of a cupboard” at the Art Bar.

Zoe, now residing in Dundee, then endured 120-hour weeks and hostile locals while in charge of the Inverpark Hotel in Arbroath.

She says Inverkeilor was “a fabulous place to grow up”. She regularly walked two miles after school to have fun at Lunan Bay.

But as a pupil at Arbroath Academy, Zoe admits she was a “nightmare child”.

She left school with a Higher in English but admits: “I didn’t do as well as I probably should have.”

In her late teens Zoe dabbled with drink and drugs. “It was mainly MDMA at raves and that kind of stuff – I was a proper raver,” she says.

Aged 17, Zoe was sent to Bergen on the west coast of Norway to stay with her father Ian, who had moved to Scandinavia and was working in the oil industry for Otis.

“I stayed there for a year and it was kind of a detox – at least for a little while.”

Having returned to Arbroath, she started jobs at De Vito’s and the Santana.

At Santana she worked under Orlando Marcantonio. “He was a brilliant man,” Zoe recalls. “He was the singing chef and would serve the food and then start serenading customers.”

Zoe then moved to Dundee where she attended summer school to guarantee a place on Dundee University’s English and psychology degree course.

She ended up dropping out after “it made me hate reading”.

But she remained dedicated to work. In Dundee she was employed by her uncle, Jack Cooper, who owned The Globe, which later changed its name to Molly Malones.

“Down the road from The Globe there used to be a music shop, Rockpile Records, run by fantastic guy called Ian Walker. He passed away not long ago,” said Zoe.

“He said I would make a fantastic sound engineer and I was like ‘I don’t even know what that is’.” Interest piqued, Zoe headed to North Glasgow College to study an HND in audio engineering.

“I was living next to Savalas recording studios in Glasgow,” Zoe says. “I lived with some great musicians and the amount of bands that would come through the house was amazing.”

These bands included Spiritualized, and she also lived with a guitarist from Stiltskin.

Zoe had high hopes for a career in audio engineering but there was a lack of paid positions available.

So it was back to Dundee and the hospitality trade.

The Globe had been sold to Belhaven and was being managed by Zoe’s cousin, Tracey Cooper.

Belhaven had bought Slattery’s Irish bar on Westport and had converted it to a Czech bar called Pivo.

“Slattery’s was a great Irish bar but they ripped out a kitchen for seven seats. I thought ‘you can’t open a trendy bar in this area without food’ so at the last minute they said I had to do food from behind the bar.

“We had a microwave and The Globe had to cook me stuff off site to give to me.”

Zoe’s next assignment was something very different.

She became the manager of Liberty, a lapdancing bar in St Andrews Lane.

Zoe was always dressed strictly from head to toe but that did not stop her from having to rebuff one chancer who offered her £4,000 for a dance.

And then there were the dancers themselves.

“They were brilliant,” she says. “A lot of them were students and dancing was easier than getting into student debt.”

Zoe Cooper and colleagues.