Ten Years Above the Water: Christian Ryan on the Making of Aloft

At Aloft, the room itself moves with the river.

That movement is literal. Aloft sits at the very top of Brooke Street Pier, the 80-metre floating structure rising and falling with the tide on Hobart’s waterfront. From the dining room, glass stretches towards the Derwent on one side while the open kitchen works away on the other. Everything about the setting lifts you above the city; the food keeps bringing you back down to Tasmania.

On the current chef’s menu, wallaby arrives against the heat of Balinese tomato sambal and tapioca; Cape Grim ox tongue meets yakiniku and fresh horseradish; koji pork comes with beetroot and goat’s curd. Crispy chilli eggplant, a dish with enough staying power to have lived through multiple chapters of Aloft, remains in the mix. Tasmanian wine moves alongside it all. Ten years in, Aloft’s language feels entirely its own.

That balance may be its greatest trick. It is rarefied without ever feeling removed; ambitious without becoming self-serious. Having eaten there recently, what stays with you is how completely the experience holds together. The food is exacting but generous, the drinks feel inseparable from the kitchen, and the service has that particular Hobart warmth that can make a long, intricate meal feel almost weightless.

For all the skill involved, nobody seems interested in making sure you notice how hard they are working. You look up somewhere between courses, the harbour shifting beyond the glass, and realise Aloft has made something difficult feel remarkably easy.

What the dining room cannot show is how hard-won that ease has been.

The Leap

Christian Ryan did not open Aloft in November 2015 with a manifesto about changing Hobart dining. A decade later, he resists any neat mythology around its beginnings.

“I didn’t open Aloft thinking I was filling a gap in the market or doing something groundbreaking,” he says. “We found a space that felt too good an opportunity to pass up, and that pushed us into a leap of faith I wasn’t really ready for — mentally, financially or ability-wise.”

“I didn’t know what I wanted to achieve beyond serving people tasty food, making them feel looked after, and keeping the doors open.”

The room above Brooke Street Pier helped.

“For a young chef short on experience and confidence, the space was perfect,” Ryan says. “I knew that if the space itself was amazing and people wanted to be in it, that was one box ticked — we could figure out the rest as we went.”

The floating pier gave Aloft one of its most obvious pleasures — dinner suspended above the Derwent — but it also dictated how the restaurant could operate. Storage was limited, cooking methods were restricted and temperature was difficult to control. Over time, those limitations began shaping the restaurant.

“That minimalist room, with its window onto the world around us, helped shape a menu and drinks list that championed Tasmania and what came from around us.”

The Asian character of the food almost wasn’t there at all. Ryan had initially imagined a restaurant influenced by the new Nordic cooking he had encountered on his travels, something that seemed a natural match for Aloft’s spare dining room above the water. Co-head chef Glenn Byrnes had other ideas.

The pair had previously worked together at Melbourne’s Taxi Dining Room, cooking pan-Asian food.

“Glenn kept reminding me we’d met cooking pan-Asian food, that we both loved eating it, and that Hobart was missing a place like that,” Ryan says. “That’s how Aloft’s Asian focus was born.”

Aloft’s beginnings were highly collaborative. Ryan and Byrnes were joined by Ryan’s then-partner and business partner Heiki Stanley, alongside a small group responsible for the floor, drinks and the financial machinery required to get an ambitious restaurant open.

There were plenty of opinions, plenty of risk and, Ryan admits, very little certainty.

“Everyone had good intentions, but it was an extremely hard time,” he says. “Long, hot days, stressful services, scarily large debts, and me without the confidence to call the shots.”

Opening night brought the reality of it into focus.

“It was a hard service, as any opening tends to be, and Heiki and I got home and sat on the bed and cried.”

Ryan compares it now to being handed a newborn for the first time.

“After all the anticipation, you realise you’ve made something you can’t put down for a long time, and life as you knew it is instantly more consuming and more challenging.

“But just like my kids, watching Aloft grow and evolve under our care has far outweighed those harder moments.”

Keeping the Doors Open

For roughly half of Aloft’s first decade, survival was achievement enough. The build had run late and over budget. Without deep reserves behind it, the restaurant spent its early years clearing one financial pressure only to find another waiting behind it.

“We were learning it all for the first time,” Ryan says, “and plenty of things that seem obvious to me now as a business owner simply got missed in the day-to-day stress of staying open.”

From the dining room, Aloft was steadily becoming part of Hobart. Ryan’s experience on the other side of the pass looked very different.

Those early years were defined by doubt about whether the business would survive at all, something Ryan credits the people around him with carrying him through. As the original group changed and some stepped away from the risks attached to the business, the accumulated weight of running it began to show.

“By the year or two before Covid, I was running on empty: worn down by the stress and seriously low on passion.”

Then comes the admission that says more about that period than any balance sheet could.

“I joke now that in those darker days, I’d have sold Aloft for a packet of Tim Tams if someone had offered.”

Ryan had begun contemplating an entirely different life, even retraining as a paramedic — still working with his hands, still looking after people, but away from the restaurant he had spent years fighting to keep alive.

Then Covid hit.

Starting Again

Ryan is careful not to romanticise what came next. The pandemic devastated businesses and lives. Privately, though, the closure offered something he had been unable to give himself: permission to stop.

“Part of me saw it as a chance to close Aloft’s doors and finally walk away, with Covid taking the decision out of my hands rather than me making it myself,” he says.

“For three months, JobKeeper kept Aloft on life support while I put it to the back of my mind.”

Without services or the constant pressure of the restaurant, he gradually found his way back to food.

“I found time to read cookbooks, watch food shows, and actually cook and experiment at home — not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

“Cameron, Aloft’s sous chef at the time, and I would watch MasterChef most nights and text each other about what we liked and what inspired us, and slowly the colour started coming back into how I felt about being a chef.”

When Aloft reopened, the interruption gave Ryan a rare opportunity to reconsider how an established restaurant operated without existing bookings and expectations dictating the answer.

“I used the reopening as an excuse to try some of the ideas I’d had back in 2015, but had lost confidence to pursue,” he says. “Nothing had been working the way I’d hoped up to that point, so it felt worth a shot.”

Aloft made the tasting menu its only dining format and accepted fewer bookings. The wine match could become more considered, while halving the number of diners meant producers too small to supply the restaurant previously could finally become part of it.

“With a tighter menu and a deeper reliance on smaller Tasmanian producers, we leaned into what was around us more than ever,” Ryan says. “We were serving half the number of guests but giving each of them a better experience.”

The greater shift was personal.

“For the first time since opening, I set out to cook food I actually wanted to serve, rather than what I thought people expected.

“We kept the Asian lean but put more of myself into it.”

After years spent second-guessing himself, the response caught him off guard.

“The biggest surprise, after years of feeling like I was faking it, was that customers and their reviews genuinely seemed to enjoy what we were doing.”

With Cameron and a revitalised team around him, Aloft’s reputation grew. Government support, combined with discounted rent from its landlord, finally allowed the business to climb out from under the debt that had followed it through those first years.

“That second half of our first decade wouldn’t exist without the hardships of the early years,” Ryan says. “I wouldn’t change them for the world, and I’m incredibly proud of the team who made it possible.”

Cooking Like Aloft

Hobart changed across the same decade.

“More options, more skill, more exposure,” is how Ryan describes the city now, though he is less interested in claiming Aloft’s place in that evolution than in what the restaurant has gradually learned about itself.

“Aloft has evolved too, but never by trying to copy anyone or force ourselves into a niche we felt was missing,” he says.

“There are venues and chefs with more technique and skill than I’ll ever have, and I’ve genuinely matured to the point where I’m not concerned with measuring myself against my peers.”

What he has found instead is a balance that now feels instinctive.

“Juggling refined with fun feels like our niche.”

That tension runs through the food. There is technical ambition, but little of the ceremony that can sometimes come with it. Ryan’s own description is simpler.

“Anyone who knows me knows my food isn’t subtle.

“There’s a place for subtlety, and I enjoy eating that way sometimes, but it’s not how I like to cook. At its heart, Aloft’s food is bold and punchy — seasoned further than you’d take it cooking for yourself at home.”

The challenge is making that intensity work equally well for diners fluent in tasting menus and those who might never ordinarily book one.

“Guests who love fine dining are often surprised at how the food holds its own while feeling a bit more fun and relaxed than what they’re used to,” Ryan says. “The guests who don’t eat out much, or don’t often have ‘fancy’ meals, often have an experience unlike anything they’ve had before — through food and service alike.”

Some find themselves eating ingredients they would never usually choose.

“More than a few guests have told us the meal changed their culinary trajectory, or woke up a taste they didn’t know was there.”

For all the international reference points in Aloft’s cooking, the ingredient list begins close to home. Tongola goat’s cheese appears across both of Ryan’s restaurants; mushrooms arrive from Tunnel Hill and BT Mushrooms; horseradish comes fresh from the ground in central Tasmania. Wallaby, shot by Richard on Bruny Island, has become another constant.

“More than almost any other ingredient, it ties us to the land around us,” Ryan says. “It’s sustainable, economical, a great story for guests, and above all, genuinely delicious.”

The drinks follow much the same instinct.

For its tenth year, Aloft collaborated with Hobart distillers Taylor & Smith on a nasturtium gin built around flavours that have appeared throughout the restaurant’s decade: Meyer lemon, black garlic and nasturtium. Its seasonal martini takes those ideas further with yuzu vermouth, miso, lemon amaro and black garlic oil, while an anniversary collaboration with Overeem brought bourbon and port casks together in a whisky made specifically for Aloft.

It is Tasmania not as theme, but pantry, cellar and starting point.

The Hug at the Pass

When Ryan thinks about the moment his relationship with his own cooking shifted, he doesn’t choose a particular menu or award. About four years ago, after Aloft had reopened and he had begun cooking food that finally felt like his, Ryan recognised Jacques Reymond and his wife in the dining room.

“As a young chef, Jacques was like royalty to me,” he says. “I’d never worked for him or even met him, but I admired him greatly.”

After dinner, Reymond walked towards the pass.

“He came to the pass, shook my hand, and then hugged me to thank me for the meal.”

Soon afterwards, Reymond’s wife followed.

“She told me it wasn’t something he did regularly — that the excitement and bold flavours had taken her back to being cooked for by a young Jacques.”

“That moment has stayed with me. It was the first time someone I respected so deeply — with no connection to me and no reason to say it if he didn’t mean it — told me that what I was doing was great.

“From that point on, I started to actually believe the positive feedback and reviews a bit more. And with that confidence came the freedom to cook for myself, rather than worrying about what everyone else wanted from my food.”

Aloft began because Ryan took a leap he did not believe himself ready to take. Its first years were spent negotiating other voices, financial pressure and the sheer work of keeping a restaurant alive. It took nearly losing it for him to stop asking what Aloft ought to be.

Ten years later, the restaurant still rises and falls with the Derwent. What has changed is the certainty inside it. Ryan is no longer cooking towards some idea of what Aloft should be; the food is bold, Tasmanian, pan-Asian, generous and recognisably his.

Perhaps that is the clearest measure of the decade. Aloft has not become easier because the work got easier. It became easier when Ryan stopped second-guessing the thing he had built.

Ask what he hopes another decade might bring and his answer returns to the leap that started everything.

“If we’re lucky enough to make it to 20 years, I hope we’ve stayed relevant and exciting, and that we’ve helped inspire people to take a chance — to trust the chef, try something new, and maybe even change the way they look at an ingredient, or where it comes from.”

Continue eating your way around Tasmania with our guides to Stillwater in Launceston and Fico in Hobart — two more restaurants shaping the way the island eats.