A job that changed me: At the Titanic theatre restaurant we always hit an iceberg, but were often hit by bread rolls too

‘I’d become smitten with my third-class Irish rose up to five nights a week in defiance of my overbearing sister’: Tristan Lutze as “Jonathon LaRich”, with Jonathon’s sister “Cynthia LaRich", circa 2000. Photograph: Tristan Lutze

It was 1998, the year after James Cameron’s Titanic had made a splash with cinematic audiences worldwide, and I – an amateur musical theatre performer and creative arts uni student – took an acting job in one of humankind’s most venerated performance venues: the theatre restaurant.

If you loved restaurants, theatre and the idea of combining those two things, there was nowhere in the world that had more to offer in the late 1990s than Melbourne. Dracula’s, Witches in Britches, The Looney Bin and others proudly continued the legacy created by Dirty Dicks and The Last Laugh in the 1970s, dishing out average meals and watered-down cocktails to a soundtrack of bawdy jokes and themed song parodies.