I remember when I was 13 years old, I went into my parent’s spirit cupboard to “borrow” some of their alcohol for my upcoming school disco. I was going to make my friends and I a “Haxa”, which in a direct translation means, “Witch”. It’s an outstanding concoction of everything in the cupboard carefully blended in a, well, plastic bottle, shaken without ice. You then refill each of the bottles you have thieved from with water to cover your tracks. I thought it was a genius idea until I poured water into a bottle that said Ricard on the front, and the content turned milky white. Shit.
My so-called Cocktail tasted like the liquid you would find in a pub’s slops bucket and I was grounded for a week. That day I decided where I would take my life, and killed my father’s dream of a straight A student who would go on and follow in his footsteps.
The road, as we all know, has to start somewhere, and mine started with bar backing. 60-hour weeks filled with bin changing, floor scrubbing, glass polishing, fridge stocking, heavy lifting and too much alcohol drinking. It took almost a year until I finally was allowed to make drinks, but not in front of customers; no, trapped up in a basement with no one to talk to and a machine that just wouldn’t stop spitting out dockets. Ladies and Gentleman; I present to you the Dispense Bartender. Your job description would be to smash out as many fine-tasting drinks to the diners as humanly possible. I learnt speed and specs (bar terminology for drinks recipes), but being stuck in a basement where no one can see you made me a messy bartender with no chat. I like to think I’ve moved on.
In the quiet hours I would read shit Swedish cocktail books. Of course I didn’t know that they were useless until later on in my career. God, I wish someone had told me who Jerry Thomas or Gary Regan were in 2001, it would have saved me some time and cut down numerous embarrassing moments over the years.
The next section in my bar life I would like to call “Let there be light”: where I was pulled out of the basement and put to work on a bar.
I realised in 2004 that the Swedish (or at least my punters at Buddha Bar) idea of a classical cocktail was a P2 (vanilla vodka, apple sours and lemonade, garnished with a lime wedge.) I thought there must be more to Bartending than that. I moved to London- the land of Bartending dreams.
I was in for a rude awakening. I knew nothing in comparison to these cocktilians. After The Sanderson, Hilton and Harvey Nichols, better cocktail books, longer hours, harder work, wine studies, much more interesting chat, trainings, some competitions, more alcohol drinking, no daylight and better mentors to lead me on the way, I started working at the Lonsdale. It felt like I was taken to another level, these bartenders, and especially Charles Vexenant- mixology legend- were walking and talking drinks information banks. Time to step up again. But this time it felt like we all had something to give – knowledge, passion, bad jokes in terrible taste. And now I’m learning to share my knowledge, my passion. And the only joke I ever remember.
When you are infatuated with someone, it takes over your whole life. I’m writing this at the bar in the Lonsdale. What else can I say?
