Notting Hill Blog

We have had some great Christmas parties here in the last 2 months. They all start off with some sophisticated cocktails and canapés around 7pm and a few hours later you are singing Karaoke, dancing on the tables in front of your boss (don’t worry, he won’t remember), dress up as Santa and snogging colleagues in the corners. This sort of behavior makes us feel happy, it means that we have done our job if you see what I mean.
And don’t worry, we won’t tell or judge, because everything you did, we have done much worse- mostly all the time (glories of being a bartender: we are allowed to misbehave whenever, and drink before noon everyday of the year without our conscience knocking on the door) *
NYE at Lonsdale was a strong party with a lot of familiar faces. We had a Heaven theme in Genevive and hell on the ground floor… Most of you, I have proudly realized left their angels locked up in a box at home and only brought the devil to the party. Genevive didn’t see a soul on the night, and I think that is sending us a message.
Now you probably woke up the 1st of January (or if it was a good one like ours the 2nd) with a month worth of hangovers, regrets, joys and scary photo memories on facebook. Some people have asked me if I have any New Years resolutions… Does people still do that was my first thought? I haven’t had any since 98 became 99 and I think it was me promising myself to maybe get a gym card before 2010 (that is frighteningly near) The kind of resolutions that we all hear about are the “I’m not going to drink and/or smoke for x amount of time” I might consider a day or two if my liver is lucky.
The message I believe is; don’t open that box just yet and indulge in some more fine tasting distillate.

Until then

*This normally has consequences that we tend to ignore

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?