Family and Home
Let me state this right from the start, emphatically and unequivocally: I love bars. I feel at home in bars, whether it be a pub, a dive bar, an elegant restaurant bar, an avant-garde cocktail bar or a glamorous hotel bar.
What’s more, I love the people who work in these places - not all of them obviously, but the majority of them. I understand their work, appreciate their highs and lows and empathise with their hardships. I celebrate their skills, talent and creativity, after all they are all part of what I consider my extended family. To comprehend why I feel like this it is important to go back to the beginning of my long and varied career in this business.
In the late summer of 1987, aged 19, I arrived in London from the provinces to study History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. To help fund my academic endeavours I got a job as a part-time dishwasher in a private members club called Fred’s’ that was about to open. I had read about the impending opening of Fred’s in the style bible The Face and had deemed it an appropriate place for someone as cool as me to work…it didn’t take me long to figure out just how uncool I was. I was an awkward teenager, in a dirty apron, washing the greasy plates of an incredibly fashionable and trendy clientele. I missed my family and I missed home.
At the end of the long shifts I would sit down with the rest of the team and enjoy a beer or two, initially I was the outsider and the lowest of the low. The bartenders held sway In Fred’s, and they were a motley crew of misfits who all knew each other from previous jobs and were led by the gentleman punk himself Dick Bradsell. Slowly over the course of a few months I was accepted into their band and I realised I had found a new family and a new home. Over time I rose from dishwasher to barback and finally to bartender at Fred’s, although I very rarely worked on the main bar but was exiled to the basement or upstairs bars. The main ground floor bar was staffed by the same core team that had opened the venue and most would remain working there until Fred’s closed after a few years. The pay was great, the customers were pretty cool, and the perks were amazing. Of the team only Dick actually wanted to be a bartender, the rest of us all held what we considered loftier, though largely unfulfilled ambitions. However, when we were at work, we all did our allotted jobs to the best of our abilities and because of the hours we worked Fred’s was our home.
When Fred’s finally closed we all had to find new homes and the family was split up, but over the years that followed we often found ourselves working together in new bars and we’d temporarily set up home there, with new family members. Time after time I found myself working for Dick in one new venue or another; The Atlantic Bar, Detroit Bar and the Flamingo Club, honing my bartending skills but each time convincing myself it was only temporary and that one day I would get a “proper” job.
I distinctly remember one evening at the Flamingo Club when things changed. Dick and I had been chatting about the cocktail recipes in “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks“ by David Embury. At the time Dick considered this book to be the gospel on cocktail making but one drink in particular – the Bacardi Cocktail - did not seem to make any sense to us. The recipe in the book did not seemed to work the way it was written and so the two us spent several hours after the shift trying to perfect the recipe by adjusting the proportions, using different base rums, etc etc, but without success. Finally, Dick had the inspired idea of adding a little bit of crushed ice to the shaker along with the usual cubed ice we had been using, and suddenly the potential in the drink was revealed. Dick reasoned quite rightly (but without any proof) that the ice available to bartenders would have been different when Embury had written the recipe. In this moment I realised that there was so much more to being bartender than I’d previously thought, and that if I acted more professionally, I could combine it with the skills of research and creativity that I so loved.
Many years have passed since that evening in the Flamingo with Dick, and I have been incredibly lucky to have worked in some wonderful bars with an amazing bunch of people. Most of those bars I considered to be my home and my colleagues in them were my family for the time we were together. Sadly, over the years I have seen too many members of this family pass away when they were far too young and still had so much to contribute. I try to rationalise this by thinking that this happens in all families at one time or another. Looking on the bright side though, I have seen this business become bigger and better than ever - it has evolved in ways I never imagined possible, and is now quite rightly a legitimate career choice for so many people globally.
Most mornings, after I have dropped my kids off to school, I first check up on the BBC news and then I check up on my extended family via Instagram. By extended family I mean the global bar and restaurant community, whom I consider to be my extended family. It saddens me deeply to see the livelihoods of these brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and distant cousins threatened in the way they are now. I have seen how resilient and creative my family have been in setting up new and diverse opportunities in their businesses and places of work. I am incredibly proud of them for continuing to survive, but I dearly hope that governments around the globe will see just how important the bar trade is and offer meaningful support. Please do not allow our homes to be torn down brick by brick.