Barbau: Bar Door 74 in Amsterdam (I)

Von Helmut Adam | November 7, 2008 um 09:22 | Keine Kommentar | Bars, Blog | Tags: Amsterdam, Bar, Barbau, door 74

This article by Philip Duff will be published in our Mixology print Issue 6/2009 in German translation. Here at mixology.eu it will start the coverage of the configuration of door 74, his new speakeasy bar in Amsterdam.

We’ve been covering other German bar start-ups over at barbaublog.de (mainly bar Le Lion from Hamburg) but decided to move this over here, as we have German and English content here at mixology.eu. "Barbau" translates to "bar building" by the way. Enjoy the read! H.A.

 

"Every bar
needs a gimmick, and here’s ours: at door 74 we are going to be nice to people." Philip Duff (Liquid Solutions)

 

OPENING THE BAR – THE BEGINNINGS OF DOOR 74

By Philip Duff

 

I wasn’t
going to open a bar, you know. It’s great fun being a lavishly-paid jet-set bar
consultant, roving contest judge, drinks writer and freelance brand ambassador
and bars are, well……..hard work. They
need daily care and attention from people who give a damn, ideally mildly
schizophrenic people who are equally at home being a charming host at midnight,
an amateur plumber at 0300h and comparing supplier price lists to invoices at
0900h to see if they are being overcharged for a bottle of Rowan’s Creek
bourbon. You have to care, and you have to care every day.

At first
the idea was I’d be just an investor in my friend Sergej Fokke’s new bar-
there’s more than enough consulting and bar-show-hopping and writing to keep me
busy – but there was no-one to develop the drinks policy or write the first
drinks list. And once you’ve written the drinks list, it’s your responsibility
to find all these arcane spirits and individual glassware, not to mention
ice-ball moulds. Then you’ll have to bartend yourself for the first few weeks
to teach the staff the drinks….Before I knew it, I was knee-deep in bar
ownership and the tide was rising. What in God’s name had I gotten myself into?
Just when I thought I was out, they pull
me back in. How much worse would it get?

I stumbled
upon Toby Maloney writing about opening his (excellent) bar, The Violet Hour,
in Chicago in 2006:

"Opening a bar is like juggling 14 chainsaws, 3 bowling balls, 17
kittens, 2 bottles of rum on fire, and a tennis ball while running across a
marsh seething with piranhas, using only the heads of crocodiles
as stepping stones while being chased by an angry mob of vengeful Vikings,
tattooed repossession men and a couple of tax collectors.".

Whoa!

"Will soon have everything under control."

OK, so maybe this was going to work out.

But what
kind of bar to open? One of the best pieces of advice for an entrepreneur
surely has to be "see what everyone sees, and then do what no-one is doing".
One downside of the egalitarian culture of the Netherlands is that Dutch people
have an in-built paranoia about somehow being seen as less than equal or as
servants; this paranoia prevents them giving genuinely good service. They
equate service with servility, you see, which is as wrong as equating mezcal
with mescaline. There is a definite opportunity for a place, any place, where
you give good service. Where you are nice to people. That would be our gimmick:
not an LED light installation or DJ Overpriced Olly or half-price cocktails or
Paris Hilton. Being nice to people.

My raging
ego, not to mention that of Sergej’s and our superb head bartender Timo, demands
that we open a bar that serves decent drinks. No cocktail nerdiness, or at
least not a lot, but really, really good drinks. Grown-up drinks. Strong
drinks. No chocolate martinis, no 7UP or Sprite or Red Bull, no over-sized
glasses. A bar. A proper bar. Where you
are nice to people in the first place, and serve great drinks quickly and
expertly in the second place.

The second
piece of advice I dredged up from the murky depths of a university education in
marketing: first look for a gap in the market, then look for a market in that
gap. Is there a market for door 74 here in Amsterdam?

Follow the trials and tribulations of the
opening of door 74 here on www.mixology.eu/en/blog!

Next episode:

Barbau: Door 74 in Amsterdam (II)