“Opening a bar is about overcoming challenges,” says George Curtis
The Brisbane bar owner on how he opened his two bars, cyclones, and why food is more important than ever.
Bartenders’ Weekender approaches! The three day festival of all things bars and drinks — it’s a long weekend for bartenders and drink nerds — is happening next month from June 15 to June 17 in Brisbane. There’s loads in store — tickets to the Better Bars Summit are available here — so do check the timetable, get your RSVPs in, and we’ll see you there.
It’s going to be a good time!
And speaking of Brisbane, on this week’s episode of Drinks At Work I talk to Brisbane bar owner George Curtis. He’s got two bars in Brisbane, his first — Before + After — is nearly three years old, and it’s an amaro and cocktail bar. It’s a little hard to find — which presented some challenges for George in the early days — but they’re making great drinks. They’ve also recently added rising star bartender Georgia Gresham to the team, someone who has been making some of the best drinks in Australia in recent years.
His second bar, Milquetoast, opened last year in the Brisbane CBD. It’s a wine and cocktail bar (you want to try their namesake cocktail) with some very good food — the chip butty has quickly established itself on my must eat list whenever I’m in Brisbane. We talk about how food is ever more important in bars, about how he sought to fill a gap in the market there in Brisbane and why it is that, as George says in this chat, opening a bar is all about overcoming challenges. He talks about why he’ll never take bookings, and why opening bar number two wasn’t easier than opening bar number one.
There’s some good advice here.
A quick note on the recording — there’s a bit of background noise in this one, and we’ve done our best to tamp it down — but hey, that’s the way it goes when you schedule a chat in the hours before service; if the chefs have to tenderise meat, they have to tenderise meat.