For this weekend’s long read, a piece from issue number four by the talented Charlie Ainsbury. Charlie is an award-winning former Australian Bartender of the Year, cocktail comp winner, and an experienced bar consultant who shares his experience opening a bar in Geneva that just wasn’t meant to be.
While we have you, the next issue of Boothby is set to land at the start of December — you can get your copy here.
In the summer of 2022, we got our first project in mainland Europe. A friend and former manager from one of our Sydney venues had moved to Geneva after getting married. His new father-in-law was the landlord of a stunning 16th century building in the Old Town and wanted to turn its bottom floor and basement into a bar.
“Want to build a bar in Switzerland?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
He sent me some pictures and a shaky video of the site. It was a blank canvas. Great start. It meant fewer restrictions on our creativity. Before we even drafted a proposal, I had the bar figured out. I knew where the tables were going, which walls would be better suited for booths, I had a uniform designed, and the glassware already picked out. I caught myself googling, “bar top wood native Switzerland.”
After the usual back and forth with proposals, the contract was signed. I was elated. Not just because I was adding a new stamp in my passport, but because this was our first project in a new continent, and I helped land it. If it went well, it could lead to more work on this side of the world. It felt like growth. Like expansion.
At the end of their winter, I flew to Geneva. The plan wasn’t just to visit the site and get our bearings, but to properly immerse ourselves in the city and understand what Geneva was about because by the end of this trip, I needed to have the concept nailed.
Nailing the concept is the most crucial part of creating a bar. Every decision after that has to align with that concept. It doesn’t just shape the drinks or the style of service, it sets the tone for the music policy, its voice on social media, the style of glassware, even the colour of the coasters. The concept is the thread that runs through every decision we make. It was meant to guide us through what was supposed to be an 18-month project. And that’s the hardest part of the job to get used to. You get invested, drunk on the potential, you start selecting wood for the bar top, and sometimes it may never come to be.
Even though the site was technically a shell: a 500-year-old, dusty, hand-laid-stone-walled, brick-arched shell, it was never truly a blank slate. Like most of our projects, a lot of decisions had been made by the time I arrived. The father-in-law landlord, our key stakeholder, had some ideas.
“I love whisky”, he said. My friend added, “He also loves music. He’s in a band and they’re going to play in the basement bar.”
I looked back and there he was, smiling and nodding.