![]() ![]() The logical next step? To start his own place. The prospect, also, of having a family, and of getting old, weighed on him: nobody wants to be working 16-18 hour days with young children, or indeed in old age. “But after five years I was getting a bit comfortable there: after five years everything works, and you’re just doing a new cocktail menu once a year.” ![]() “I started from zero, literally designing the bar, defining the team and creating the concept,” Beke says. “That was a learning experience for me because they’d been doing liquid nitrogen and foams – it was nice to play with liquid nitrogen, dry ice, those kind of things,” he says.Īnd from there came the invitation to set up Nightjar, the much-awarded Shoreditch bar. After three years, Perrone left for the Connaught, while Beke went to Artesian, where he worked alongside Alex Kratena, another émigré from the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia.Īfter Artesian, the next step was Purl. “That was something different to be doing classic cocktails, from Champagne to Negroni, and I learned Italian hospitality and how to socialise with guests,” Beke says. Next up came Montgomery Place, a speakeasy then run by Ago Perrone. First was Townhouse, the second bar from the team behind LAB, one of the most influential bars of turn-of-the-millennium London, where he learned to work fast, fluidly and with fresh fruit flavours. Moving on from Attica, newly acquired language skills in hand, Beke embarked on a learning programme that could hardly have been better calculated. “He got me my first job, at a nightclub called Attica: he was already a bartender, but I was a bar back.” “Erik was one year ahead of me, and he’s Slovakian: I knew him because he used to work across the road from me in Bratislava, and he left one year before me,” Beke recalls. There was at least one familiar face in the big city: Erik Lorincz, now head bartender at the American Bar. So you’d take undergrounds, you’d know the tube station, and at the tube station, you’d open the page of the A to Z, and then you’d be walking the streets for half an hour trying to find the place.” “The first thing you’d do when you came to London, everyone advised, was buy an A to Z. “My language school had an internet café and you’d sit there and do your emails,” he recalls. With both social media and smartphones in their infancy, no Google Maps and no Ubers, adapting to a new city where he didn’t speak the language – and a city double the population of his entire country – was tougher than it would be today. Beke decided on the spot to leave Bratislava, move to London, study English and learn to bartend. The training and inspiration worked a little too well. “It was liquid cooking, not just opening a bottle of beer or pouring a glass of wine, but customising the drink.”īeke’s school didn’t teach bartending, not least because the students were too young, but after graduating he started work at a well-known Bratislava bar, Paparazzi (no relation to the Warsaw Paparazzi). “The personalisation for each guest was what fascinated me the most,” Beke recalls. There were three or four international-style bars in Prague at the time, among them Bugsy’s and Tretter’s, which are still going today, and a trip across the border to the Czech Republic proved eye-opening. Žilina, Slovakia’s third city, has a population of barely 150,000, and Beke didn’t come across cocktail bars until he moved to Bratislava to study hospitality as a teenager. ![]() “Since I was 9 or 10 I was helping him with the snacks and serving wine by the glass.”īut his original idea was to be a sommelier, or follow in his father’s footsteps. ![]() “My father has a wine business in our home town, selling from the cellar and distributing in restaurants and bars,” he says. Growing up in the little city of Žilina in the country then called Czechoslovakia, Marian Beke always knew he wanted to work in hospitality. ![]()
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