The Bubbly From Barbary
Knowledge is power but it’s not champagne. Celia Schoonraad shows us why she loves both.
“WE FELL INTO each other,” Celia Schoonraad says with a laugh, describing her love affair with bartending. ‘Life is a series of neverending rabbit holes’ is what I wished she had said instead – such was her life’s journey, leading to her present mantle as proprietor and creative director of Barbary Coast, which she co-founded with Michael Callahan of 28 Hong Kong Street fame. And that’s not counting her role as creative director for The Compound Collective, a beverage experience consulting firm.
The New Zealander (her family moved from South Africa when she was a teen) fell into her first rabbit hole pouring wine and making gin and tonic at Christmas parties in a cafe she worked at, marking the start of a lifelong relationship.
At university, bartending was seemingly a marriage of convenience; it was a gig that made the most sense, schedule-wise, (no) thanks to her double degree in business and journalism. By
the time Schoonraad was done with school, she was earning more than she would behind the bar than as a budding journalist, and she stuck with it. It was a job option that made the most sense, given her then semi-nomadic ways.
But it was in London where she took a lifelong career in bartending seriously. Happenstance perhaps, as times were a-changing in an industry that had started to operate very differently. “By the time I got to London, this whole approach of not sharing your knowledge with other people had dissipated. It was suddenly this world of pure knowledge, pure education, and for someone who loves learning, it was wonderfully overstimulating,” she muses.
It was also during her time in London that she started to think about flavour pairing and manipulation. Her obsession included the mechanics of how saliva breaks down proteins at different rates, as well as learning the nous to fine-tune flavour pairings to that degree of attention. For Schoonraad, her career-long journey in exploring flavour development was the one thing she enjoyed the most.
So much so that, somewhat unsurprisingly, she took up a postgraduate degree in food science to supplement her learning behind the bar. Now she’s busy burrowing into another rabbit hole: studying for a master’s degree in distilling from the London-based Institute of Brewing & Distilling. “If you’re interested in something, learning about it becomes very rewarding,” she reasons.
For all of Schoonraad’s eclectic journeys across the world, the common denominator in her life has been the pursuit of knowledge. And champagne; and anything with champagne. “I love, love, love champagne. Sidecars are amazing because I love cognac. Sidecar Royales are great because they are cognac and champagne.”
And if you visit the Ballroom at Barbary Coast, you’ll find a button curiously labelled ‘press for champagne’. It’s one of Schoonraad’s many ideas – and her favourite of the lot – that along with Callahan’s, which makes up the two-storey concept bar inspired by the bustling red-light district in San Francisco that prospered during the Gold Rush. They were a collection of ideas that they dreamt up for their clients but weren’t used for one reason or another.
“We kind of ended up with this mental catalogue of cool ideas that would work in a bar. And then one day we said, why don’t we open a bar? And here we are,” she muses.
Ten years ago, Schoonraad would never have imagined herself where she is today, and she certainly has no idea where she’d be 10 years in the future. But you can bet your last golden nugget that she’d be reading something along the lines of Greek mythological figures or the history of coffee.
For now at least, she’s dreaming up a new menu concept for the bar. She’s understandably tight-lipped, though the Cherry Blossom cocktail is the closest thing we have to a teaser. “It’ll be an aesthetically interesting menu. It’ll be very visual, and from a production side, geeky too,” she promises.