Drink News Mal Evans, Mojo Bar
We find out how the owner of Leeds bar Mojo raised £100,000 for Elton John's AIDS Foundation while designing a cocktail for Lily Allen
Drink News: Mal Evans, Mojo Bar
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For the third consecutive year, The Grey Goose Character & Cocktails event has been pairing up celebrities and influential people in the bar trade to raise money for Elton John’s AIDS Foundation. The premise is that a celebrity designs a home bar to be put up for auction, then someone who knows their drink designs a cocktail to match the bar.
This year one of the pairings was internationally famous pop singer Lily Allen and Mojo’s (and Leeds’) very own Mal Evans. Their combination of bar and cocktail raised £100,000 for the charity, beating the second highest combination (Lily Cole and Dale DeGroff - known as ‘The King of Cocktails’ and famed for his work at The Rainbow Room in New York) by some £40,000. We asked Mal to explain the event to us.
“I got approached by Grey Goose. Unfortunately Lily was a bit busy during the design process but I dealt with that through my friend who works for Grey Goose, he set it all up and it was really great. It was really organic - they’re very professional at what they do. We’ve had Lily’s dad (Keith Allen) in here a few times, and through our friends at the bar we have had a bit of a crossover with relationships.
“She specifically wanted to do something that was really organic that you could sit around and have fun with. So, rather than have the bar as a server that you’d stand at and sip your drinks, she decided she wanted to do something that was based around music, where you could sit around and enjoy music and enjoy drinks. She specified a drink to go with it in which she wanted elderflower and cucumber. She wanted it to quite zingy and refreshing.
“I decided to make a sociable drink, something that someone could have a few of on a night out. It’s long and fruity with a ribbon of cucumber around it. The drink was made with apple juice and lemon juice and instead of using sugar we used a touch of elderflower cordial, shaken up with the Grey Goose Citron, which has a lemon infusion to it, and then we topped it with soda.
“As I arrived at the event on the day, I was instructed to make some of the drinks on Lily’s bar for people who were possibly going to buy it. I sat down, got a feel for it all and got all my equipment ready and then looked at the record deck that was incorporated into the bar. There was a box of records, and I asked the organisers if I can run the bar as I’d run a bar. I’m putting the records in order and there’s Dusty In Memphis, the Stones, Rod Stewart, Iggy and the Stooges and Nirvana - all the rock’n'roll stuff, and I look up and Elton John’s stood there and he’s obviously doing a little check up before the event starts. I just looked up and said to him ‘these records are absolute brilliant’, and he says, ‘I know, I chose them’. He spent a couple of minutes with me just going through the records.
“I did a session on the bar for people who might buy it, and it was a bit slow at first. I was sat on this little rigged stage about a foot and a half high and I thought, ‘well screw it, I’ll make some drinks’, and decided to turn it up a bit. Then this sort of Zsa Zsa Gabor character comes over, dripping in diamonds, big flowing white silk ball gown and she says, ‘what’s going on here?’ and I told her what it was all about. There were two sofas on the bar either side, so I said, ‘well, why don’t you come sit up on here with me?’ She stepped onto the stage and then another couple of girls, sort of supermodel types, came and sat here. Soon a guy started DJing and then all of a sudden, I realised that the bar was doing exactly what the brief was: it had a group of people around, talking about music, making great drinks and interacting with each other.
“Then I got a call from the main lady running the event and she said, ‘do you mind just killing it for a second, because everybody’s waiting to have dinner?’ So I’ve just done exactly what we do at Mojo - bring some people a drink, whack the tunes up and they all get carried way with themselves. So the whole room’s sat around waiting for us to pack it in!
“They had this great speaker, I think he’s quite a famous auctioneer, and he was really ramping it up. Then the Lily Allen bar came up and it just started going up and up and up. There was a couple of people bidding and I was getting a bit giddy at this point, at the sort of money it was going for. It went for £100,000 and it had a standing ovation and everyone was really chuffed about it. The guy who bought it was an American chap. I saw him at the bar later on and I said to him, ‘You’re really lucky, you’ve got a great thing here.’
“At the end, Lily, who was doing a gig in Brighton, came back and she had her photos taken with the guy who’d bought the bar and I got to meet her and talk to her and tell her that it’s gone really well. She was totally chuffed at the money it had taken and the cocktail.”
For more information see www.greygoosecharacter.com
Posted on Wednesday 3rd February 2010
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