Knud Scheibelt – Schwarz Weiss Bar

My Life

I’m originally from Mainz. After finishing school, I started training in hospitality in Freiburg, and following my studies and army service, I started working as service staff in a business hotel in Mainz. At one point my superior came up to me and said: “Follow me to the bar please.” He told me that Andrea, the bartender, had just quit and so he showed me where to find the syrups, juices, spirits, and all the recipes. “Have fun, you are our bartender now!” This was back in 2001. I tried to do the job as well as I possibly could, but obviously I did not use any jiggers or pourers to measure exactly.

In retrospect, I think the cocktails must have been awful. After that position I moved around Germany for a bit, was working here and there, and in 2005 I decided to move to Bath, England for a couple of years. I worked in various hotels as bartender, sommelier, and restaurant manager.

“In retrospect, I think the cocktails must have been awful”!

Knud Scheibelt

In 2010 I came to Stuttgart and started to work at Ciba Mato (permanently closed), a high-volume bar. We did up to 800 cocktails a night. It was a tough place; you were always on a clock and had to be fast, but I learned a lot during that time. A year later I was already ready to open my own place, when I walked by the location of today’s Schwarz Weiss Bar. It looked like the bar was available to rent. At the time there was a flat available to rent above the bar, so I called up the tenant and asked if the bar was available as well.

The bar had been vacant for nearly a year when I found it, but the location was pretty central. Maybe it was due to its small size that nobody was interested, but I decided to start renovating the place in August 2011. After a couple of months of hard work to completely remodel the place, I opened on November 11, 2011. We had a three-day opening celebration and the bar has been going strong ever since.

Schwarz Weiss Bar

So first of all, why is the bar called Schwarz Weiss Bar? When I started out as an entrepreneur, I always imagined owning the perfect bar. There was a movie I had seen at the time which in one scene featured a big room with small round tables and a lamp in the middle of each table. The movies had been shot in black and white. The people were dressed up in evening attire, were smoking cigars, and sipping champagne, whisky and cognac. On stage there was a grand piano, and a woman dressed in red was playing it and singing at the same time. This was the mood I wanted to capture for my bar.

Obviously my bar with its 28 square meters does not come close to the size of that room but the mood as such was what I wanted to recreate for my guests and my bar. Therefore, one can say it is an homage to that movie scene. The concept of the bar was always to serve cocktails. Back then I had a business partner for the first one-and-a-half years and we decided that the sole focus should be on cocktails. We do have a few wines but there is no food and no coffee on the menu for example. Looking back over the last ten years, it seems the concept was working out just fine and the bar has established itself on the night scene in the city.

Over time, whisky became our main spirit and we offer over 250 bottles in this small bar. All our cocktails on the menu are our own creations, but of course you can order all the classics too. All the creative work takes place in our small lab upstairs, which used to be a flat, and we use all the latest knowhow to come up with new recipes. It is an investment, but it’s very important for our consistency towards the guest.

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The Future

Personally, I am a big fan of good products, high quality but in a relaxed environment. This is very important for me. I don’t like this fake façade which you sometimes see in bars—when bartenders smile at you just because they have to, but drop the smile a second later when they walk away. In all the successful gastronomy businesses in Stuttgart, they are professional and deliver high quality in a relaxed space. I like that, this is also why I see our bar as somewhat of a living room. I wish even more places would follow suit with such a philosophy. In terms of techniques, a lot has already found its way into the bar but more is to come and we try to be on top of the game here—obviously always in a way that makes sense to us economically.

Profile

Year Born: 1980

Special skills: Ginger beer & bad jokes

Free time: I have a small daughter and I’ll soon become a dad for the second time, plus we have a dog that needs attention, so my spare time is very limited. Having a family and a business fills up my time pretty much

Bartender since: 2001

Biggest fail: I wanted to open a second bar but that turned out to be a mistake. Lots of energy and funds were wasted with that project. I’d rather focus on what I have now

Most significant career step: Opening Schwarz Weiss Bar for sure

Favorite cocktail: A whisky sour and a gimlet. Simple ingredients, focused on the spirit that allows variation. Just perfect.

Check out Knud’s recipe: Jamaican Spaceballs

Favorite bar: Of course I love Schwarz Weiss Bar, but if I have to mention another one, I was always a big fan of the Curtain Club in Berlin under the management of Arnd Henning Heissen

Stuttgart: In three words: home, self-employment, traffic jam.

Schwarz Weiss Bar Website

Video Portrait of Knud Scheibelt

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Images: ©Wolfgang Simm