The HIstory of the Barfly’S Club

Mario Castillo

Mario Castillo was considered one of the best known and most creative players in the Viennese bar scene. He came from the Dominican Republic and, after attending a Catholic school for gifted children at home, he had studied mathematics and electronics in France and England. On the side, he earned money as a waiter and bartender. At the beginning of the 1980s he moved to Vienna, where he immediately started working in one of the most popular bars in the city at the time, the “New York – New York”. He married an Austrian woman and became the father of a daughter.

In 1989 he went into business for himself. Far back in the gloomy, tube-like ground floor of the three-star “boutique” hotel Fürst Metternich, which had just undergone a change of ownership, he was able to realize his dream, a bar based on the American model: Barfly’s. And he had bet on the right concept at the right time. Right from the start, the small wood-panelled room, furnished to the top with bottles in various shades of brown, was a magnetic attraction for night owls, even if its location outside the city centre would not have led one to expect it. Whether copywriters or lawyers, journalists, doctors or students, a regular clientele quickly formed, which provided a good atmosphere and sales, especially on weekends until well after midnight between after-dinner drinks and nightcaps with jazz, Rat-Pack songs or salsa.

It wasn’t just the boss’s expertise that played a role – he was an obsessive whisky collector, his wife reckons there are around 2000 different varieties to choose from today. With his mixture of cool gentleness and Caribbean temperament, he had also hit upon a diffuse longing and an unconscious deficiency of the Viennese public. After his death, the bar’s website featured touching obituaries like “Thank you for the hours I was allowed to be with you.” “For many, the bar was their second living room at late hours,” says Melanie Castillo.

But Mario Castillo wanted to go further. Within a few years he opened a whole series of new bars – each with different partners – whether it was the Bar Castillo in Vienna, the neighbouring restaurant Castillo Comida y Ron, Nightfly’s or the Havana Club in Linz. He also opened up at the Copa Cagrana on the Danube Island, and it was there that he met his second wife, Melanie, 13 years ago, who was working on the Danube bank alongside her job as a stewardess.

The press once called Castillo the “founder of the Viennese bar miracle”. This, however, was not to last for him. The bankruptcy of the Linz bar forced him to give up his shares in the other Viennese businesses – except for the first one (which belonged to him alone), Barfly’s. Here Melanie also helped him out, albeit with simple work. “The bar is a male domain. I didn’t shop or do the bookkeeping, more like stock management of the whiskies.” After his first stroke, Mario Castillo tried to keep a low profile and spent more evenings at home, but then he wanted to try again with a new restaurant on the Danube Island and threw himself into fresh work.

“My big fear was: Is it going to collapse?” the widow and bar owner recalls of her first days of self-employment. But it went well. The four employees, who have been with the company since it was founded 20 years ago, helped her just as naturally as her family from Upper Austria. As the

granddaughter of confectioners on Lake Attersee, Melanie also has some gastronomic genes in her. And above all, the guests kept faith. “When the financial crisis started, I had been nervous the first time,” she says. “But my husband stayed very calm and said, ‘What are people going to do when things get worse? They’ll have a drink. And at first the effects weren’t that strong either, then you started to feel it. Most people have continued to come to us, but just a little less often.”

At the moment, business is booming. Melanie Castillo has retired from the Danube Island pub and is concentrating entirely on the classic bar. “Everything here is the way it was 20 years ago, and I think it will still be the same in 20 years. I can’t change anything big there.” Revenue drivers are classic cocktails, but especially more colorful, complicated Caribbean drinks like the Daiquiri, Guajiro, Pipeline or Mario’s Favourite. The nine to 12 euros are even for students no thing of the impossibility. And every now and then the one or other more expensive whisky or rum from the collection goes over the bar, a shot may already cost 30 or 40 euros.

“What you can’t tell nowadays is when the bar will be full and when it won’t. Once upon a time the weekends were very good, and during the week it was rather weaker. Today it’s very different,” the new boss has noticed. The audience has become more mobile, more unpredictable, this is also reported by other restaurateurs and hoteliers. Of course, the offer is also significantly larger than a few years ago, the leisure behaviour more fragmented and unclear.

“I’m trying to be calmer, like my husband was,” Melanie Castillo gives herself as advice. “And I like being here, after all, that was his life too.” Briefly interrupting the conversation, she makes a call on her cell phone, “I’m setting up a whisky tasting right now.” A little marketing and regular customer loyalty don’t hurt a bar that has long been considered a Viennese institution. “I was thrown in at the deep end and I’m still learning every day.” But the entrepreneur is no longer quite as driven as she was in the beginning. She is already starting to implement her own ideas. And she prescribes herself fixed evenings when she is only there for Noah.

(From the online version of “Die Presse”, print edition, 04.06.2011)